On May 16, 2020, Dexter Tiff Roberts, nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Security Initiative and a distinguished China journalist, published an article on Foreign Policy. His article talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the livelihood of China’s 300 million migrant workers and the families they support in the countryside. He also elaborates his experience with the Mos, a group of young Buyi ethnic minority people working in export factories in Dongguan, Guangdong and southeastern Guizhou.
The pandemic left them trapped back home for weeks, and they now face a critical question: Should they go back to cities where they have long worked, but where many of the jobs in factories, construction, and in restaurants they depended on are drying up?