Once again, labour issues hot topic in domestic media

30 November 2010
Looking at influential newspaper Southern Weekend (南方周末) – one couldn’t help but notice that three of the top ten “most popular” articles are directly linked with distortions in the labour market.

Recently NPC Standing Committee member and director at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics −Cai Fang − made headlines by pointing out that the starting salaries of college graduates have been continuously falling in recent years – to hit an average of roughly 1500 yuan by 2008, while workers’ average wages have increased over the same period from 700 yuan to 1200 yuan. Although Cai was careful to emphasize that college students saw an increase in their wages a few years after initial employment, nonetheless, the startlingly near convergence in the wage figures have caused some to ask questions like, “why in the world should we study?”

Another article talks about Zhou Li – a man who has come to fame after making and giving a banner to the local labour inspection team that sarcastically reads “not serving the people”. Zhou filed 14 lawsuits against the Wuxi New District Labor Inspection team in efforts to get back unpaid overtime wages. After getting nowhere, Zhou decided to give the labor department a homemade banner (锦旗), using the same style that is often used by officialdom when giving work units special honors of achievement. Zhou described the process of making the banner by saying, “you can’t make it too black and white, and it can’t be too conciliatory in tone. The message certainly needs to be concise: getting across the heart of the issue”. In Zhou’s case, and as is the case throughout China, the core issue is a negligent and unresponsive labour inspection team that allows labour rights violations to occur. As one Phoenix TV commentator noted, the “Banner Brother” incident typifies a certain state of mind prevalent on the Mainland today.

Finally, a touching essay by the poet Duo Yu calls for city residents to understand the feelings of rural residents; however, in between the emotional personal narrative and the call for understanding, Duo manages to slip in a fairly powerful, if seemingly innocuous, criticism of the policies that have contributed to the “bifurcation” of rural and urban China, in economic, social, and economic terms. Zhou recalls his days growing up in the countryside in the 1970’s, searching the forests for anything edible: tree bark, corn husks, insects…etc. He naturally assumed that all people grew up in these conditions. However, it was only when he went to college and came into contact with city folk that he finally realized that “…the situation in which those who plants grains don’t have grains to eat stems from a policy design”. As young people from rural areas increasingly leave the bleak prospects of being a subsistence farmer, this naturally leads to the simple question of “if no one is farming, what will the People eat?” (This is also reminiscent of a recent documentary from China Geeks).
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