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In the previous article, I mentioned that the government needs to consider the sensitivity of coastal port cities (such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen) as major industrial towns when clearing customs. As the Spring Festival is approaching, everyone is more concerned about the issue of in-situ Chinese New Year. If customs clearance reflects the anxiety of a mega-city, the New Year in situ reflects the anxiety of the hometown-will the aging parents and the weak local medical facilities be able to cope with the returning home army?
The population movement during the Spring Festival travel season is more complicated than other types of population movement
Compared with ordinary inter-provincial tourism, reunion tourism such as Spring Festival travel has some very unique characteristics.
One of the typical features is the “three secrets”: the intimacy of gatherings during the Spring Festival makes it prone to family-level and accompanying relatives and other multiple connections; climatic conditions during the Spring Festival make gatherings in a confined space with heating; and Intimate festive events, including the New Year’s Eve dinner, are considered close contact because they don’t wear a mask.
At the same time, the objects of contact are also different. The people contacted by ordinary tourism activities are mainly service workers (mostly young and middle-aged laborers), while those contacted by family visits and other activities are mainly elderly and children such as parents and left-behind children. Therefore, the epidemic may have a greater negative impact on relatively vulnerable elderly groups with underlying diseases, and children who are inconvenient to wear masks will further spread the epidemic between families through social activities between peers.
Compared with normal population movements (such as commercial activities), another characteristic of the flow of people visiting relatives during the Spring Festival is that they are more difficult to track. For example, most business travelers or tourists will stay in hotels-this allows the local government to learn about the traveler’s itinerary when checking in. But many visiting relatives do not do this-they will temporarily live in the homes of local relatives, making the government almost ignorant of when they return to the city or where they live in the city. At the same time, returnees generally can also use the local dialect, which makes it impossible to distinguish them from local residents at a glance unless they are familiar neighbors or friends on the street.
If the usual demand for visiting relatives is relatively small and the locals can afford it, the scale of the visitor flow during the Spring Festival makes it necessary for the locals to consider some measures.
The foundation of the Spring Festival is the population flow caused by the uneven distribution of labor in various places.
The seventh census collected statistics on the age structure of the population of each city based on the age structure of the population under the age of 14, 15 to 59 and over 60. We refer to people aged 15 to 59 as the “workforce.” At the level of the 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country, the labor force accounts for 63.35%.
We can make an analysis of the proportion of each province, and look like this:
68%: Guangdong, Beijing
67%: Zhejiang, Qinghai
66%: Tibet, Shanghai, Heilongjiang, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia
65%: Yunnan, Hainan, Jilin
63%: Gansu, Shaanxi, the whole country, Hubei, Liaoning
64%: Tianjin, Shanxi, Fujian
62%: Jiangsu, Chongqing, Sichuan
61%: Anhui, Jiangxi
60%: Guizhou, Hunan, Shandong
59%: Hebei, Guangxi
58%: Henan
It can be seen that the provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions with a labor force ratio lower than that of the whole country (63.35%) are all “provinces exporting labor services” without exception. Among them, Henan (58.79%), Guangxi (59.69%), and Hebei (59.92%) have an overall labor force ratio of less than 60%; Hunan, Guizhou and Shandong are also around 60%.
If we put our perspective on the level of prefectures and cities, we can see some more extreme and polarized situations:
It can be seen that Henan and Guangxi have 4 seats and 3 seats respectively in the 10 lowest cities; Guangdong has 6 seats in the cities with the highest labor force ratio and 2 seats in the lowest cities. In Dongguan and Shenzhen, Guangdong, about 80% of the people are the labor force; in Nanyang, Henan, the labor force is already less than 55%.
In order to better analyze the scale of population migration in China, we can project the proportion of labor in various regions on the map of China. For more than two-thirds, we set red; for less than three-fifths, we set green, and in between, set yellow. It can be seen that in the densely populated areas east of the Tengchong Line in Heihe, China (the red dotted line in the figure), the distribution of the labor population is uneven:
1. Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and the capitals of the provinces in red indicate that there are more laborers in the local area;
2. The green colors in southeast Henan, northern Jiangsu, northern Anhui, southwestern Shandong, southeastern Hebei, southwestern Hunan, east-west and north-east of Guangdong, and east of Guangxi show the fact that the local labor force is outflowing;
This high degree of imbalance in the distribution of the labor force is the inevitable basis for the large-scale tidal flow of population during the Spring Festival. We make two assumptions about the population movement during the Spring Festival in order to estimate the impact of population movement on the population surge in different places (that is, the population greatly deviates from the permanent population in a short period of time):
1. The absolute number of the population outside the labor force remains unchanged (assuming that children and the elderly do not move)
2. The labor force ratio is consistent with the national labor force ratio of 63.35% (that is, all the labor force returns to their hometown)
According to the two assumptions above:
Guangdong Province, with a population of 126 million and a labor force ratio of 68.80%, will reduce its population by 14.9% (approximately 19 million people) during the New Year, which is equivalent to one less population in Guangzhou or Shenzhen. Similarly, Beijing (population 21.89 million, labor force ratio 68.53%) will lose 3.1 million people, and Shanghai (population 24.87 million, labor force ratio 66.82%) will lose 2.4 million people.
In turn, Henan, with a population of 99.37 million and a labor force accounting for only 58.79%, will bring about a population surge of about 12 million, which is equivalent to a population increase of 12.44% during the Spring Festival. In the same way, Shandong needs 8.4 million more, Hebei needs 7 million more, and Guangxi and Hunan need 5 million more.
At the level of prefectures and cities, this situation may be more serious considering the population migration from the provincial capital to other cities within the province. For example, Nanyang City, Henan Province, which has the lowest proportion in the country (with a population of 9.71 million and a labor force ratio of only 54.99%), may have a population of 2.21 million (22.8%) returning home during the Spring Festival.
Such a large-scale movement will bring about a problem-there will be a mismatch between supply and demand for infrastructure that matches these populations. A very typical example is when you take the subway in a big city during the Spring Festival, you will find that there are seats available for the subway which is usually overwhelming. The subway facilities are designed according to the size of the population on weekdays. In the case of population reduction such as the Spring Festival, the supply will naturally exceed begging.
Migration of population has brought oversupply to big cities, and in turn, it has brought more than supply to small cities. Every time I return to my hometown during the Spring Festival, there will be traffic jams on the roads of my hometown. Looking at the traffic queue, there are more license plates from other places than local ones. This kind of traffic jam is the best manifestation of the short-term population surge caused by the population movement-the basic local road resources are designed for the usual local population and vehicle scale, and the flow of people and vehicles influx during the Spring Festival The son squeezed the local road network.
This is true for transportation resources, as are other resources. Sudden increase of 10% or even 20% of the population will undoubtedly stretch any resources in the hometown. One of the most stressful resources is labor in the service industry. What we need to remember is that the 10% to 20% of the middle-aged labor force that has poured into cities will not participate in local production activities during their stay, but will mainly participate in the local economy as consumers. Therefore, the local labor force is still providing services and goods-including medical services.
We assume that a city of 9 million people (5 million laborers, 4 million dependants) had 1 million returnees during the Chinese New Year, and an epidemic occurred. The existence of returning labor will not only bring the most intuitive risk of imported risk, but also affect the cost of epidemic disposal. For example, the city’s nucleic acid testing needs to do 1 million more copies; the return of labor has increased the demand for accommodation facilities, the number of hotel rooms available on the market has decreased, and it has become more difficult to find a centralized isolation and disposal location; similarly, when it is closed and controlled It is also difficult to secure food and so on.
A very typical example is the epidemic in Shangyu District, Shaoxing. Asymptomatic infected persons who returned to Shangyu from outside Zhejiang Province transmitted their symptoms to their 18 relatives in Shangyu; and the 18 relatives were in daily routine. Unconsciously in life, the virus was transmitted to more than 250 people. For this purpose, Zhejiang Province needs to conduct more than 14 million nucleic acid samples and quarantine nearly 70,000 people.
The cost of nucleic acid testing alone cost more than 100 million yuan, and the accommodation arrangements during the isolation period also require hundreds of millions of funds. For a city like Shaoxing with a per capita GDP of more than 100,000 yuan, the local finance may still be able to bear it; but if you further consider the fact that the wanderer left his hometown and reflects the relatively distressed financial situation of his hometown, it is not difficult to understand that the “hometown” is Why do you take an extremely cautious attitude when considering the issue of returning home travellers: During the Spring Festival travel period, millions of returning home travellers multiplied the possibility of the epidemic-and the local fragile financial foundation will only increase in the face of the epidemic. Shows the left branch and the right dwarf.
For example, on December 12, Zhoukou City, Henan Province (with a population of 9.03 million and a labor force ratio of 55.33%, the fifth lowest in the country, the number of travellers is estimated to be about 2 million, and the per capita GDP is only 36,182 yuan). A letter from an outsider
The letter was earnest, beginning with “Insist on not returning to the week if it is not necessary, please stay there for the holidays as much as possible.” At the same time, the local government separately proposed “to inform the village (community) of the destination of the return time, transportation, physical health, history of residence within 14 days, occupation, etc. to the village (community) of the destination 3 days in advance for the two points that are difficult to trace and close contact. “And “Try to achieve the requirements of not getting together, not visiting, not going to family, not visiting friends, not participating in gatherings such as dinner parties, and not going to shopping malls, restaurants and other crowd gathering places.”
One stone stirred up a thousand waves. After Zhoukou’s release, Xinxiang, Sanmenxia, Kaifeng, Pingdingshan, Nanyang, Puyang and other cities in Henan Province followed suit. In front of hundreds of thousands or even millions of wanderers, the pressure on the hometown is conceivable.
(This article only represents the author’s own views, editor in charge: Yan [email protected])