Zhong, 26, returned home to rural Sichuan province in December and plunged into China's now perilous business waters, opening a small clothing shop with her savings and a new government credit line for peasant businesses.

"My hope is that business will be good enough to eventually expand. But if I can just support my self, that's good enough," said Zhong, who was laid off in November after eight years with an embroidery company in Guangdong province.

As China confronts the reality of millions of job lost due to the world economic downturn, the success or failure of people like Zhong could determine whether the country can avoid a full-blown economic and social crisis.

The government is frantically pulling an array of policy levers, including new business loans and a massive retraining push, in a bid to keep people earning money.

Zhong utilised a 5,000-yuan (730-dollar) government credit line and 20,000 yuan of her savings to open her Cool Lulu fashion store here in Zhugao, a poor Sichuan farming town.

But merely keeping the store open in a poor town dependent on remittances from migrants will be tough.

At least 20 million migrant workers have been left jobless due to the economic crisis, the government said last week as it warned of possible social unrest.

Sichuan is a major source of China's estimated 130 million migrant workers. But with the well-trodden path to distant factories on the coast a dead end for many, they are seeking other ways to survive.

Some hold out hope that new jobs closer to home will be created by a 586-billion-dollar stimulus plan focused on infrastructure development announced in November.

In Sichuan, many expect work on reconstruction from last May's devastating earthquake.

In the provincial capital of Chengdu 90 minutes' drive from Zhugao, authorities are handing out 11 million dollars to various organisations that can provide free skills training to jobless peasants, many of them illiterate.

Former migrant Ma Jingmei's family lost a vital lifeline when her husband recently lost his job outside Sichuan.

She is now one of an increasing number of jobless migrants on a free one-month course to become a nanny.

Run by a Chengdu maternity services provider, the hardy peasant women are taught to forget the rough upbringing of the villages and instructed in the finer points of subjects like baby massage.

"The head is most important, it will make the baby smarter," an instructor asserts as Ma, 36, and her bemused fellow students massage baby dolls on desks in a classroom.

Forsaking a now-fruitless search for work on the other side of China, Ma hopes for a job near Chengdu as a nanny that will pay between 1,000 and 3,000 yuan per month to help support her family in Dayi, a farming village in Sichuan's countryside.

"The impact of the crisis has been huge. With no definite breadwinner now we can't support our children and parents, especially as our parents get older and have more health problems," she said.

"I have to find some way to make money or we can't subsist."

Helping migrants land on their feet in poor rural areas is one of the biggest challenges China's leaders face in years.

But China will need to do much more than it has, said Stephen Green, chief of China research at Standard Chartered Bank.

Noting that most migrants lack a sufficient social safety net, he expressed hope the government would greatly increase social welfare spending in the central budget put to the legislature next month.

"But with the steps China has taken so far, there is no way they can replace jobs on the scale that they are being lost," he said.

Nevertheless, Xia Wanzhong saw today's troubles as a blessing as he strolled a chilly Zhugao street with his tightly bundled daughter Lei Lei, four, to buy vegetables.

Xia, 32, toiled eight years in a southern China factory until it folded last year, seeing Lei Lei a total of 12 weeks in her whole life.

"If I can find work in Chengdu, I could see her every month. We will find a way," he said with a smile.

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