Читать книгу Scattered Sand - Hsiao-Hung Pai - Страница 8
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Exodus: Northeast Youth Head for the City
Peng, a twenty-one-year-old man with large black eyes and a look of genuine innocence, approached me as I stood inside Shenyang’s Lu Garden Labour Market. Hundreds of people gathered here each day to wait for work. Right outside the building, men were selling watermelons to thirsty job seekers, some of whom had queued overnight, just to be first to see the ads in the morning. Inside, large slogans of national economic progress were hung on the four walls and propped against the lifeless old marble floor. Workers crowded around the job boards, some wearing placards to advertise their skills, such as catering and decorating. I was speaking to one of them when Peng walked up and introduced himself, then launched into his story, speaking freely, delighted to have someone to talk to about the years of hardship and solitude. He had been living in Shenyang for three years, in a room five metres square that he shared with four other men from nearby villages. The bed cost him ten yuan a day, which meant he couldn’t afford to remain long without work. He lived on four meat buns (baozi) a day, bought near the labour market for three yuan. He would waste no time on meals – he ate his buns while he searched the job market, which he visited daily. He hadn’t much in his life apart from looking for work. Once, he’d been stopped in the street by a cosmetics company representative who tried to persuade him to become a salesman. He would have to sell hard and earn a commission. Although he was tempted, he turned the offer down; he’d heard too many stories from other villagers about getting trapped in sales work (chuanxiao), where you earn little and are constantly under huge pressure to sell products to your personal network. The companies subject recruits to a militaristic training and the work regime is harsh. Recruiters always target young rural migrants, who are more desperate than other job seekers.
Peng had lost his last job, as a security guard, a month before, and was still unemployed. ‘What’s the bloody point?’ he exclaimed. ‘Work at Lu Garden always comes through a middleman, who charges 50 yuan for a job worth 50 yuan.’
Peng was a farmer from Fuxing village in Liaoning province, three hours’ bus ride from Shenyang. He called Fuxing a ‘poor old place’. The main produce there is sweet corn and wheat, incomes are low, and many young farmers had left to work in cities – mostly Shenyang – in recent years. Peng’s mother had died when he was young; his father was strict and temperamental. Peng was the only child and had grown up lonely. At thirteen, he’d had to go to work, helping his father on the farm. He was expected to work hard because he was a boy, which he resented very much.
Peng had not otherwise had a memorable childhood. He remembered only that he’d spent all his time in the fields with his dad. Home life was monotonous; the work was tough and never-ending – but then it was the same for everyone else. If you stayed in the village, that was the kind of life you led. In the evening, Peng cooked for his father. Occasionally he would read a book. He’d taught himself to read – he liked Chinese historical tales. He’d gone only to primary school and wasn’t expected to further his studies – only to work on the land and bring in income for the family. Sometimes he was asked to help out on his uncle’s farm too, particularly during harvests.
On two mu of land per person – a third of an acre – he and his dad farmed wheat and sweet corn, for sale and their own subsistence. In total, they brought in 6,000–7,000 yuan (£545–630, $952–1,111) a year –enough to feed and clothe themselves but not much else. His dad had tried to look for other work nearby in order to improve their income, but there wasn’t much industry around Fuxing. They saw that the sons of many families had left for work outside the village.
In 2004, his uncle developed heart disease and could no longer work on the land, and so could not afford the frequent checkups and treatment. He had no wife or children to support him. No medical insurance was available to peasants. Peng’s father tried to shoulder his brother’s medical costs – more than 1,000 yuan per month – taking a job transporting timber into town in his horse cart, but the extra income was hardly enough. He was too old to leave the village, and so after two years, Peng, then seventeen, volunteered to go work in the city, and became the main breadwinner in his family.
‘The ruling clique doesn’t care that most peasants aren’t insured for basic medical care,’ Peng concluded.
From 1952 to 1982, health care institutions in China were funded by the state, with communes providing free health care to all. The Cooperative Medical System established health centres in villages staffed by ‘barefoot doctors’, medical practitioners with basic training. These health services were poor in quality, but at least available, and during this period infant mortality fell from 200 to 34 per 1,000 live births, and life expectancy increased from about thirty-five to sixty-eight years. Infectious diseases were controlled.
When the communes were abolished in 1982, the system was dismantled, and peasants instantly became uninsured. Health care was privatized and decentralized, as the central government drastically reduced its funding for social services. Between 1978 and 1999, the government’s share of funding for national health care fell from 32 percent to 15 percent. Now doctors are paid according to a performance-oriented system, in which bonuses are granted according to the amount of money doctors generate for their hospitals from drugs and tests. Sales of expensive drugs – the chief source of income for China’s hospitals – have boomed. In 2007, the total revenue of public hospitals in China was 375.4 billion yuan; 200 billion were from drug sales, compared with 28.5 billion yuan in government funds – just 7.6 percent of total hospital revenues.
The result is that health care is no longer accessible to most Chinese. Local authorities in the interior provinces and rural regions in particular have been unable to properly fund health care. In 1999, only 7 percent of rural residents and 3 percent of residents in the interior had health insurance, compared with 49 percent of urban residents.1 In 2006, according to the Ministry of Health, fewer than 10 percent of rural residents were insured, compared with 50 percent of urban residents. It was also reported that 87 percent of rural residents paid for all of their health care. Experimental initiatives, like the New Rural Health Cooperatives (NRHC), launched in 2003 in 300 counties, have largely failed. NRHC offered limited health insurance to peasants: 30 yuan per person per year – 10 yuan each contributed by the participant and central and local governments – proved insufficient to cover participants’ medical costs. Even in 2006, when the central and local authorities both increased their contributions to 20 yuan per year, the 50 yuan total per peasant covered only 25 to 35 percent of yearly health care costs in rural areas. Many peasants, too, suspect that the usual rampant corruption plays a part – that local authorities are skimming the funds.
Recent health reforms have brought new problems. In 2010, as part of the national plan to promote domestic consumption, the government put forward guidelines for health care reform, along with an investment of $124 billion, 40 percent of which would come from the central government and the rest from local ones. The thinking was that if health care were improved, people would not have to save so much for medical costs and would spend more on consumer goods. However, the government never announced how the money would be allocated. The reform itself consisted of two parts: increasing funding for medications and medical equipment, and improving medical insurance coverage. The government planned to raise funds for the rural cooperatives to $18 per person in 2011, although at the time of writing there had been no release of information on how and where that would be done. Moreover, this was not a universal reform: Only sixteen cities (six each in central, western, and eastern China) were chosen to pilot it, with 5,000 township hospitals targeted for upgrading. InMedica, a medical research company, predicted that in China’s largely privatized health care system, the biggest winners in this reform would be medical equipment suppliers like Mindray, Beijing Wandong and Yuyue Medical. Private hospitals, too, including private foreign hospitals, would be favoured by the scheme. The rationale was that opening the door to foreign investment in health care would ease the burden of public health care, since middle-class patients would be more inclined to use foreign hospitals.
Peng’s first security job in Shenyang paid 1,300 yuan (£118, $206) per month. He sent two thirds of this money home, and kept the rest for his living expenses. He was able to pay rent, and spent very little on food – a few yuan a day. The best meal he made himself was two eggs fried with tomatoes, and he cooked this only occasionally. He had no other expenses – no transport costs, because he walked to work. He was guarding a local three-star hotel. There were three other guards working with him, who also came from nearby villages. Many of the hotel’s guests came from the southern provinces; others came from abroad. He had wondered about them and why they came to a place like Shenyang, a city he found dull and depressing. His job was not easy; hardest to bear was his supervisor’s daily bullying – shouting and name-calling – and one day he talked back. Two weeks later, he was dismissed without notice. Since then, he’d been back at the labour market, looking for work, but had found only a temporary job as a labourer on a building site not far from the market. The pay rate was two-thirds that of the security job, and the work only lasted two days.
The month before I met him at Lu Gardens, he’d found another security job, at a local brewery. The ad, like many listed at the labour market, had given no information about fixed wages. Such ads say only ‘good starting wage’ or ‘guaranteed good wage for the experienced.’ Peng took the job because he had no other option. When the first paycheck came, 1,000 yuan (£90, $158) for the same work he had performed at the hotel for 1,300, he asked for a raise and was immediately fired. His bosses said they couldn’t pay more, because of the global economic crisis – and they knew that they could find a replacement immediately.
‘Bosses can do anything they like,’ Peng said. ‘Heaven is high above and the emperor is far away. They don’t care about breaking the rules, precisely because the rules are not enforced.
‘In Shenyang, no one is on your side in these kinds of situations,’ he continued. ‘Arbitration is unfair and slow and always in the interest of the businesses. If worse things happen and you get injured, you can’t afford the costs to take the company to People’s Court. A Shenyang builder fell on a building site and lost his leg. He didn’t sue the company because he couldn’t afford to. Who cared about him? He’s one of us – from the countryside.’
Now Peng came to Lu Garden every day. He got up at around 6 a.m. along with his roommates. They usually cooked porridge for breakfast and ate it with pickled vegetables. Peng never had much appetite that early in the morning, so he’d leave the flat and walk alone to Lu Garden, through the quiet alleyways and streets. He enjoyed it; it was the most tranquil part of his day. When he arrived, a crowd of job seekers was already there, well ahead of him, all eagerly waiting to see that day’s new opportunities. He would push himself to the front and scan the ads on the walls, taking notes, and then call up each number and ask for an interview. If he saw no suitable ads, he would walk around the market and chat with fellow job seekers. Sometimes he would sit on the floor in a corner and rest, before getting up again to look for more incoming ads. He would also walk around seeking potential employers – sometimes they would come down to look for individual workers to do a casual job, just for the day.
At noon, Peng would leave the market and buy his lunchtime buns from a vendor he’d known since his first day at Lu Garden. The bun seller had been a job seeker himself, but had given up looking for work and taken on this little street trade instead. The watermelon seller was in the same situation: unemployed labourer turned trader. Peng would take a fifteen-minute break, chewing his buns and chatting with them about news of the day. After lunch, he would get back inside Lu Garden and start searching again – new ads did come in throughout the day, so everyone carried on, hoping for a job. The latest Peng ever stayed was till 8 p.m., when his flatmates also packed up and went home.
As I was leaving Lu Garden myself that day, another man walked up to me and said, ‘Wait! I have something to show you. Would you like to see my poems and essays?’ His eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. ‘I wrote them in my years working away from my home village.’ He was Ren Jianguo, from Hugou village, Shanzuizi county, Liaoning province.
I followed him to his flat, like Peng’s just ten minutes’ walk from the labour market. We entered a tiny alleyway and turned a corner into a dingy-looking block of flats. He said these were mostly occupied by retired urban poor. I saw some men and women in their seventies doing calisthenics in the tiny public area in between the flats. They were in their pajamas, leaning on a metal pole and stretching their legs. I followed him up the stairs, which smelled bad. The railing had rusted. No doubt, this was among the most modest housing in Shenyang, as he told me – and migrants cannot afford anything better. All of his flatmates were still at Lu Gardens, waiting for work. By the look of the place, there must have been at least a dozen people living there besides him. But Ren Jianguo didn’t seem to care about the mess and the lack of space. He seemed interested only in what he’d written in black ink. He searched anxiously in a pile of documents on a desk next to an old washbasin. Finally, he found it: some fifty pages of handwritten poems and essays. ‘There! Please read it. It’s my sweat and tears,’ he said, pushing the papers into my hands.
The first page was titled ‘To My Parents.’ It told of his regrets over the years when he had not brought sufficient income from his job in Shenyang to support his aging mother and father, who had been farming the land in Hugou village:
One of the most pointless things in life is to exhaust yourself in rearing children. I say this for you, Mother and Father…I left home in tears, to make a living in the world outside. You had fed and clothed me for twenty years, and I had to leave to know what it’s like to be so giving. You had toiled in the fields, suffering and bearing the heat and the cold, just to pay for my schooling. You had cared for me and provided me with everything that there was. All you were hoping was that I would make a good life for myself one day. But how I broke your hearts – earning such a poor wage on a building site in a heartless city…getting drunk in my depressed moments…I do not deserve you. I would like to go down on my knees, to beg for your forgiveness…
Ren Jianguo began writing down his thoughts from the day he left home for the city. Peng, instead, found consolation in sharing his experiences with other migrants. He told me that for him, solitude was one of the most distressing things about living and working in a city as an outsider. The day I left Shenyang, Peng accompanied me through the dusty lanes of the city to the train station, confessing that he was trying to look after his mental health by not being alone.
Shenyang’s past glories and tragedies are no longer very visible in the city today. Still the capital of Liaoning Province in northeastern China, and historically known as Mukden, it had been the legendary Manchu general Nurachi’s first capital after Nurachi overthrew the Ming Dynasty in 1625. It remained so until 1644, when the Manchus invaded Beijing and established the last dynasty there, the Qing.
Toward the end of the Qing dynasty, when the imperialist powers were dividing the country into their spheres of influence, Shenyang was an object of competition between Russia and Japan. The former built a railway connecting the city with the South Manchurian Railway, in an attempt to tap into the region’s natural resources; the Japanese used a train-car explosion north of Shenyang in 1931 as a pretext for invading the city, seizing all of northeastern China, and establishing a puppet state called Manchukuo. The anti-imperialist sentiment among the people of this region has lasted and evolved over the years into a strong nationalism.’2
Shenyang has developed into an important industrial centre since the 1920s, and in the 1970s it became one of China’s top three industrial cities, alongside Shanghai and Tianjin. Shenyang today is the largest city in the northeast of China, with a population of 8.1 million. Its historic heavy industry (it has been known as the rust belt since the industrial decline of the 1980s) is still manifest: you cannot ignore the polluted air when you enter Shenyang. You also see the city’s new look: the inflow of foreign investment and the fast growth of the city’s service industries apparent in the ubiquitous high-rises housing foreign banks and insurance companies.
As a fast-growing city, Shenyang boasted a total GDP of 383 billion yuan in 2009, and has been recognized as one of the top twenty emerging cities in China. Its income level is known to be the highest in the region. In 2010, the average income in Shenyang was reported to be 1,708 yuan per month,3 an enviable one compared with other northeastern cities and towns. For that reason it has pulled in many rural people from the northeast as well as from the south. Currently, there are around two million migrant workers in Liaoning province, most of them seeking opportunities in the private sector, particularly in Shenyang’s manufacturing and service industries. Thousands of labourers, a massive reserve army, crowd the streets and labour markets each day, waiting for jobs.
The Lu Garden Labour Market in central Shenyang is the city’s largest. Two or three hundred jobless migrants gather there each day. Near Lu Garden is a well-known antiques market much liked by the city’s middle class. In fact, it is much better known to them than the labour market. ‘Just cross the bridge and it’s on the left-hand side,’ is what everyone tells you when you walk in that direction. The labour market itself is an unimpressive, grey-looking concrete building that can be seen from the other side of the bridge. Street sellers with three-wheeled carts crowd around Lu Garden. Job seekers can be seen waiting and talking to one another even hundreds of metres before you reach the bridge. When you push yourself into the building, you feel the heat coming from the mass of people inside. In midsummer, it was just as the migrant workers described it, ‘like being inside a steamer’. The heat of competition is just as fierce: people try to grab the first job around; they cannot afford compassion for other aspirants. The place is particularly overcrowded at the beginning of the year when migrants return to the city from their winter break, with the number of job seekers rising to more than two thousand each day. Then it’s like a movie scene of a wartime train station. It is all about survival.
Lu Garden’s labour market was originally formed spontaneously by migrant job seekers who gathered here looking for work, and it has been regulated by the local authorities since 2003 as a casual-labour exchange. Official estimates say that 2,000 to 5,000 job seekers visit Lu Garden every day – up to a million people per year. Big companies advertise their vacancies on the walls, but some construction employers and small- to medium-size catering businesses come here in their cars and look for workers themselves. Employers often go through middlemen, because it is the easiest way for them to find migrant workers. And employers prefer migrants because their labour costs much less than urban workers’. This is particularly the case in the private sector. The middlemen receive fees from both the employers and the workers. Some middlemen are labour contractors themselves, which means they will take a regular cut from the migrants’ wages.
In 2011, the number of Lu Garden’s migrant job seekers has apparently increased while in similar markets in other provinces employers have complained about a labour shortage. At Lu Garden, employers now complain instead about workers’ reluctance to accept low wages.4 One caterer was reported to have said: ‘These workers nowadays…they want their wages on the day. And those workers you want to employ are just unaffordable!’5 An employer from a cosmetics company who had visited Lu Garden five times said, ‘I’m now offering 1,500 yuan per month and still can’t find workers!’6 It seems that in Lu Garden, migrant workers’ self-confidence has grown.
Even so, Shenyang is now known not only for its fast growth but also for its mass unemployment, which affects workers in both the state sector and private sector. The mass layoffs here are largely a result of the conversion of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) since the era of reform and opening up.
Previously, all enterprises in China had been publicly owned and managed, and the state was the largest employer, providing work for more than 75 million people. But since the late 1970s, the government under Deng sought to increase the competitiveness of the economy by dismantling or privatizing them, a process that took more than two decades. In the first stage, 1978 to 1984, greater autonomy was given to the management, and enterprises were allowed to keep a portion of their profits instead of submitting them to the state. In the second stage, 1984 to 1992, this autonomy was increased, as enterprises were given freedom to hire and fire staff and to establish direct links with suppliers. Increasingly, traditional administrative relations between the state and entrepreneurs were replaced by contractual relations. In the third stage, 1992 to the present day, the central government has limited its ownership to 500 to 1000 large-scale SOEs, allowing all smaller SOEs to be leased or sold; by 1998, a quarter of China’s 87,000 industrial SOEs had been restructured. By the end of 2001, this number had grown to 86 percent, 70 percent of those having been partially or fully privatized.7
The result was mass unemployment. From 1998 to 2004, six in ten workers in SOEs were laid off, or 21 million workers from 1994 to 2005, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MOLSS). In the northeast, as the centre of heavy industries, which were all state-owned, layoffs were nearly twice the national average.8 Although workers are entitled by law to compensation when laid off from an SOE, there is no national standard for the amount of compensation: It is completely up to the individual enterprises. In certain enterprises, particularly in those SOE-concentrated provinces such as the northeast, workers often receive no compensation at all from a corrupt management. In March 2002, 10,000 workers at the state-owned Liaoyang Ferro-Alloy Factory in Shenyang embarked on a series of protests against the corruption of factory managers during the forced closures of the local state-owned enterprises.9 While company assets disappeared, the company failed to pay workers their pension contributions and full wages. Following a closure, workers were promised only the minimal compensation of 600 yuan for each year of their service. After receiving this compensation for two years, workers would not be eligible for further unemployment benefits. As the workers’ petitions had brought no solution to their misery, they took to the streets. Adding insult to their injuries, the worker activists Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang were arrested and convicted of ‘subversion of state power’. Yao was sentenced to seven years in prison, Xiao to four.
A report titled ‘No Way Out’ put it this way: ‘The government’s failure to implement clear policy guidelines for the process [of the enterprise closures], combined with a lack of transparency, flawed auditing of company assets, and widespread corruption, left millions of workers out in the cold, with no job and barely enough income to support their families…’ In 2006 alone, according to the report, a total of 2.05 billion yuan was owed in unpaid wages and a total of 700 million yuan in unpaid compensation by SOEs that were undergoing closures in eleven provinces.10
There is a basic living subsidy that the laid-off SOE workers are entitled to receive for up to three years, but this is lower than the minimum wage. The monthly minimum wage in Shenyang is 700 yuan. For workers with families to support, the subsidy isn’t enough to live on even in the short term. As a result, some have started to seek work in the private sector or tried to set up their own small businesses if they’ve managed to accumulate any capital. Others, in their thousands, have opted for a more ambitious project: migrating abroad, seeking work in South Korea and Europe, including the UK.
Among the unemployed I met in Shenyang there were also migrant workers who had lost their land in their home villages. Some of these migrants had left the countryside as a result of local government land seizures. Nationally, these official seizures of land for commercial or industrial use have driven an estimated 70 million peasants from their farms and have been a major cause of peasant pauperization.11 In Liaoning province alone, millions of peasants are estimated to have been affected. Land grabs in Liaoning are related to government debt. Eighty-five percent of local government borrowers in Liaoning could not afford their interest payments.12 Banks were willing to loan to them in the first place because there is a huge amount of land that the local authorities can grab. It is modestly estimated that 23 percent of the total loans to local governments in China depend on sales of appropriated land for repayment.13
Although farmland was decollectivized through the 1980 Household Registration Act, and peasants given rights to till and manage allocated parcels of land under contract with the village production team, all of that land remains state-owned, and can be transferred only through expropriation by the state. Since the early 1990s, local governments have been seizing peasants’ allocated land and converting it to industrial and commercial use to fuel economic growth. This has increased steadily as a direct result of the uncontrolled growth of property development and the anarchy of the market since the reform and opening up. And although local authorities are required by the Land Administration Law to compensate peasants for expropriated cultivated land, in practice peasants’ petitions against the loss of their homes and farmland are almost always ignored.
When peasants protest, they are often attacked by armed thugs sent in by the local authorities. In March 2011, police officers and hired thugs attacked a group of 300 peasant protesters in Fuzhou. Ten of them were beaten up and injured; in 2004, peasants were protesting against land seizure in Sanchawan village in Shanxi province and many were seriously injured by rubber bullets; in June 2005, six villagers of Shengyou in Hebei province were killed by hired thugs; in May 2009, Yingde villagers near Guangdong province were attacked by armed police; one villager suffered brain damage and was left paralyzed.
Hence the migration into cities like Shenyang, where they scramble for the few jobs they can find. Many migrants to Shenyang arrived during the worst of the recession in 2009, when manufacturing and service industries in the city were seeing large layoffs of migrant workers – an estimated 0.4 million lost their livelihood then. Even so, Shenyang tempts migrants with a manual labour wage that averages 1,200–1,500 yuan per month, higher than other cities in the region.
Li Long, twenty-nine but older looking, weathered from years of farm work, stood out among the job seekers I saw for his energetic manner, his keenness as he talked to other migrants, while he walked up and down the streets of Lu Garden with his shirt rolled half up to relieve the heat. He’d come from Yuelai, a village in Heilongjiang province with 600 households – a fair size. But most of the villagers had nothing but small, fragmented plots of land to work on, and in recent years many had left for surrounding towns in search of work, though many of those soon returned after being laid off. He himself had been a farmer, with less than an acre of arable land, and what he could earn in a year – 1,500–2,000 yuan – was such a pittance that he’d moved to Shenyang, where he’d worked as a loader and general labourer for two to three years. But now he had been jobless for several months. He lived with two other job seekers from Heilongjiang, and they often came to the labour market together. He would wait around Lu Garden for the whole day, if no work came up. When he got tired, he would walk to the bridge and sit on it, watching the crowd. ‘I’m always ready to put up with hardship,’ he said. ‘Poor Mom and Dad, they are still tilling the land, at their age… I feel so incompetent. It’s so hard to survive in Shenyang.’ Even when he was employed and sent his income home, it had not been enough to support them.
Two months after I left Peng in Shenyang, I was staying in a guesthouse in Beijing. I’d just come back from a short trip to visit Ying, a Chinese who had returned to his hometown, Handan, from London. The train journey had exhausted me. At five minutes to midnight, the phone rang. It was Peng.
‘Did I wake you up, sister?’ he asked.
‘Not at all!’ I replied. I’d been kept awake by the calls from the local saunas anyway – the reception kept putting them through to the rooms. The female callers, mostly rural migrants, would offer ‘special services’ – a massage and sex – if a man answered, but would hang up without a word if they heard a female voice.
‘How have you been?’ I asked.
‘I’m not good. Not good at all. Couldn’t find any work at all in Shenyang,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried really hard in the past month. Since you left, things have got considerably worse and most people have given up their job search in Shenyang – sixty out of a hundred migrants have returned home to their villages. I’ve hung around here long enough. But no sign of a job.’
‘I’m so sorry, Peng!’ I said, not knowing how to reassure him. ‘What are you planning to do now?’
‘I’m going home, back to Fuxing. I’ll help out on the farm for a while…and see what happens. I can’t stay in Shenyang anymore – I’m going mad! And everyone’s leaving. I am dead scared, sister. I don’t want to end up like Ah Shan.’
There was a pause.
‘You know Ah Shan?’ he asked.
I struggled to remember.
‘You met him in the Lu Garden labour market,’ Peng said. ‘Ah Shan couldn’t live with the pain and shame of staying jobless for more than six months. He took his own life – just a week after you left. One day, he just jumped into the river right by the labour market and drowned himself.’
I was speechless. I really didn’t remember Ah Shan. He must have been one of the many job seekers who had gathered when I talked to Peng. Peng described him as an honest man, ‘although you probably wouldn’t notice him in a crowd.’ Peng was obviously upset about the death. He’d spent days searching for work alongside Ah Shan and they must have built up a friendship. For Peng, friendship meant a lot. He was trying to hold back his tears as he spoke. I advised him to return home for a break and told him to call me whenever he needed to talk. Then we hung up.
The next day, he returned to Fuxing on a three-hour bus trip. Going home didn’t turn out to be much of a break. His father, who had never left to work in the city, did not sympathize with him. ‘Other villagers’ sons can make money in the city. Why can’t you?’ he nagged. The accusation was hurtful, but Peng ignored it because he didn’t want to talk back to his dad. He tried to justify staying in the village for a while. But it wasn’t yet harvest time and there was little farm work. So he spent some time cleaning the front yard and sorting the farmhouse storage for his dad, and cooked dinner for him every evening. ‘Have you learned a few dishes in Shenyang?’ his father asked, not knowing that Peng had never had time to cook during his time in the city.
Two weeks later, his father got on his case again, and this time he was much harsher: ‘If you don’t move your ass and go work in the city, we won’t be able to survive.’
Peng packed his bag and left home the next morning. Shenyang was the only large city nearby. He had to return to the Lu Garden labour market, which held nothing but memories of failure and Ah Shan’s suicide. How could his father understand? ‘I am just like his working buffalo,’ Peng told me.
One day, waiting around Lu Garden in the early morning, Peng met a recruiter from Hebei province who was looking for candidates to go and work as security guards in Beijing. Peng was thrilled with the opportunity. He had worked as a security guard before. And wouldn’t it be great to leave Shenyang and work in the capital? He took the offer immediately, without negotiating.
The security company was called Tianhe Antai ‘Heavenly Peace’. It was one of the largest security companies in Beijing – and infamous for its covert operations, which included running drug deals, regularly bribing the public security department, and deceiving and transporting rural migrants into unpaid jobs. But Peng was a stranger to Beijing. How could he know? All he knew was that he was to board a bus from Shenyang to Beijing, along with fifteen others – all older than Peng – to start a new life.
The whole busload would soon be joining the army of migrant workers who performed the dirty work for China’s grand capital: building apartments for its new rich, cleaning its streets, planting trees along its avenues, guarding its properties. Each of them was as hardworking as the next, but the younger migrants, like Peng, were more equipped with information about life and employment in the cities and less willing to tolerate poor conditions and more prepared to stand up for their rights. Would his father ever understand?
The trip to the capital was a long one – ten hours. Peng had taken so many bus trips before, and each time he’d told himself that he would make a success of himself and send the much-needed money home. He would be proud of what he could do for his family. He nibbled at the steamed buns that he had brought with him for the trip. He had only two.
It was well past midnight when the bus finally arrived. As it turned in to the depot, Peng wondered where they were: the place didn’t look remotely urban. A few other buses were parked, but no one was around. Under the dim streetlight, Peng could see two men selling steamed buns on the side of the empty street. Wasn’t this Beijing? ‘Gongzhufen,’ said the conductor – a quiet part of the city.
Peng and the other fifteen villagers got off the bus and looked around in the semi-darkness. Another bus would take them from this east Beijing depot to Daxing district, in the south of Beijing, where the company was based. Though the depot was not well lit, their many pairs of eyes found the right bus stop soon enough. Daxing, it said. This second ride lasted another hour.
Daxing district, situated on the periphery of Beijing, is clogged with factories of all kinds – ugly even at night. The district comprises nine towns and eighteen townships, and has a total population of 650,000, more than 75 percent of them migrant families who have created their own communities. They come from Hubei, Henan, Shandong and Hebei provinces, as well as from the northeast.
Tianhe Antai has many security contracts with companies in Daxing, to whom they supply migrant workers recruited from Shenyang and elsewhere. The company is housed in a first-floor office in an ordinary-looking street. You can easily miss it. On arrival, Peng and the others were asked by the recruiter to hand in their IDs. ‘It is just our normal procedure,’ he said. ‘It’s for our records.’ But after a few days, the workers realized that they weren’t going to get their IDs back. Peng’s repeated requests for his were refused. But none of them protested, for fear of offending the company.
They were then sent to guard a business nearby which they were told was an insurance firm. During the first two weeks, they were also told by the security company not to leave the premises under any circumstances. They were to station themselves right at the gate, but they were not to step outside the compound. They were to eat in the company canteen. Peng became very concerned, because this was the first job where his movements had been restricted – but without his ID, he couldn’t simply get up and leave. As time passed, he began to feel trapped. He and the other workers talked about what to do. Should they approach the management collectively? Should they be more confrontational? The shared feeling, however, was that there was little recourse, so the subject was dropped. Meanwhile, the men were desperate to be paid.
Passive cooperation did not bring them peace. In fact, things got worse. When they asked for their weekly pay, they were told that there was no pay yet and they’d have to wait. At the end of the second week, their request was again rejected, without any reason given. The workers realized then that they would not be paid at all. Not one yuan. They didn’t voice their concern because they didn’t really understand what was going on. Peng, however, did: He and the others were simply being treated as rural peasants who were so desperate for work that they’d accept whatever deal was on offer.
Peng wanted to flee. But to do so, he’d have to fight a large security company. How many bodyguards and thugs did the company have at its disposal? Peng had no idea, though he had heard that workers had been beaten for demanding owed wages and that one of them had been stabbed. There was enough talk like this to keep him frightened.
By the third week, Peng felt like a prisoner. He wanted to get out – there was no way he could go on like this without pay. One day, he noticed that his team leader, a simple-minded man, was easily placated by the offer of a bottle of spirits. Peng came up with an escape plan. He shared it with only two coworkers, because the others seemed too frightened to do anything.
The next week, as their shift ended for the day, Peng invited the team leader for a drink in their dining area. The man had no suspicion about Peng’s motives, as so many workers had offered him alcohol to sweeten him up in the past. As cup after cup of liquor was poured, the leader became less and less aware of what was happening. ‘Have more, my elder brother! It is my fortune to have met you!’ Peng cheered and toasted him.
Finally the team leader downed the last drop in his cup and, voice slurred, said he had to go to bed. Less than a minute later, he was asleep. Then Peng and his two companions snuck out of the building, into the dark night of Yellow village, in central Daxing. They ran as far as they could, although no one was chasing them, slowing down only to catch a bus headed away from Daxing. They had nothing to show for their three weeks’ work, but they knew they had done the right thing.
The bus took them to the east side of Beijing, where they stayed with another job seeker from Liaoning, who let them sleep on his floor and fed them for two days. Peng and his two coworkers then tried to recover their IDs, calling the recruiter and threatening to call the police. Of course, this was an empty threat, since reprisals from the security company for carrying it out might be anything from an ordinary beating to a disabling one by company thugs – but it worked: the recruiter sent the IDs via another migrant from the northeast. The company still refused to pay them; Peng had to give that up. He didn’t know what became of the workers who had remained on the job.
Eventually, he and his two friends learned the security company’s real reputation – much too late. Tianhe Antai is well known for its criminality. Their labour recruitment is used to make illegal profits. Many of the rural job seekers they hire are underage and made to work for nothing. The migrants even have a saying: ‘You can get work from Tianhe Antai, but you can’t get money!’
It is as if the Labour Contract Law never existed. The law was passed on 1 January 2008, thanks to momentum generated by a child labour scandal in May 2007 that caused a great deal of public anger: Thousands of children, some as young as eight years old, had been kidnapped and sold for 500 yuan a head to 7,500 illegal brick kilns in Shanxi and Henan. Of these, 576 children were rescued. The kidnapped children were found to have been beaten, burnt, and disabled, and some were killed. Those who survived were forced to work in the kilns under the most subhuman conditions. It was found that these illegal brick kilns employed 53,036 migrant workers.14 At the time, many feared that this scandal was only the tip of the iceberg. Its aftermath was also shocking: A few foremen and middlemen (one of them a Labour Bureau official) were prosecuted, and one of the kiln owners, the son of a Party official, was sentenced to nine years in prison for what amounted to a crime against humanity. Other than that, little was done. But the public outcry had worried the government. It was in this context that a call for the enactment of new labour legislation was heard. A law to protect workers’ basic rights was recognized as necessary. Eventually, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, that is, China’s top legislature, decided to adopt the Labour Contract Law, which had been under consideration since 2005 but never became reality until after the brick kiln scandal.
The law contained ninety-eight articles setting out rules requiring employers to provide workers with signed contracts of employment, which must be based on ‘equality and free will’ and designed according to the principle of ‘negotiated consensus and good faith’. The government claimed that the Labour Contract Law aimed at providing greater job security than the old contract law enacted in 1994, for example stipulating that employees of more than ten years’ standing are entitled to non-fixed-term contracts, requiring employers to contribute to workers’ social security, and setting wage standards for workers on probation and those working overtime.15 At the time, Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, promised that the new law would ‘regulate employers’ use of labour and protect workers’ rights’.
In practice, however, the law has made no difference for workers like Peng and his colleagues. ‘Even when you are given a contract by these companies, you’ll find that the contracts are always written in the interest of the company!’ Peng told me. ‘[The law] doesn’t take into account the workers’ position at all. Some of us simply don’t dare to sign the contracts because they are written in such ambiguous ways. We are afraid of being cheated.’
Utterly demoralized by their experience in Beijing, Peng and the other two workers returned to their villages. This was the second time in a month that Peng had returned home to Liaoning without any pay.
And the relentless cycle continued. Two months later, I received another call from Peng. Back at home, his father wouldn’t stop hassling him, and he’d returned to Shenyang and the Lu Garden labour market. ‘But I’ve been unlucky,’ he said. He’d found absolutely nothing. Now, his plan was to head back to Beijing. Word was that Daxing’s labour market was flush with jobs. ‘I am determined to find something.’
I was in Beijing at the time and met Peng at the Gongzhufen bus station when he arrived. Dozens of villagers, mostly young men and women in their twenties and thirties, some with children back home, all from Liaoning, filed off the bus. They’d come to Beijing looking for work, some in the building industry, others in domestic service and cleaning. They were all carrying bags of belongings, looking as if they intended on settling for a while.
Then we all boarded another bus, as Peng and his fellows had done just a few months back, and proceeded on to Daxing district. ‘I’m gonna make it this time, sister,’ Peng said to me. ‘I’ve got to find a job that lasts.’ We got off at Yinghai township on the east side of Daxing, where Peng said he knew of cheap lodgings for new arrivals, where you could sleep five to a room. He led me up the stairs of this place and we had some green tea. There was obviously no room for me to stay, and so I wished him good luck and left.
The next day, Peng went to the Daxing labour market at around 9 a.m., a mistake, because most jobs are taken early in the morning. He told me the Daxing market is smaller than Shenyang’s and full of people from everywhere – from the northeast, Shandong, Henan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu. Competition seemed even harsher than Lu Garden. He met four other migrants from Liaoning, and they told him that there were many jobs advertised around Beijing’s train stations, so together they took a bus into the city centre, some fifteen kilometres away, to have a look. At West Station, they found plenty of ads on shop windows, all for low-paid, temporary manual work. Peng spotted one that read: ‘Grand four-star hotel near Beijing West Station. Looking for fit, young men to do security work. Call to discuss pay.’
The five of them, including Peng, felt encouraged and called the hotel recruiter immediately. The ad was clearly aimed at migrants from rural areas, and so Peng and his group did not expect an offer of a reasonable wage. However, they did not expect to be offered only 35 yuan (£3.1–£3.5, $5.5) per day. Beijing’s legal daily minimum wage, meagre enough, is 54.40 yuan (£4.9, $8.5). On top of that, they were asked to pay for their own uniforms, and to do three days’ work, called training, without wages, and they would have to work without a contract.
‘You take it or leave it,’ said Peng. ‘Stay like a slave, or go back to the countryside – who gives a damn about you?’ Without other options, they took the jobs and were housed in a garage by the hotel, where they were given hard bunk beds, no sheets or pillows provided. Peng slept on top of his jacket and jeans. The floor was concrete, and filthy, as if it were never cleaned. The work was straightforward enough, though – guarding the hotel entrance. The men worked eight-hour shifts and were sometimes asked to do overtime. They felt lucky that they all got paid.
But it is impossible to live in an expensive city like Beijing on 35 yuan per day, let alone send money home. After three weeks, Peng was forced to move on. His co-workers stayed. Work isn’t easy to find, and they didn’t feel confident enough to leave.
‘Did I do the right thing, sister?’ he later asked me, obviously looking for reassurance. I told him he had, and he returned to the Daxing labour market next day to try his luck again.
Peng resented the idea of security work, but it was the only work he had substantial experience in and a likely chance of getting. He continued his search. He had only 200 yuan left and couldn’t remain unemployed for long. When I saw that he’d cut down to one tiny meal a day to save living costs, I offered to help. But he refused – he was far too proud.
‘I’m OK. I just need to take up the next job available and make no fuss,’ he said.
As I left Peng at Yinghai township, I wondered how I could possibly help him. The fact is that there is no national minimum wage in China. The minimum wage law that came into effect in January 2004 makes local authorities responsible for setting their own minimum wage standard. The law stipulates that this should be 40 to 60 percent of the average wage in the particular area, making the so-called minimum wage very difficult to live on. In Beijing, the monthly minimum wage of 640 yuan (£58, $101) can provide little more than a substandard living, but what other options do workers like Peng have?
I could have helped Peng only if I’d had connections. Guanxi! A word heard so often in China. You need connections to open doors for you in every aspect of your life. This is particularly true in post-Mao China, ruled by monetary values and the social relations they establish. Sadly, I had no guanxi good enough to help Peng. I was a foreigner.
Fortunately, times, like tides, do change. A week later, Peng called with good news. ‘I’ve got a new job!’ he said excitedly.
‘What is it? And where?’ I asked.
It was another security job, he explained, but this time in the biggest hotel in Yinghai township, Daxing district, the Golden Sail Holiday Hotel. ‘And this time, I am here to stay!’ he said.
I had never heard Peng sounding so positive. I was thrilled for him. He invited me to visit his new workplace for a hot pot (huoguo) dinner when he would be off duty in the evening. We would celebrate his new job and a new beginning.
Peng had just finished his shift when I arrived. He greeted me with a warm hug, wearing a dark blue uniform, and introduced me to his colleagues – Qiang, the thirtysomething team leader from Jiangxi province, and Mr Li, a security guard in his fifties from Henan province.
‘We have ten security guards here, all from rural areas in other provinces,’ Peng explained. It wasn’t a marvellous job, but it paid more than his last, 1,100 yuan (£100–110, $174) per month. ‘I don’t mind working ten hours a day for the whole week,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna work hard.’
I knew that Peng was determined to send money home to his father. He felt that he must do that, no matter what.
Qiang joined us inside the hotel café. ‘Please sit,’ he said. He poured baijiu, or sorghum wine, into our cups, sat himself down and raised his cup: ‘Let’s toast to Peng’s new life here! Success! Let’s toast to sister Hung’s health and safe journey!’
I had to drink up. It’s easy to get drunk on baijiu – its alcohol content is 40 percent – so I followed with a gulp of hot pot soup to dilute the effect. It was delicious, a mixture of all types of mushrooms, spinach, bean curd, and beef slices.
Qiang had another cup of baijiu, and conversation turned to the security industry in Beijing and how it is one of the shadiest industries here, with only 25 law-abiding security firms, compared with over 500 unregistered ones. (Other migrant workers also quote a similar figure.) The companies work with recruiters to pull in migrants from the countryside who are desperate enough to take anything, Qiang explained, and the recruiters also charge the workers a ‘tax per head’, on top of the money they’re taking from the security companies. Both recruiters and companies are crooked.
No wonder then, Peng said, that around 7,000 labour disputes have been reported in Beijing each month. His figure is not far from the statistics given by the Beijing trade union’s law department, which said the number of workers filing grievances with the Beijing municipal authorities reached 80,000 for the year 2009.16 According to the trade union, Beijing’s Labour Dispute Arbitration Committees (LDACs) were understaffed and had a backlog of cases. Each dispute now took around ten months to resolve, very often in favour of the employers. The Beijing courts have also reported seeing an increase in labour disputes for the same year – a total of 4,506 labour cases were heard. Nationwide, courts heard a growing number of labour cases from 2008 to 2010. Resolving them became one of the most difficult tasks for the Chinese courts during the peak of the economic crisis. Wang Shengjun, head of the Supreme People’s Court, said that courts across the nation handled 295,500 labour dispute cases in 2008, 317,000 in 2009, and then 207,400 in 2010.17 He noted that a large proportion of these disputes involved back wages, nonpayment of overtime and insurance contributions.18
And lawsuits do not always end justly. A high level of incompetence in the courts has been reported in Shenyang. In July 2007, Wu Guangjun, a worker at Liaoning Cotton and Hemp Company, filed a lawsuit against the company seeking reinstatement of his employment contract. After a ‘talk’ with the company, the Huanggu district court in Shenyang told Wu that the court could not accept his case. Wu revisited the court and was told the same thing by the judge himself, and offered no justification. Wu couldn’t get a written copy of the rejection ruling, and was unable to appeal to a higher court. By April 2008, Wu had sold his house to meet the costs of his numerous petitions, which had received no response. Eventually, he became homeless and was seen camping out on the streets of Shenyang. This was a direct result of the failure of institutions and legislation to protect the basic rights of workers.
‘With so many labour disputes, it’s obvious what is happening,’ said Peng. ‘Why doesn’t the government do something to stop the unregulated security middlemen?’
‘These underground security firms are run by criminals,’ Qiang replied. ‘Criminals are the reason the police receive their pay and keep their jobs. Without criminals, the police can’t justify their good salary. They work with each other – they need each other to survive. I am sure you know that these underground firms feed the police with never-ending bribes.’ Tianhe Antai, Peng’s first employer in Beijing, was notorious for that, in fact.
‘As if they gave a damn!’ said Qiang, downing another cup of baijiu. ‘Without migrant workers, Beijingers would starve.’
Eventually, their colleague Mr Li joined in as well. ‘We definitely need to be given more respect and more rights,’ he said quietly.
As we drank more and more baijiu, Peng began asking me about London and whether security guards have a good life over there, in a ‘world-class city’, as he called it. I told him about a place in east London I knew quite well called Canary Wharf, guarded by hundreds of non-British security guards employed by dodgy agencies, to which he listened with wide-open eyes. ‘Really, sister? Are most of them also migrants? From where? Surely they’re not earning peanuts like us…’
Peng toasted me near the end of the evening. ‘Sister, I hope that when you return to Beijing one day, you will see that I’ve got myself a more senior position at work and have done something better with my life,’ he said. ‘I truly hope that conditions will improve for us all.’
