in every city. This was the cry of China’s mobile proletariat, always on the move, from the rural interior into the cities of their unevenly industrializing country and from those cities to the metropolises of north and southeast Asia and the US, and Europe. These workers were struggling to survive –and barely subsisting – through all the upheavals of the global market economy.
Their journey began three decades ago, and since then the global economic downturn has exacerbated the causes of their migration: rural poverty, the collapse of urban job security, mass unemployment and rapidly falling living standards.
Despite state proclamations of a ‘rising China’, the reality is that China has been struck hard by the global recession and is as bitterly divided as the rest of the world. The ‘iron rice bowl’ no longer exists. More than 600,000 small- and medium-size firms closed in China in 2008, throwing millions out of work. The deepening slump has encouraged a reverse migration, back to the countryside. The area most affected has been the export-led manufacturing heartland of southern China, where millions of migrants from rural Sichuan, Henan, Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan and other provinces normally congregate for work.
China’s agricultural adminstration revealed that 15.3 percent of the 130 million rural migrants in the cities – about one in seven – had returned to the countryside jobless following the mass layoffs between 2008 and early 2009.7 By spring 2009, more than 25 million migrant workers had found themselves without a job. Though the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reports that ‘the average (annual) urban wage rose 13 percent in the first half of 2009 to $2,142’, these figures exclude the private sector, which accounts for 40 percent of China’s GDP, more than 120 million workers, most of them migrants.8
One can be easily fooled. The skyscrapers continue to shoot up in Beijing. Top-range department stores are doing well; 27.5 percent of the world’s luxury goods are consumed in China, more than in the US and second only to Japan. Money is made and spent by the middle classes as if they were still living in a boom. A successful Beijing filmmaker, Li Yang, on his first visit to Britain sneered at the housing and the lack of super shopping malls in London’s East End, where I live. ‘You’re missing out on a lot, living in this part of London,’ he said, referring to his own upmarket district in Beijing, Haidian, a world away.
During 2008–2009, I followed the footsteps of migrant workers from Russia and the border region to China’s industrial northeast; from earthquake-affected Sichuan to the building sites and brick kilns of the northern cities and to the isolated factories of Shaoguan, Dongguan and Guangzhou of the manufacturing south; from the region west of the Yellow River to the east, where class divisions in the townships and villages are intensifying, decades after the Revolution; from the dazzling special economic zone cities to the impoverished coal-mining villages of Henan; and finally from central to northern Fujian, where communities are being rebuilt thanks to remittances from abroad.
I witnessed the living conditions of peasant families. Their annual income – barely a third of the average urban wage – continues to decline. I witnessed the impact of layoffs and the growth of local corruption as desperate workers waited for jobs. Meanwhile, working conditions and wages have deteriorated, and some workers, out of sheer hopelessness, have taken their own lives – a bitter testimony to the tragic impact of gaige kaifang. Yet local governments have been reluctant to penalize companies who laid off their workers without pay or to punish directors who simply hid or fled. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, acknowledging the ‘huge impact’ of the recession, launched a $585 billion government stimulus package and $1.1 trillion in bank loans to encourage domestic consumption, but little of this money was allocated to public services, housing or health care.
Yet many of the workers dismissed as ‘scattered sand’ are not prepared to accept what is thrown at them. In May and June 2010, a series of spontaneous strikes, involving thousands of migrant labourers, broke out at large multinational plants such as Honda and Toyota in southern and northern China. The strikers demanded wage increases, improvement of working conditions, and the right to form their own independent trade unions. At the Nanhai Honda plant in Guangdong, migrant workers won a 500 yuan ($79) monthly pay increase, with a further increase of 611 yuan set for 2011. At Toyoda Gosei in Tianjin, workers won a 20 percent pay increase. In fact, such strikes or ‘mass incidents’ now break out every day throughout the country.
As ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ reveals itself to be little more than a variant of the brutal capitalist order that the Communists once denounced, the strikers have shown that they will not wait passively for their iron rice bowl.
‘No matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,’ Deng Xiaoping used to say of China’s urgent need to embrace market economics by any means necessary.
When I mentioned this to a migrant worker from Henan, he said, ‘But no mice have been caught.’
1
Exodus: Northeast Youth Head for the City
Peng, a twenty-one-year-old man with large black eyes and a look of genuine innocence, approached me as I stood inside Shenyang’s Lu Garden Labour Market. Hundreds of people gathered here each day to wait for work. Right outside the building, men were selling watermelons to thirsty job seekers, some of whom had queued overnight, just to be first to see the ads in the morning. Inside, large slogans of national economic progress were hung on the four walls and propped against the lifeless old marble floor. Workers crowded around the job boards, some wearing placards to advertise their skills, such as catering and decorating. I was speaking to one of them when Peng walked up and introduced himself, then launched into his story, speaking freely, delighted to have someone to talk to about the years of hardship and solitude. He had been living in Shenyang for three years, in a room five metres square that he shared with four other men from nearby villages. The bed cost him ten yuan a day, which meant he couldn’t afford to remain long without work. He lived on four meat buns (baozi) a day, bought near the labour market for three yuan. He would waste no time on meals – he ate his buns while he searched the job market, which he visited daily. He hadn’t much in his life apart from looking for work. Once, he’d been stopped in the street by a cosmetics company representative who tried to persuade him to become a salesman. He would have to sell hard and earn a commission. Although he was tempted, he turned the offer down; he’d heard too many stories from other villagers about getting trapped in sales work (chuanxiao), where you earn little and are constantly under huge pressure to sell products to your personal network. The companies subject recruits to a militaristic training and the work regime is harsh. Recruiters always target young rural migrants, who are more desperate than other job seekers.
Peng had lost his last job, as a security guard, a month before, and was still unemployed. ‘What’s the bloody point?’ he exclaimed. ‘Work at Lu Garden always comes through a middleman, who charges 50 yuan for a job worth 50 yuan.’
Peng was a farmer from Fuxing village in Liaoning province, three hours’ bus ride from Shenyang. He called Fuxing a ‘poor old place’. The main produce there is sweet corn and wheat, incomes are low, and many young farmers had left to work in cities – mostly Shenyang – in recent years. Peng’s mother had died when he was young; his father was strict and temperamental. Peng was the only child and had grown up lonely. At thirteen, he’d had to go to work, helping his father on the farm. He was expected to work hard because he was a boy, which he resented very much.
Peng had not otherwise had a memorable childhood. He remembered only that he’d spent all his time in the fields with his dad. Home life was monotonous; the work was tough and never-ending – but then it was the same for everyone else. If you stayed in the village, that was the kind of life you led. In the evening, Peng cooked for his father. Occasionally he would read a book. He’d taught himself to read – he liked Chinese historical tales. He’d gone only to primary school and wasn’t expected to further his studies – only to work
