S01E06 - China Decoded

Welcome to the Wild Side, a podcast that discusses the world of modern employee relations ten minutes at a time. This episode is the first in the series of country-specific employee relations profiles. In this episode, host Alan Wild discusses the background of human resources and how employee relations works in practice, in China. Alan is the Global Affairs Director of the HR Policy Association, the leading voice of chief human resources offices today.

China today is the world's largest economy with a workforce 776 million strong. 30% of the Chinese workforce produce 40% of China’s GDP. The first Chinese Labor Code was launched in the 1990s and Human Resource Management wasn’t enacted as a discipline until the mid-90s. The Chinese labor code which is fundamentally based on international labor organization conventions has laws set at multiple levels and some laws have no penalty for non-implementation.

Key Takeaways: 

• China is the central cog in the world's supply chain wheel: Facts that support this statement. [3:42]
• How the Chinese Hukou system works. [6:10]
• The birth of human resource management in China. [7:55]
• The Chinese labor code has laws set at multiple levels and some laws have no penalty for non-implementation. [8:23]