Migrant Worker

Year of the Piglet?
Originally uploaded by PEAC.

Spring Festival, the most important holiday of the year in China, is approaching fast. That means those of you teaching English at a Chinese university probably haven’t been working since Christmas-ish and may very well have vacation until the end of February.

The rest of us ‘migrant workers’ have to wait until China’s central government officially announces the holiday vacation dates, at which point we charge to the nearest train or bus station to get in line for tickets home. People regularly spend full days waiting to buy tickets, and often are forced to camp out in the hopes of getting a reasonable seat home. A fairly accurate depiction of this phenomenon is presented here, in the hilarious (Chinese) satire film entitled “Spring Festival Travel Evil Empire.”

I was considering bypassing the charge this year and booking a flight somewhere until I noticed an article in Shanghai Daily about a price freeze on Spring Fest train tickets.

Saaa-weeet! This means they won’t jack up the prices an extra 20% just in time for everyone to be socially, culturally, and morally obligated to go home for their single yearly visit. As one of my coworkers put it last year, “It’s not like if you charge me more I will tell my grandma, ‘Grandma? Sorry I am not coming home for Chunjie this year.’”

The article mentions the fact that China’s 150 million migrant workers make up a large part of those travelling home for the holiday. Since these workers make very little, and are often owed thousands of RMB in unpaid back wages (see previous post), many get increasingly desparate when it comes time to get in line and buy those train tickets. Which leads to:

A huge outbreak of theft every year in the month or two leading up to Spring Festival. Shanghaiist Zat Liu reported on her personal experience with this phenomenon, a missing pair of “masculine” riding boots, as well as some information on where in Shanghai theft is most rampant.

I can identify, as I have had a cell phone cut out of my purse on a public bus and mysteriously “lost” a wallet in a crowded bar in the last two months. Needless to say, I’m getting a bit paranoid.

I was able to find a collaberative map of thefts in Beijing, but it is in Chinese and there are only a few additions. This article (Chinese) also details cooperative online maps of high-theft areas, and highlights the Sanlitun, Xizhimen, and Gucheng areas, as well as major hospitals (where people often carry large amounts of cash to cover medical bills).

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Harvesting Rice
Originally uploaded by Even Rogers Pay.

After kissing the fresh fruit and blue skies of Kunming goodbye, I made my official migration to Beijing just before Christmas with two papayas in my carry-on luggage. I’ve spent the last month moving and the last week or two in a cesspit of holiday debauchery, but I am, at last, back on track with the latest in agricultural and migrant-related gossip, not to mention a healthy dose of Yunnan and Beijing hearsay.

It Sucks to Live in Rural China

I may have been on hiatus, but People’s Daily was still hard at work, bringing us insightful and groundbreaking news like this article: China’s rural life still harsh. Now that’s a shocker.

The story follows two migrant workers who, after the repeal of agricultural taxes was announced last year, returned to their home village to work the 4 mu (.65 acre or .2 hectare) allocated to them. A typhoon hit, and flooding submerged most of their land, and the husband was diagnosed with cancer. With no insurance, the family spent their entire life savings (just over $1,000 US) on hospital bills.

Two things worth noting about this article:

The couple had been working in an urban area as ‘migrant workers’ - the typical translation for 农民工 or farmer-workers in Chinese. They worked in the city long enough to save a substantial amount of money - and yet the 4 mu of land in their home village was still there, awaiting their return. Would this couple be better off if they could sell their farmland to a neighbor and use that capital to relocate permanently to the city? Under the current legal system, agricultural land is state property, and farmers can’t sell (and in some cases, can’t even lease).

Second, this is a classic example of the fallacy of a “poverty line” - in many cases, Chinese farmers’ savings level pushes them above the line and disqualifies them for all kinds of aid, but in practice, lack of access to insurance and inability to access the value of their land, they immediately return to poverty if they must pay tuition or hospital bills.

More rough life for the poor after the jump…

It Sucks to be ‘Ethnic’

At least, according to this article, also from the People’s Daily, China’s minority populations are much more likely to be poor than average Han Chinese in rural areas.

China’s ethnic regions still have 11.7 million people living in abject poverty, accounting for 49.5 percent of the country’s poor rural dwellers, a Chinese legislator said Wednesday. […] Besides the historic, natural and social disadvantages in these areas, local government failure to carry out national policies and laws, and the misuse of funds were also to blame for the lack of development, he said.

And in case you thought moving to urban china was a panacea,

It Sucks to be a Migrant Worker

China Daily reports on this story, eventually picked up by the international press, of a migrant worker who was beaten to death after demanding back pay for himself and his construction crew.

A survey of the Ministry of Agriculture shows China’s migrant worker population has grown to 114.9 million with an estimated 6.7 million new migrant workers this year. The central government has ordered local officials to make sure workers are paid on time and in full, but enforcement is lax. A recent investigation found that 980 employers in northwestern Gansu Province owe 130 million yuan (US$16.6 million) of wages to some 130,000 migrant workers. Most of the debtors are construction firms and restaurants, according to the provincial labor and social security department that investigated nearly 6,000 businesses in October and November to make sure all migrants’ wages are paid. (emphasis mine)

The entire article is a fascinating set of stories about companies that fail to pay workers and then disappear into a corrupt and inefficient legal system. The article makes the point that most migrant workers simply don’t have the time to wait around for back pay, since they desperately need to send money home to their families. It seems from the article that this problem is very widespread, which would not surprise me, given both the state of the legal system in China and friends’ personal experiences with similar situations. If an accredited school or university will try to screw foreign teachers out of money, I’m sure that construction companies treat their impoverished and status-less workers much worse.

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