Financial Times: An army marching to escape medieval China

This was supposed to be a spring of soup kitchens and breadlines in China’s manufacturing heartlands, the potential precursor to a long, hot summer of industrial unrest threatening the government’s vision of a “harmonious society”. Times are hard in China’s export sector, the hardest in memory. Exports from southern Guangdong province, which account for a third of the country’s total, fell 21 per cent in January and February as western retailers ran down their inventories. But in March the year-on-year decline was a less precipitous 14 per cent, and widespread worker unrest has failed to materialise in the Pearl River delta, Guangdong’s industrial hub.

The Guangdong government estimates that 10m of the province’s 19m migrant workers returned to their homes in interior provinces for the lunar new year holiday, which this year fell in late January. As of the end of February, 9.5m had come back to the province. Of these, about 5 per cent (or 460,000 people) had not found jobs. In the context of a province with a total population of 110m, half a million migrants is a sizeable but still manageable army of unemployed.

Cassandras who predicted this army would be quick to mutiny overlooked the resilience and political savvy of its soldiers. The archetypal image of the Pearl River delta’s workforce – uniformed factory girls who work for a few years before returning to the village homes – no longer applies. Today’s workers tend to dress as they want, shun the factory canteen and live off-site with their friends.

They are also much more likely to fall in love, marry and settle in their new home – as evidenced by the fact that half of Guangdong’s migrants did not return to their villages for the lunar new year holiday. Bowing to this new social reality, last year the Migrants and Rental Accommodation Administration Office in Dongguan, an export centre, changed its name to the New Dongguan Residents Service Bureau.

Dongguan’s “new residents” are, not surprisingly, entrepreneurial risk-takers, akin to the European migrants who boarded boats for a better life across the Atlantic. If they were not, they never would have left their villages in the first place.

Do not let visions of Shangri-La and other picturesque idylls fool you: rural China is not a happy place.

The Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, founded by labour activist Han Dongfang, has translated the fascinating reflections of a migrant worker on village life. Having experienced the bright lights of Shanghai, Xiao Sanlang says of his return home: “It was a leap from post- to pre-modernism, from the 21st century back into the medieval world. It left me with a mixture of feelings – anger, sadness, bitterness, impotence and much else.”*

Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Zhongshan University, captures a similarly bleak view of the Chinese countryside in her revealing documentary film The Train to my Hometown. Ms Ai details the chaos at Guangzhou’s main railway station in January 2008, when snowstorms in China’s interior trapped hundreds of thousands of workers trying to make it home for the holidays. She travels to the littered, listless villages of a young woman and young man who died in the mêlée, to interview their grief-stricken family members. Her grim panoramas are illustration enough of the drudgery that the two ill-fated migrants, Li Hongxia and Li Manjun (no relation), were fleeing.

Thus determined to set down roots in the Pearl River delta, China’s migrant workers are more cognisant of their rights but also careful about how they go about asserting them. Those that have established self-help organisations emphasise that their aim is simply to educate migrants about their legal rights, government recognition of which peaked in January last year with the implementation of the pro-worker Labour Contract Law.

Ask about the upcoming anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which occurred 20 years ago this June, or whether they oppose one-party rule, and the conversation grows awkward. “Please don’t write so much about politics when you write about me,” one labour activist recently demurred when pressed on these issues.

Mr Han, a Tiananmen veteran once incarcerated for his efforts to establish an independent alternative to the government-sanctioned All China Federation of Trade Unions, notes that the last thing the country’s labour movement needs is more martyrs rotting away in Chinese prisons for daring to challenge the Communist party’s authority. Far better, he adds, to focus on factory-floor issues that affect workers’ daily lives.

As Mr Han said in an address to Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club earlier this year: “Why not let workers and employers settle their problems [independently] at factory level? That’s the best way to make a harmonious society.”

* www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100435

The writer is the FT’s South China correspondent