If future historians try to identify the day the global economic crisis reached the tipping point, they might want to consider Nov. 15 of last year.
That was the day, after years of slowly battling their way out of poverty as China's economy rapidly expanded, that 39 villagers decided there was no more money to be made in the once-booming factory cities on the Pacific Coast. So they packed themselves into 16 rickety three-wheeled tuk-tuks and began a slow, two-week journey home from booming Guangdong province to this speck of a place in the country's southwest.
Call it the Long Ride, a modernized and peaceful version of the Long March retreat staged by Mao Zedong's Communist army 75 years ago. Only the current retreat is being staged by China's army of suddenly jobless migrant workers — an estimated 20 million of them and counting, a number larger than the combined populations of Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. For years they were the fuel that fed China's booming economy, but this restless mass now poses a huge challenge for Beijing, which is openly fretting about the possibility of wide-scale unrest.
Pu Qingsheng and his neighbours were in the vanguard of the movement. Driving 17 hours a day for two weeks, in an open vehicle that couldn't exceed 20 kilometres an hour, Mr. Pu drove his motorized rickshaw in convoy with his neighbours from the port city of Shantou back to this mountain village in Sichuan province.
His wife and two teenage children spent the arduous journey packed in the back along with their meagre belongings. They endured the exhaust-choked highways and potholed back roads while crammed three across onto a metal bench that looks designed for two. They paused once a day for a meal of instant noodles mixed with borrowed tap water.
The Pu family felt they had no choice but to return to Yuanshan. As the garment and toy factories that are the economic heart of Shantou shut down last fall, largely because of slumping demand from North America, fewer people were willing to pay even the small fee for a ride in Mr. Pu's tuk-tuk. His wife and children, who all had low-paying jobs collecting plastics for recycling plants, were told in October their services were no longer needed.
"When the bosses started closing down the factories, our earnings couldn't cover our expenses any more," Mr. Pu explained grimly. "Before the crisis, a normal day's business would bring in between 50 and 60 yuan [$9 to $11] a day. In October, it suddenly dropped to 30 or 40 yuan [$5 to $7] a day. Sometimes, it was only 10 or 20 [$1 to $3]. Nobody wanted to take a cab if they could walk instead and save the money."
The math was the same for everyone from Yuanshan. The 39 villagers had come to Guangdong together at a time when it looked like China's economic miracle would go on forever. Now, back home together in this village that has neither paved roads nor a sewage system, they're trying to understand what to do next.
In addition to the estimated 20 million, another 5 or 6 million migrant workers could lose their jobs in the month to come. Some argue that even those numbers underestimate the scope of what is happening.
As the months go by and the number of jobless mounts, there are rising concerns that desperation could turn into anger. Scarcely a day has gone by recently without a new warning from the government in Beijing about the possibility of growing social unrest.
In the short term, organized action seems unlikely, largely because independent trade unions are banned in China, leaving workers with nothing to rally around in these hard times. While workers are involved every year in tens of thousands of "mass incidents" (the official terminology for strikes and protests; there were 87,000 in 2005, the last year they were reported), nearly all have been isolated incidents that were quickly brought under control by authorities.
For now, many migrants, such as Mr. Pu and his family, have returned to their homes in the countryside, hoping to scrape by farming their tiny state-assigned plots of land, just as they did before the boom times. But with the Chinese New Year festival over, many more have returned to the cities impatiently waiting for new jobs to materialize to replace the ones they lost.
