From Knowledge@Wharton, via YaleGlobal Online(link):
Early this year, at a job fair held in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province in China, more than 50,000 positions designed to encourage farmers to move to urban areas went unfilled. In addition, of the more than 400 farmers who left their hometown of Qinghai last year to work in Fujian’s Quanzhou City, less than a third stayed. Usually, the two to three months following the country’s Spring Festival are the time when farmer-workers leave their families and start work in cities. But this year, many labor-intensive enterprises in China found themselves short of workers to start the engine.
Yet this is not the first time that China has experienced a labor shortage. An article published in The Economist in October 2004 pointed out that although there were 19 million farmer-turned-workers in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, the area still faced a shortage of two million workers. In 2005, the problem extended from the Pearl River Delta into the Yangtze River Delta and the coastal areas in the North. According to a 2005 survey conducted in Guangdong province, although a third of the manufacturers there have tried to solve the labor shortage by raising wages and benefits, overall demand still exceeds supply by more than one million positions.
