By the end of this year JD.com, a Chinese company often likened to Amazon, will employ 150,000 people, almost four times as many as it did two years ago. These workers, who mostly deliver packages across the mainland by bicycle or car, are hardly living what President Xi Jinping would call the Chinese dream. Still, it is better than working for a low-end textile manufacturer or one of the steamy electronics factories across the border from Hong Kong.
The expansion of companies such as JD helps explain how the mainland has continued to create jobs at an impressive rate, even as economic growth has slowed. China generated 7.2m new jobs between January and June last year, better than it managed the year before, when official statistics show the economy was growing faster. “The quality of growth is more important than the speed of growth,” says a report from Citic Capital.
Many jobs are paying more, too. Except in the perennially depressed north-east of the country, incomes have been rising by between 10 and 15 per cent a year. In India, and most developed markets, by contrast, incomes have barely risen at all. Better-paid workers should also mean China can rely more on domestic consumption, instead of pouring yet more concrete in a country that has already built too many steel mills and cement plants.