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For decades, hundreds of millions of rural Chinese have flocked from their home provinces in the interior to make a better living in the factories and construction sites of the country’s more affluent eastern and southern cities.
Qatar Tribune reports that, with China’s domestic demand weakening and well-paying urban jobs becoming harder to find, recruiters and policymakers are concerned that many migrant workers are now staying closer to home.
At Jinan Senfeng Laser Technology in Shandong province, well-paying urban jobs are proving harder to come by.
“Since 2023, the number of jobs advertised at our companies has been falling while the number of people looking for work has been steadily rising,” said one member of staff at a state-owned labour agency that recruits workers in Longhui county in the central province of Hunan.
China’s ruling Communist Party is increasingly worried about unemployment. In November, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs held a work conference on the issue that warned in particular about workers’ “large-scale returning and staying in the countryside”.
Beijing does not publish annual data on the number of people returning to their home provinces, but analysts believe the trend has accelerated recently.
The government has issued guidelines aimed at boosting the number of jobs available for migrant workers, which include the provision of transport subsidies for those who travel to different provinces.
China has an estimated 300 million migrant workers, but an increasing proportion work in other areas of their home provinces rather than venturing further afield. The weakening pull of richer regions has meant the number travelling to other provinces has declined consistently since 2015.
