For the migrant worker, the act of travelling home for the holiday has become more efficient in recent years due to the dramatic increase in rail links between coastal provinces and between the coast and the central regions. Even so, the logistics remain fraught: a population the size of Indonesia’s is on the move at the front and back end of the holiday week, and the improved rail links have emboldened more to attempt the there-and-back journey than ever before. Phat Dragon notes that large employers of migrant workers have indicated that return rates after the break have been very high – in the region of 90%. Traditionally…
It’s an incredible spectical to see this migration. I have lived in Shanghai, Beijing, Goungzhou and Shenzhen and seen it every year. It’s like watching an African wild life doco on migrations but instead of animals it’s people. The number of buses and trains that are on service is mind boogling. And taking a train is an interesting experience, I took one from Beijing to Shenzhen and you pass hundreds of trains coming back the other way fully loaded, 100′s of freight trains, I can remember seen flatbed trains with brand new tanks (maybe for us one day)and the hundreds of small towns and cities (small city been about 1 million people) you pass seem like grains of sand on the beach.
News that monetary conditions have plateaued is interesting in light of Andy Xie’s assertion in his Caixin piece the other day that M2 needs to expand by 20-30% annually to mop up the excess property inventory. It seems unlikely that the Chinese will permit such runaway monetary growth. If there is any truth to Andy’s related claim- that the market value of property inventory is 1.5 times GDP- then the impact on the property market will be very interesting.