Twenty-year-old Zhou Xiong quietly squatted beside his luggage at the Guangzhou Railway Station, waiting for the train heading to Mianyang City in Sichuan Province in southwest China.

He decided to end his four-year migrant worker's life and enter school again in his hometown to learn something practical, such as machine repair.

"I just want to launch a new chapter of my life ?? to learn something and start my own business in my hometown," he said. "I think my hometown, which was hit by the earthquake in May, might provide me with more opportunities, as massive reconstruction work has been launched there," he said.

Zhou had worked for a furniture factory for four years as a painter with a monthly salary of around 2,000 yuan (US$293). "Despite the global financial crisis, the factory operated quite well and I still earned 1,500 yuan a month. I quit the job merely because I have my own dream."

Wang Shanjian, 35, is another migrant preparing to return to a rural life.

"I am good at farm work and many agricultural taxes and fees have been exempted," he said.

Wang and his wife were able to earn 4,000 yuan a month, but the living cost was high, too. "I prefer living a rural life, for it is stable and the living cost is low," he said.

While many migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta region in south China are choosing to go back home to start afresh or because of the closure of small and medium enterprises, there is not yet a flood of laid-off workers streaming out of Guangdong Province.

Passenger flow at Guangzhou Railway Station, the major station in the Pearl River Delta, which attracts at least 30 million migrant workers, is an important yardstick.

The latest statistics from the station show daily passenger flow between 68,000 and 70,000 people, slightly higher than the same period last year.

China currently has 120 million migrant workers. If there were massive job losses the future could be full of unrest, officials say.

In a bid to avert social turmoil, cities in Guangdong aim to provide a variety of skill training for migrant workers and the Dongguan City government is planning to ask enterprises to pay into a fund to guarantee workers' wages if factories close.

(Xinhua News Agency January 6, 2009)