Dongguan's migrant factory workers dream of going home for same wages

On a rainy afternoon in early April, four young women in their early 20s walked along Gangjian Avenue in Dongguan's Changping township, home to a cluster of factories looking for workers.

They stopped and looked at the ad on the gate of one factory.

"The base salaries are 1,250 yuan and overtime pay is only10 yuan an hour! Let's check out other factories," one of the girls said as they moved on.

Ads for jobs like these are plastered on the factories along the avenue. The postings, and the young women's response to them, speak loudly to Dongguan's conundrum: how a city's manufacturing base can simultaneously be facing falling orders and a labour shortage.

The decline in export orders has come as wage costs have risen, forcing firms that are still alive to uproot and move inland to one of the many thousands of provincial cities in a bid to lower labour costs.

Those left behind with a business model based on low cost manufacturing struggle to survive.