Wei left Liangshan at the age of twenty. The poverty and the scarcity of opportunities in his rural home gave him no choice but to live a life of constant migration. Liangshan is a largely agricultural region, and one-third of Liangshan residents live below the poverty line. Agricultural income in most Yi households is well below subsistence level. Shen Wei went to work as a security guard in Chengdu in 1996, and then left the province to work, also as a security guard, in Shijiangzhuang, a city in Hebei province, in the late 1990s. After that, he travelled to Beijing when offered a job in the same trade. Soon enough, he had spent his youth toiling in various industries in eight provinces all over China, and now his parents, who lacked a pension in their old age, depend on his earnings.
Shen Wei described working as a security guard in Beijing in 2001. The job paid 800–900 yuan (now £72–81, $127–142) per month – low, considering the high cost of living in the capital, but considerably better than what he could have made at home. He’d lived with other migrants in shabby, overcrowded shacks in Daxing, and his commute to the city centre took two hours each way, but it was the fact that he couldn’t save enough to send money home that eventually made the job not worthwhile.
He returned to Chengdu’s labour market. There, in 2005, a Sichuanese recruiter – there were many of them around – offered him a job making toys and mobile phones in a factory in Dongguan city, in Guangdong province in the south. Jobs down south were seen as a lot better, offering better terms and conditions, than those in the north. Recruiters often targeted Liangshan, seeing the Yi people as cheap and docile, eager to work and desperate to earn, and therefore much more vulnerable and easy to control as a workforce, more apt to accept poor working terms and then stick with the job. Liangshan’s unemployment rate was as high as 4.12 percent in 2009, and it was a known fact that most Yi youth were unemployed.
A few of those workers from Liangshan were only fourteen to sixteen years old. They went south in order to support their parents back home. Once out of the province they would be expected to stay out and keep earning. This job was the beginning of a long journey. After being laid off from the Dongguan factory, Shen Wei said, some of the kids were sent to a new workplace, a brick kiln up north, back in Hebei. When leaving Guangdong, they spent some of their meagre wages on the bus tickets home. The trip took a day; they couldn’t afford to buy food or water. The company – a Japanese and Korean joint venture, which employed hundreds of people – knew the workers were underage, of course. ‘But they don’t care,’ said Shen Wei. The middlemen and supervisors were responsible for recruitment, and the company knew how to avoid blame for employing child labour.
So, Shen Wei made his own journey to Dongguan with a group of ten young men from Liangshan who had all been recruited at the same time in Chengdu’s labour market. He didn’t like the look of Dongguan and found it instantly depressing. Immediately, they were put to work assembling mobile phones, ten hours a day, seven days a week. For that, the monthly pay was about 850 yuan.
Shen Wei stayed in Dongguan for three years. Management withheld their wages for the entire year, calling it a deposit. The workers were paid just before they returned home to the villages for the Chinese New Year. (Migrant workers always return home for the Chinese New Year and go back to work in the spring.) Legally, employers are supposed to pay workers each month, but the Dongguan workers were told that annual pay was the common practice in Guangdong province. Shen Wei was never able to send money home during the working year. The policy was intended to keep the recruits from leaving the job, and it worked.
But that was not the worst of their situation. The Liangshan Yi did not apply for a temporary residency permit in Dongguan, because they simply couldn’t afford one on their scanty pay. So they lived and worked in Dongguan without the permit, that is, without hukou, and without status. That meant they had no access to local heath care – if they became ill, they would have to pay the doctor themselves, which they couldn’t afford either. Any children they brought with them would not be able to go to local schools. And apart from being denied access to public services, they would face punishment if caught without papers by the police.
As Yi, they were not only looked down upon, but also faced open hostility on the streets. Shen Wei knew personally of co-workers who had been verbally abused, and one who’d been badly beaten and kicked in an unprovoked attack in an alley, late at night, by local men. He’d heard of many other similar attacks. Yi were easily singled out by their facial features and strong accent. In Guangdong province, ethnic minority migrant workers usually have a hard time and find it difficult to be accepted by local people. ‘People of Yi origin get the worst pay and the worst treatment,’ Shen Wei said. ‘Not only in that factory, but in the cities generally. Everywhere we went in Guangdong, we faced hostile eyes.’
But in spite of the prejudice and violence, the workers from Liangshan stayed, because they had to. They worked even when they were sick – they were not allowed to take sick days. Even when Shen Wei had a high temperature, he’d gone to the factory, not the doctor. He’d heard about two young workers from Liangshan before his time who’d become ill in Dongguan and died. One of them, working sick and untreated, had developed pneumonia. When he died, not much fuss was made at the factory. His family was informed and that was the end of the matter. Somehow, the news never became public. ‘But our lives are cheap,’ said Shen Wei. ‘There was no compensation. No one would make a noise.’
I asked if this was why he’d eventually left the job.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually, I would have stayed if I could.’ But the scandal of child labourers in the Shanxi brick kilns had been exposed not long before, and local media had become interested in the issue of child labour. On 28 April 2008, a report highlighting how Dongguan factory foremen used child labourers from Liangshan was printed in the Southern Metropolitan Daily, and the factory bosses got scared and fired all the Yi workers, regardless of whether they were adults or kids. The report read in part:
[The trafficked children] came from faraway Liangshan in Sichuan, and most of them are not yet 16. The overseers sought and recruited them from families mired in poverty, promising them high wages; some were even abducted and sent off in batches to Dongguan and from there distributed by the truckload to factories across the Pearl River Delta. On unfamiliar soil, these children are often scolded and beaten and only have one proper meal every few days. Some little girls are even raped. Day after day, they undertake arduous labour. Some children think about escape, but the road is blocked. The overseers threaten them and warn them that if they try to run away, there will be a price to pay.
In fact, the foremen in these factories were regularly recruiting children. Thousands of Yi kids from Liangshan were working in Guangdong. At Shen Wei’s factory, more than twenty kids were recruited every year. ‘But even before the report came out, I heard that the factory was thinking of cutting down its workforce,’ said Shen Wei. ‘I guess it was easy for them to sack us because they didn’t really need us anymore.’
Fei, a twenty-five-year-old Tibetan, spoke up. He had been deceived by a local job recruiter, who knew that he was desperate for work, into selling the drug ecstasy in Beijing. The recruiter had promised him a security job, but not one guarding a company. He took the offer without hesitation; the pay was 150 yuan (now £14.5) a day. ‘Good money, isn’t it?’ he said, and everyone around us perked up: Indeed, it was a large sum compared to usual urban wage levels. Every day, Fei was instructed to stand at a particular location, to wait for buyers. Sometimes it was outside a building, sometimes on a certain street corner. He had no idea who the buyers were, only that they were regular. ‘But I was so frightened of getting caught all the time. You wouldn’t want to spend a minute in prison – as a Tibetan, you would have a hellish time there. I was so scared of that,’ he said. ‘When I wanted to quit the job eventually, they wouldn’t let me.’
The crowd listened quietly. ‘I fled in the end,’ he said. One day, he simply didn’t show up. He went to buy a ticket home and stayed waiting in the train station for hours,
