Wages are on the rise again in Guangdong, a big exporting province, and across much of the rest of China. In recent months, there has been much anecdotal evidence of labour shortages and wage hikes on the south-ern and eastern coasts. We showed a while ago that the labour market had made a surprising V-shaped recovery in coastal areas and was also strength-ening in central and western China,where the downturn was less severe (see On the Ground, 9 December 2009,'China - Job watch'). In Charts 1 and 2, we show the most recent data on job vacancies from local job centres. Chart 1 shows the growth in job vacancies,while Chart 2 shows the ratio between job vacancies and applications. Things seem to be pretty much back to pre-crisis levels.