Migrant workers return to S China's Guangdong

Chen Caixia stood in a line with hundreds of passengers in the arrival hall at the Guangzhou South Railway Station on Thursday evening, waiting for a bus picking them up to go to Dongguan, a city in South China's Guangdong Province.

Chen, 33, was one of 551 migrant workers returning from Jingzhou in Central China's Hubei province to Guangzhou.

"I spent a lonely, long holiday at home. Now I am so eager to go back to work," said Chen, who had been working for five years in Dongguan.

A chartered high-speed train, carrying Chen and other workers from Jingzhou, arrived in Guangzhou at 7:40 pm on Thursday, marking the first train departing from Hubei, which is China's hardest hit area in the novel coronavirus pandemic, to Guangdong province, a major destination for jobs

In addition to the train to Guangzhou, another chartered train departed at 3:13 pm on Thursday to Shenzhen in Guangdong province, carrying 1,080 migrant workers from Jingzhou.

Guangdong, a manufacturing hub in South China and home to millions of migrant workers, receives about 2.4 million workers from Hubei each year, according to the Guangdong provincial Human Resource Authority.

Early on Wednesday, a chartered train carried 547 migrant workers from Hubei to East China's Zhejiang province, marking the first time citizens have left the province that was hit hardest by the novel coronavirus pandemic on the Chinese mainland since the lockdown in late January.

All workers, from Enshi Tujia and Miao autonomous prefecture, had to have their personal identities and health conditions verified before boarding the train, and they were taken to isolation centers to undergo 14 days of quarantine after their arrival in Shaoxing, Zhejiang.