Recruiting in China

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese companies' foreign direct investment expanded 353 percent in the first quarter compared with the same 2007 period as domestic firms sought out a more open global market.

The investment hit 19.34 billion U.S. dollars in the first three months, Vice Minister of Commerce Chen Jian said Sunday at a forum. The figure stood at 18.76 billion U.S. dollars for the whole last year.

China set forth the "going-beyond-the-border" strategy in 1999,encouraging domestic enterprises to invest and do businesses abroad.

To support the outbound investment momentum, the government also offered help, including scrapping unnecessary controls on foreign exchange reserves and simplifying administrative procedures.

More than 12,000 Chinese companies have established firms in about 172 countries and regions by the end of 2007. Foreign investments rose nearly sevenfold from 2002 to 2007.

BEIJING, May 15 -- Toyota plans to invest 1.5 billion yuan to boost production capacity at a facility in northern China by 50 percent to 150,000 vehicles a year. The expansion at the plant in Tianjin Municipality is due to be completed by the end of 2009.

The move would boost annual capacity of FAW Toyota, its venture with China's FAW Group, to 470,000 units, and Toyota's overall capacity in China to roughly 690,000 units.

Annual reports from several Chinese banks over the weekend reveal sky-high salaries for the senior management boards in China's banking sector. China Minsheng Banking Corporation stands out with the highest paycheck.

Dong WenBiao, the president of China Minsheng Bank, tops the income chart. His annual pre-tax salary reached over 17.5 million yuan last year.

China Merchants Bank is also being generous to senior executives. In 2007, it doled out 53 million yuan to 26 board members and executives, and its CEO, Guan MaWei, earned nearly 10-million yuan pre-tax.

The Industrial bank paid out nearly 16-million yuan to 15 board members and executives. And its president, Gao JianPing, earned nearly 3 million yuan.

China had 1.54 million nurses as ofthe end of last year, up 240,000 from 2005, a senior health official said in Beijing on Monday.

Ma Xiaowei, vice health minister, told a tele-conference that last year alone, 120,000 more nurses joined the workforce, the biggest increase ever.

He said nurses accounted for 34 percent of China's medical workers.

The quality of the nursing workforce was also being lifted, with 57.5 percent of those at 696 major hospitals nationwide having received junior college education or above, Ma quoted a survey as saying.

However, the survey also found nurses faced many problems including a heavy workload and lack of protection of their rights, he said.

In the surveyed hospitals, one nurse often cared for 10-14 patients and some cared for more than 30 patients, he said.

"The shortage of nurses has increased their workload and led tobelow-standard service for patients," he said.

Ma said a new regulation on nurses that took effect on Monday would better protect their rights as to salary and benefits.

CHINESE companies' foreign investments jumped more than fourfold in the first quarter as the government encouraged spending overseas to help cut a surging trade gap.

Foreign direct investments rose to US$19.3 billion in the period, Vice Minister of Commerce Chen Jian said at an investment forum in Beijing yesterday. That compares to US$18.7 billion for the whole of 2007.

China has pledged to help companies invest overseas as it seeks to curb a trade surplus that threatens to overheat the economy, Bloomberg News said. Inflation has already hit an 11-year high, partly because of a flood of cash from Chinese exports.

The government is to talk to other countries about lowering barriers for Chinese companies to invest abroad.

South China's Guangdong province is the latest area in the nation to unveil plans to raise wages, state media said Wednesday, a move economists worry runs counter to efforts to rein in inflation.

Guangdong provincial labour authorities said in a 2008 plan that they aimed to establish a regular salary increase system and raise wages of all employees in the region by 12 percent or more this year, the China Youth Daily reported.

Other areas in China have announced similar polices, including the financial hub of Shanghai, where a salary rise guideline for this year has called on companies to lift employee wages by five to 16 percent.

This is meant to help households, especially low-income families, cope with the country's surging inflation, which has fuelled government fears of potential social unrest.

China's consumer price index rose 8.0 percent in the first quarter of the year. In February, it climbed to 8.7 percent, the highest in nearly 12 years, before easing slightly to 8.3 percent in March.

But analysts have voiced concern that salary hikes risk exacerbating the inflation problem that they are supposed to alleviate.

"Salary rises are certainly contributing to inflation," said Chen Xingdong, an economist with BNP Paribas in Beijing.

If companies are told to pay higher wages, they may have to raise their prices to stay out of the red, the economists argued, warning this could be the beginning of a vicious cycle.

"The problem will get worse if salaries and price rises take turns," said Ma Qing, a Beijing-based analyst with the think tank CEB Monitor Group.

They argued that it could also add an extra burden on companies that are already under big pressure of soaring upstream raw material prices and might even put them out of business.

"If the requirement goes beyond what companies can afford and therefore forces them to cut jobs or stop production, then the losses may be bigger than the gains," said Shen Minggao with Citigroup.

The Chinese government has signalled growing concern about the ways in which rising prices might adversely affect the poorest in society.

Since January, it has resorted to freezing price hikes on key consumer items like grain, edible oil, meat, milk and liquefied petroleum gas in order to keep them affordable for most families.

Wage rises may be meant to do the same, but economists warned they could actually lead to more social tensions by widening income disparities.

This is because wage rises by decree are likely to benefit mainly government employees, while blue-collar workers in private companies may get left behind.

"I doubt who will benefit from a policy where the government directs salary increases," CEB Monitor Group's Ma said.

"In the final analysis, I think it will only raise government employees' wages. This is what happened in 2006 and 2007."