Some do get their gold but others are in what might be called a permanent temporary situation. Estimates for last year range between 12 and 20,000,000 more with another 10,000,000 expected to join them this year. Nor does it include the sizeable number who still work but don't get paid. It is a grim picture that is being painted. All this leads to folk in the street starting to complain.
Women seem to suffer more than men as they are the first to lose their jobs when redundancy hits.
But it seems that those who suffer most are the rural poor who have migrated to the cities and seem unable to adapt. Often on their own, away from their families, they do their best to survive often having to rely on trade union charitable type organisations if they are lucky and, if not so lucky, looking in vain for non-existant work so they can earn money to send home to their families who are, meanwhile, left without a breadwinner. Any rural stability which China may have enjoyed in the past is thus undermined as the traditional distinction between a commercial eastern seabord centred on Shanghai feeds on an enslaved peasantry in the west - such a colonial legacy is still a reality in China today. And so of course is the brutal regime which did its butchering at Tiananmen Square and continues to outshine the world for its record of state murder. China executes more of its citizens each year than the rest of the world put together.