It’s that time again. The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey (MEOS) is out, and the figures for China are better than others in the region.

Following my theme of actively looking for good news to satisfy my Good News Radar, that’s about as far as I can stretch it because otherwise the report is depressing.

Manpower’s Net Employment Outlook for China now stands at its weakest level since the survey began in Q2 2005. This is not long history for a survey, but the sentiment has been non-stop-positive since 2005, and the scale of the research is huge, so we have to take it seriously.

If we wanted to keep with the good news theme, we could note that employers in 23 of the 33 countries and territories are reporting the weakest hiring plans since the surveys were established in that country by Manpower. The exception is India and China. Both countries expect to add employees in Q2 2009.

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Good news is also to be found from a geographical analysis of the results. Employers in Shanghai and Dalian may be experiencing negative hiring, but hiring expectations is positive in the central and west cities such as Chengdu and Xi’an.

The specifics are scary tho’.

Quarter 2 2009 Net Employment Outlook for China stands at +4% (based on seasonally adjusted data), a decline of 6% quarter-over-quarter and 8%s year-over-year. In addition, the Net Employment Outlook in China has been declining for four consecutive quarters since Q3 2008.

Finally, as if to hammer home the message, in Q2 2009 employers in three cities and two industry sectors reported their first negative forecasts, signaling hiring contraction in those regions and industries.

Clearly it is better to be in China than any other territory in the world, with the exception perhaps of India, but this is little comfort when we are experiencing hiring & travel freezes, overtime bans, and actual redundancies.