Before I leave I’m trying to finish several books on my always-too-high stack of reading material. One of the particularly fascinating volumes in my pile is China Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World. The author, former commodities trader turned journalist Ted Fishman, offers a plenty of interesting facts and enlightening vantage points.

While the American focus relative to China invariably centers on domestic job losses, the tremendous swirl of China’s job market makes ours seem negligible by comparison. I’m speaking in the macro sense, of course; to an individual, whether in the United States or elsewhere, the loss of a job is hardly a trivial affair.

The rapidly expanding private sector in China is creating massive disruption among state-owned companies. Since 1978, Fishman notes, nearly 40,000 state-owned enterprises have been shut down. In the five years ended in 2001, about 53 million Chinese workers lost their jobs in the state-owned sector. By comparison, the five hundred largest corporations in the world, as measured by Fortune magazine, have a combined workforce of 46 million people.

In the four years beginning in 1998, the state-owned sector in China fired 21 million workers. This figure, Fishman notes, is more than the entire American workforce employed in the manufacturing sector.

This competitive disruption is largely being caused by China's own private sector, which Fishman pegs at about a quarter of the country’s GDP. This figure is likely understated; a World Bank study estimates the size of the “informal economy” in China was 13% of 2003 GDP.

Even so, the intensity of the swirl in China’s job market likely has a number of years to play out.