Tech_Esq
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
Today, around 500 protesters rioted at the Kai Da toy factory in Dongguan in the Pearl River delta, flipping over a police car and trashing computers in a dispute over payoffs to 80 fired workers. Tens of thousands of factories across the region have already shut their gates.
Yin Weimin, China's Social Security minister, has revealed that employment is the Communist Party's number one concern in the downturn and said the "situation is critical". Unemployment is expected to rise from 4pc to 4.5pc by the end of the year and anecdotal reports have suggested that 3m people have already been fired in the industrial province of Zhejiang alone.
China cuts interest rates as Panic surges
There has also been reports that workers are leaving the farm fields and headed to the cities to demand jobs. It should be kept in mind that even 1% of the workforce out of work represents a HUGE number of people in a country with well over 1 Billion people.
I heard on a radio show yesterday that on one of Bush's trips to China he asked their leader what his greatest challenge was. He responded that (since they are a "command economy") he has to create 25 million jobs per year. If he fails, rioting is to be expected. As a quickly expanding new economy, what is China's role in the down turn? Are they at the end of a whip? The mature economies go down a little while China crashes violently in reaction to vastly reduced demand for goods?