“回家乡工作吧，家里需要你的照顾”，一个红条幅赫然横在位于中国中部的福兴镇大街上。直到现在，周围村庄的农民们仍然梦想着离开自家的菜园，跑去1000公里以外的沿海城市赚大钱。政府当然也很高兴农民能这么想，但现在情况不同了，政府迫切希望能把这些农民留在家乡。
福兴镇所在的金堂县曾经是传说中的四川省劳务输出大县。由于贫困、位处内陆以及与海外市场严重隔阂，四川省政府除了鼓励这些没有工作的大量农村劳动力去外地工作外，也别无他法。与金堂县处境相仿的这些县的政府官员曾多次前往沿海的工业城镇参观，为县里的富余劳动力做宣传——而宣传用语仍然是四川人如何坚强、果敢这些陈词滥调。
20世纪80年代至90年代期间，金堂县去外地务工的人员数目从几乎为零增长到18万人（金堂县的总人口为90万人）。这些人中超过三分之一都去了广东省，这个首先从中国外贸繁荣景象中获益的地方。中国农民工喜欢和同乡人扎推，许多来自金堂县的农民工最终定在了广东省劳动力密集型生产的中心——东莞，这里生产的产品几乎涵盖所有种类，从电子产品到服装。东莞的一条街因此有了“小金堂”的称号。媒体称金堂县的党政领导曾访问过这里的工厂，并说服这些工厂雇佣从金堂来的农民工。6年前，金堂县也因为同样的目的在东莞设立了一个办事处。
来自家乡的诱惑
现在情况出现了重大的转变。金堂县归四川省的首都成都管辖，和其他内陆城市一样，它也将步入繁荣了。这要得益于近几年大量涌入的政府投资，和沿海制造企业希望在这里找到更便宜的土地和劳动力。现在的福兴镇，墙上和路灯柱上贴满了各种招工广告，而且这些工作地点不在遥远的沿海工厂，就在成都市的周边。生产苹果iPad和其他计算机产品的富士康公司也发布了招聘广告，这家大型台湾公司的工厂就设在成都市附近（一张粉红色广告上写着待遇：每月2000多元——即320美元）。富士康最大的工厂在广东省，但它于2010年10月在成都开设了一个大型的现代化工厂，并声称要在5年内扩展为拥有50万名员工的大厂。成都的政府官员花尽心机尽量想让本地人得到更多的工作机会（难怪富士康在中国工厂里发生的多起自杀事件并没有怎么惊动政府）。
在福兴镇的一个道路边，几个附近村的年轻男女正拖着大大小小的行李等着去成都的汽车（尽管是去成都，但是从福兴出发仍需2至3个小时才能到达，并且一路上大多走的是蜿蜒的乡村小路）。这时候刚过完农历新年，往年的这个时候，农民工早已在家过完年返回沿海去打工了，这种状况持续了20年。但对汽车站的大部分乘客来说，成都就是他们的目的地。一听说成都现在的工资已经跟沿海差不了多少，工作也很容易就找到，他们就争先恐后地涌向那里。
变化当然不止局限于中国这个遥远的小村落，这种变化的普遍性标志着中国的一个发展阶段开始走向终结：这个阶段的标志是人们经过长途跋涉来到远方那些黑暗的工厂，然后继续过着痛苦的生活。新修的路很快就能让被孤立的福兴镇离高速公路只有几公里的路程，村民们为此很激动，因为这条路不仅缩短了去成都的路程，更让他们离商业和工作机会更近了。在福兴镇工作的工人们给这个庞大的新兴市场和购物中心画上了最后的一笔。
金堂县的政府官员现在忙着做的事是他们3、4年前根本不敢想的：劝说县里的农民工过年后留在自己家里，不要再去沿海打工了。他们把农民工代表召集在一起开会，给他们提供税收优惠，并帮助那些想要自己创业的人筹集贷款。重庆一家国有报纸甚至刊登了一张警察帮回家过年的农民工提着行李的照片，这充分说明了一点：政府欢迎他们回家。重庆某老板更是提供了一个加长轿车，专门给农民工托运行李。
政府于2011年报告说，本地劳动力在重庆市内迁移的数量首次超过了迁往外省的数量。就在几年前，70%的劳动力都流向了外省。新华社报导说，自2008年以来，另一个劳动力输出大省河南省，第一次离开河南的人口中有五分之四都已经选择在河南境内迁移。听说在那之前五分之四的人口选择的是去外省。在四川省有类似的趋势。2008年，该省的2000万名农民工中有58%的人选择去外省，而去年这一比例就降到了52%。成都一位政府官员说，农民工选择留在离家近的地方的意愿在今年尤其强烈。他说其中一个原因是欧洲经济衰退导致沿海城市的工厂出口产品的生产受到影响。（内地新增的工作机会不可能都是农民工通常所从事的出口领域。）
农民工远距离迁徙在未来几年仍会是中国的一个突出特色。沿海地区的就业情况在2008年后期就因为全球金融危机而遭受过打击，数百万的农民工因此失业。但是这种状况不久就因为出口繁荣而好转，政府的一系列刺激措施也很快让就业恢复增长。现在的沿海工厂又回到了劳动力短缺的时期，没能逃脱欧洲经济衰退的阴影。
然而，尽管才刚刚开始，最近劳动力迁徙模式发生的转变可能比萧条的西方市场给中国带来的暂时性影响还大。这些转变映射出中国目前的经济状况和人口老龄化问题，源源不断地供应大量廉价年轻劳动力的时代已经一去不复返了。根据联合国预计，去年15至29岁年龄的人口数目已经达到顶峰，工作年龄的人口总数接下来几年就要开始下降。根据发展研究中心去年的报告，农村地区30岁以下的人口中有90%的人已经开始从事非农业性的工作了。因此，重庆和四川一些需要半成熟工人的企业压力比较大，当地政府今年已经开始走访其他省市，帮这两个地区的公司找工人。
农民工迁徙模式的转变可能也反映了中国经济正在重新找到平衡。在基础设施上的重大投资的驱使下，内部需求近几年对中国经济增长做出了重大的贡献。不断扩大的内部市场，让公司不必一定要靠近港口，从而让沿海和内陆的工资差距不断缩小。根据国家统计局的数据，2004年沿海地区农民工的工资比内陆地区要高出15%。而现在，许多在四川打工的农民工说，如果考虑到交通成本和沿海地区较高的生存成本，工资虽少但离家更近的工作对他们的吸引力逐渐提高。
成都市、郊区和重庆市将颁布一系列试行政策，意在让城市的农民工也能享受到本地城里人享有的福利待遇。福利的缺少，尤其是城市教育、保障性住房和医疗保险的缺少，对农民工来说是最大的问题。他们中的许多人把孩子留在村里，交给爷爷奶奶或其他亲戚照顾（通常照顾得不是很周到）。
2010年8月至去年12月期间，重庆市给300万名已经在城市生活了一定时间的农民工享受城里人所有的福利待遇。成都计划今年年底之前在本市范围内消除对农民工的福利歧视。这将意味着福兴镇的农民工以后就可以真正地迁移到城市，享受那些曾经只有城镇户口或经过户口登记后才能享受到的权利。农民以后也允许在农村保留他们的土地使用权。这次改革给当地政府带来了很大的财政负担，但是改革后的重庆和成都——因为政府引导的大量投资——正在享受一种曾经大多被沿海城市所享受的繁荣。2011年成都市的经济增长了15.2%，重庆市GDP也增长了16.4%，这比其他任何省的增速都快。这种转变在解决一部分问题的同时，也会产生新的问题，但是它却预示着中国经济发展一直处于的失衡状态可能会因此发生重大改变。
“RETURN to your hometown to work and care for your family”, reads a red banner strung over the main street of Fuxing, a hillside town in the heart of China. Until recently, farmers in surrounding villages dreamt only of getting away from their pumpkin patches and earning good wages in factories on the coast more than 1,000km (625 miles) away. Officials were happy to be rid of them. Now they are desperate to get them to stay.
Jintang county, to which Fuxing belongs, once enjoyed the dubious honour of being the biggest labour-exporting county in Sichuan province. Poor, deep inland and badly connected with overseas markets, Sichuan had little choice but to encourage its huge, underemployed rural population to find work elsewhere. Officials from counties like Jintang used to tour factory towns near the coast touting the merits of their surplus labour— and trading on the stereotype of the tough and determined Sichuanese.
In the 1980s and 1990s the number of people from Jintang who were working elsewhere grew from almost nothing to 180,000 (out of a population of 900,000). More than a third of them went to factories in Guangdong province (see map), the first area in China to cash in on the country’s export boom. China’s migrant workers like to stick close to others from their hometown, and many of Jintang’s workers ended up in a single district of Dongguan, a centre of labour-intensive production in Guangdong, making everything from electronics to clothing. A street in Dongguan became known as Little Jintang. Chinese media say the Communist Party chief of Jintang used to visit local factories to persuade them to hire his county’s migrants. Six years ago Jintang set up an office in Dongguan for this purpose.
The lure of home
A big change is now coming. Jintang is administered by Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, which like other inland cities is beginning to boom, thanks to a flood of government investment in recent years and the transfer of some manufacturing away from the coast in search of cheaper land and labour. In Fuxing walls and lampposts are plastered with job advertisements, not for work in distant coastal factories but for positions in and around Chengdu. Some of them offer jobs with Foxconn, a huge Taiwanese firm which makes Apple’s iPads and other computer products at a plant near the city (for pay of more than 2,000 yuan—$320—a month, says one pink poster). Foxconn’s largest factory is in Guangdong, but it opened a huge, modern operation in Chengdu in October 2010, and has talked of expanding to an astonishing 500,000 staff within five years. Chengdu officials have been scrambling to make sure that as many jobs as possible go to locals (who appear undeterred by a number of unexplained suicides at Foxconn’s huge plants in China).
By a roadside in Fuxing, a few dozen young men and women from the surrounding countryside wait with piles of baggage for a bus to take them to Chengdu (though technically in Chengdu, Fuxing is two to three hours’ drive away from the city proper, much of it along a winding country road). It is just after the lunar new year holiday, a time when migrant labourers have for more than two decades returned to the coast after spending the festival in their home villages. But for many of those at the bus-stop, Chengdu is their final destination. They crowd around your correspondent, regaling him with stories of how wages in Chengdu are no
w not much lower than on the coast, and how jobs nearby are getting easier to find.
In a change with implications that resound beyond this small, remote corner of China, such stories mark the beginning of the end of a phase in China’s development: one that was marked by lengthy journeys and often miserable lives in faraway, Dickensian factories. Isolated Fuxing will soon be just a few kilometres from an expressway. Villagers are excited about the new road, not only because it will make travel to Chengdu much easier, but because it will bring business and job opportunities closer. Workers in Fuxing are putting the finishing touches to a large new open market and shopping complex.
Officials across the county have been busying themselves with what until three or four years ago would have been an unthinkable task: persuading migrants to stay in Jintang after the new-year festivities rather than go back to the coast. They hold meetings with migrant-worker representatives and offer tax breaks and help secure loans for those wanting to start up businesses. A government-owned newspaper in Chongqing, a region neighbouring Sichuan, even published a photograph of policemen carrying the bags of migrants returning to spend the new-year holiday there. In a country where officials (and long-established city-dwellers) often view migrant workers with disdain, the signal was clear: welcome home. A stretch limousine was provided by a Chongqing boss as a free shuttle service for the workers (see picture above).
Officials say that in 2011, for the first time, the number of local labourers migrating from one part of Chongqing region to another exceeded the number leaving for other provinces. Just a few years ago, 70% were going elsewhere. Xinhua, a state-run news agency, reported that since 2008, four-fifths of people leaving their homes for the first time in Henan, another big exporter of labour, had been migrating within Henan. Before then, it said, the same proportion had left for other provinces. In Sichuan the trend has been similar. In 2008, 58% of its 20m migrants were working outside the province. Last year the ratio dropped to 52%. A labour official in Chengdu says enthusiasm for staying close to home has been especially marked this year. One factor, he says, has been the difficulty that Europe’s downturn has caused coastal factories producing export goods. (By no means all of the new jobs being created inland are in the export sector, the traditional employer of migrant labour.)
Migration over huge distances will remain a striking feature of China’s labour market for years to come. Employment along the coast suffered huge disruption late in 2008 as a result of the global financial crisis, with millions of migrants losing their jobs. But it quickly recovered as exports revived and stimulus measures helped spur growth. Now coastal factories are back to hand-wringing about a shortage of labour, notwithstanding the dark shadow cast by Europe’s misfortunes.
But recent changes in migration patterns, though they are only just beginning, may be more than temporary distortions caused by troubled Western markets. They reflect China’s evolving economy and its ageing population. Even deep in the interior, the days of an abundant and apparently endless supply of cheap, young labour are over. The number of 15- to 29-year-olds peaked last year, according to UN estimates, and the working-age population as a whole will begin to decline in a few years. More than 90% of people under 30 from rural areas are already engaged in non-agricultural work, according to a report last year by the Development Research Centre, a government think-tank. So pressed are some businesses in Chongqing and Sichuan for semi-skilled labour that officials this year helped companies from the two regions to visit other provinces in search of workers.
The shift in migration patterns may also reflect a rebalancing of China’s economy. Domestic demand has made a bigger contribution to China’s growth in recent years, driven by heavy investment in infrastructure and property. To serve this expanding internal market, firms do not need to nestle close to a port. The result is a fast-narrowing wage gap between the coast and the interior. In 2004 coastal wages for migrant labourers were 15% higher than inland, according to a survey by the National Bureau of Statistics. Now, many workers in Sichuan say that taking into account transport costs and higher living expenses on the coast, less well-paid jobs closer to home are beginning to look much more competitive.
Experiments are under way in Chengdu and its environs, as well as in Chongqing, aimed at making it easier for migrants in urban areas to enjoy the same welfare benefits as registered city-dwellers. Lack of access to such benefits, particularly to urban schools, subsidised housing and health care, is a big problem for migrants. Many leave their children behind in their villages to be looked after (often not very attentively) by grandparents or other relatives.
Between August 2010 and December last year, Chongqing awarded full urban-welfare rights to 3m migrants from its rural hinterland who had lived for a certain period in urban areas. Chengdu plans to eliminate welfare-related barriers to migration within the city boundary by the end of this year. This will mean that Fuxing’s farmers will be able to migrate to the city proper and enjoy the same benefits as were once enjoyed only by holders of urban hukou, or household-registration papers. The farmers will also be allowed to keep their land-use rights in the countryside. The reforms impose a big financial burden on local governments, but for the moment Chongqing and Chengdu—buoyed by a surge of government-led investment—are enjoying the kind of boom that was once confined largely to the coast. Chengdu boasted 15.2% growth in 2011, while Chongqing says its GDP grew 16.4%, faster than almost every other provincial area. The shift will create new problems even as it solves others, but it heralds a change of huge consequence for China’s hitherto unbalanced development.
