Just days after China's premier promised parliament he would find work for over 14 million people, the country's labour minister said unemployment remained a grim problem that would not be solved for years to come.
Premier Wen Jiabao opened the annual session of parliament last week with a pledge to create nine million new urban jobs in 2004 and re-employ five million jobless as China struggles to keep a lid on the number of unemployed for fear of social unrest.
But Labour and Social Security Minister Zheng Silin yesterday admitted that finding jobs for all in the world's most populous nation would be no easy task.
"Unemployment will continue to be a major issue for China in the coming years," told a news conference on the sidelines of parliament.
"The situation is grim." The government has bankrolled debts that failed state-owned plants owed to millions of ex-employees and pensioners, begun to repair the frayed social safety net and offered incentives to private businesses to soak up the jobless.
But analysts and officials acknowledge it could take years to uproot the seeds of protest that saw tens of thousands of laid-off workers protest two years ago just as parliament was meeting.
In the old northeast industrial bastion, Liaoning province's new welfare and pension pilot will spread to the neighbouring provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang this year.
But it would take "several years" before the heavily subsidised fund could "run normally", Mr Zheng said.
The trimming of some bloated state firms would be a slow, strategic process aimed at heading off a deluge of layoffs and a jump in unemployment, he explained.
A critical social security law, discussed for years by parliament's legal committee, was still being prepared, he said.
Labour officials were still exploring how to stretch benefits to the countryside, where only 60 million of 800 million resident receive pensions and only a small number of landless farmers along the prosperous eastern seaboard get subsidies, he said.
In March 2002, two of the country's largest demonstrations erupted in the northeastern rustbelt, a region lauded as an industrial Utopia under the late Mao Zedong.
Workers' widely publicised demands for unpaid benefits and lost jobs at the oil fields of Daqing and in the flagging smelting town of Liaoyang, as well as protests elsewhere, forced Beijing to tackle the plight of the urban unemployed.
"This year, compared to 2002, there are fewer workers' protests," said Li Qiang, director of New York-based China Labour Watch. "The state pays more attention to big state firms. Local bureaucrats can't turn a blind eye like before.
"But the new mechanisms are not fully in place," he said. "There are still many small protests. They just don't attract as much attention."
Mr Liaoyang, where two protest leaders were later jailed for subversion while one manager of the city's ferroalloy factory went to prison for smuggling, has yet to make a comeback.
"The factory has gone into bankruptcy and workers have no jobs or incomes," former ferroalloy worker Wang Xian said by telephone. "The city government promised to help us to find other jobs but they haven't kept their promise."
The minister said as many as 24 million urban Chinese enter the jobs market every year - eight million of them unemployed, six million laid-off by state-owned or other enterprises and a 10 million first-time entrants, mostly students and ex-soldiers.