With huge investment in province, especially its capital Chengdu, many migrants are coming home

Niu Qi gave a sigh of relief, after waving former colleague last month at Chengdu Railway Station North.

The colleague was catching a train to Ningbo, Zhejiang province - a grueling journey, and Niu was so relieved not to be making the journey herself.

"I no longer have to elbow my way into the station during the Spring Festival peak travel season," she said, "and sit on a packed hard-seat compartment for 34 hours."

A native of Dayi county, Sichuan province, Niu has just quit her job in a shoe factory in Ningbo, where she had worked for 11 years, to take care of her 6-year-old daughter, who is starting primary school in the southern suburbs of Chengdu in September.

She has found a job locally, at another shoe factory, at a monthly salary of 2,600 yuan ($418).

"Although that's 400 yuan less than my salary in Ningbo, prices are lower in my home province. And it is important to be with my family," she said.

Niu is just one of a growing number of migrant workers now choosing to stay in their home province of Sichuan, rather than earning their money often many miles away from their families.

With a population of 90 million, Sichuan has been one of China's largest labor-exporting provinces in recent years.

In 2000, about 6 million rural people left the province, and last year that figure rose to more than 11 million.

But the year was significant too, in that it marked the first time that more rural migrant workers were exported to other parts of Sichuan, rather than outside the province, said Xiong Jianzhong, a spokesman for the Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Statistics, who revealed that in 2012, nearly 13 million Sichuan rural migrant workers left their hometown to work in other parts of the province.

Hao Yuenan, the deputy chief of the information office of the Sichuan provincial government, added: "The reason for the change in the labor export pattern is that Sichuan has witnessed rapid economic development in the past five years."

"After the world financial crisis of 2008, coastal provinces faced a dwindling number of orders from overseas.

"As a result, many rural migrant workers are returning to Sichuan," he said.

One of the counties worst-affected over the years, in terms of numbers leaving to work away, was Jintang in the eastern part of Chengdu, with around 180,000 people from there choosing to work outside the province, many of them in Guangdong province.

In 1998, Wang Hongqiong, then 17, became one of the first migrant workers from the county to head for Guangdong.

Together with another 48 women from Jintang, Wang arrived in Dongguan and started work in a leather plant, where she was paid more in a month than she did in a year back home.

But like many manufacturing companies in China, orders dropped in the wake of the financial crisis, and she returned to her home village of Yongfeng in 2008 to start a garment plant.

"Many former co-workers have returned since, all lathe operators in shoe and garment plants," said Wang, whose plant has now employed some of her previous co-workers.

Thanks to its abundant resources, and relatively lower production costs, Sichuan has attracted many investors from coastal provinces to set up manufacturing bases in recent years.

In 2008, 142 of the world's Fortune 500 companies were represented in Sichuan. Now there are 247 invested there.

Over the past five years, Sichuan has seen 2.7 trillion yuan in investment from other parts of the country and more than $36 billion in foreign investment.

In Chengdu, the provincial capital, an average of 537 domestic and foreign companies, private businesses and agricultural professional cooperatives were registered every workday in 2012, according to Xue Min, the deputy chief of the city's bureau of industry and commerce.

"Their daily average investment was 610 million yuan on each work day last year," Xue said.

The influx of coastal Chinese and foreign firms has created huge job opportunities.

Mei Lan, a middle-aged woman from Pixian county, Sichuan, works on the assembly line of an electronic equipment producer in Xiamen, Fujian province.

But her sister has returned to their home county and works with Texas Instruments Inc, the US semiconductor design and manufacturing company, at a factory that can be reached by motorcycle from their home village.

"As wages are almost the same in my plant in Xiamen and Texas Instruments in my hometown, I plan to return," Mei said.

According to the Sichuan Daily, the divorce rate in some rural areas is higher than in urban areas as many husbands or wives work away as migrant workers.

In some townships, the divorce rate of some migrant workers is as high as 50 percent.

In 1993, Liu Daoqun, a young woman villager in Xinzheng village, Luzhou city in Sichuan, went to Guangdong working as a waitress in restaurants.

In 2008, Liu returned and got permission to manage 16 hectares of barren land in her home village for 50 years.

She invested about 300,000 yuan to plant bamboo and build a road. Now she earns more than 60,000 yuan a year selling bamboo as building materials.

As more and more land has been lost to urbanization, vegetables and fruit are getting expensive, and many farmers like Liu are returning to the land, to earn a living from planting cash crops.

Ren Jun, an official with the Sichuan provincial employment service center, said it is now hard to persuade people to work outside of Sichuan.

In charge of labor export since the early 1990s, Ren said back then an ordinary worker in Sichuan earned between 500 and 600 a month, while a counterpart in a coastal area earned around 1,400 yuan.

Now, the wage gap has narrowed dramatically and coastal areas have lost much of their appeal, he said.

Liu Huiping, an official in Zhugao town, Jintang, who sent Wang Hongqiong to Guangdong in 1998, still remembers the slogan prevalent at that time that said sending a migrant worker somewhere in the country meant poverty alleviation for one household, and that sending one abroad meant a comfortable lifestyle for the household.

But all the employment agencies in her town were closed in 2009 as fewer people in the county chose to work away from home, Liu said.

huangzhiling@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 04/02/2013 page14)