Zheng, Siqi, Fenjie Long, C. Cindy Fan, and Yizhen Gu. "Urban Villages in China: A 2008 Survey of Migrant Settlements in Beijing." Eurasian Geography and Economics 50.4 (2009): 425-46. Print.
Monday
Figures for Migrant Real Estate in Beijing Chengzhongcuns
Zheng, Siqi, Fenjie Long, C. Cindy Fan, and Yizhen Gu. "Urban Villages in China: A 2008 Survey of Migrant Settlements in Beijing." Eurasian Geography and Economics 50.4 (2009): 425-46. Print.
Migrant Laborers of Beijing
"Beijingers think we pollute their air and that our baggage takes their space. They always look at us scornfully, but our work alone is great. Without us, they couldn't live in their new houses...We have the same ideals in our childhood as people in Beijing, but we are not able to choose how to live. We have no money or education so Beijing can’t be our home."- Guo Tao, a Beijing migrant worker
China Daily, Sept. 9, 2003
Beijing's rapid urbanization is largely attributed to the work and efforts of the migrant workers who moved from the countryside into the city in attempt to find higher-paying wages. Approximately one million migrant workers comprises 90% of the construction worker population in Beijing, of which most of the recent workforce was directed towards the construction of the Beijing Olympics.
Such migrant laborers face considerable barriers to social acceptance. Given already the status of their hukou, which is immediately a stigma of social inferiority, migrant workers are barred from government-provided welfare such as medical care and public education. Work contracts are often not legally written out but instead are orally established, often leading to difficulties when it comes to payday or work-related medical coverage.
Sunday
Zhejiangcun
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| Zhejiang Village, Beijing. (Michael Dutton, Poverty in Beijing) |
Zhejiangcun (浙江村) (translated as Zhejiang village) is the biggest migrant settlement in China. Located only five miles south of Beijing, it originated from six migrant families into 1984 and by 1998 boasted of over 100,000 migrants. Known mostly for its local clothing business, Zhejiangcun represents an intricate network of people and their connections. Despite the deplorable conditions of the village, most migrants choose to stay and live among their fellow migrants due to the social network.
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| An alleyway in Zhejiangcun (Poverty in Beijing, Michael Dutton) |
Saturday
Woman in Zhejiangcun
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Wednesday
Zhejiangcun - Crime and Drugs
Zhejiangcun is already not the safest area due to discrimination against migrants as well as the the corrupt police system that distinctively puts migrants at a disadvantage unless they have connections within the police force. Migrants experience considerable fear at being robbed by both Beijing and Zhejiang liumang (流氓), or hooligans, who are often drug addicts as well.
Drugs are a serious problem in Zhejiangcun, developing into prominence around the 1990s. Drugs are easily accessed in the area due to lack of law enforcement and the high concentration of private wealth; migrants are introduced to the drugs upon arrival and slowly addicted. The migrants divide the drug addicts into two classes: chi dayan de (those who eat opium) and chou baifen de (those who smoke heroin [literally translated "white powder."])
Drug dealers hook the migrants early upon their arrival and, once the migrants are addicted, raise the prices to exorbitant amounts. The average heroin user spends up to 400 yuan per day, which accumulates to 100,000 yuan a year. When the drug addicts are arrested, their parents often rely on their connections with the police in order to bail their children (usually sons) out of jail. In doing so, they, in ways, allow their children to continue their drug addiction.
Drugs are a serious problem in Zhejiangcun, developing into prominence around the 1990s. Drugs are easily accessed in the area due to lack of law enforcement and the high concentration of private wealth; migrants are introduced to the drugs upon arrival and slowly addicted. The migrants divide the drug addicts into two classes: chi dayan de (those who eat opium) and chou baifen de (those who smoke heroin [literally translated "white powder."])
Drug dealers hook the migrants early upon their arrival and, once the migrants are addicted, raise the prices to exorbitant amounts. The average heroin user spends up to 400 yuan per day, which accumulates to 100,000 yuan a year. When the drug addicts are arrested, their parents often rely on their connections with the police in order to bail their children (usually sons) out of jail. In doing so, they, in ways, allow their children to continue their drug addiction.
Migrant Laborers in Beijing - 鸟巢。
Migrant Laborers in Beijing's Bird's Nest (Stadium of the 2008 Olympics)
Tuesday
Shanghai's Structural Expansion
Similar to Beijing’s exploitation of rural construction workers due to the high volume needed to build 2008 Olympic structures such as the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube, Shanghai’ fuel to find construction migrants last year occurred with oral contracts, sub-par housing, and indecent hours. Shanghai’s chengzhongcun are characterized by poor quliality housing, limited buildings, and euphemisticall termed ghettos with poor hygiene and saftely conditins much like Beijing’s chengzhongcun.
According to the World Bank, China is expected to build more than half of the worlds construction with more than 2 Billion suquare meters of floor space every year between now and 2015. Shanghai is directly in part of this with construction allowing fiscal expeditures to grow 8% in a year due to the World Exposition. With a 17% population of liudong renkou, Shanghai consists of a large minority of Rurual Hukou status individuals. This megalith of people put strains on infrastructure, natural resources, and exacernbates the differnce between the already distant low and high classes.
Monday
Shanghai Housing Extremes
In Shanghai, with 13.6 million people living in an area of 6340 square kilometers, the population has nearly tripled over the last 50 years and is expected to quadruple by 2015. Although residents have started to grow the Chengzhongcun, this erection of the Chengzhongcun reacts only as a band aid to a national problem instead of solving it. With a formulaic equation for settling in housing, Shanghai’s rural migrants usually settle in the central city slum, then relocate into the intra-urban periphery.
A new group of people called “bridge-headers” have begun to maximize intentions of living near their place of employment. Small and tepid infrastructure such as the “dorms” of two/thirds of construction workers are built on construction sites to ensure timely work. Overall, 36% of migrants live where they work to save commune time and money. These buildings are frequently called “shanties” and are upgraded though they are essentially illegal apartments of “inferior quality on the urban fringe.”
A new group of people called “bridge-headers” have begun to maximize intentions of living near their place of employment. Small and tepid infrastructure such as the “dorms” of two/thirds of construction workers are built on construction sites to ensure timely work. Overall, 36% of migrants live where they work to save commune time and money. These buildings are frequently called “shanties” and are upgraded though they are essentially illegal apartments of “inferior quality on the urban fringe.”
"CONSTRUCTION WORKER HOUSING IN SHANGHAI INVESTIGATIONS OF URBAN MOBILITY – PART 1." Saa. Web. 19 Dec. 2010. .
Shanghai Government Intervening in Job Placements
The statistics from the Shanghai migrant population are largely due to poor and unqualified migrants being kept away from civil rights granting them access to basic amenities such as health care, insurance, and education benefits. Though this is widely known, discriminatory polices have led to an even further segregation of the urban and rural force; the Chinese government has passed laws guaranteeing a urban high position job over a rural applicant. While Shanghai businesses usually recruit members of their workforce from their own hometowns and provinces, the government has passed a law stating that companies must hire 15%-30% of urban laborers before beginning the process of looking for migrant workers.
The government has also segregated the working sector, naming three parts: The heavy industries and textiles, the mass consumer goods, and administration, with rising forms of "suitability" within each strata as migrants are guaranteed working in areas of heavy industries and textiles, but only allowed to work in mass consumer goods if the extreme need arises, with no potential to work in administration as the government believes the job to be too "difficult" for them, even going as far to publish a list of 22 jobs forbidden to them (taxi drivers, telephonists, insurance or bank clerks, and etc.)
Even though some migrants have achieved temporary resident statuses, they are still excluded from working in the government, public security, management of joint property, sales positions in state-owned stores, or in cleaning services. Though migrants are more freely able to move with in provinces and cities in order to complete their dreams, they're still hindered by the fact that they can only achieve so high a position before their denied their ambitions, not due to a lack of competence, but discriminatory measures meant to keep the urbanites on top.
Roulleau-Berge, Laurence, and Shi Lu. "Migrant Workers in Shanghai Inequality, Economic Enclaves, and the Various Routes to Employment." China Perspectives (2005). Print.
Sunday
Shenzhen Urbanization
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| A street in Shenzhen. |
Shenzhen was once a fishing city but has now transformed into a mega-city right across the border from Hong Kong. Now highly populated by locals, who were generations before farmers and fishermen, and migrants who arrive at the city in search for work opportunities, Shenzhen's landscape has transformed into one of many industries and what locals call "handshake houses," apartment complexes located so close to each other that one can shake hands with someone in the next complex.
The Shenzhen locals have grown extremely wealthy by transforming their farms into apartments and leasing them out to the influx of migrants that is constantly entering the city. The mindset of "looking down" upon migrants seems to be ubiquitous in China, where migrants are considered of a "lower" class than native Shenzhen citizens.
"China Urbanization: Shenzhen." PRI: The World. Reported by Mary Kay Magistad.
Classes of Shenzhen
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| Photo Credit given to Mary Kay Magistad |
Shenzhen is a city of migrants. Says Mary Ann O'Donnell, an anthropologist who has been living in Shenzhen for sixteen years, there are three general classes of people in Shenzhen. The first class is the locals, who were farmers before Shenzhen's urbanization and consist of approximately 300,000 people. The second class is the "white class," the migrants who have poured into Shenzhen and have transformed it into a mega-city in less than 30 years. The migrants look at the locals as the "nouveau riche" of Shenzhen, while the locals look at the migrants as the outsiders who work for them.
Pictures of Shenzhen
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| Shangbu Overpass, Downtown Shenzhen Photo credited to Mary Ann O'Donnell |
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| Songgang Road Photo credited to Mary Ann O'Donnell |
Migrant Women
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| Migrant women as they wait for a job-opportunity in Hangzhou (杭州), capital of Zhejiang Province Shanghai Daily, Sept. 16, 2009 |
Hangzhou, like many other major cities in China, is overflowing with migrant workers, with the exact number of migrants somewhere close to three million. Hangzhou is a magnet for many migrant women who are exploited as domestic workers (ayi 阿姨) or as masseuses in massage parlors that often have other implications behind the role.
Saturday
Birth Control for Migrants in Urban Areas
Women with more than one child already can be forced to have an intrauterine device (IUD) implanted to prevent the possibility of another child. The policy can also be implemented from afar, when the rural governments demand a cash deposit while the migrants are away from home in order to make sure that they do not have additional children. Violation of the one-child policy can lead to heavy fines or loss of residency or employment.
Zhang, Li. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population. Stanford, California: 2001. 37. Print.
Reformation of Migrant Treatment
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| Shanghai Urban Construction Group workers visit Shanghai Expo after contributing to its construction. | (Chinatoday). |
Some Shanghai construction companies have recently taken the economic term of corporate responsibility. Shanghai Urban Construction Group has recently built movie theaters, exercise rooms, libraries, and Karaoke rooms for the psychological health of the workers.
As Zhang Haojun admits the now wide variety of applications that the company offers; initially, he was cut off from all sources of outside communication other than through his own personal cell phone. Now, he states that, "...once I’ve finished work I can use company facilities to watch TV, read books, play basketball or Chinese chess. I can watch a film for free every week too. It’s great.”
Monday
Conclusive Thoughts
While this blog in no way encompasses all cities in China that deal with migrants, we hope that the brief overview we have given illuminates in some way the driving force behind China's rapid urbanization. The social division between migrants and urbanites is one that is comparable to the social divisions existing in the developing process of any other country, but considering that this is one of the most massive internal migrations in the history of the world, some light ought to be shed on the subject.
China is a remarkable country that is growing increasingly urbanized and modern. With the combined forces of the local urbanites and the incoming migrants, we can only expect that China will continue to grow in leaps and bounds. However, as we close up this blog, we leave you in hopes that you have learned about a group of people whom you may have not acknowledged before, as well as their fundamental position in contributing to one of the greatest economies in the world.
China is a remarkable country that is growing increasingly urbanized and modern. With the combined forces of the local urbanites and the incoming migrants, we can only expect that China will continue to grow in leaps and bounds. However, as we close up this blog, we leave you in hopes that you have learned about a group of people whom you may have not acknowledged before, as well as their fundamental position in contributing to one of the greatest economies in the world.
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