China’s official holiday ends, but not the woes of its firms
It is hard to keep factories going when workers are stuck in the countryside
RED BANNERS and an enormous QR code flank the iron gates of a compound for recruitment agencies in Waigaoqiao, a north-eastern district of Shanghai. “Scan with WeChat and get jobs”, the banners urge visitors, who are normally migrants from the countryside. In any other year, on the first day of work after the lunar new-year holiday, people would stream to this complex after celebrating the festival in their ancestral villages. But this time, on February 10th, it was all but deserted.
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Business in paralysis”
From the February 15th 2020 edition
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