China has undergone major changes over the last few decades, its results exemplified through the phenomenal 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Buildings have sprung up over the once rural landscape, Shanghai's skyscrapers could be compared to New York City's, and the sheer transformation of Chinese cities is undeniable. And yet, the people physically behind this transformation are often overlooked, their stories are largely untold, and the conditions under which they live are muffled by the grandeur of what they've produced.
The migrant workers, the constituents of China's "floating population" (流动人口), are the reason for the urban metamorphosis. Having migrated from the rural areas of China to the cities for work, these migrant laborers are largely underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked. Stories of their lives, in which they work for little or nothing at all, have slowly surfaced into local and international news but only among those who are interested. The aim of this blog, therefore, is to promote awareness of their situation to the general public, and allow others to see what China's economic backbone truly consists of.
Wednesday
Urbanization in China - Who are the Migrant Laborers?
China's urbanization policy is one that aims to highly restrict internal migration. Using the hukou (户口) system of internal passports, in which each individual is given a rural or urban hukou that determines the legal and often binding area to which they must live, the Chinese government prevents massive migrations of country workers into the city from occurring. Nevertheless, the internal migrant labor migration is enormous, as the youth of the countryside often enter the cities illegally to work as migrant laborers; their occupations consist of factory workers, construction site workers, nannies and babysitters (保姆 baomu), hostesses and sex workers, among others. Migrant workers often go to large industrial cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen to search for employment; the money they earn is sent to the families they have back home. and the little they have leftover is used or saved at their own leisure. More often than not, migrant workers, especially females, willingly spend their money and remake their physical appearance in order to appear like a native urbanite; in doing so, they are able to display their sophistication and attempt to mingle with the urbanites using consumerism as their leverage. |
Evolution of the Hukou
China’s politcal parties have attempted to control this floating population with the rise of the negative pressure the rural Hukou places on migrant workers attempting to situate themselves in urban cities for an economically stable setting or their child’s future. As migrants desperately vye for these Hukou’s, the government hands them only to those who meet impossible migrant standards; those who’ve obtained a professional degree, investors in a city's government budget, or those who are able to purchase high-end apartments[1].
Although the Chinese government has made minute concessions toward the Richie noveau in the metropolitan cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, smaller fishing and production cities have made “urban” Hukou much easier to acquire with a few years of domestic settlement in the city . Despite the seemingly straightforward way the government allows these citizens to obtain “urban” Hukous, the negative aspects of gaining a “urban” Hukou happen to be the loss of land in the migrants home city[2]. With these deficient choices, the migrants must choose to be either self-sufficient for themselves or for their future generation.
[1] Employment and Residence Regulations in Cities) (Beijing: Zhongguo fazhi chubanshe, 2003
[2] Kam Wing Chan, ‘‘Internal labor migration in China: trends, geographical distribution and policies,’’
Proceedings of United Nations Expert Group Meeting on Population Distribution, Urbanization, Internal
Migration and Development, ESA/P/WP206, United Nations (2008)
Chengzhongcun
Rural Urban migration growth in China has been responsible for 70% of the country’s urban population growth over the past three decades. Researchers in the field of Urban growth have dubbed the places where these migrants have settled as 城中村 (Chengzhongcun), or “village amid the city”. Land in these Chengzhongcun are allocated to migrants through village officials, but instead of acquiring an agricultural profession, these migrants instead build houses and rent them out as a way to procure more income. Hundreds of these Chengzhongcun in growing migrant factory cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The main reasons these villages exist is due to the fact that migrant workers can’t find affordable housing due to their low paying jobs along with the fact that migrants with rural hukou can’t apply for housing even in these villages as rural citizens.
Zhang, Kevin Honglin and Shunfeng Song, “Rural–Urban Migration and Urbanization in China:
Evidence from Time-Series and Cross-Section Analyses,” China Economic Review, 14, 4:386–
400, 2003.
The History of Guangzhou's Chengzhongcun
Guangzhou's Chengzhongcun started out when the Chinese government requisitioned houses and farmland in the city in order to build an "urban" city and in return gave land and money to the owners of these houses. Thus the locals discovered the very financially rewarding situation they were in, so they began to build more stories and more houses, leasing to new migrants on the outskirts of the city with increasingly smaller rooms and minimal walking space in between, leading to residents calling them "houses that kiss each other", "houses that shake hands", while outsiders called them "tumours" and "pustules" for their unclean appearence.
While Beijing's Chengzhongcun have been renamed multiple times, Guangzhou's
Chengzhongcun have kept their original names; in addition gates seperate the villages with the average number of inhabitants around 50,000 with only 40% having residence permits to live there. While both the natives of a village and new migrants are "marginalized" by the Chinese governemnt, one makes up the "novue richie" as the landlords, and the other the ones who live in slums, leading to an imbalance of societally equal citizens.
Gransow, Bettina. "Slum Formation or Urban Innovation? – Migrant Communities and Social Change in Chinese Megacities." Freie Universität Berlin and Sun Yat-sen University Guangzhou, P.R. China. Print.
Guangzhou's Social Inequalities
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| A construction worker demolishing migrant slums. The image shows the average housing size a migrant is able to afford. (LIFE) |
The aggregate of creating smaller villages in order to "kick" them out of the city defines the Chinese societal ladder as one that has missing rungs. With the pursuit of new smaller cities instead of housing these citizens in a mega city supporting all of its residents, the government has issued a statement saying these migrants are second class citizens and will continue to stay that way, thereby eliminating the need for government effort in order to "support" them in health, insurance, or education benefits. This erroneous policy, while it has served the older generation as their needs weren't apparent in staying in the city, needs to change in order to accommodate the new generation, staking their future on lives in a city unwilling to accept them. Even those with college degrees from their province or city have only become white collar workers, not yet equivalent to the middle class.
While the older generation worked fields until they decided coming to cities and factory work was more financially stable compared to agriculture, while the new generation simply comes to the city for business and promising opportunities, as they lack the knowledge in working on a farm. Given this, the new generation's access to magazines, the Internet, and an pop-culture infused media has fueled the need to vie into materialism and what other people have instead of staying content with what they have. Metropolises look more appealing to this generation because that's what's portrayed on TV, sprawling homes with luxurious cars and rich decoration, but migrants are "forced" to live in apartments barely 10 meters squared, with 38.4% of total migrants in Guangzhou living in less than 5 meters squared.
Gransow, Bettina. "Slum Formation or Urban Innovation? – Migrant Communities and Social Change in Chinese Megacities." Freie Universität Berlin and Sun Yat-sen University Guangzhou, P.R. China. Print.
Guangzhou's East Asian Games Urbanization
Guangzhou's recent 7 year urbanization method consisted of several Billion Yuan spent on infrastructure and "beautifying" the city for its East Asian Games hosted this earlier this year. Similar to Beijing's Olympic games in 2008 and Shanghai's Expo earlier this summer, Guanzhou has also reached a higher level of urbanization with an international event. With more than 14,000 athletes and officials from 45 countries attending this event, the magnitude of its "incredibility" shocks most migrants. A bigger, but unknown number, 30 million, is coupled with the number of migrants who came into the city looking for jobs once this event was hailed. With this monstrous event comes the underlying negative aspects, doled out to migrants, who are forced to work long and tiring hours for little pay and families tossed out of their homes in order to demolish houses that are deemed "eyesores".
Hailed as an "breakthrough" for Guangzhou's international image, the public are forced to accommodate more laws and regulations through this time. Though roads and structures have been rebuilt and foliage planted in order to resonate the "quintessential perfection" Guangzhou has achieved, workers have been inconvenienced by the law that requires drivers alternate days on the road in order to create less traffic, shutting down construction sites and factories, banned interior decoration, as well as evicting more than 600 beggars from the city. Migrants have been calling this event a "show" for Communist party officials rather than the people; bosses have been given tickets to see the games, while mere employees are stuck working, but if they had wanted to see the games, the likelihood that they would be able to afford it seems minimal.
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