The top priority for the Chinese Government is tilting towards job creation as soaring unemployment threatens to undermine the country's economic growth and even social stability.

The trend is evident from the unprecedented importance attached by the top leadership to the issue of jobs, which was highlighted at two high-profile national meetings in as many days.

At the latest symposium on employment held in Beijing on Friday and Saturday, President Hu Jintao called on governments at all levels to place the issue of employment on a "more prominent position" on their agenda.

Premier Wen Jiabao went as far to say that top local authorities be held accountable for generating employment; while urging for the introduction of various pro-employment policies.

Encouraged by the positive moves, some labour experts optimistically predict that the long-anticipated "employment first" strategy may be officially unveiled at the upcoming Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

The meeting scheduled in October plans to discuss "how to further improve China's socialist market economic system" and deepen economic restructuring to stimulate economic and social development.

"Up to now, it is still unclear whether the so-called (employment first) policy will be introduced as some researchers have been hoping for," said Mo Rong, deputy director of the Institute for Labour Studies under the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

The researcher, whose institute is one of the central government's top thinktanks focusing on labour policy, said how the policy is labelled is not of the most importance in addressing the worsening jobless problem.

"What the government does matters most and you can see that the government has prioritized the issue of employment in an unprecedented way," Mo said.

"Over the past few years, the government has come up with a series of employment-oriented policies and incentives to improve employment."

Leading economists and labour experts have long warned that the government's excessive emphasis on economic growth and failure to deal with mass unemployment would finally drag down the country's fast growth.

They call for a long-term "employment first" strategy to replace the government's current "growth first" strategy.

Economist Hu Angang, director of the China Study Centre with Tsinghua University, said the nation "is facing the world's biggest battle against unemployment".

"The issue of employment will pose the biggest challenge to our country's economic development in the early 21st century," said Hu, a staunch supporter of the proposed "employment first" policy.

He added that China's excessive labour supply and declining capability of generating job opportunities are set to result in relatively-high urban jobless rates at least in the short and medium term.

At the end of June, China's registered urban unemployment rate jumped by 0.4 percentage points year on year to 4.2 per cent, with 7.95 million out of work.

In the same period, the figures in job-starved provinces of Liaoning and Heilongjiang stood as high as 7.8 per cent and 5.1 per cent respectively, far above the academically-set alarm level of 5 per cent.

Official statistics show that some 10 million job hunters will enter the labor market this year, in addition to over 6 million laid-off workers and 8 million registered unemployed people nationwide.

The mounting pressure will make it an arduous task for the government to reach its original target of creating 8 million jobs to keep the registered urban jobless rate below 4.5 per cent this year.

What's worse, the jobless situation is expected to remain grim as the labour force supply will continue to exceed demand for the next few years.

Given the gloomy prospects, Hu said, the government's economic policy should centre around creating employment so that economic growth can stimulate job creation.

"Generating more job opportunities should become the top goal of both the central government and local governments," Hu said. "And the employment policy should be placed highest among all economic and social policies."

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