"My sister wanted me to go home, but my parents preferred me to stay here. They said this year was not auspicious for me," said Chen.

His parents were referring to an accident in which he was hit by a motorbike. He suffered fractures and was awarded 1,000 yuan ($120) in compensation.

He earns 1,700 yuan ($205) a month working as an operator of a weaving machine at Shanghai Yada Knitting Wear Company Ltd in Sunqiao Town, Pudong, working nine hours a day. Food and lodgings are provided free of charge by the factory.

His ambition, he says, is to one day earn enough money so that he can do calligraphy and painting in his free time.

He looks very young but this belies the richness of his experience. Since coming to Shanghai in 1994, he has been to Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Beijing, Zhejiang, and Hunan. Of course not everybody working at the factory earns that much.

Twenty-three-year-old Zhou Haiyan from Hai'an, in Shanghai's neighbouring Jiangsu Province earns 1,100 yuan ($132) a month, and had to work 11 to 12 hours a day over the Spring Festival as most of her fellow workers had left for home.

She has been in Shanghai for about six years and although her hometown is only six or seven hours' ride from Shanghai, she decided not to go home for the holidays.

Of the 16 roommates in her dormitory, only two or three actually remained to work through the holiday.

According to Zhao Cuidi, general manager of the factory, about 50 per cent of the factory employees are migrant workers, virtually all of them working in workshops.

These migrant workers represent only part of a growing number of people from outside the city seeking their fortune in Shanghai.

New hometown

"In Sunqiao Town there is one migrant worker to every four residents. About a third of the migrants are on the farms," said Shen Cuidi, charged with overseeing the migrant population on behalf of Sunqiao Town government.

The fact that Sunqiao is the site of an emerging high-tech agricultural park partly explains its attractiveness to migrants.

"Most of the native farmers, particularly the younger generation, no longer work on the farms and prefer to lease their land to migrants," said Shen. He said these workers had to turn in roughly 300 yuan ($36) per mu (0.164 acres) on a yearly basis to the local authorities.

Most of these migrants come from Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Southwest China's Sichuan provinces.

A vast increase in jobs available as Pudong has developed has attracted migrant labour in the form of men seeking work in urban or suburban centres.

A family affair

Although many leave their families behind in their village tilling the land, some have brought their families with them to the area, swelling the numbers of the local population.

Having their families here is why a growing number of people are choosing to spend their holidays in Shanghai.

And the local government is encouraging this tendency.

In the first place, it eases the pressure on the transport sector during the festival period.

Secondly, the settlement of a whole household in the area tends to make for a more stable migrant population and reduce crime.

While migrant workers have made indelible contribution to Shanghai's development they are also known to have committed a disproportionate number of crimes, particularly violent crimes like rapes and robbery.

Statistics from Pudong's Zhangjiang Procuratorate indicate that during the January to October period last year 68 migrants turned to crime in the district.

This is almost double the number for the whole of 1998.

According to Shen, although Sunqiao Town is one of the places with the highest migrant density, and that density is increasing, the crime rate for migrants in the area is nevertheless decreasing thanks to co-ordinated efforts by the local government and Zhangjiang Procuratorate.

Migrant workers in Shanghai

According to a census regarding migrant population conducted from June to August 1998, the total migrant population in Pudong New Area was 379,214.

The census also investigated the composition, employment, residence, livelihood, and registration of the migrant population in the Pudong Area.

"The general tendency is that the number of migrant workers in Shanghai as a whole has been dropping over the past few years," said Zhou Haiwang, assistant researcher specializing in population studies at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

He attributes this tendency to the restrictive measures taken by the local authorities on the employment of migrant labour in order to better provide for the employment of local people who have been laid-off.