Nothing can be done to promptly stem the loss of millions of US dollars worth of exports. Haining city, China's leather clothing center in eastern Zhejiang province, has had to drop international orders that flock in because it suffers an acute shortage of skilled workers.

The city has more than 2,000 leather clothing enterprises that can produce 60,000 items daily, but they are able to do little to increase their capacity as they can hardly recruit new competent staff.

The same dilemma has faced other industries in the Yangtze River Delta, China's economic powerhouse region that mainly includes Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. The region recorded the fastest economic growth in China, which demands a huge pool of technicians for sustainable high-rate development.

In Kunshan city of southern Jiangsu, an enterprise offered 280, 000 yuan (about 34,000 US dollars) in annual salary to a senior electric welding worker. In Zhejiang's capital city of Hangzhou, even if some firms promised a monthly salary of 6,000 yuan (some 720 US dollars) for a digital machine tool operator, more than double the average government salary, they could hardly find one.

Prof. Zhang Xukun with the Economic School of the Hangzhou- based prestigious Zhejiang University, said the dearth of skilled technicians poses a major hindrance to the Yangtze Delta region's growth, as the global manufacturing industries have transferred to the region on a massive scale.

According to the estimate of the Shanghai Municipal Economic Commission, the city will suffer a shortage of some 18,000 technicians in the next three years in the fields of craft designing, machine tool operation, electric equipment and optimization of optical, mechanical and electronic synthesis. Authorities in Wuxi city, a major industrial base in southern Jiangsu, surveyed more than 700 overseas-funded enterprises and found a technician shortage of up to 10,000.

Xu Long, deputy director of the personnel training center of Zhejiang Modern Logistics, said Zhejiang province will see a shortfall of at least 300,000 logistics workers in transportation and warehousing within the next few years.

The technician hunger has led to a fierce competition of skilled workers. Facing an extreme scarcity of textile machine operators, bosses of private enterprises in Zhili Town, a children 's clothing center in Huzhou city in Zhejiang, waited around the local railway station after the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), competing to offer higher salaries to workers with basic experience who came there to find a job after SARS.

To cope with the problem, the local government even planned to import technicians from overseas countries and regions. For example, Shanghai has announced it will enroll skilled retired technicians from Japan.

Some technician training schools made plans to increase the number of students of majors that are in great market demand. On the list of the most popular training programs this year in Hangzhou are for senior electricians, digitally controlled machine operators, druggists, gardeners, metallists and painters.

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