Among the millions crowding China's railway stations and airports in the annual Lunar New Year trek home are many workers who won't be coming back to their jobs in the workshop of the world.
At the end of a year of rising wages and labor unrest in coastal manufacturing regions, some manufacturers are pulling up stakes and moving to less costly locales in the hinterlands or out of China altogether.
Premium leather-goods brand Coach Inc. said last week it would gradually slash production of handbags and wallets in China and shift to lower-cost countries such as Vietnam and India.
More and more workers in the traditional manufacturing belts in the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas will be staying back in their home villages in the countryside after the long New Year holidays. Some of them will be taking jobs with those companies moving into the interior.
"I won't come back. I want to find a factory nearer home," said He Yingkang, a worker from Jiangxi Province joining the crush at the East Dongguan train station in the Pearl River Delta.
"There the environment is better and cleaner ... a lot of people I know are considering moving. Things are also too expensive here."
The seemingly endless flow of migrant workers into the booming coastal provinces about 150 million of them make the annual journey from the interior to the coast is drying up.
At the East Dongguan railway station, migrant workers wheeled suitcases, hefted sacks on bamboo poles and lugged nylon bags bursting with family gifts, bought with those fatter paychecks.
"I hope, of course, my wages get higher year after year," said Fan Zhen, a 24-year-old plastics worker heading back to his village in central Henan. "I want to work hard and earn more."
While migrant workers have long clamored for better pay in China, last year may have marked a tipping point, when a series of independently organized strikes crippled production at several factories, including Toyota and Honda car plants.
Local governments in many regions responded by raising minimum wages.
