'Reverse migration of workers could shake China's stability'

NEW YORK: With China's roaring industrial economy sputtering by the effects of the global financial crisis, rural provinces that supplied much of China's factory manpower are watching the beginnings of a wave of reverse migration that has the potential to shake the stability of the world's most populous nation, a media report said today.

Fast-rising unemployment, says the Wall Street Journal, has led to an unusual series of strikes and protests. Normally cautious government officials have offered quick concessions and talk openly of their worries about social unrest, it adds, pointing out clashes between factory workers and police in Dongguan last Tuesday.

On Wednesday, workers let go from a liquor factory in northern China mounted a protest in Beijing, at the parent company's headquarters. In the latest sign of economic stress, China's currency fell yesterday by its single largest margin on record against the dollar, on expectations the central bank might devalue it to prop up sagging growth, the paper said.

As the government tries to calm tensions in the cities, the Journal says, it also fears that newly unemployed migrants returning home could upend the already-strained social system in the countryside.

Many of the returning workers have too little income from the land to support their families, it says, adding that Beijing has been encouraging many to lease out their farms to more profitable cooperatives - which don't share their increased earnings from the crops with the landholders.

Others have no farms to come back to, having seen their land gobbled up by decades of previous Chinese urbanisation drives, in which unscrupulous developers and corrupt officials often illegally seized peasants' land, it said.

For workers accustomed to a decade of double-digit growth, it says, China's sudden downturn has come as a shock to the system.