This was supposed to be a spring of soup kitchens and breadlines in China's manufacturing heartlands, the potential precursor to a long, hot summer of industrial unrest threatening the government's vision of a “harmonious society”. Times are hard in China's export sector, the hardest in memory. Exports from southern Guangdong province, which account for a third of the country's total, fell 21 per cent in January and February as western retailers ran down their inventories. But in March the year-on-year decline was a less precipitous 14 per cent, and widespread worker unrest has failed to materialise in the Pearl River delta, Guangdong's industrial hub.

The Guangdong government estimates that 10m of the province's 19m migrant workers returned to their homes in interior provinces for the lunar new year holiday, which this year fell in late January. As of the end of February, 9.5m had come back to the province. Of these, about 5 per cent (or 460,000 people) had not found jobs. In the context of a province with a total population of 110m, half a million migrants is a sizeable but still manageable army of unemployed.

Cassandras who predicted this army would be quick to mutiny overlooked the resilience and political savvy of its soldiers. The archetypal image of the Pearl River delta's workforce – uniformed factory girls who work for a few years before returning to the village homes – no longer applies. Today's workers tend to dress as they want, shun the factory canteen and live off-site with their friends.