For decades, China was one of the world’s largest sources of migrant labour. Its workers staffed factories at home and built infrastructure abroad. But demographic decline may eventually force China to contemplate a striking reversal: importing workers on a meaningful scale.

That change is not imminent. China still has a vast labour force and substantial youth unemployment. It is investing heavily in industrial automation, extending working lives through a gradual increase in the retirement age, and trying to move workers from regions with surplus labour to where employers struggle to recruit.

Yet the direction of travel is becoming difficult to ignore. China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025. The number of employed people declined to 725 million from 740 million in 2023.

The problem is not simply that China will have fewer workers. It is that the composition and expectations of its workforce will almost inevitably have to change.

The rural migrants who supplied the factories and construction sites are ageing. About 85 million migrant workers were already over 50 in 2022, almost twice the proportion a decade earlier. Meanwhile, younger Chinese are often reluctant to accept lowly paid, physically demanding or insecure jobs.

China can offset part of this pressure through robotics and productivity gains. Automation, however, cannot easily replace carers, hospitality staff or every construction worker. Nor can it fully resolve geographic and skill mismatches. A country can have unemployment and labour shortages at the same time when workers do not live where vacancies exist, or lack the required skills or reject the conditions offered.

China’s neighbours already confront that reality. Japan’s foreign workers hit a record high of 2.57 million last October. South Korea keeps expanding its Employment Permit System to recruit workers for smaller manufacturers, farms and other sectors. Singapore’s foreign workforce reached 1.91 million in June last year, supporting construction, shipyards, processing industries and domestic care.

They show labour immigration usually begins not with a grand declaration that a nation has become an immigration society, but with programmes designed to solve specific workforce shortages. China could follow that path.

The timing would depend on economic conditions. A prolonged slowdown could postpone shortages by reducing employers’ demand for labour while further automation could eliminate some repetitive jobs. But that merely changes which occupations encounter pressure first.

As the working-age population contracts, Beijing will have to choose among accepting lower output, raising wages, automating more quickly, keeping people at work for longer and recruiting abroad. It will probably use all five.

Beijing is already more willing to compete for elite talent. Its new K visa targets young foreign professionals in science and technology. But recruiting engineers and researchers is politically easier than admitting large numbers of carers, technicians, service workers or factory employees. The latter would require wider changes to work permits, social insurance, family rights and long-term residence.

China remains an exceptionally small immigration destination relative to its population. The 2020 census counted only 845,697 foreigners. Public opposition to expanded permanent residence rules in 2020 showed how quickly immigration can become entangled with nationalism, race and perceptions of preferential treatment.

These political sensitivities will encourage a gradual roll-out of foreign recruiting policies. China could initially sign bilateral agreements, allow employers in designated sectors or provinces to sponsor foreign workers, and describe the policy as a temporary measure. Care work may become an early pressure point.

Such a system would fit Beijing’s preference for experimentation and administrative control. Pilot programmes could be expanded, modified or cancelled without presenting immigration as a permanent transformation of national identity. Yet temporary schemes often become durable when employers organise their business models around foreign labour, as the experience of other ageing Asian economies illustrates.

If China enters Asia’s migrant-labour market at scale, the consequences would reach far beyond its borders. Japan, South Korea and Singapore already recruit heavily from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and other Asian countries. Chinese employers would be competing for many of the same people.

China’s scale could increase wages and recruitment costs across the region. It could also strengthen the bargaining position of labour-sending governments, allowing them to demand better workplace protections, lower placement fees and stronger enforcement against abuse. Migrants would gain more ability to compare destinations according to pay, living costs, personal safety, family reunification and the possibility of remaining permanently.

China would not automatically win this competition. Its geographic proximity and enormous labour market would be advantages, but language barriers, limited settlement pathways, internet restrictions and concerns about legal protection could deter.

The immediate question is not whether China will suddenly embrace mass immigration. It is whether demographic decline will gradually make selective foreign recruitment less politically difficult than leaving essential jobs unfilled.

China became an industrial power by mobilising hundreds of millions of workers from its countryside. Its next labour transition may require looking beyond its borders. If that happens, the country that once transformed global labour markets by exporting workers could reshape Asian migration by beginning to import them.