(Yicai Global) Feb. 8 -- Central and western regions of China are scrambling to attract migrant workers who left for coastal megacities to return to their hometowns for work.

Cities, including Ganzhou and Changde, launched job fairs around the latest Chinese New Year holiday to lure people to come back to their roots for employment, Yicai Global learned.

On Jan. 30, Jiangxi province's Ganzhou kicked off a job fair with over 1,980 vacancies, attracting more than 110 companies and self-employed individuals to attend. On the same day, the autonomous county of Songtao in Guizhou province held a recruiting event where over 20 employers offered more than 7,000 jobs.

Moreover, on Feb. 3, Changde in Hunan province held a large career fair. Three days after that, Shangrao in Jiangxi organized a special employment event to facilitate communication between employers and job seekers.

Leveling Off

Development and resident flows are becoming more balanced as certain industries are moving production to the increasingly urban and industrialized central and western parts of China while land and labor costs are rising in eastern regions.

Part of the western appeal may come from the multi-year Covid-19 pandemic. Due to the impacts of the pandemic on coastal areas last year, regions that usually log outflows now managed to attract new residents, Ding Changfa, associate professor at Xiamen University, said to Yicai Global.

The appeal is expected to increase as the population is aging. In the future, development opportunities for central and western regions will increase and people who earlier considered working in other regions will be able to choose to get employed somewhere near their hometowns in order to take care of their families better, Ding added.

Certain cities have managed to lure the departed to return. In 2021, some 97,000 people came back to live in eastern China's Anhui province, up from 20,000 in 2020, per the municipal bureau of statistics. The 2021 addition made up almost all of the province's new permanent residents that year.

So far six central and western Chinese regions, including the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Gansu, and Qinghai, have published their population data for last year. All of them recorded growth when taking into account the nationwide population decline.

Finally, some non-coastal cities have been able to limit the number of migrant worker exits. In 2021, the number of residents without local household registrations who departed Chongqing tallied 4.1 million, down by 50,000 year-over-year, marking the first decline since 2013, the statistics bureau of the city in southwest-central China revealed.

Editors: Shi Yi, Emmi Laine, Xiao Yi