Urbanites stranded as migrants leave for festival

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-02-23 08:56

As a large number of migrant workers are enjoying the Spring Festival family reunion in the countryside, China's city dwellers have to face inconvenience caused by the absence of some daily services provided by migrant laborers.

A Beijing resident surnamed Wang said she now has nowhere to buy steaming breakfast after the owner and waiters of a restaurant in her neighborhood went back to Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province for the Lunar New Year.

Even the market sees fewer vendors during the week-long Spring Festival holiday and vegetables are sold at a higher price than usual.

"Most food and vegetable vendors are rural migrants who have gone home for the annual hard-won family reunion. So, no wonder things are expensive during festival," said a resident surnamed Peng.

In most large Chinese cities, baby-sitters, car wash workers, express delivery and takeout food delivery workers are hard to find during the festival as rural migrants, who make the largest proportion of the service industry laborers, are going home as part of the world's largest "human migration".

China has more than 120 million migrant workers, most coming from poor rural areas.