He Pengyuan, manager of a Beijing depot for courier group ZTO Express, strolls around his warehouse at 7.30am, checking packages, looking at his watch and absent mindedly introducing each of his about 30 couriers by referring to their home regions. “Hebei”, “Guizhou”, “Guizhou”, “Sichuan”, he says, going down the line.
Not one of them is from the capital. “We had two people from Beijing last year but they quit; they couldn’t handle the workload,” he says. “People from the city are too soft and spoiled.”
Mr He hails from China’s southern region of Guizhou, with the lowest per capita income in the country, and says he would not be in business without fellow migrants. “China’s rural labour force is a huge army that keeps advancing. They come to the cities and keep the cost of labour relatively low,” he says.