Labour markets in China: coming to terms with globalisation

The People’s Republic of China (Zhonghua renmín gongheguo) henceforth to bereferred to as ‘PRC’, or just ‘China’, is the country with the oldest continuous existenceas a political entity in the world, going back millennia. It was known as the ‘MiddleKingdom’ and was for centuries a model of technological and economic innovation. TheChinese not only introduced key ‘hard’ inventions in ‘metallurgy’ and so on but also‘soft’ innovations such as ‘bureaucracy’ as Joseph Needham has shown us (see Ronan,1978-1985). Its accomplishments are only now being fully recognized as contributions toworld civilization...