"The Chinese economy, after nearly three decades of rapid, almost uninterrupted growth, seems to be settling down to a still strong but less blistering pace. But some sectors are struggling, including exports and luxury residential real estate construction.
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"Urban minimum wages are rising briskly, particularly here in Guangzhou and elsewhere in the industrial Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China. And they are supposed to keep rising 13 percent a year under Beijing’s five-year plan. But many of the job applicants and their friends from nearby factories said that they did not feel they were benefiting from the labor shortage.
“It’s hard to find a good job; it’s easy to find just any job,” said Gao Qing, a 21-year-old who was hoping for a quality-inspection position. Many of the available jobs pay only the local minimum wage, around $200 a month before overtime, and many of the jobs are at small factories with questionable reputations for paying workers on time.
And some of the smaller factories have reduced or eliminated traditional subsidies for workers’ food, housing and other benefits to offset the cost of higher minimum wages, Ms. Gao and other workers said."
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The government is trying to engineer a decline in real estate prices to improve affordability, without damaging investor confidence so much that prices tip into a multiyear downward spiral of the sort seen in the United States. Down payments have been raised to 40 percent or more and many regulations discourage investors from buying more than one home."
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