Roughly 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs as a result of the financial crisis. Xinhua quoted a senior official in Beijing on Monday as saying that about 20 million of China's migrant workers had already returned home after losing their jobs as the global financial crisis took its toll on the economy.

"Chen Xiwen, director of the office of the central leading group on rural work, said about 15.3 percent of the country's 130 million migrant workers had returned jobless from cities to the countryside.

The figures were based on a survey by the Ministry of Agriculture in 150 villages in 15 provinces, carried out before the week-long Lunar New Year holiday which began on Jan. 25."

Similarly, Xinhua notes that GDP in the fourth quarter of 2008 had slipped to 6.8 percent, well below the eight percent that the government had sought to protect, a policy informally known as bao ba.

The slowing economy and large number of returning migrant workers will almost certainly put a strain on rural economies and on rural social and political governance capabilities. To improve conditions in the countryside, the government’s first Opinion of the year (Yi Hao Wenjian), a document which often shows the public what issues the priorities for the upcoming year will be, addressed various rural issues, including: increasing rural income, ensuring social stability, and re-incorporating returning migrant workers into their home communities. 

 

To some degree, the priorities set forth in the government’s first Opinion are mainly laudable goals. Paragraph 24, which deals with returning migrant workers, proposes: increasing rural income, finding employment for returning migrants, supervising salary payments to make sure they are on-time, appropriately solving labour disputes, increasing rural training, reducing taxes, ensuring land rights are respected, increasing non-agricultural industries…and many other policies.

However, one has to wonder whether any individual village cadre could meaningfully prioritize and make plans to carry out all of these various policies. But at the very least, it’s clear that the government understands the importance of helping and providing for returning migrant workers, and the destabilizing impact that would happen if they fail to do so competently.