Dongguan face labor shortage after sex crackdown

A labor shortage has worsened in the service sectors of Dongguan after the crackdown on the local sex industry, yicai.com reported on Friday.

Recent figures from the human resources and social security department of Guangdong province show that the city of Dongguan lacks 100,000 people in its labor force.

Almost all the nightclubs, saunas and massage parlors have been shut, Chen Chen (not his real name), a local civil servant in Dongguang told the reporter.

Meanwhile, taxi drivers in Dongguan also are complaining their business has been strongly affected by the crackdown. They told reporters that their per monthly income dropped sharply from 10,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan to 5,000 yuan to 6,000 yuan.

"The sales volume of sauna products dropped 20 percent to 30 percent after the crackdown," the manager of one sauna services company said, "and we have transferred our business to the internet."

According to Lin Jiang, head of Public Finance and Taxation Department of Lingnan College at Sun Yat-sen University, also a special researcher on Dongguan, " known as 'the world factory', Dongguan needs more high-end hotels to meet the demand of the businessmen who came to Dongguan for trading. "

However, the figures from Dongguan Tourism Bureau show that the number of five-star hotels in Dongguan has reached 22, while there aren't even 20 five-star hotels in China's first-tier or second-tier cities. That implies the hotel industry in Dongguan is actually thriving.

"The rumor that the sex industry is the pillar industry of Dongguan, and has an income of 50 billion is simply a nonsense." a Dongguan government official said.

According to Cai Xiaomei, a senior manager of a Guangdong labor market, in recent years there has been a labor shortage. The monthly salary companies offer to workers now usually ranges from 2,800 yuan to 3,000 yuan, a slight rise compared to last year.

Based on previous coverage, companies in the electricity, shoe, garment, hardware, catering and hotel industries find it hard to employ more workers, which account for more than 70 percent of Dongguan's labor shortage gap.

"My salary didn't rise for 3 years, so I decided to go back to my hometown", said Zhang Ming, from Hainan, who has been working in a leather company in Dongguan.

However, the Dongguan government said employment is usually more closely tied to a company's operation, rather than the crackdown.

Furthermore, the transformation on the manufacturing and high-tech industries are helping Dongguan to upgrade its traditional industries more confidentially.

Yuan Baocheng, mayor of Dongguan, said the GDP growth of Dongguan will be maintained at 9 percent.

Another official from the Dongguan Bureau of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation disclosed that the crackdown hasn't had an impact on attracting foreign investment for the moment, and the number in January rose 5.3 percent year-on-year.