After more than 20 years on the job, Zhou Debao didn’t think that there was anything left to learn. Since the late 1980s, the director of the Labour Export Bureau in Gushi, a rural county in the central Chinese province of Henan, has been helping locals find work in more developed regions of the country.
“For at least 20 years, the first thing our young people would do after graduating from junior high school would be leaving [the area],” says Mr Zhou. Indeed, the county has long been one of China’s largest sources of migrant workers.
But things are changing – so fast that the local government wants to rename Mr Zhou’s office as its focus is no longer just on getting local labour out.