Coronavirus: China’s migrant workers determined to stay in cities as most see ‘no hope’ in rural hometowns

Name: Jobless struggle to make ends meet in Hong Kong as city battles coronavirus and recession
Uploaded: 2020-09-01T04:00:21.000Z
Duration: 4 min 53 s
Description: Jobless struggle to make ends meet in Hong Kong as city battles coronavirus and recession

Most migrant workers want to stay in big cities for education and health care, despite the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, a new survey shows

But a lack of local residency permits, pressures on jobs and income make city living difficult for migrants who have been among the hardest hit by the outbreak

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The mass migration of workers from China’s countryside to cities has contributed enormously to its economic growth over the past 40 years. Photo: EPA-EFE

Cissy Zhou

Published: 12:00pm, 1 Sep 2020Updated: 12:00pm, 1 Sep 2020

Most of China’s migrant workers will stay in cities despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on jobs and incomes because there are fewer opportunities in their economically-backward hometowns, a new report has found.

The number of migrant workers that saw no opportunities for themselves if they returned home almost doubled from 35.3 per cent during the global financial crisis in 2007-08 to 63.35 per cent this year, according to the study released by the Beijing Social Work Development Centre for Facilitators on Sunday.

“More migrant workers are forced to go to cities to make a living. To most of them, going to cities is the best of bad options, because there are no [opportunities] or hope left in their hometown,” said the report, which was based on a survey of 311 migrant worker families in 23 provinces.

Fully 58.84 per cent of the survey respondents said they would stay in the city no matter what happens to have access to better education for their children, well above the 22 per cent who said so in the organisation’s survey during the financial crisis.

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Jobless struggle to make ends meet in Hong Kong as city battles coronavirus and recession

In addition to staying for better education, some of the migrant workers chose to live and work in big cities because they have chronic diseases and there was no access to good medical care in their hometowns, the report said.

The findings contrast with reports from state media like CGTN, which this month said as of end July local governments had created 13 million new jobs for migrant workers who returned from big cities, adding that 5 per cent of these were in new industries, such as live-streaming sales of agricultural products.

China has undergone the world’s broadest and fastest urbanisation in recent decades. By the end of 2019, more than 60 per cent of the Chinese population lived in towns and cities, a rise from 30 per cent two decades ago, official data showed.