During the first four months this year, 3.6 million more Chinese people found jobs in urban areas, said Vice Minister of Labor and Social Security Zhang Xiaojian here Friday.

Zhang made the remark at a meeting on trade unions' role in promoting reemployment. He expressed his confidence that the unemployment problem can be properly resolved in the period of the Tenth Five-year Plan (2001-2005).

The private economy, which employed 30 million more people from1996 to 2000, has become the main force for solving the unemployment problem, he said, and also underscored the importance of the service industry and small and medium-sized enterprises.

The number of registered unemployed stood at 8.1 million in the first quarter this year, 100,000 more than that at the end of 2003,while the urban registered unemployment rate remained at 4.3 percent, the same as last year, latest statistics from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security showed.

Source: Xinhua