People prepare to ride motorbikes for home at a service station in Wuzhou, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region Jan. 18, 2020. Many migrant workers in Guangxi chose to go home by motorbike for a family reunion in the Spring Festival, or Chinese traditional lunar New Year, which starts from Jan. 25 this year. Photo:Xinhua

The local government of Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province, has prepared charter transportation including buses, trains and airplanes to help migrant workers return to their jobs amid the novel coronavirus onslaught.

Such polices to ensure work resumption in a sound manner should be encouraged and more cities should follow suit as the Chinese government makes strengthened efforts to avoid the virus bringing an "epidemic" to domestic economic growth, an expert said on Wednesday.

The Xiamen government said that migrant workers can take a free ride if they choose a charter bus or train and need to pay one third of the fee if they want to take a flight, according to a recent report by Xiamen Daily.

A charter flight operated by Xiamen Air will leave from Guiyang, Southwest China's Guizhou Province, at 2 pm on Friday and a charter train from East China's Jiangxi Province will also leave for Xiamen at 11:25 on Friday.

Workers taking public transportation and returning by themselves can also get travel subsidies from the local federation of trade unions.

"We started to resume work from February 10 and the recovery rate is only 50 percent now," an employee with the Xiamen branch of a Taiwan-based glass producer told the Global Times on Wednesday.

"Being short of hands, technicians in particular, has delayed production. We are considering applying for charter transportation from the government to help get our colleagues back," said the employee, who preferred to be anonymous. "More than 70 percent of our employees come from places outside Xiamen and we hope our factory can achieve full work resumption by the end of February."

Included in the China (Fujian) Pilot Free Trade Zone, Xiamen has attracted many companies from Taiwan as well as foreign firms like US computer technology company Dell.

There are more than 9,000 Taiwan-funded projects in the city and more than 600 Taiwan-funded firms are located in Siming district, according to media reports. 

"More than 70 percent of the Taiwan-funded firms in Xiamen have resumed work in an orderly manner… many of our companies said they have confidence toward the economic growth and the market in the Chinese mainland," Wu Jiaying, chairman of the Taiwan Businessmen's Association in Xiamen, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Wu praised the measures taken by the Xiamen government and said it is possible that Taiwan-funded firms will also launch charter transportation to pick up their workers in the mainland.

Xiamen is not the only city launching such services to help work recovery. Spring Airlines told the Global Times on Wednesday that the government of Huzhou in East China's Zhejiang Province chartered a flight on Tuesday afternoon from Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, to Shanghai. It is Spring Airlines' first such service.

On Tuesday, China's main consumer export hub, Yiwu, in East China's Zhejiang Province, dispatched its first fleet of six buses to Southwest China's Yunnan and Guizhou Provinces to pick up workers.

Local Chinese governments and companies urgently need to resume work amid the epidemic as the central government has stressed that local authorities should strengthen efforts to adjust economic operation while containing the virus, Liang Haiming, chairman of the China Silk Road iValley Research Institute, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Apart from Central China's Hubei Province, the epicenter, the number of newly confirmed cases has decreased continuously and the overall situation of the epidemic has changed positively, Liang said.

Given the context, adopting such measures to ensure work resumption in a sound manner should be encouraged because "we don't want the virus to bring an epidemic to China's economic growth," he said.

More cities will follow suit, especially those with free trade zones such as South China's Hainan and Guangdong Provinces, according to Liang.

Charter trains or buses could be adopted if transporting a large group of workers who return to their jobs at the same time, Song Xin, an official with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, told a press conference on Wednesday. 

For instance, Southwest China's Sichuan Province has set up a linkage mechanism with Zhejiang Province to dispatch workers through special inter-city buses and charter trains, Song said, noting that 1,000 workers returned for work in Hangzhou via this method on Monday.

Zhang Dan contributed to the story