labor - Recounting the unemployed

Figures and China, that is traditionally a minefield, especially when those figures tend to be political sensitive. Mostly foreign media just repeat those figures, then explaining what is really going on might be not doable.
So, I end up reading this rather strange story, brought to us by the China Daily through Reuters, on how China is going to change the way how it is counting its unemployed. There are at least two lose ends in the story that need more explanation.
First, China only counts the urban unemployed. The country has an administrative division between the cities and the country side, that has no relation with the real occupation of its inhabitants. Does such a figure make sense? Only on a local level, since it does not say anything about nationwide trends.
Second, the new, internationally used, method of counting urban unemployed is according to the article already done since the year 2000, but before that nobody dared to actually publish them. So, the academics involved know already for sure that the now official figure of 4.2 percent unemployed will be going up dramatically. That could have happened a bit earlier, or not?