CHINA CENTRAL TELEVISION’s “Economic Person of the Year” for 2003 is Xiong Deming, a 42-year-old pig farmer from Sichuan Province. But Ms. Xiong wasn’t singled out for any entrepreneurial or agricultural undertaking of her own. Rather, her 15 minutes of fame are the result of a chance encounter with Premier Wen Jiabao on October 24, when Wen was visiting her village. Ms. Xiong told the premier that her peasant-turned-worker husband was owed 2,240 yuan ($270) in back pay for work on a government-financed construction project in Yunyang Prefecture. The premier promised to help. About six hours later, Xiong’s husband received payment in full, albeit a year late.
The incident, first reported by China’s official Xinhua News Agency, triggered a deluge of stories in local newspapers about the plight of the country’s floating population of peasants roaming from city to city looking for work. Official figures place their number at 94 million. Special efforts to recover overdue wages on their behalf–a total of as much as $40 billion, by some estimates–were a hot topic around the Lunar New Year (January 22 this year), as migrants rely on their wages for train fare back to their villages for family reunions.
There were almost daily media accounts of village or township chiefs’ recovering migrants’ overdue wages from subcontractors and middlemen. Several websites devoted to the subject are up and running, featuring scholarly articles on the history of the rural exodus, as well as sketches of the daily lives of migrant workers, who are the backbone, but also the victims, of China’s boom.
According to callers to Radio Free Asia’s Mandarin-language hotlines, however, all this is mostly hype. Skeptical of the reports in state media, a Fujian listener said, “Only last week they reported 1.5 billion yuan had been recovered. But just now I heard on the news that fully one-half of the 100 billion yuan owed to more than 90 million migrant workers has been recovered. Are they saying they managed to collect almost 50 billion yuan in a matter of days?” And a peasant from Anhui Province working in Guangdong said, “I haven’t seen a red cent!”
A glut of rural labor and growing urban prosperity are driving the migration to China’s cities that has been going on for 20 years. Some independent economists believe the number of migrants could be as high as 130 million. They come mainly from Anhui, Henan, Sichuan, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei provinces, and work mostly in construction and the service sector. Thanks largely to their remittances home, rural incomes tripled between 1989 and 2001.
For a long time, internal migration was limited by the household registration system set up in the late 1950s. But in the mid-1980s, large numbers of peasants started moving to cities without permission. In 1993, the Beijing government relaxed the system, permitting millions to enter and work in cities on a temporary basis. Then in 2003 the government repealed a rule that allowed police to round up peasants seeking employment in cities without temporary residence certificates.
While China continues to encourage such migration, it hasn’t managed the resulting challenges well. Defaults on payments owed migrant workers are apparently common, especially in the construction industry, where developers sometimes default on payments to subcontractors, who in turn default on workers’ pay. Sometimes crooked middlemen skip town, leaving the workers in the lurch.
Poorly educated and low skilled, the migrants have little recourse. “We’re in no position to make demands,” said a Shanxi listener. “If you want to quit, go ahead. Nobody asked you to come here. If you are looking for laborers, just go to the train station and wave your hand. And they descend on you en masse.”
This listener had once worked in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. After laboring for six months in construction and not getting paid, he’d returned to Shanxi Province. But what he earned from tilling the land in his village didn’t even cover the agricultural taxes and fees imposed by local officials. So he quit farming and took a job in a coal mine. Last year he survived an underground explosion that killed more than 30 miners. He said he would stick to mining, however, because “they actually pay us here.”
Several callers claimed that some migrants unable to recover back pay had committed suicide. A Shenzhen journalist and a cadre in rural Shandong corroborated this in separate interviews with RFA’s Mandarin Service. The cadre from Shandong disputed the official estimate that average arrears are 1,000 yuan ($120) per worker. He believes the actual figure is several times higher.
A Shanghai caller characterized the Lunar New Year as “a season of misery” for migrants. Pointing a finger at the central government for “abandoning the rural population,” he asked, “Why are they treated so badly? They are human beings too–each with two eyes, a nose, and flesh and blood.”
Former Premier Zhu Rongji once warned that China’s economic growth might be jeopardized if migrant workers weren’t allowed to enjoy their share. Two years in a row now, China’s new leaders have spent the Lunar New Year holiday visiting the rural poor. While their efforts to bond with the masses have not gone unnoticed, the prevailing sentiment among RFA-Mandarin callers is that the gesture may be too little, too late. As a 36-year-old salesman put it: “They do it because they feel a terrible sense of crisis. The people and the ruling elite are now on opposite sides. And the gap is getting wider and deeper.”
Jennifer Chou is director of Radio Free Asia’s Mandarin Service.
