Beijing ? The global economic crisis has taken hold deep in China’s impoverished countryside, as millions of rural migrants are laid off from factory jobs and left to scratch a living from tiny landholdings — creating unsettling prospects for a government anxious to avoid social unrest.

With demand for Chinese toy, shoe and electronics exports evaporating overseas, as many as 26 million of China’s estimated 130 million migrant workers are now unemployed, the government announced Monday. A day earlier, Beijing warned of “possibly the toughest year” this decade and called for development of rural areas to offset the economic fallout.

“The government should not sit idly and disappoint the farmers,” said Liu Shanying, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“If they are unemployed for a long time, it will be a time bomb,” Liu said.

The severity of the situation will become clearer in the weeks ahead, as workers eager to test their prospects return from spending the Lunar New Year with their families in the countryside.

But already, agencies that seek to match workers with factory managers say demand has plummeted.

Throughout the years of China’s long economic boom, migrant work provided a sort of social pressure release valve, allowing millions of farmers to escape to factory jobs in better developed coastal regions.

Those jobs, however, have dried up quickly as China’s economic growth — once red-hot — plunged to 6.8 percent in the final quarter of last year. Analysts have cut forecasts for whole-year economic growth in 2009 to as low as 5 percent, with the export sector particularly hard-hit.

Layoffs have already led workers in some cities to take to the streets in protest at factory shutdowns or to demand back pay. Authorities have moved quickly to placate them, in some cases using public funds to pay workers after factory owners run off.

Chen Xiwen, director of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, outlined a number of policies aimed at helping migrants, including encouraging companies to retain workers, investing in public projects to absorb rural workers and helping returning migrants set up businesses in their hometowns.