Читать книгу Scattered Sand - Hsiao-Hung Pai - Страница 7

Introduction

It was nine p.m. at Moscow’s busiest railway station, Yaroslavsky. The platforms were dense with people, most of them of Russian or Central Asian descent. Kiosks and peddlers touted their wares – matryoshka dolls, hats, and T-shirts emblazoned with illegible English words – beneath high archways and portraits of Soviet soldiers and Arctic fishermen. It felt more like an open Sunday market than the terminus of the world’s longest railway, the Trans-Siberian. And its peaked brown roofs seemed more suited to a Russian fairy-tale castle than to the point of transit in so many modern stories of personal migration, on trains heading to and from northern Russia, Siberia, Mongolia and China.

It was the beginning of my trip. I bought a loaf of black bread and a bottle of water. Large groups of Chinese men and women, carrying heavy plastic bags and suitcases, were arriving on the platform for the train to Beijing, obviously homeward bound. Immediately, a police officer approached, rattling off questions in Russian and singling out three of the men, apparently at random, lining them up against a wall, where they were searched. I could see the fear in their faces. They didn’t dare move an inch. The other passengers, including the Central Asians, watched sympathetically. The sight was familiar to them – possibly the experience was, too – and I could see that they expected the worst for those men. Still the crowd did not linger, though some looked back as they walked steadily on.

How had all these Chinese migrants wound up here? What were they returning to?

As my train pulled away, the three Chinese men were still being questioned by the police. Their look of fear remained etched in my mind. I didn’t know then that I would see that look again many times.

That day, I was bidding farewell to Europe, embarking on a journey through Siberia into China. I had spent 2004–2007 researching Chinese Whispers, my book on the life of undocumented Chinese workers in Britain, and often found myself wondering about the origins of these migrants. What forces drive migration? What compels migrants to journey to the West, despite the exploitation that awaits them? Why would the widow of a Chinese migrant who died working in Britain want to borrow another £20,000 to send her young daughter there?

Today, an estimated 200 million Chinese peasants have left their homes in search of work; 130 million of those have left their home provinces, according to the China Labour Bulletin (CLB). They represent half of the urban workforce and are responsible for half of China’s GDP, as reported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with jobs largely in construction, services and manufacturing. This indispensable army of labour from the vast rural interior, moving from city to city and country to country in search of a livelihood, has been described, by academics as well as by migrant workers themselves, as ‘scattered sand’. More often, and less accurately, they are called peasant workers – nongmin-gong – reflecting their society’s deep-seated ideological reluctance to regard them as part of China’s industrial working class. They are not organized as a workforce and experience institutional discrimination and social exclusion. They remain the most marginalized and impoverished group of workers in China.

Sixty years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rose to power on the strength of the peasantry. The misery of rural life under the corrupt Kuomintang – the Chinese Nationalist Party – and the KMT’s unwillingness to oppose the imperialist powers ensured the revolution’s success. The new Chinese state could begin to carry out its work: to develop and industrialize China with the aim of achieving full socialism.

In that process, the peasantry has been considered an unchangeable social class, one of Mao Zedong’s ‘four blocs of society’ along with workers, the national bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia. This theory of ‘four blocs’, known as New Democracy, bypasses the bourgeois-democratic revolution that classical Marxism holds to be necessary for establishing a working-class majority – the universal class through which a socialist revolution must be achieved. Instead, socialism is instituted directly through a coalition between the four blocs, led by the Party. Once the old ruling powers had been overthrown, the CCP claimed that this coalition had been forged. The bourgeoisie were not abolished, only expected to realign themselves in the interests of the country.

Thus, in revolutionary China, a citizen’s class position was fixed and permanent, no matter what his occupation or relationship to the means of production. Those born as peasants were nongmin on their ID, a status they carried for life, determining their rights and entitlements in society. (For example, peasants are not entitled to pensions.) Movement into the cities was strictly controlled and in effect prohibited via the system of hukou (household registration) set up in 1958. It was impossible for peasants to move their hukou to the cities.

As in Stalinist Russia, national investment during China’s industrialization was focused on building heavy industry and increasing industrial output. The rural population served as a massive backyard production team for the urban one, feeding the cities that were modernizing the ‘Chinese nation’ but agriculture as an industry in itself was neglected. There were no initiatives to develop rural infrastructure or improve life in the countryside, both widely studied and documented by Marxist academics. In the Great Leap Forward of 1958, the collective power of the peasantry was institutionalized as simply a vast resource to help develop industrial China. About 53,000 communes were set up to direct the 700-million-strong rural labour force for national use (remaining in place until 1985, when they were replaced by townships), and local cadres inflated figures to meet unachievable grain production targets set by the state;1 the tragic result was the death of tens of millions of peasants.

After the four years of fierce political power struggles that followed Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping emerged as leader and embarked on gaige kaifang, a process of economic reforms and ‘opening up’ that established ‘special economic zones’ for international investment without state restraints; that is, he opened China up to the forces of global capitalism. Yet the farm remained the backyard of production. Reforms directed at the countryside were still geared toward developing the cities and the country as a whole, under the banner of the ‘four modernizations’, in agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology, which were to transform China into a global economic powerhouse. Increased agricultural production required measures to ‘release the productive forces’, which amounted to decollectivization and commercialization of the rural economy, along with decentralization of national industries. Many communes were disbanded after the Household Responsibility System was established in 1981. Peasants were given limited rights to the use of land through fifteen-year contracts (later, thirty-year contracts), and with the increase in grain prices, production increased.

However, because of poor administration, the amount of land distributed to each household was very limited and fragmented. According to a survey conducted by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture among 7,983 sample villages in 29 provinces in 1986, the arable land allocated per household was only seven mu,2 or little more than an acre, hardly sufficient to feed the average household of more than four people.3 Half of China’s 400 million rural working people became unable to sustain themselves and therefore ‘superfluous’, the government term for off-work, ‘extra’ labour.

The growth in agricultural production lasted only a few years. Long-term state investment in agriculture was lacking; there was no political will to develop the countryside. After 1985, as growth stagnated, rural income began to decline. Class divisions intensified, and inequalities deepened within the villages as peasants suffered from heavy taxation and the corruption of local party bureaucrats, who profited hugely from the increasingly commercialized rural economy. Under these conditions, the 200 million ‘superfluous’ peasants could no longer depend on the land for a living.4 About 100 million of them became workers in newly developing village enterprises, including nonagricultural enterprises. Another 100 million were without work and had to find other ways to survive. They began to move cityward and opened up the restricted rural-to-urban movement, and the authorities allowed this as cheap labour was much sought after now the economic reforms were gathering pace. These people became the new mobile proletariat, going from one city to the next searching for work – from service industries and food to electronics manufacturing to construction. Meanwhile, the per capita income gap between the cities and countryside continued steadily to widen, from a ratio of 2.49 in 1980 to 3.3 in 2009. Rural unemployment also continued to rise.

The millions of unemployed rural migrants were referred to as ‘blind flow’ (mangliu). This derogatory term was coined in the early 1950s, when state media (especially the People’s Daily) began to describe rural to urban migration as ‘blindly leaving the countryside’ and ‘blind penetration’. Mangliu came into wider use in the 1980s and 1990s as migration grew, and has helped to shape urban prejudice against the rural population. But the term also reflects the desperation and directionless movement of the migrants in search of a livelihood. The government tried to control this growing rural migration by directing it abroad. Unemployed former peasants were sent out of the country in a variety of work and construction schemes through national government corporations (with foreign building contracts), local government corporations, and trading companies. Throughout the 1990s, up to 200,000 workers from China’s countryside were recruited and sent abroad in this way, mostly to Asian countries, where they received payment below the local rates and were isolated in their own enclaves. According to the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, the remittances from Chinese migrant workers abroad generated $8 billion for China in 1994.5 But despite the contributions of this diaspora, most of the superfluous rural workers were left in China, travelling internally in search of jobs. Some, from China’s border regions, crossed over with short-term visas that did not permit them to work, in search of better opportunities, but the majority eventually returned to their families back home.

My train was packed with homebound Chinese migrants. Their suitcases and food parcels lined the floor. The mass exodus was largely due to the closure of Moscow’s Cherkizovsky Market, a 400-acre outdoor space where about 100,000 migrants (half of them from China, the rest from Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam and North Korea) sold counterfeit goods – purses, jeans and shoes – out of wooden shacks. My cabin mates, Ah Sheng and his wife, Xiao Ning, both in their late twenties, had run a handbag stall, and now they sat at the foot of another passenger’s bunk, anxious to relate their story.

They’d been in Moscow less than a year, said Ah Sheng. Xiao Ning missed her seven-month-old daughter, who was being looked after by her parents back home. She often asked Ah Sheng when they might be able to return. ‘Soon enough,’ he always said. They had once worked on the land in Changchun, Jilin Province, but Ah Sheng had quit farming and gone to work in a joint-venture car assembly factory in Changchun, earning 1,000 yuan (£91, $145) a month, better than his farming wages but not enough to support his and Xiao Ning’s parents, all retired farmers, who as peasants did not qualify for state pensions and were dependent on their children’s income. Xiao Ning’s relatives in Moscow had told the couple that despite the difficulty of living in a foreign country without speaking the language, money was fairly easy to make because there was a strong demand for their products. They also spoke of Moscow’s well-established Chinese migrant community, which acted as a constant network of support. In 2008, Ah Sheng and Xiao Ning decided to join them there.

They were led to the Cherkizovsky Market, like many migrants before them. A vibrant multicultural community, like its ancient predecessors in the Silk Road era, the market had been established in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed and China began opening its doors to world markets. The 1997 border demarcation agreement between Russia and China, coupled with political and military rapprochement, reinvigorated Chinese migration to the Russian Far East.6 As soon as the doors were opened along the 4,300-kilometre Russian-Chinese border, Chinese peasants began to cross in waves. Many had been trading in consumer goods for more than fifteen years near the border areas, in towns like Manzhouli, China’s busiest entrypoint on land, with a population of 300,000.

Trade expanded further into Siberia, and small-scale bartering along the railway flourished in response to the disruption of economic links after the disbanding of the USSR. The Chinese migrant garment trade filled the gap left by Russia’s lack of light industry and met the needs of lower-income Russians from villages outside of Moscow. And for fifteen years, the Cherkizovsky Market was part of normal Russian life, until one day at the end of June 2009, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin ordered it shut down. Reportedly, Putin was angry that the market’s owner, Telman Ismailov, was using his wealth, earned in Russia, to open an opulent resort in Turkey. Ostensibly, the closure was mandated by safety regulations.

Xiao Ning recalled that day when their flatmate Dakuan stormed in with news of the crackdown. ‘We are finished!’ he shouted, ‘The bastards have shut it down!’ All Ah Sheng could think about were the unsold handbags left lying in their containers. It would be a huge loss of money for him and Xiao Ning. But Dakuan warned them not to go near the market. The police were making arrests.

Dakuan was right. The news that night reported that the police had seized a total of $5 billion worth of goods belonging to the migrants. The authorities claimed that the products had been illegally smuggled into Russia, without explaining why they had turned a blind eye to smuggled goods for more than a decade.

‘We spent a lot on the containers for the products,’ said Ah Sheng. ‘On top of that we had to deduct the cash we spent paying penalties to the police. Every time we made money, we lost some. In fact, only three months out of the entire year were relatively good ones, when we made money instead of losing it. But now our $30,000 worth of containers – one million roubles’ worth of products – have been taken by the authorities.’

The market had been the only place the migrants knew well in Moscow. It was ten minutes’ walk from their flat. Each day, this short trip to and from work was fraught with fear: They feared the police, the frequent random arrests resulting in heavy penalties each time, the name-calling, and, worst of all, the skinheads and robbers lurking on street corners, awaiting the most vulnerable. For this reason, many migrants hadn’t left the market’s confines in years.

Xiao Ning and Ah Sheng recalled being regularly stopped and searched on the street. ‘The officer would tell us that our tourist visas were too old,’ Xiao Ning said. ‘And then he would ask us where we lived, although it was obvious that he had been told already. It couldn’t have been a coincidence for him to find us in the street right in front of our flat.’

Ah Sheng thought that the large number of Chinese migrants was seen as a threat by the Russian authorities. There are currently 200,000–400,000 Chinese working in Russia, and about 30,000–50,000 new Chinese migrants entering each year, mostly as traders and temporary workers. But with the Russian population decreasing, particularly in the Russian Far East, the Chinese presence became alarming. ‘The real reason they’ve closed the market, I think, is to put a halt to migration into Russia, particularly Chinese migration,’ he said.

Indeed, more than 100,000 migrant workers were immediately made jobless by the closure. Some Tajik migrants were camping out, as they had nowhere to go to outside their workplace. The atmosphere in Chinese-occupied flats was dense with anxiety. A group of long-term Chinese migrants decided to do something: a hundred of them, joined by a number of Vietnamese migrants, attempted to block traffic on a highway. The police acted quickly and deported them all.

‘We can’t do anything about it. They make the rules and they can change the rules,’ said Xiao Ning. ‘I thought we should leave and see what happens after a while – maybe things will quiet down and we can come back to Russia later.’

Unable to recover their confiscated goods, two thirds of the Chinese migrants were returning to China. Most of those who stayed couldn’t afford to go home.

Ah Sheng mentioned that Dakuan was known among their community for the rap songs he wrote in his moments of depression during his time in Moscow. He recalled one his friend had written after their release from the police station:

Trading in Russia is a lousy life!

Our goods go cheap, there’s too much strife.

Twelve cents’ worth we sell for four,

Then come the cops to ask for more.

Strip your ass, they’ll search you all!

Give em cash to keep your stall,

Drag you down to the bloody station,

Pay the slap to stay in their nation.

Aren’t we here to make good cash?

No ticket home, not enough in the stash.

Every single day feels like a year,

Better go back, even China beats here.

I’ll never get rich from farming the land,

But at least I will have peace of mind.

Yet another ordeal awaited the Chinese at the border. Those who had been working on Siberian farms, who had a different immigration status, had to leave our train at the Russian border town and follow a ‘facilitator’, who would negotiate with the border officers and lead them back to China by bus. Many would be fined for ‘minor visa problems’ and others detained – then charged by the facilitator for ‘accommodations’ while they were being held. Most had not even been paid by their farm employers, and here they were held at the mercy of the border authorities, terrified about being prevented from returning home.

As I entered China, just before arriving at Manzhouli, the border officers insisted on checking all my laptop files. It was all ‘part of the anti-terrorist procedures’, the other passengers later said, against the Uighur ‘splittists’ – a key word used by the state to silence ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, and to justify, for the sake of national identity and security, the repression of discontent.

From that moment on, I heard two distinct, conflicting voices. The first was that of the Chinese state, emphasizing the national progress of the ‘Chinese nation’, material bounties, and a bright, sustainable future for all. Sometimes paternal in tone – lecturing and condemning, as during the Olympics and anti-terrorist campaigns – it proclaimed: ‘Unite against the separatists and splittists’ and ‘The twenty-first century is the Chinese century.’ At other times maternal, it persuaded, cajoled and encouraged: ‘Love your country’; ‘The Chinese astronaut takes the nation’s first step into space, with tears in his eyes – he has triumphed for the Motherland’; and ‘The five-star flag is greater than my own life.’ The voice lingers permanently in the air, permeating every inch of society.

But another voice could always be heard from below – all over the cities and the countryside, in the factories and down the coal mines, by the brick kilns, at the job centres and the labour markets in every city. This was the cry of China’s mobile proletariat, always on the move, from the rural interior into the cities of their unevenly industrializing country and from those cities to the metropolises of north and southeast Asia and the US, and Europe. These workers were struggling to survive –and barely subsisting – through all the upheavals of the global market economy.

Their journey began three decades ago, and since then the global economic downturn has exacerbated the causes of their migration: rural poverty, the collapse of urban job security, mass unemployment and rapidly falling living standards.

Despite state proclamations of a ‘rising China’, the reality is that China has been struck hard by the global recession and is as bitterly divided as the rest of the world. The ‘iron rice bowl’ no longer exists. More than 600,000 small- and medium-size firms closed in China in 2008, throwing millions out of work. The deepening slump has encouraged a reverse migration, back to the countryside. The area most affected has been the export-led manufacturing heartland of southern China, where millions of migrants from rural Sichuan, Henan, Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan and other provinces normally congregate for work.

China’s agricultural adminstration revealed that 15.3 percent of the 130 million rural migrants in the cities – about one in seven – had returned to the countryside jobless following the mass layoffs between 2008 and early 2009.7 By spring 2009, more than 25 million migrant workers had found themselves without a job. Though the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reports that ‘the average (annual) urban wage rose 13 percent in the first half of 2009 to $2,142’, these figures exclude the private sector, which accounts for 40 percent of China’s GDP, more than 120 million workers, most of them migrants.8

One can be easily fooled. The skyscrapers continue to shoot up in Beijing. Top-range department stores are doing well; 27.5 percent of the world’s luxury goods are consumed in China, more than in the US and second only to Japan. Money is made and spent by the middle classes as if they were still living in a boom. A successful Beijing filmmaker, Li Yang, on his first visit to Britain sneered at the housing and the lack of super shopping malls in London’s East End, where I live. ‘You’re missing out on a lot, living in this part of London,’ he said, referring to his own upmarket district in Beijing, Haidian, a world away.

During 2008–2009, I followed the footsteps of migrant workers from Russia and the border region to China’s industrial northeast; from earthquake-affected Sichuan to the building sites and brick kilns of the northern cities and to the isolated factories of Shaoguan, Dongguan and Guangzhou of the manufacturing south; from the region west of the Yellow River to the east, where class divisions in the townships and villages are intensifying, decades after the Revolution; from the dazzling special economic zone cities to the impoverished coal-mining villages of Henan; and finally from central to northern Fujian, where communities are being rebuilt thanks to remittances from abroad.

I witnessed the living conditions of peasant families. Their annual income – barely a third of the average urban wage – continues to decline. I witnessed the impact of layoffs and the growth of local corruption as desperate workers waited for jobs. Meanwhile, working conditions and wages have deteriorated, and some workers, out of sheer hopelessness, have taken their own lives – a bitter testimony to the tragic impact of gaige kaifang. Yet local governments have been reluctant to penalize companies who laid off their workers without pay or to punish directors who simply hid or fled. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, acknowledging the ‘huge impact’ of the recession, launched a $585 billion government stimulus package and $1.1 trillion in bank loans to encourage domestic consumption, but little of this money was allocated to public services, housing or health care.

Yet many of the workers dismissed as ‘scattered sand’ are not prepared to accept what is thrown at them. In May and June 2010, a series of spontaneous strikes, involving thousands of migrant labourers, broke out at large multinational plants such as Honda and Toyota in southern and northern China. The strikers demanded wage increases, improvement of working conditions, and the right to form their own independent trade unions. At the Nanhai Honda plant in Guangdong, migrant workers won a 500 yuan ($79) monthly pay increase, with a further increase of 611 yuan set for 2011. At Toyoda Gosei in Tianjin, workers won a 20 percent pay increase. In fact, such strikes or ‘mass incidents’ now break out every day throughout the country.

As ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ reveals itself to be little more than a variant of the brutal capitalist order that the Communists once denounced, the strikers have shown that they will not wait passively for their iron rice bowl.

‘No matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,’ Deng Xiaoping used to say of China’s urgent need to embrace market economics by any means necessary.

When I mentioned this to a migrant worker from Henan, he said, ‘But no mice have been caught.’