A little pickled product, the Zhacai, a root taken from a plant of the mustard family, is one of the most popular dishes for Chinese migrant workers.
The consumption of the product is usually stable in a village, unless there is a good number of migrants who move in for work in that village or location.
The Chinese government, hard pressed to keep track of its immense number of migrant workers who number in the hundreds of millions, has had to come up with ingenious ways to tally up the numbers.
One of the ways, it has found, is to track how much of the pickled condiment is sold where, and when there is a spike in sales.
One of the things the government has been able to track through this novel method is also in what sector the migrants are working in. If the village they move in is highly industrialized the migrants are working in different jobs as say than if they had moved to a village that is still agricultural.
What those trends have already told the Chinese govt, is that the manufacturing powerhouses of the Pearl and Yangtze river have suffered a significant decline. This trend was reflected neatly in the drop of percentage of sales in Zhacai from 49% to only 30% in the industrial hubs of Southern China.
Meanwhile, in Central China, the sales of the same staple rose fourfold from 2009. That indicates that many migrant workers have returned to their home areas in central and western China.
Residency is a very important in China, because depending on the status as resident of an urban center, or 'Hoku', a person can gain access to a number of social network benefits, including health care and education. MIgrants, often, do not have access to those benefits, even if they work in the same urban area. Residency therefore, is tied to provenance. This might explain why so many migrants are returning to their home towns.
Source : France 24/ 8.14.13
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