known since his first day at Lu Garden. The bun seller had been a job seeker himself, but had given up looking for work and taken on this little street trade instead. The watermelon seller was in the same situation: unemployed labourer turned trader. Peng would take a fifteen-minute break, chewing his buns and chatting with them about news of the day. After lunch, he would get back inside Lu Garden and start searching again – new ads did come in throughout the day, so everyone carried on, hoping for a job. The latest Peng ever stayed was till 8 p.m., when his flatmates also packed up and went home.
As I was leaving Lu Garden myself that day, another man walked up to me and said, ‘Wait! I have something to show you. Would you like to see my poems and essays?’ His eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. ‘I wrote them in my years working away from my home village.’ He was Ren Jianguo, from Hugou village, Shanzuizi county, Liaoning province.
I followed him to his flat, like Peng’s just ten minutes’ walk from the labour market. We entered a tiny alleyway and turned a corner into a dingy-looking block of flats. He said these were mostly occupied by retired urban poor. I saw some men and women in their seventies doing calisthenics in the tiny public area in between the flats. They were in their pajamas, leaning on a metal pole and stretching their legs. I followed him up the stairs, which smelled bad. The railing had rusted. No doubt, this was among the most modest housing in Shenyang, as he told me – and migrants cannot afford anything better. All of his flatmates were still at Lu Gardens, waiting for work. By the look of the place, there must have been at least a dozen people living there besides him. But Ren Jianguo didn’t seem to care about the mess and the lack of space. He seemed interested only in what he’d written in black ink. He searched anxiously in a pile of documents on a desk next to an old washbasin. Finally, he found it: some fifty pages of handwritten poems and essays. ‘There! Please read it. It’s my sweat and tears,’ he said, pushing the papers into my hands.
The first page was titled ‘To My Parents.’ It told of his regrets over the years when he had not brought sufficient income from his job in Shenyang to support his aging mother and father, who had been farming the land in Hugou village:
One of the most pointless things in life is to exhaust yourself in rearing children. I say this for you, Mother and Father…I left home in tears, to make a living in the world outside. You had fed and clothed me for twenty years, and I had to leave to know what it’s like to be so giving. You had toiled in the fields, suffering and bearing the heat and the cold, just to pay for my schooling. You had cared for me and provided me with everything that there was. All you were hoping was that I would make a good life for myself one day. But how I broke your hearts – earning such a poor wage on a building site in a heartless city…getting drunk in my depressed moments…I do not deserve you. I would like to go down on my knees, to beg for your forgiveness…
Ren Jianguo began writing down his thoughts from the day he left home for the city. Peng, instead, found consolation in sharing his experiences with other migrants. He told me that for him, solitude was one of the most distressing things about living and working in a city as an outsider. The day I left Shenyang, Peng accompanied me through the dusty lanes of the city to the train station, confessing that he was trying to look after his mental health by not being alone.
Shenyang’s past glories and tragedies are no longer very visible in the city today. Still the capital of Liaoning Province in northeastern China, and historically known as Mukden, it had been the legendary Manchu general Nurachi’s first capital after Nurachi overthrew the Ming Dynasty in 1625. It remained so until 1644, when the Manchus invaded Beijing and established the last dynasty there, the Qing.
Toward the end of the Qing dynasty, when the imperialist powers were dividing the country into their spheres of influence, Shenyang was an object of competition between Russia and Japan. The former built a railway connecting the city with the South Manchurian Railway, in an attempt to tap into the region’s natural resources; the Japanese used a train-car explosion north of Shenyang in 1931 as a pretext for invading the city, seizing all of northeastern China, and establishing a puppet state called Manchukuo. The anti-imperialist sentiment among the people of this region has lasted and evolved over the years into a strong nationalism.’2
Shenyang has developed into an important industrial centre since the 1920s, and in the 1970s it became one of China’s top three industrial cities, alongside Shanghai and Tianjin. Shenyang today is the largest city in the northeast of China, with a population of 8.1 million. Its historic heavy industry (it has been known as the rust belt since the industrial decline of the 1980s) is still manifest: you cannot ignore the polluted air when you enter Shenyang. You also see the city’s new look: the inflow of foreign investment and the fast growth of the city’s service industries apparent in the ubiquitous high-rises housing foreign banks and insurance companies.
As a fast-growing city, Shenyang boasted a total GDP of 383 billion yuan in 2009, and has been recognized as one of the top twenty emerging cities in China. Its income level is known to be the highest in the region. In 2010, the average income in Shenyang was reported to be 1,708 yuan per month,3 an enviable one compared with other northeastern cities and towns. For that reason it has pulled in many rural people from the northeast as well as from the south. Currently, there are around two million migrant workers in Liaoning province, most of them seeking opportunities in the private sector, particularly in Shenyang’s manufacturing and service industries. Thousands of labourers, a massive reserve army, crowd the streets and labour markets each day, waiting for jobs.
The Lu Garden Labour Market in central Shenyang is the city’s largest. Two or three hundred jobless migrants gather there each day. Near Lu Garden is a well-known antiques market much liked by the city’s middle class. In fact, it is much better known to them than the labour market. ‘Just cross the bridge and it’s on the left-hand side,’ is what everyone tells you when you walk in that direction. The labour market itself is an unimpressive, grey-looking concrete building that can be seen from the other side of the bridge. Street sellers with three-wheeled carts crowd around Lu Garden. Job seekers can be seen waiting and talking to one another even hundreds of metres before you reach the bridge. When you push yourself into the building, you feel the heat coming from the mass of people inside. In midsummer, it was just as the migrant workers described it, ‘like being inside a steamer’. The heat of competition is just as fierce: people try to grab the first job around; they cannot afford compassion for other aspirants. The place is particularly overcrowded at the beginning of the year when migrants return to the city from their winter break, with the number of job seekers rising to more than two thousand each day. Then it’s like a movie scene of a wartime train station. It is all about survival.
Lu Garden’s labour market was originally formed spontaneously by migrant job seekers who gathered here looking for work, and it has been regulated by the local authorities since 2003 as a casual-labour exchange. Official estimates say that 2,000 to 5,000 job seekers visit Lu Garden every day – up to a million people per year. Big companies advertise their vacancies on the walls, but some construction employers and small- to medium-size catering businesses come here in their cars and look for workers themselves. Employers often go through middlemen, because it is the easiest way for them to find migrant workers. And employers prefer migrants because their labour costs much less than urban workers’. This is particularly the case in the private sector. The middlemen receive fees from both the employers and the workers. Some middlemen are labour contractors themselves, which means they will take a regular cut from the migrants’ wages.
In 2011, the number of Lu Garden’s migrant job seekers has apparently increased while in similar markets in other provinces employers have complained about a labour shortage. At Lu Garden, employers now complain instead about workers’ reluctance to accept low wages.4 One caterer was reported to have said: ‘These workers nowadays…they want their wages on the day. And those workers you want to employ are just unaffordable!’5 An employer from a cosmetics company who had visited Lu Garden five times said, ‘I’m now offering 1,500 yuan per month and still can’t find workers!’6 It seems that in Lu Garden, migrant workers’
