Reverse urbanization provides new direction for rural regions

Former migrant workers are returning home and establishing their own businesses. Jiang Chenglong reports.

Spring Festival sees the largest annual migration in the world. During the 40 days of China's most important festival, hundreds of millions of people, most of them migrant workers, return to their hometowns from the distant cities where they work.

The great migration is inseparable from reform and opening-up, one of the country's most important policies, which started in 1978. The policy triggered rapid urbanization in the coastal regions, leading massive numbers of farmworkers from impoverished parts of central and western China to move south and east to feed the hunger for laborers in construction and other trades.