Nation's job market remains steady in 2023

China saw a steady job market in 2023, and a new way has been unveiled to calculate the unemployment rate of young people, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday.

Latest figures from the bureau show that the average surveyed unemployment rate in urban areas stood at around 5.2 percent in 2023, decreasing by 0.4 percentage point from the previous year.

Last year's urban unemployment rate, according to the bureau, marked a stepwise decrease by quarters — 5.4 percent in the first quarter, 5.2 percent in both the second and third quarters and 5 percent in the fourth quarter — while the number of newly hired employees grew continuously from January to November, reaching roughly 11.8 million, a year-on-year rise of 350,000.