Amid a virus lockdown, how are China’s migrant workers surviving?

“FAMILY IS HAPPINESS,” reads the motto over the front door of a village house in the north-west of Sichuan province. From the mahjong table beneath a velvet dust-cloth, to the child-sized chair facing a television flanked by pink plastic speakers, all is ready for a family reunion. The home’s owners, grandparents in their 50s, have had six weeks to clean and tidy, their longest break in years from lives of toil in Beijing. Alas, the couple did not choose this extended holiday, nor the loss of pay it involves. In common with many of China’s 173m long-distance migrant workers, their jobs have been halted by the new coronavirus. Worse, during this subdued lunar new year they have not seen their only child, a 32-year-old chef. Curbs on travel have left him stuck in the next-door province of Shaanxi with his wife and eight-year-old son.

In medical terms, covid-19 has largely spared this corner of Sichuan. As The Economist went to press there were 22 confirmed cases and no deaths in the nearest large city, Mianyang, and in the villages that surround it, with their fir trees and duck ponds and fields of yellow rapeseed. Still, quarantine restrictions have shut down bus services. Villages are closed behind checkpoints guarded by local officials and volunteers in masks and red armbands, wielding digital thermometers and disinfectant sprays.