Unlike other industrialized countries, China's resource enterprises have to, too early, to face a series of issues derived from exhausted resources, which emerge before the completion of industrialization. These issues chiefly reflect on inherited burden, loss of core competitiveness and insufficiency of human resources because of a lagging regime reform, lack of technical innovation and weak industrial transformation. The dilemma from a unique historical reason needs efforts for enterprises in many aspects so as to achieve a sustainable development, in regime reform, industrial policies, social guarantee and industrial transformation and upgrade
Xuzhou, a typical resource-exhausted city with sole industrial structure, less economic growth point, and poor employment, is facing vast structural unemployment due to the exhausted resource. It is challenge that a labor transfer is unavoidable. This paper, based on a case study on Xuzhou, under the precondition of resource-exhausted city theory and surplus labor transfer mode theory, uses qualitative and quantitative method to analyze the feature of Xuzhous labor transfer, and presents approaches to a proper selection of surplus labor transfer mode, which guarantees a full employment for this transferred labors and promote a sustainable development in its economy.