State-owned enterprise layoffs (1997-2001)
Restructuring of state-owned enterprises shed millions of industrial workers, concentrating job losses in heavy-industry regions like the northeast. The services and private sectors gradually absorbed the displaced labor.
Mass dislocation hit industrial cities; many laid-off workers took informal or low-paid work.
By the 2000s, services and private enterprise had become the dominant employers in urban China.
Today's policy repeats that bet, with delivery riders and livestream hosts replacing the factory jobs of the 1990s transition.
