Yiwu: The city of Yiwu in Zhejiang Province, east China, boasts the largest wholesale market of small commodities and a large population of migrant workers. Wang Guocheng, Director of the Yiwu Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, is tasked with finding out the travel plans of the workers during the Spring Festival holiday.
“Hold on please. The data has been updated just now,” Wang told Beijing Review in the middle of a call.
By 10 p.m. on January 26, the number of migrant workers who had answered the bureau’s survey had crossed 636,000 from the previous day’s 598,700. “During the Spring Festival, 47.38 percent of them have decided to stay in Yiwu,” Wang said. “I think the proportion will rise in the coming days.”
The festival, also known as the Chinese New Year, is what Christmas is to most people in the West. Every year, tens of millions of people reunite with their families and celebrate a new beginning together.
However, this year’s 40-day travel rush, starting on January 28, days before the festival on February 12, is anticipated to dwindle. As a precaution against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people who work outside their native places have been asked not to return to their hometowns for the celebration, but instead, to stay in the cities where they work to reduce the flow of travelers.
Dubbed the “world’s supermarket,” Yiwu produces nearly two thirds of all Christmas decorations used worldwide and is an indicator of the vitality of China’s foreign trade. Last year, in order to promote production resumption, the local government agencies and enterprises arranged charter flights and coaches to bring their workers back from other places as transportation was disrupted by the epidemic.
This year, Yiwu is trying to keep its workers in the city during the holiday. One incentive is a gift bag. Migrant workers and business people from other cities, provinces and regions, including Hong Kong and Macao, as well as foreign countries, are eligible to get the gift bag if they are registered with the police and stay in Yiwu till March 1, according to the municipal government.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
