Li Yingguo, a 52-year-old woman in north China's Tianjin Municipality, is making an ambitious plan these days -- selling self-made frozen candied haws to neighboring Beijing and Hebei Province, even to faraway Shanghai Municipality.

It is unimaginable for Li, a laid-off staying idle at home three months ago, to become owner of a seven-staff company in sucha short time.

With the help of the Tianjin Municipal Employment Center for Women, Li hired an office at the Women Business Incubator Center of Tianjin (WBICT), an organization set up specially to help womento start their own businesses, at the end of 2004, obtained government loans and was admitted into a training course on e-commerce, risk investment and marketing techniques. She attributedher success to government's preferential policies for laid-off workers.

Li was one of the millions of Chinese workers who were laid offfrom unprofitable state-owned enterprises in the 1990s when a market-oriented economy was in full swing in China.

The Chinese government attaches great importance to the re-employment of laid-off workers and promulgated a series of preferential policies, including tax reduction and exemption, to help laid-offs seek new jobs or set up their own businesses.

In the past 10 years, statistics showed, the country has created more than 80 million job opportunities for laid-offs. In 2004 alone, China helped 5 million laid-off workers find new jobs.

Founded in October, 2000, the Tianjin Municipal Employment Center for Women, jointly set up by the United Nations Developmentand Planning Program, Australian International Development Programand the Tianjin Women's Federation, is dubbed "cradle" of businesswomen.

The center offers low-rent office and provides business consultation and training courses for women who are willing to start their own businesses but lack funds and technical know-how.

Taking Li's experience as an example, she only sold 6,000 bunches of candied haws in each of the first few months of operation. After attending the training course, Li found her salesvolume skyrocketing to present 16,000 bunches a month.

"It did help me a lot", Li told Xinhua, adding that the initialsuccess gave her much confidence to further expand her business. She said she is considering to put her company's business on the center's web page to experiment with e-business someday.

"I have confidence in myself, in my product, and especially in the center which has helped many people like me," Li said.

In Tianjin, more than 50 laid-off women have carved out their own businesses with the center's help. Recently, the center got 200,000 US dollars of donation from the World Bank to equip the center with information communication technology (ICT).

Source: Xinhua