On migrants returning home

I've been arguing for a while now that in this economic downturn, China's migrants will not be a source for instability - despite warnings from authorities in Beijing and fear-mongering from China-watcher friends of mine. Pieces like this one in last week's Financial Times echo my views. But I have also argued that many migrants will not be excited about returning home during this crisis because the Chinese countryside is a step back developmentally to people accustomed to life in the big cities. The second generation of Chinese migrants - the generation born in the 80s - is not in it so much for the money as for the experience. This is why a blog written by one of these young migrants and translated into English by China Labor Bulletin is so fascinating. It's important to remember that the writer, Xiao Sanlang, is the only person from his village to go to graduate school - so he's not typical. But his comments are sympathetic and fascinating. They raise an interesting question about the transformation of the China price from a coastal China price to an inland China price: Will workers who have been working in Shenzhen and Shanghai really want to live in the same basic conditions they fled to work at an export factory near their home, particularly if the conditions are no better and wages are lower than on the coasts?

The price of a life in China

In this morning's South China Morning Post, under the headline "250,000 cameras watching you in Guangzhou", the unidentified SCMP "staff reporter" describes a report from the city's Public Security Bureau, or police. The report discusses the 2008 Chinese New Year snowstorms, when at least half a million people were stranded at the Guangzhou train station. During that event, a recent Guangzhou police report "said that given that only one female worker was trampled to death in the days of huge crowds, the surveillance system had been a great aid to the government's handling of the emergency." I often cite the relative calm of the Guangzhou train station crowds when I argue that China's migrant workers are not rabble rousers. Can you imagine half a million people in America or France stranded at a train station (or a football stadium) for days on end without things getting violent? I hadn't realized that a woman died at the train station. That would have been big news in the US (and it was covered by the Chinese press), but in China, the fact that only one woman died is viewed as a qualified success.

Chinese New Year in Jiangxi

These are some pictures from my recent trip to the Chinese countryside for my friend's engagement party. It's my first foray into making videos out of photos, so please forgive the rough edges. But at least the pictures give you a sense of what life looks like in rural China, and how different it is from the cities where these migrants (and most every able bodied person in these photos is a migrant) work.

Chinese migrants are not rabble-rousers

As some of you might have noticed, I've been peeved by some of the media coverage of China's migrants as a force for instability recently. I don't believe migrants are a destabilizing force for China; just the reverse. Revolutions are rarely started by people like China's migrants. I vented about this in a piece in the Wall Street Journal Asia today.

Migrants, the NYT, and social stability

The New York Times has another piece on the potential for migrant unrest in China this year. While there are clearly many migrants out of work, all this reporting on migrants as a brewing pot of discontent is starting to get on my nerves. Nowhere in the piece does Andrew Jacobs quote any migrants who are actually angry, or even talking about stirring up trouble. The strongest quote probably comes from Tan Liangsheng, a 52 year-old man who lost his construction job. "We have no savings," Jacobs quotes Tan as saying. "All our hard work and bitterness is invested in this house." The piece quotes an academic saying that these guys have very low expectations, and makes the fair point that there is little land for many to go back to. But what Jacobs misses is that the migrants he interviews don't seem to be angry - that there is a real gap between what the government is saying and what he is hearing in his interviews. Sure, these migrants are worried. But they're not angry, not now. All this talk of migrants as potential sources for unrest makes me think back to the old discussion of migrants as the floating population, creating problems for people in the cities. For more on this, see Dorothy Solinger's excellent book, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. Totally unrelated to this, check out this piece on my recent speech at the University of Delaware. (Picture courtesy of TaylorMiles.net via Flickr)

Everything in moderation

I'm in Ann Arbor, Michigan to give a speech at the University of Michigan and it's certainly a thought-provoking place to be. Kyle, the kind man who picked me up from the airport, is a former designer for GM who was laid off three years ago when his job was moved to Mexico. Before my speech last night, a man walked up to me and told me he had just been laid off as a business development executive at University Bank. No wonder so many people turned up for the food and drink at the reception beforehand! As I've been preparing my Congressional testimony, I've been thinking about my earlier post about what China needs to do, and actually, I think we should give Beijing credit for paying attention to the needs of workers - retraining, loans - in the middle of this economic downturn. Talking to workers, they're not angry, at least not the ones I'm meeting. They have very positive views of the government, and are strangely optimistic about their own prospects. I think living in such insecurity for so long - not ever knowing where their next job might be - has better prepared them for this downturn than Americans accustomed to a steady job with benefits. (Photo credit: Flickr, maskofchina.com)

China's migrants and 毎日新聞

I'm just back from Bejiing, where everyone is very concerned about China's 26 million unemployed migrant workers. More to come, but I will say this: instead of temporary handouts, China needs to help create long-term job opportunities outside the factories for these hard-working people. It's not just that many have lost or sold their land. These workers have been an engine of economic growth for China for the past 20 years, but still have too few options beyond factory work. They need education and retraining, which the Chinese government has acknowledged. They also need security, in the form of a social safety net - another point Beijing has sagely realized. Most of all, they need to be treated equally to China's permanent urban residents. They must not be treated as second-class citizens. 日本語が読める方、毎日新聞の「中国貧困絶望工場」についての記事はこちらにあります。

Shenzhen raising minimum wage to US$144/month

The city of Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, has announced that it is raising its minimum wage to RMB1,000 a month in the center of the city. That's $144 a month or $1728 a year for the most basic factory salary, before overtime and benefits. Paltry, yes, by Western standards, and sure to be inadequately enforced, but quite significant by Chinese standards. I could be wrong, but I think that's the highest minimum wage in China right now. Thanks to CSR Asia for pointing it out.

Sichuan migrants need money

CHENGDU, China, May 26, 2008 (AFP) - After rushing back to their families following China's devastating quake, many migrant workers are returning to their jobs in the industrial heartland to funnel desperately needed cash home.
Still grieving and in shock after the tragedy that killed more than 60,000 people in largely mountainous and rural Sichuan province, the young men and women from farming areas feel they have no choice but to head back to work.
Sitting on a curb outside the main railway station of Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, 34-year-old Li was contemplating the fate of her family in quake-hit Mianyang as she waited for a train to take her back to her job hundreds of kilometres (miles) away.
"The family home is too dangerous to live in so everyone is outside, and they'll have to build a new house though I can't imagine how long that will take or how much it will cost," said Li, who only gave her surname.
Li works as a sewing machine operator in a textile factory in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, China's premier manufacturing region.
She and her husband, who works in a Hong Kong-owned electrical goods factory in Guangzhou, had rushed home 10 days earlier after not being able to get through to their families by phone for two days.
They would have to work and save even harder now, Li said, as she counted herself lucky not to have lost her only child, a 12-year-old daughter.
Many parents were not so fortunate when schools collapsed after the quake hit at 2:28 pm, during nap time.
Like many Sichuanese working in Guangdong, Li took annual leave to return home.
If workers wanted longer than their statutory two weeks' leave, they could take leave without pay, said Liu Kaiming, an expert on labour movement at the Shenzhen Institute of Contemporary Observation.
He added that many factories had helped Sichuanese get home, and were holding their jobs for their return.
Two weeks after the 8.0-magnitude quake, China's government is spending vast sums of money providing for the millions of people made homeless in the disaster.
But many are also depending on money being sent back by the millions of young Sichuan men and women such as Li who comprise one of the biggest groups of migrant workers in China's industrial revolution.
The money they send home is always a vital source of income for villages and towns across Sichuan, but even more so now after the disaster, said Alexandra Harney, author of "The China Price," a study of China's manufacturing boom.
"Most who have come home after the earthquake would be encouraged to go back to their factory jobs to ensure the flow of remittances continues as the need for that money has been exacerbated by the tragedy," she said. Sichuan is one of China's most populous provinces, with nearly 90 million people, and one of the poorest as it is mostly mountainous and largely agrarian.
As a result, millions of Sichuanese have headed out in search of work, with five million in Guangdong alone -- accounting for almost 20 percent of the workforce there, Wang Liwei, of Guangdong's labour department, told official media last week.
Harney said the earthquake damage would have exacerbated the poverty of many people in the stricken region, and could potentially lead to an even greater exodus of Sichuanese looking for high-paying jobs.
"What drove them to Guangdong in the first place was a desperate need to make money and that need is now even more desperate," she said.
"If I'd lost my home and my family, I would know that I could find a place to live in a dormitory and earn a steady wage in a factory in Guangdong."