China’s hard landing
With exports shrinking and unemployment rising, China must find a way to recover. That will take longer than most think.
In the early evening light, on a block that once bustled but is now deathly quiet, Li Zhong-he walks to the front gate of the factory where he used to work. There he looks for his name on a sheaf of papers. They are notices from a local administrative court, granting small unemployment payments to workers like Li and the hundreds of others who were left without jobs when their company, Hejun Toy Manufacturing, ceased operation.
Nearly a decade ago Li had come from the countryside to Dongguan, a sprawling manufacturing town in southeast China that for much of the past decade had boomed. He had made decent money, the equivalent of about $250 a month, worked his way up to shift supervisor on the factory floor, and unlike many of China’s migrant workers - an army of an estimated 115 million people nationwide - he had asked his wife and young son to join him so that they could have what he calls a “normal life.”
Now, he says quietly as he turns away, disappointed that his name was not on the list, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
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