Illustration: Liu Rui /GT

I'd read a lot about China's labor shortages before I travelled back to the country recently. I knew it was hard for the manufacturers to find workers to fill their assembly lines now, young people don't like to do laborious work for low pay anymore, and labor costs have been going up. 

Still, when I travelled in southern China recently, I was surprised to see labor shortages have affected the details of everyday life for average people. One friend told me she had been trying to hire a nanny for her paralyzed 80-year-old mother but had failed. Both the two nannies she found so far left in weeks for better jobs such as baby sitting. One of them left without even leaving a note. Another friend told me a newly hired secretary at the high-tech company at which she worked, a smart and capable woman in her early 20s, had just quit because, in the former employee's own words, "it's hard to catch the crowded bus in the morning." 

A third story I heard concerned the owner of a small tea shop. A salesgirl at the shop, a fresh high school graduate from a rural village, quit recently because she doesn't like the fact that the shop only had one other salesgirl and she had no one else to hang out with.

Then, on a rainy night in Fuzhou city, the taxi driver who drove me back to my hotel, a young man in his early 30s who was originally from a rural area of Sichuan Province, told me that when he first came to the city two years ago, a friend found him a job in construction. But he quit in a few days. "It was well paid, 400 yuan ($60.85) a day, but too tiring. I'd rather work less hard for less money," the driver, who now makes half the amount, told me.

This, in a country that's been quickly aging, is alarming. As a response, China has decided to raise the retirement age and most recently, repealed the decades long one-child policy, hoping to boost the working and the young population.

But on another trip, I discovered at least one solution, which, with or without conscious backing of the government, is happening. I realized this when a friend took me to a restaurant in Shuitou, a county in the suburb of Quanzhou city. 

The restaurant is known for its Sichuan-style hotpot. But in the middle of the dining hall it stationed an Indian chef making roti, Indian bread. The roti was adapted for Chinese tastes with some fruit slices inserted in the middle of two thin layers of flour. And clearly part of the chef's job was to perform for the diners.

Foreign chefs may not be a rare species in big cities like Beijing or Shanghai. But Shuitou is little known and doesn't even have a train station. To have a foreign chef working there seems to me an unmistakable sign that China is getting more open to hiring foreign labor.

The presence of the Indian chef in Quanzhou is part of a wider statistical trend. 848,500 foreigners lived in China in 2013, and the number had been rising at 3.9 percent in the previous decade compared to the 3.0 percent annual growth rate in 1990 to 2000.

Still, foreigners amount for less than 0.1 percent of the Chinese population. But this may change soon. While China's population is aging quickly, young people looking for jobs are quickly increasing in neighboring countries.

The Philippines, for example, saw its population reached the 100 million benchmark in 2014, and more than one third of its population is aged between 0-14, and only 5 percent are over 65. Among Bangladesh's 150 million people, the demographics are similar.

Other Asian countries with a labor shortage have already taken advantage of the surplus in neighboring countries. In Singapore, for example, foreign workers do a lot of vital work. Even Japan, a country known for its firm commitment to maintaining its homogeneity, has started to take in a few more foreign workers.

Sooner or later, China will have to seriously consider opening its doors wider. The only concern is that Chinese are far from being prepared for a multi-cultural and multi-racial society. We will need to learn quickly from any missteps - because there will be some - and work hard to resolve any conflicts quickly.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com Follow us on Twitter @GTopinion