Coronavirus knocks back China’s ‘incremental’ gains in closing urban-rural wage divide
- Before the first Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, the wages of China’s high, middle and low-income earners were growing at roughly the same level
- Afterwards, low-income wage growth fell 8 percentage points to near-zero, double the rate of decline among high and middle-income groups
For two decades before the coronavirus pandemic upended the economy, Zhang Chuan earned an enviable income for a migrant worker.
The 45 year old left the countryside of Anhui province in 2001 and worked as a vegetable delivery man in the northeast for eight years, before starting an appliance refitting business in Shenzhen.
Four years ago, he more than doubled his monthly earnings thanks to an application called Idlefish, on which he began reselling second-hand furniture.
“I was earning around 3,000 yuan (US$426) per month, but after selling second-hand appliances, I could earn up to 10,000 yuan per month before the outbreak,” Zhang said.
Today, Zhang earns almost no income at all. He has watched his customer base dwindle to a trickle over the course of the pandemic, and picking up casual work is not as easy as it used to be.
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“There used to be daily jobs all over Shenzhen, but now I simply can’t get work any more,” he said, adding he planned to stick around until April before returning home to work on a farm.
