It’s a sombre gathering in the backstreets of one of China’s biggest manufacturing hubs, where workers are smoking under a tree in front of storefronts advertising temporary factory jobs.<\/p>\n
“No-one understands what our life is like,” says one man who is unwilling to be named. <\/p>\n
“We work and work and have no life. Please help us,” another adds – a rare, risky plea to a foreign journalist.<\/p>\n
They seem desperate, struggling to earn enough to send money home, as they cope with the massive shifts in Chinese manufacturing, from cheap, mass-produced goods to automated advanced tech.<\/p>\n
And that was even before the US-Israel war with Iran shook the global economy.<\/p>\n
China’s economy was already battling slower growth and unemployment when Donald Trump’s tariffs hit last year. Still, it proved resilient, boosting exports and reporting GDP growth of around 5%. But the discontent continued to simmer. And now the Middle East conflict is starting to take a fresh toll, putting pressure on factory orders, costs and jobs.<\/p>\n
In Foshan, in the southern industrial province of Guangdong, the workers’ best opportunity is plastered in bright red lettering in front of them: a few weeks of moulding plastic, or screwing together parts of a mobile phone, for 18 to 20 yuan an hour, which amounts to just a few dollars or pounds.<\/p>\n
“I’m going to try and find work elsewhere,” says another worker from a rural province. Most are well over 40 years old, and frustrated at yet more uncertainty.<\/p>\n
This is one of the reasons Beijing is calling for the war to end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s a sombre gathering in the backstreets of one of China’s biggest manufacturing hubs, where workers are smoking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-545519","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}