By Tom Mitchell in Dongguan
Published: September 2 2009 18:35 | Last updated: September 2 2009 18:35
Migrant children line up for classes at Dongzhu elementary school, Dongguan, Guangdong
At midday parents arrive at the Eastern Pearl School on an assortment of vehicles as they pick up their children, drop them off, or deliver hot lunches at the front gate. Most ride bicycles, pedal carts or motorcycles. A relatively wealthy few drive up in cars or vans.
All, however, have one thing in common. They are migrant workers or entrepreneurs who have come to Dongguan, a manufacturing centre in China’s southern Guangdong province, in search of a better life.
Until recently in China, where some 130m people have left home in search of work, the pursuit of this universal ambition entailed a terrible cost. Migrant workers would be forced to leave their children behind in distant villages.
The problem remains a serious one. According to Chinese government surveys cited in a recent report by the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, more than half of an estimated 58m “left-behind children” had been separated from both parents and were living with grandparents, other relatives or friends, or on their own.
But that dynamic has been changing in recent years and schools such as Eastern Pearl have sprung up to serve a new population. “Whole family units” now account for a quarter of the country’s entire migrant population, according to the China Labour Bulletin. The economic crisis has put a spotlight on what is a new reality for many of them: once young, footloose and willing to travel far and wide to chase jobs in good times and bad, many of China’s migrant workers are finding that they have deeper roots in their new homes than they once had.
The central government estimates that 20m migrant workers returned to their villages jobless before the annual Chinese new year holiday, which this year fell in late January. But many more stayed put.
According to Guangdong government figures, about half of the province’s 19m migrants did not return home for the festival. And of those who did leave, by the end of February more than 90 per cent had come back to Guangdong. The statistics reflect a common determination among many migrant workers to make their move to the coast a permanent one. According to the China Labour Bulletin, a third of all (usually rural) migrants say they have no plans ever to leave the city, “suggesting in future that a higher number of migrant workers will be brought up in urban areas”.
The Eastern Pearl school is situated in the middle of a factory district populated almost entirely by migrant workers. The Ox Hill area was once a rural backwater, but the quaint name is the only reminder of its agricultural past. In the distance, and plainly visible from school grounds, a trash incinerator sends a steady plume of brown smoke into the sky. Such gritty districts are common across Dongguan and provide important support networks to new arrivals, who appreciate the opportunities they offer.
“Migrants can’t work in peace if their children are alone at home,” says He Shaowei, Eastern Pearl’s principal. Established in 2004, the vast majority of the school’s 2,800 students are migrant children. Tuition costs Rmb1,000 ($146, €103, £90) a semester, as against fees of Rmb10,000 at elite private schools.
There are about 200 such minban or “people-run” schools in Dongguan, where an estimated 7m-10m “new Dongguan people” – the new official, politically correct, term for migrants – vastly outnumber 1.7m locals, who alone enjoy subsidised educational and medical services. Minban schools also provide a crucial link in the social infrastructure that is helping migrants to establish new lives in China’s coastal provinces even as the global financial crisis reduces employment opportunities in the export sector.
“In Guangdong we can change our fates,” says Huang Weimu, a 25-year-old former factory worker and labour activist who grew up in a poor village in neighbouring Guangxi province and became a national hero late last year after working “undercover” at a factory to collect evidence of alleged labour violations before suing the factory.
Mr Huang is a second-generation migrant, who followed his father to the Pearl river delta seven years ago. But unlike his father, who has since returned to Guangxi, he has no plans to head back and dreams of starting a retail business with his friend and fellow migrant Yuan Yong, who hails from Jiangxi province. “We want to start our own business,” says Mr Huang, who lives in Foshan, a city south-west of Guangzhou, the provincial capital. “In 10 years we will both be very famous businessmen.”
In Dongguan, Fan Tianhua harbours similarly grand commercial ambitions. Having lost his job at a footwear factory in October, he chose to start up his own shoe-stitching business rather than return home to central China. It is a struggle, but if plan B fails he has a plan C inspired by his sister Xiangying, who traded in her factory job to work for a local insurer. Even if that fails, he is not keen to return home.
“I don’t want to give up,” he says.
Determination alone does not guarantee that all migrant families can successfully begin new lives in Guangdong.
Mr He estimates that enrolment at Eastern Pearl will be down 5 per cent for the coming school year – the first decline since the school’s establishment. And with Guangdong’s exports down by a fifth in the first half of this year versus 2008, more parents will be forced to return to their rural homes with children in tow.
The transition back to village life can be traumatic, however. The principal remembers one mother who fell on hard times and took her children back to rural Guangxi, where the local school was a ramshackle affair with poor lighting and dirt floors. “They cried so much, the mother brought them back to Dongguan,” Mr He says.
This is the fourth in a series examining the effects of the global crisis on migrants around the world