Word: guangzhou
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Today, Wang, who has chosen a Western name, Colleen, works in a gleaming office tower in the manufacturing center of Guangzhou in southern China. At age 37, she is the very image of a polished chief executive officer, right down to her Milano briefcase. Wang is the founder of an advertising agency that employs nearly 70 people in three Chinese cities and counts as customers major multinational companies including Procter & Gamble and Sony Ericsson. Like so many of her generation, Wang never looked back after racing through the door Deng's economic reforms opened, and her accomplishments show...
...Every day now at the Guangzhou train station, just a few miles away from Wang's office, hundreds of migrant workers wait to start the long journey back to their home provinces. They have been laid off from jobs working in toy and textile factories, and from construction sites throughout what used to be a booming province. Among them is Zhang Dingli, 36, who worked in a toy factory for a decade. But in early November, the plant closed. He is a victim of an economic transition - a move away from the low-end, low-wage, export-oriented manufacturing...
Dongguan, along with a handful of similar nearby towns, is the real Santa's factory at the North Pole. A sprawling, charmless city of 7.5 million that sits 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong in southern China, Dongguan produces a vast amount of the toys that will end up under Christmas trees around the world. Toys were one of the critical, low-wage, low-tech industries on which China built its economic ascent over the past 30 years. But as workers such as Wei know better than anyone, 2008 is the year that that...
...exodus out of Guangdong province of migrant workers, now jobless, who are headed back to their hometowns in less-prosperous parts of the country. This exodus - the reversal of more than two decades of migration from poor rural areas to faster-growing, coastal cities - is most visible at the Guangzhou train station, where hundreds of migrants, all bearing suitcases and shopping bags crammed with their worldly belongings, sit outside for hours waiting to board trains home. On Nov. 26, Zhang De Jun, 35, was one of them. For 10 years, he said, he worked in a sweater factory...
...situation that is only going to get much worse in the next few months, as the number of unemployed balloons. According to estimates by the Dongguan City Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, 9,000 of the 45,000 factories in the cities of Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen - the heart of China's industrial south - are expected to close before the Chinese New Year in late January. That could mean up to 2.7 million workers facing unemployment, the association said. And they called that number "conservative...