The FT reports from Longhui county in Hunan that China's 300mn-strong migrant labour force is increasingly staying put — a quiet reversal of four decades of rural-to-urban movement. A state-run labour agency in Longhui says that since 2023 job listings have fallen while the number of jobseekers has risen; the same recruiter says the county's sports-shoe factories now employ 200–300 people, down from close to 3,000 at peak, blaming the US–China trade dispute. A construction worker interviewed at a mah-jong parlour says monthly pay on Guangdong building sites has dropped from Rmb 15,000–16,000 at peak to Rmb 7,000–8,000 today. A marble tiler says a Dongguan project on pause could pay Rmb 20,000 a month, versus around Rmb 4,000 locally: "Whatever the pay is, I will take it."

The macro explanation is the combination of a multi-year property and construction slump with a structural shift away from labour-intensive manufacturing. Ernan Cui at Gavekal Dragonomics says urban labour markets are weakening "across construction, manufacturing, and services", and that new jobs are increasingly concentrated in AI-related sectors — creating a structural skills mismatch with displaced older workers. Jenny Chan at Hong Kong Polytechnic University says workers in their late forties through early sixties are being caught out by industrial upgrading and fall back on farming and odd jobs. Inter-provincial migration has been declining since 2015. Wages for those who still move are higher than for intra-provincial migrants, but in 2024 they grew more slowly.

The politics are starting to show. In November, China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs held a work conference that explicitly flagged workers' "large-scale returning and staying in the countryside". Beijing has issued guidelines to boost jobs for migrants, including transport subsidies for inter-provincial travel. A local recruiter frames the risk bluntly: "Practically every village now has a number of stranded workers. In terms of social order, it's not great." Beijing does not publish annual data on returnees, but analysts believe the trend has accelerated since 2023. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, William Langley (with additional reporting by Tina Hu).