Coronavirus: China’s stranded migrant workers desperate to return home as savings dry up

With no income, no job and little hope of returning home, some overseas Chinese workers feel like they are languishing in prison

A lack of international flights, much less affordable ones, leave China’s migrant workers competing for airline seats with tourists, pregnant women and children

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Tens of thousands of foreign workers in Singapore have been put under quarantine amid the pandemic, and returning to their home countries – including China – is simply not an option. Photo: EPA

Published: 8:00am, 1 Aug 2020Updated: 10:55pm, 1 Aug 2020

Zhu Bowen was excited about the possibility of landing an IT job when she travelled to Tokyo in December. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic having completely upended her life, the 24-year-old is out of options and looking to return to China.

After graduating from college in the northeast Chinese city of Dalian last year, Zhu took a six-month training course in computer science and then went to Tokyo to receive language training in business Japanese at an IT outsourcing company, which offered IT support for local firms.

And this past spring, she was supposed to be dispatched to a company in Japan to do software testing. But the move never happened. The pandemic, and subsequent corporate cost-cutting, stripped away the job opportunity.

Many Chinese workers want to go home, mainly because they feel like they’ve been sitting in jail

Xiong Gang in Singapore

Before March, Zhu’s net income was around 127,000 yen (US$1,210) a month. From March to May, that was cut by 20 per cent. In June, it was slashed another 20 per cent. Finally, she said, the company asked her to voluntarily resign with no compensation.

“I eventually resigned,” she said. “But there is another Chinese peer who refuses to sign the papers, and he still gets about 30,000 yen. That’s not even enough for you to eat. He is also looking for other jobs. But the job market is so bad. If I go for an interview with another local firm, the company will definitely consider Japanese candidates first.”

Zhu is not alone in her plight. The pandemic has wreaked havoc on numerous overseas workers from China – one of the world’s largest labour-exporting countries. These workers include crews on cargo ships and cruises, as well as construction workers on belt and road projects.

Some have been stranded abroad for months, with no income, no job and little hope of returning home.

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