Chinese migration and its environmental impact

“RETURN to your hometown to work and care for your family”, reads a red banner strung over the main street of Fuxing, a hillside town in the heart of China. Until recently, farmers in surrounding villages dreamt only of getting away from their pumpkin patches and earning good wages in factories on the coast more than 1,000km (625 miles) away. Officials were happy to be rid of them. Now they are desperate to get them to stay.

Jintang county, to which Fuxing belongs, once enjoyed the dubious honour of being the biggest labour-exporting county in Sichuan province. Poor, deep inland and badly connected with overseas markets, Sichuan had little choice but to encourage its huge, underemployed rural population to find work elsewhere. Officials from counties like Jintang used to tour factory towns near the coast touting the merits of their surplus labour— and trading on the stereotype of the tough and determined Sichuanese.

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