The eastern coastal city of Qingdao, Shandong province has made unremitting efforts to ensure and improve people's livelihoods in the past decade.

Qingdao plans to devote more energy and implement more concrete measures to improve people's living standards. [Photo/VCG]

Employment is essential to the people's wellbeing. Over the past decade, Qingdao has continuously strengthened the employment priority policy and promoted the construction of an entrepreneurial city, so that more people have access to employment channels as well as entrepreneurial opportunities.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012, Qingdao has created a total of 5.47 million new urban jobs, and policy support has been given to 227,000 people to start businesses, and the city's registered urban unemployment rate has been kept under 4 percent.

In 2021, the per capita disposable income of urban and rural residents in Qingdao was 1.9 and 2.1 times the figures in 2012, respectively.

In the past 10 years, Qingdao has made steady progress to ensure people have access to childcare and education, and it has accelerated the construction of a high-quality educational system.

In the past 10 years, Qingdao has built, renovated and expanded 1,123 kindergartens, and increased the capacity of public kindergartens to enroll additional over 210,000 students, and a total of 899 primary and secondary schools were built, renovated or expanded.

The city has also formulated a series of measures to boost elderly care and witnessed an improvement of senior citizens' livelihoods.