ABSTRACT
At the beginning of its economic reform, there is no doubt that China was a labor surplus economy. Its huge rural population has provided a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor for the world economy since then. However, in early 2010, it was reported that factories in some coastal cities have been struggling to find workers to meet their export orders. It is puzzling, because only a year prior in 2009 a large number of migrant workers were laid off in coastal cities due to the negative impact of the global financial crisis, as documented by Cai and Chan (2009). In the broad picture of China’s migration history, the phenomenon of labor shortages was nothing new: labor shortages occurred in coastal areas as early as in 2003 (Chen and Hamori 2009). These occasionally occurring labor shortages seem controversial – even now, there is still a labor surplus in rural areas (Kwan 2009; Minami and Ma 2009), as there was in 2003.
