Global economic crisis takes the jobs that were supposed to be these workers’ path out of poverty.
December 30, 2008
CHENGDU, China (Reuters) — China’s ocean of blue-collar workers is streaming back to the country’s farming hinterland, bringing thwarted aspirations and rising discontent in tow as their city jobs, their paths out of poverty, fall victim to the global economic crisis.
Officials estimate that more than 10 million migrant laborers have already returned to the countryside as thousands of companies have been dragged under by weak global demand for everything from clothes to cars.
The government, always concerned about social instability, is now on high alert, fearful of the consequences of a huge mass of jobless, disappointed, rootless young men.
Beijing has urged firms to avoid cutting jobs despite falling profits, and many bosses have obliged by retaining workers but giving them unpaid leave.
Over the past three decades, about 130 million people have left China’s countryside for the smokestacks, assembly lines and construction sites of cities.
That migration, described as the world’s biggest ever by the United Nations, has underpinned the country’s heady growth and also given its poorest citizens a share of the spoils, as urban residents’ incomes are much higher than farmers’.
Known as China’s “floating population”, laborers rarely settle permanently where they work — effectively prohibited from doing so by residency rules — and return in droves to their hometowns for the Chinese lunar new year.
State media have put the best possible gloss on the in-bound tide of migrants under way: they are simply returning home early, one month ahead of the Year of the Ox which begins on Jan. 26.
But China is heading into uncharted territory and the picture could deteriorate quickly…
