Chinese skilled laborers look beyond the seas

Many blue-collar workers hope to emigrate, but admission policies are being tightened, reports Zhang Yuchen in Shandong.

Before he emigrated to Australia in 2005, Yin Fagang was a migrant worker in Shenzhen, a coastal city in the south of China. The quality of his work was so high that some foreign colleagues urged him to emigrate to Australia, where there were opportunities aplenty.

As a result of their prompting, Yin, who now lives in Perth in Western Australia, was one of the first of many hundreds from Xiaoli, Shandong province, to emigrate - about 1,000 skilled workers followed him to Australia between 2005 and 2007. At the time, the immigration quota was generous and authorities were relaxed about admitting people with a comparatively poor grasp of English.