SHENZHEN faced a shortage of 740,000 workers in the first quarter of this year even as a great number of city residents were struggling to land a job, Thursday’s Chinese-language newspapers reported.

    The reports, however, did not specify what factors caused the labor shortage.

    The city government has implemented a series of employment policies in recent years, resulting in the jobless rate dropping to as low as 2.29 percent in 2007. Last year, a fair for skilled workers was held in the city, drawing 23,000 skilled workers and 80,000 unskilled workers from other parts of the country. The city has set the goal of keeping re-gistered urban unemployment within 3 percent this year.

    Priority will be given to both economic development and the creation of more job opportunities this year, said Mayor Xu Zongheng at a meeting Wednesday. Xu said the city’s employment policy will shift from the model of “blood transfusion” to “blood creation” to fundamentally solve the problem of employment difficulties. “The old ways of helping members of the disadvantaged groups find jobs is no longer compatible with the new situation,” the mayor said.

    To “create blood,” companies will be offered more incentives to hire jobless people, while the unemployed will be encouraged to start their own businesses, according to Xu. The government will offer subsidies and provide free training to the unemployed to help them acquire new skills.

    Xu also disclosed at Wednesday’s meeting that the city government will make the process of getting hukou, or permanent residence permit, easier to drastically increase the ratio of hukou holders in the population.

    At present, there are 2.12 million hukou holders and more than 8.61 million non-hukou holders in Shenzhen. “The low proportion rate of hukou holders makes the ratio of city legislators low and that of the provincial and national legislators much lower,” Xu said.

    (Eunice Kang)