In the old days Guangdong migrant workers like Liu Xiaorong would have been treated as factory fodder, given the bare minimum in wages and easily replaced if they complained. The tables have turned with an acute labour shortage in the so-called "factory of the world" meaning workers like Liu now call the shots. Even the lure of three times the normal pay and perks such as air conditioning, basketball courts and television is not enough to get workers to sign up.

Buoyed by a wave of new orders, Chinese companies are scrambling to recruit manual laborers, as pressure mounts on the country's lawmakers to boost the rights of China's millions of migrant workers.

If you ask a factory worker or a waitress in Dongguan if they have had a pay raise recently, they will either stare at you blankly or just burst out laughing. For all the hype in the Chinese and international media about 30 percent wage inflation and a “famine” of more than one million labourers in the Pearl River Delta, the reality for migrant workers remains the same; low pay, long hours and no job security.

Momentum towards reform of China’s household registration (hukou) system seems to be growing in the build-up to this year’s National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s annual parliament, which opens at the end of this week. Zhou Yongkang, China’s most senior official in charge of public and state security, wrote in the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Seeking Truth (求是) that there was now an “urgent” need to reform the country’s anachronistic policy of dividing citizens into urban and rural residents, and explore new ways of managing internal migration.

Just a year after laying off millions of factory workers, China is facing an increasingly acute labor shortage. As American workers struggle with near double-digit unemployment, unskilled factory workers here in China’s industrial heartland are being offered signing bonuses. Factory wages have risen as much as 20 percent in recent months.

Life for China's 130 million migrant workers has never been easy. In recent years, however, family life for the ‘liudong renkou' (floating population) was showing signs of improving until the financial crisis.

Following the lead of Jiangsu, which announced a 12 percent increase in the minimum wage this month, several other municipalities have indicated they too will raise the minimum wage this year. The cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Dongguan have all separately indicated that the time is now right for an increase in the minimum wage, frozen by central government order on 17 November 2008.

When school reopens after the Spring Break in February, thousands of children of rural migrant workers in a Beijing district face having no classes to return to as their schools will have been demolished to make way for urban redevelopment. At least 6,000 students, among them young children of kindergarten age, would be affected after some 20 privately run migrant schools in Chaoyang District are torn down by the end of February, according to principals of the schools slated for demolition.

The average salary for senior executives at China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has risen to around 600,000 yuan a year, according to the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. Executive salaries have nearly doubled over the last five years, and now stand at about 20 times the average SOE employee’s salary of 31,500 yuan a year.

This week, the managing editor of Time Magazine unveiled the final nominees for the famed 'Person of the Year' edition. The list included a number of the usual suspects, including Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke, but the most surprising addition to the list was also the most deserving – 'The Chinese Worker'.