Yuan Yangzhou: As indicated by the authors, measuring China's unemployment rate is extremely difficult because of data source limitations. This paper clearly demonstrates the main problems of using official unemployment data. To solve this problem, the authors cite Giles et al. (2005), which shows a strong correlation between official data and adjusted estimation. Nevertheless, that paper still claims a large difference between official data and true data. Specifically, in 2001 November, the vast majority of the unemployed (8.9 percentage points out of 12.7 percent) had no official status as laid off or registered unemployed. This means that official data contain little information about the true employment situation. Therefore, unemployment data must be adjusted to narrow the gap between official data and true data.
This paper uses private employment as a measure of reform. According to my experience, however, corresponding data from the National Statistics Bureau can be misleading....