Migrants are China's 'factories without smoke'

In the crowds still stranded by snow at train stations around China stand some of the country's most valuable economic assets: migrant workers.

This group of 150 million to 200 million farmers -- more than the population of the United Kingdom, France and Australia combined -- account for the majority of employees in China's world-beating manufacturing sector, the bulk of its coal miners and most of its construction workers.

During the past two decades, according to a conservative estimate from UNESCO and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, migrants have contributed 16 percent of gross domestic product growth.

Living for years at a time in coastal cities, China's migrant workers have built the country's skyscrapers and assembled its exports, sending tens of billions of dollars in earnings home to their families in poor inland provinces. For the workers known as "factories without smoke," the Chinese New Year holiday that starts in less than a week is often their only annual vacation.

The forces that brought these smokeless factories to the cities took shape in the early 1980s, when Beijing, as part of an easing of central controls on the economy, loosened internal mobility regulations. Farmers have been pouring out of the countryside ever since, in what is believed to be the world's largest internal migration.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/02/01/china.migrants/index.html