An Interesting Thing About China

I learnt something interesting about China last couple of days. The country appears attracting high interests among Malaysians. May be because of the official visit by Prime Minister Najib to China since two days ago. Local newspapers seems give a wide coverage on this historic visit that had attracted 144 billions of ringgit worth of business deals between Malaysia and China.

Last week, I met a group of manufacturers led by its Chairman who came to my office to express their dilemma and difficulties in getting their factories running because of shortage of workers. They said, locals are very complicated to retain and not willing to work in dusty and dirty environment. Thus, they are left with no other options except for hiring foreign workers. However, their choices are limited although there are 15 source countries they can source from. I mean to recruit foreign workers. They said they can bring in foreigner from any one of these countries but they more prefer the workers from B country. One of the reasons was that the workers of the other 14 countries are costlier, more difficult to recruit and bla..bla..bla..which only them know better unlike the workers from B country.

That is not the interesting point that I intend to write about it here.

The shocking point is that China also will soon import foreign workers to meet their demand for labours!!! And "China has approached the government of country B for supplying work forces to China.", Said the Chairman of the group of manufacturers. "The Government must be fast to resolve this issue.", He chipped.

I said, "What? This can't be true!"

The Chairman further said that because of the China's One Child policy since last four decades, had caused labour supply constraints to their booming industrial expansion. Though, China's population is 1.3 billion, the most populous nation on earth, it cannot self fulfill their own labour needs.

He pointed out that, the policy has made Chinese people more educated, prefer to work for better jobs in a better place, higher salary, career advancement and so on. Their parents who have only one child to feed, surely will do everything for their son or daughter not to grow up and end up becomes just a general worker. The high expectation, pampering and concentration has been going on for three generations.

I didn't blink my eyes upon hearing this!

To me, it means, coming soon not only Malaysia, the other developed and developing countries will have to compete with China to lure low skilled foreign workers into the country. When the demand is higher than the price will go up.

So, you "pikir lah sendiri" what should we do. Continually depending in foreign workers or improving ourselves to do things differently, automation is inevitable. 

Another 'cepu emas' question is what the country B is?