From Time:
The global economy has been good to Yang Hong, but no longer. As a migrant worker in China’s coastal Jiangsu province over the past seven years, Yang had managed to save enough to invest in a factory that produced packaging for exports. But that was before the downturn. When orders from abroad plummeted, Yang, 37, was forced to return home to Huarong county in central Hunan province. There, on the grounds of an abandoned school, he’s started a more rustic enterprise, farming chickens. In a sandy lot 2,000 black birds squawk and flap. Some peck at Yang’s feet. Raising them doesn’t take much work, Yang says, and their eggs each fetch the equivalent of 25 American cents. Also, he ventures optimistically, their droppings “don’t smell as bad as other breeds of chicken.”
In an economy where the downturn in global demand has hammered China’s factories, the country’s migrant workers will take whatever good news they can find. China’s exports declined by 2% in November, the first drop in seven years. More than 600,000 small and medium-sized companies were shuttered last year, putting millions out of work and launching a wave of reverse migration to the countryside as laborers from the poor interior who had traveled to the coast in search of better jobs are now being forced to return home. The government says that 10 million out of China’s 120 million migrant workers are unemployed, and at least 4.85 million of those have returned to the interior, the state-run China Daily has reported. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warned recently that urban unemployment reached 9.4% between May and September of last year. In December, President Hu Jintao announced that China’s employment situation in 2009 will be “extremely grim.” (Read TIME’s Report “How to Heal the World Economy”)
