In fact, the shop assistant job offered to Zeng is only one of the 833 posts reserved for people in the community in a job bank at Yanshikou subdistrict office, a grass-roots government agency handling the official affairs of several communities, including the community where Zeng lives.

"We hire several laid-off workers as 'job hunters'. Then they can help scores of jobless in the community support their lives bycollecting employment information and filling the job bank via long-term contacts with communal businesses, hiring halls and other work places," said Wang Rong, an official with the Yanshikousubdistrict office.

"Based on the rising expectations of laid-off workers for theirnext job, job seekers will select matching posts from the bank anddeliver the employment information to the homes of job applicants,who are entitled to make the final decision," Wang said.

According to Wang, more and more labor and social security workhas been taken from state-owned enterprises and attached to subdistricts and communities. Her office has set up three labor and social security branches in communities under its administration.

Official statistics show that by the end of this May, China hadseen 3,678 subdistrict offices in big and medium cities form special employment organizations, accounting for 83 percent of thecountry's total.

In the first half of this year, communities and subdistricts inChina's 100 medium and large-sized cities had offered 600,000 new job opportunities, which helped ease the country's increasingly pressing problem of unemployment.

Currently, China has some 80,000 community-based service helpers. Zheng Silin, minister of labor and social security, notedin mid-August that the country's labor and social security departments at various levels should begin to rely more on subdistricts and communities in extending re-employment assistance,so as to assist one million more unemployed settle in community jobs.

Experts believe that community employment is becoming the potentially most promising sector to take in labor with a comparatively low level of education, especially laid-off workers who have lost their advantages in age.

However, the progress of re-employment in communities has also experienced a mental conversion, as the old feudal concept viewed it demeaning to cook, clean or do housework in other people's homes, items also included in community employment.

But many laid-off workers serving in the communities later changed their attitude and felt themselves lucky after earning satisfactory income and respect with honest labor.

Sources from the All-China Women's Federation said that 40 percent of laid-off women, who composed more than half of the country's unemployed last year, have found jobs again by cooking, cleaning and providing childcare or delivering newspapers and milkin their neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the scope of community-based jobs has also seen an expansion in recent two years from traditional services for individual residents to the community administration and public services.

Ma Qun, a 25-year-old young mother in Nanjing city of east China's Jiangsu province, began working again this April in the Tianmulu Community after losing her job over one year before.

As a community worker, Ma is responsible for the Tianmulu's public security and work safety of enterprises within the community. She is also obligated to organize cultural and entertainment activities as well as spread scientific knowledge inthe community, according to Zhang, director of the Tianmulu community office who only gave his family name.

The SARS outbreak was the first test Ma encountered only half amonth after she took the new job.

"I handed out leaflets about prevention measures against SARS and called the public's attention to the epidemic. Later when things became more serious, I visited the homes of community residents door by door, registering their temperatures and recording their long-distance trips," Ma said.

"The community is restructuring its service functions, which makes our work more complicated. However, we feel grateful that itstill gives us an opportunity to play our role and to contribute to society, no matter how tiny our role is," Ma said.

Relevant statistics have indicated that in a highly-socialized big city, for every 100 residents, eight people are needed to fillcommunity jobs, while in a medium or small-sized city, five peopleare needed for every 100 residents.

Experts hold that the great employment potential surfacing in communities is essential to honoring China's commitment made earlyin March, which promised to create over 8 million new jobs for urban residents to keep its registered urban unemployment rate within 4.5 percent in 2003.

(People's Daily Sep 4, 2003)