A Tough New Year for China's Migrant Workers

Like millions of other Chinese migrant workers, Zhang Pingdi left his village in central Hunan province a decade ago to find work in one of the factories in the Pearl River Delta region. He didn't have much difficulty finding work in Dongguan, a manufacturing hub north of Hong Kong, until the global economic crisis spread to China. Last year, 30-year-old Zhang was laid off from three different factories as export orders for electronics and lights dried up. Instead of heading home for Chinese New Year, Zhang decided to stay in Dongguan to get a head start on his job search this year. "I thought about going home to look for work or to start my own company, but it's not that easy where I'm from," he says.

With the weeklong celebration of the Year of the Ox having ended on Feb. 2 and millions of Chinese returned to factory towns along the coast, workers like Zhang are finding it even harder to make money or go home. The global recession knocked down China's fourth-quarter gross domestic product to a seven-year low of 6.8%, and factories, construction sites, and even tech companies have been laying off workers. China's official unemployment rate, also known as the urban registered unemployment rate, hit a 30-year high of 4.2% by the end of December. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) estimates that if the stats included migrant workers (who by the government's reckoning still officially have jobs on farms back in the countryside), the actual unemployment rate would be higher than 9%.