Читать книгу Scattered Sand - Hsiao-Hung Pai - Страница 9
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Earthquakes in Bohemia:
Life and Death in Sichuan
The footsteps of Sichuanese migrant workers can be found everywhere in China – in the factories, down the coal mines and brick kilns, on building sites in every metropolis. Rural poverty in Sichuan, the country’s fourth-largest province and western China’s largest source of migrant workers, has driven 20 million peasants to the cities. Among them, more than 11 million have left the province entirely.
Numerous government programmes have attempted to deal with Sichuan’s poverty. The ‘8–7 Plan’, launched in 1994, sought to eliminate absolute poverty within seven years. Whether that goal was reached depends on the definition of ‘absolute poverty’. China’s criteria for rural poverty reflected one of the lowest thresholds among developing countries. In 1986, the ‘absolute poverty’ line in China was 206 yuan per year. In 1988 it was raised to 1,067 yuan, then to 1,196 yuan in 2009, 1,274 yuan in 2010 and 2,300 yuan in 2011. The raising of the poverty threshold has put three times as many people below the line: since 2011, 128 million among the rural population.
Back in 2005, a five-year plan was launched to reduce the income gap between town and country, which had increased dramatically as a result of the reform and opening up. Yet the gap has continued to widen. Rural per capita income remains below subsistence level: by official measures it was 4,140 yuan (£350) in 2008, less than a third of urban per capita income, and all of the Sichuanese migrants I met were earning below this level. Meanwhile, what the state considers the problem of ‘superfluous labour’ has worsened in rural areas over the years: Lacking state social security provisions for their elderly, peasant families create their own by having more children, in defiance of China’s one-child policy. The government has lost count of the scale of the problem. In the 1990s, when it roughly estimated 200 million unemployed in rural China, 50 percent of rural Sichuan’s workforce was described as ‘superfluous’.
I set out for Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, just a few months after the 8.0 degree earthquake of 12 May 2008. The Information Office of the State Council placed the province’s death toll at 69,197, with 374,176 injured and 18,379 missing. Wenchuan and Beichuan, at the epicentre, had suffered the most. At least 60,000 Wenchuan residents were missing and there was little hope for their survival; nearly half of Beichuan’s 20,000 residents were dead. Even today, the government has not released a final death toll for Wenchuan, and meanwhile other natural disasters resulting from the quake, such as landslides following rainstorms, have killed more people, and fifty sources of hazardous radioactivity have been discovered in Beichuan’s affected areas. When I arrived in August 2008, four months after the quake, residents were still waiting for the local government to clean up the rubble. Between May and June more than 600,000 Sichuanese migrant workers left their badly needed jobs nationwide to visit their families. Life, they knew, was not short of natural disasters – which would always be accompanied by man-made catastrophes. But it was only acceptable to speak of the first.
I had been to Chengdu before, in 1997, and I remembered it as a haven. Known as a city of poets – a bohemian city – its relaxed atmosphere was a welcome change from the constant social struggle that many visitors feel elsewhere in China.
Chengdu sits in a sheltered basin surrounded by mountains, far from the Yellow River Delta where the dominant Han Chinese culture has historically been centred. Through the centuries these conditions attracted poets and writers, most of them travelling hermits, the most famous being Li Bai, whose family migrated from Central Asia and settled in Sichuan. Famed for his wild lifestyle and his unrestrained, individualistic literary style, a style unknown in the court-influenced writing of ancient China, Li Bai came down in legends as a Chinese Robin Hood (xiake). He helped the poor as he travelled with the money he begged from the rich; he caroused and played his lute (dombura) to accompany his poems.
We drink face to face in the midst
of these mountain blossoms,
one glass after another, and another;
Let me go home, I’m no longer sober;
In the morning I shall return with my dombura.
Sichuan was never far from his mind – many of his poems describe his delight in the beautiful landscape and his joy in the music of others, including his famous ‘Listening to the Sichuanese monks’, in which he describes feeling overwhelmed by the monks’ performance of music in the misty Emei Mountains:
For me, he waved his hand,
strumming and sounding
like millions of pine forests;
Mind as clear as water;
the echo remains
when the bells toll the dawn;
Forgetting even when dusk comes
In many layers of autumn clouds…
The romantic image of Chengdu – what the Chinese call a shi wai taoyuan, ‘a peach garden not of this world’ – has lasted for centuries; the city was a sanctuary even during the final years of the Qing dynasty as the country was being carved up into concessions by the Western powers. I can imagine the Sichuanese strolling in parks, playing majiong on the street, and chatting away in teahouses in their provincial capital while the imperial dynasty fell apart 1200 kilometres away. Since that time, the number of teahouses in Chengdu has continued to grow: from 454 in 1900 to 598 just before the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949, and up to the present day, when there is one on every street. Every day, one in five Chengdu residents visits a teahouse. And Chengdu’s literary scene also continues to flourish, with poets and poetry lovers alike gathering in clubs throughout the city to recite the poems of ancient masters and exchange notes about their own creative work. Even in the open space in Renmin Park, such a scene can be witnessed. I saw a group of poetry lovers of all ages, men and women, gathered inside the little pagoda, displaying their work on the marble table, some reading their poems aloud as others applauded.
After the earthquake, Chengdu’s authors produced an outpouring of work. The forty-five-year-old writer and poet He Xiaozhu was writing a novel on the second floor of a teahouse in Chengdu when the earthquake struck. He was terrified and tried to find a place to hide. He escaped injury, but when he heard of the deaths, he was heartbroken and wrote the poem ‘Elegy’, which was circulated all over the country:
Thousands upon thousands of anguished cries;
Return to silence and tranquillity;
Heavenly acts cannot be predicted;
The moon over Wenchuan;
Still, a question mark;
Aftershocks extend to Chengdu;
Sorrow engulfs half the world;
Tears turn to ice;
Let candlelight melt them away;
Children, climb on a dandelion
and line up for heaven.
I thought of the words of the ancient poets as I travelled by train to Chengdu – a twenty-five hour trip, across Hebei, Shanxi, and Shaanxi provinces. Though the ancient poets loved the region’s liberalism, they, too, had dreaded the long journey:
The path to Sichuan is filled with hardships,
harder than going up to the blue sky.
– Li Bai
I had boarded the train with my then boyfriend, John Davies, early in the morning. I was fascinated by an array of golden shades outside my cabin window. I climbed down from my bunk bed and saw the dusty land of the Shanxi province unfolding in front of my eyes. The barrenness looked strangely beautiful. I was struck by the magnificence of the country’s landscape as well as by the breadth and depth of its rural poverty. Shanxi, a large mountain plateau some 1,000 metres above sea level, is bound on the north by the Great Wall and on the south by the Yellow River. It was China’s strategic bastion against the ‘barbarians’ from the West for many centuries. The land is clearly poor here along the northern border, eroded by rainfall and by lumbering and ruthlessly scoured by sand and dust moved in constant wind and water, giving the bare earth a distinct yellow polish. The Gobi Desert seemed to spill over into this place. There were no traces of livestock. Many of the houses here are extremely basic – caves built up with mud walls.
When we entered the dining car the next day, we were greeted by restaurant staff in stewardess-like uniforms. Two public security officers sat at the back of the car, chain-smoking and keeping an eye on what went on. We ordered our favourite mapo tofu and minced pork with aubergines, as a first taste of Sichuan.
A young woman and an older man asked to sit with us. She was in her early twenties, a biology student at Chengdu University. The man was in his late 50s. ‘We’ve just met,’ he said. ‘I have a daughter in Chengdu University, too. So we have a lot to talk about.’ Like everyone else, they were curious as to why we were heading to Sichuan at this time, when the province had barely recovered from the earthquake. ‘We visited Sichuan years ago and would like to see it again,’ I said, sticking to our preplanned story. The student nodded.
Then dots of blue came into view outside the window: overcrowded tents, inhabited by villagers who had been made homeless by the earthquake. Not only had the Sichuanese had their homeland and their limited infrastructure destroyed in the eight mountainous counties, and now had to worry about aftershocks and heavy rain causing further disasters, they were also still waiting for their homes and communities to be rebuilt. Although the government had pledged to spend £100 billion ($15 billion at the time) on reconstruction, as reported by international media, no one I spoke to during my journey in China had a clue about this cash, let alone when it would arrive, how it would be spent and over what period of time. In fact, earthquake reconstruction was rarely in the news here, buried under the glory of the Olympics, even after the Olympics were over.
The Chengdu government had estimated that three years would be required for reconstruction to be completed – a frightening length of time for the victims, long enough for their plight to become dormant in the general collective memory, at least until the next tragedy. While the homeless waited in their tents, local officials experienced their share of stress: They’d been ordered by the central government to reduce their expense budgets, for example, by eliminating all ‘unnecessary official banquets’.
I couldn’t help asking the student, ‘Do you think the government is doing enough, or putting enough resources into reconstruction?’
The student seemed offended by my question. ‘Of course! No doubt about that!’ she said. ‘Our government has done all it could to help the victims.’
I said nothing, noticing her rising anger.
Altogether, 4.45 million households had been damaged by the earthquake, including 3.47 million in rural areas. Ten million people were living in temporary housing (tents) three months later. When winter came, the majority of villagers were still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt. By November 2008, 195,000 homes, less than one eighteenth of the total needed, had been completed. Even in May 2009, a year after the disaster, millions were still in temporary housing, and many will continue to live in those tents for years to come. State compensation in money – for those who actually received it – ranged from 16,000 yuan (£1,609, $2,540) and 23,000 yuan (£2,313, $3,651) per family, which most found insufficient to build a home themselves.
‘Maybe you’ve read negative reports about our government,’ said the student, provocatively. Her tone reminded me of students I had known in 1970s Taiwan, who had been deeply indoctrinated by the nationalist ruling party there, the Kuomintang. ‘So, do you support Tibet’s rioters? A lot of the reports in the West are anti-China. They picked on our government about everything.’
This would be my first direct experience of nationalist ideology on the trip, an ideology that wasn’t purely relative, expressed in terms of East vs. West, with the East a victim of Western encroachment, but instead increasingly positive, expressed as Chinese nationhood. It was the year of the Beijing Olympics, and the Chinese press was busy bombarding its viewers and readers with self-congratulating propaganda, including street ads exhorting them to ‘Fight for your Motherland.’ There can be no understanding of the history of modern China without facing up to its nationalism; since the reform era, no other ideology has been as powerful.
My nostalgia for Chengdu proved to be overly romantic. A decade of new development had changed the city. Most of the tranquil avenues dotted with teahouses were gone, along with the little surprises hidden in alleyways, like street snack stalls and sellers of pirate CDs who happily engaged in conversation. The town’s past simplicity and richness had been replaced by a crude and impersonal display of private affluence. Chengdu had become another grim and depressing Chinese city with chaotic traffic, suffocating pollution, oppressive high-rise shopping blocks and Starbucks everywhere, along with other multinational companies.
As always on this journey, the first place I visited was the city’s largest employment centre, the City East Labour Market, which advertises all types of jobs. It’s situated in the extreme east end of the city, that is, in the middle of nowhere. A row of cargo tricycles was parked near the market, and the riders were trying to get customers. Like the job seekers in the labour market, these riders come from the surrounding villages. Outside the gate, hundreds of rural workers were gathered, from Pengzhou area, An county, the Dujiangyan area and as far as Wenchuan, the earthquake’s epicentre, about five hours away by bus.
When I began to talk to one of them, others surrounded me and curiously asked me where I was from.
‘Taiwan? The treasure island!’ a man said.
‘I wouldn’t mind going to Taiwan to work!’ another man added.
The crowd grew bigger still, and I suddenly found myself in the centre of a large circle of job-seekers, all eager to talk. I asked if any had worked outside of Sichuan before.
‘We worked in Beijing!’ a man pointed at himself and his friend.
‘Taiyuan! For two years!’ shouted another.
‘Shanghai!’
A white-haired man in his fifties said he was from Huangtu village, five hours from Chengdu, and had been a migrant worker for ten years, including a long stint as a builder in Shenzhen, some 2,000 kilometres away. ‘I came home because I was worried about my family,’ he said. ‘Our house was damaged in the quake.’
He was interrupted by others around him, pushing and nudging, all impatiently waiting for their turn to speak.
A man from Wenchuan broke in, ‘My family and I have become homeless and are now staying in temporary shelters. The local government promised permanent housing and job priority for people in Wenchuan. But we are all waiting, for months now.’
Then a man whose thick eyebrows over deep-seated eyes distinguished him from the Han Chinese workers approached. He was in his mid-thirties. He introduced himself as Shen Wei, from the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in southwest Sichuan. Liangshan contains the country’s largest population of Yi, the seventh-largest of the fifty-five ethnic minority groups in China. ‘I come here every day, to look for work. It’s been so difficult,’ he said, his accent flatter in intonation than the others’. ‘They don’t want us Yi. We don’t know why. I told them that I’d take any kind of work.’
Shen Wei left Liangshan at the age of twenty. The poverty and the scarcity of opportunities in his rural home gave him no choice but to live a life of constant migration. Liangshan is a largely agricultural region, and one-third of Liangshan residents live below the poverty line. Agricultural income in most Yi households is well below subsistence level. Shen Wei went to work as a security guard in Chengdu in 1996, and then left the province to work, also as a security guard, in Shijiangzhuang, a city in Hebei province, in the late 1990s. After that, he travelled to Beijing when offered a job in the same trade. Soon enough, he had spent his youth toiling in various industries in eight provinces all over China, and now his parents, who lacked a pension in their old age, depend on his earnings.
Shen Wei described working as a security guard in Beijing in 2001. The job paid 800–900 yuan (now £72–81, $127–142) per month – low, considering the high cost of living in the capital, but considerably better than what he could have made at home. He’d lived with other migrants in shabby, overcrowded shacks in Daxing, and his commute to the city centre took two hours each way, but it was the fact that he couldn’t save enough to send money home that eventually made the job not worthwhile.
He returned to Chengdu’s labour market. There, in 2005, a Sichuanese recruiter – there were many of them around – offered him a job making toys and mobile phones in a factory in Dongguan city, in Guangdong province in the south. Jobs down south were seen as a lot better, offering better terms and conditions, than those in the north. Recruiters often targeted Liangshan, seeing the Yi people as cheap and docile, eager to work and desperate to earn, and therefore much more vulnerable and easy to control as a workforce, more apt to accept poor working terms and then stick with the job. Liangshan’s unemployment rate was as high as 4.12 percent in 2009, and it was a known fact that most Yi youth were unemployed.
A few of those workers from Liangshan were only fourteen to sixteen years old. They went south in order to support their parents back home. Once out of the province they would be expected to stay out and keep earning. This job was the beginning of a long journey. After being laid off from the Dongguan factory, Shen Wei said, some of the kids were sent to a new workplace, a brick kiln up north, back in Hebei. When leaving Guangdong, they spent some of their meagre wages on the bus tickets home. The trip took a day; they couldn’t afford to buy food or water. The company – a Japanese and Korean joint venture, which employed hundreds of people – knew the workers were underage, of course. ‘But they don’t care,’ said Shen Wei. The middlemen and supervisors were responsible for recruitment, and the company knew how to avoid blame for employing child labour.
So, Shen Wei made his own journey to Dongguan with a group of ten young men from Liangshan who had all been recruited at the same time in Chengdu’s labour market. He didn’t like the look of Dongguan and found it instantly depressing. Immediately, they were put to work assembling mobile phones, ten hours a day, seven days a week. For that, the monthly pay was about 850 yuan.
Shen Wei stayed in Dongguan for three years. Management withheld their wages for the entire year, calling it a deposit. The workers were paid just before they returned home to the villages for the Chinese New Year. (Migrant workers always return home for the Chinese New Year and go back to work in the spring.) Legally, employers are supposed to pay workers each month, but the Dongguan workers were told that annual pay was the common practice in Guangdong province. Shen Wei was never able to send money home during the working year. The policy was intended to keep the recruits from leaving the job, and it worked.
But that was not the worst of their situation. The Liangshan Yi did not apply for a temporary residency permit in Dongguan, because they simply couldn’t afford one on their scanty pay. So they lived and worked in Dongguan without the permit, that is, without hukou, and without status. That meant they had no access to local heath care – if they became ill, they would have to pay the doctor themselves, which they couldn’t afford either. Any children they brought with them would not be able to go to local schools. And apart from being denied access to public services, they would face punishment if caught without papers by the police.
As Yi, they were not only looked down upon, but also faced open hostility on the streets. Shen Wei knew personally of co-workers who had been verbally abused, and one who’d been badly beaten and kicked in an unprovoked attack in an alley, late at night, by local men. He’d heard of many other similar attacks. Yi were easily singled out by their facial features and strong accent. In Guangdong province, ethnic minority migrant workers usually have a hard time and find it difficult to be accepted by local people. ‘People of Yi origin get the worst pay and the worst treatment,’ Shen Wei said. ‘Not only in that factory, but in the cities generally. Everywhere we went in Guangdong, we faced hostile eyes.’
But in spite of the prejudice and violence, the workers from Liangshan stayed, because they had to. They worked even when they were sick – they were not allowed to take sick days. Even when Shen Wei had a high temperature, he’d gone to the factory, not the doctor. He’d heard about two young workers from Liangshan before his time who’d become ill in Dongguan and died. One of them, working sick and untreated, had developed pneumonia. When he died, not much fuss was made at the factory. His family was informed and that was the end of the matter. Somehow, the news never became public. ‘But our lives are cheap,’ said Shen Wei. ‘There was no compensation. No one would make a noise.’
I asked if this was why he’d eventually left the job.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually, I would have stayed if I could.’ But the scandal of child labourers in the Shanxi brick kilns had been exposed not long before, and local media had become interested in the issue of child labour. On 28 April 2008, a report highlighting how Dongguan factory foremen used child labourers from Liangshan was printed in the Southern Metropolitan Daily, and the factory bosses got scared and fired all the Yi workers, regardless of whether they were adults or kids. The report read in part:
[The trafficked children] came from faraway Liangshan in Sichuan, and most of them are not yet 16. The overseers sought and recruited them from families mired in poverty, promising them high wages; some were even abducted and sent off in batches to Dongguan and from there distributed by the truckload to factories across the Pearl River Delta. On unfamiliar soil, these children are often scolded and beaten and only have one proper meal every few days. Some little girls are even raped. Day after day, they undertake arduous labour. Some children think about escape, but the road is blocked. The overseers threaten them and warn them that if they try to run away, there will be a price to pay.
In fact, the foremen in these factories were regularly recruiting children. Thousands of Yi kids from Liangshan were working in Guangdong. At Shen Wei’s factory, more than twenty kids were recruited every year. ‘But even before the report came out, I heard that the factory was thinking of cutting down its workforce,’ said Shen Wei. ‘I guess it was easy for them to sack us because they didn’t really need us anymore.’
Fei, a twenty-five-year-old Tibetan, spoke up. He had been deceived by a local job recruiter, who knew that he was desperate for work, into selling the drug ecstasy in Beijing. The recruiter had promised him a security job, but not one guarding a company. He took the offer without hesitation; the pay was 150 yuan (now £14.5) a day. ‘Good money, isn’t it?’ he said, and everyone around us perked up: Indeed, it was a large sum compared to usual urban wage levels. Every day, Fei was instructed to stand at a particular location, to wait for buyers. Sometimes it was outside a building, sometimes on a certain street corner. He had no idea who the buyers were, only that they were regular. ‘But I was so frightened of getting caught all the time. You wouldn’t want to spend a minute in prison – as a Tibetan, you would have a hellish time there. I was so scared of that,’ he said. ‘When I wanted to quit the job eventually, they wouldn’t let me.’
The crowd listened quietly. ‘I fled in the end,’ he said. One day, he simply didn’t show up. He went to buy a ticket home and stayed waiting in the train station for hours, always looking around him, scared that someone might be after him. ‘When I returned to Chengdu that summer, looking desperately for work again, a middle-aged Sichuanese recruiter approached me and told me he had a job transporting goods,’ Fei went on. The man had been there, recruiting young people, for weeks by then, Fei believed. He made a bad impression on Fei; he didn’t seem honest. He wouldn’t give specifics about the job, just said, ‘You’ll find out when you get started.’
‘What was the job?’ asked a voice in the crowd.
‘He sent me to Yunnan province. The job covered food and accommodation,’ Fei said. ‘But it wasn’t any ordinary transporting job.’
Fei took a bus to Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, and another bus to a border town, Yingjiang, where he was picked up by the recruiter’s contact. The contact drove him to a house miles away from the town centre. At the house, another two men came to meet him. They explained the job to him: transporting heroin. By then, Fei knew that he couldn’t get out. He was reluctant to give us details, and didn’t want to identify the people he met there. ‘I had to swallow the heroin and transport it across Yunnan, all the way to Chengdu. I swallowed eighteen condoms filled with heroin, five kilograms total, every time they sent me. I felt really sick, and I kept vomiting. I had to leave the job after just a few days.’
Two other men had worked with him, both Tibetans, recruited in a labour market in Yunnan itself. All the people transporting drugs were males. Fei hadn’t talked much to them, just knew that they were carrying the same amount of heroin. He’d felt too unwell to think about the others.
Fei ran away, taking the first train back to Chengdu one morning. Again, he believed that the recruiters would be after him, but nothing happened. Perhaps young Tibetan boys running away from this job was a usual occurrence. He didn’t know. But he’d been worried enough to start wearing dark glasses to disguise his appearance. He wore them for months.
Opium poppy cultivation is a huge enterprise in Burma, and Burmese smugglers account for 80 to 90 percent of the heroin that enters Yunnan. The authorities currently seize two to three tons of opiates per year, and the majority of heroin in China is trafficked through Yunnan or Guangxi to Guangdong or Fujian, and then on to the international market.
Now yet another worker in this crowd of more than 100 stepped in and told his story. He was tall, tanned, handsome and well-built, with hair to his shoulders, quite unusual for a Chinese man. He had been working as a security guard in a bar in Shanghai, he said, and was determined to stay in that job, until one day, he met a woman.
He hesitated. I urged him to continue.
‘She was in her mid forties. Wealthy. I mean, stinking rich,’ he said. ‘Her husband was never at home, doing business abroad, heaven knows what business. She met me outside the bar where I worked. She stared at me as she passed, then turned back and approached me. She liked my looks. She asked if I’d be interested in meeting. So we met the next day and she took me to an expensive café for coffee and lunch.’
‘There was Western food on the menu. I’d never tried American steak, I said to her. She encouraged me to order it. During lunch, she told me she was interested in me and set up the next meeting, in a posh hotel in central Shanghai, which she paid for. She needed a young man, and offered to pay me for sex.’
The crowd exploded in laughter. It wasn’t the most usual kind of work around.
‘I was only nineteen!’ he said. ‘I was confused. But it was a large amount of cash she was offering. So I said yes.’
‘The word “prostitution” didn’t come into my head, until later, when the offer was repeated, again and again,’ he said. He managed to earn 10,000 yuan (now £909) a month working as her lover.
Someone shouted at him from the back: ‘Worker, you’re the tool!’ The crowd laughed again.
But the story wasn’t so funny for the man recalling it.
‘We began to meet regularly, once a week, after that,’ he said. He knew for certain that the meeting was purely for sex – she didn’t seem interested in anything else. She never asked a question about his background and what he’d done in his life. ‘I thought that I could continue working like that and earning good money in Shanghai. I was young and in good condition. Having sex with a woman more than twice my age was no big deal for me. I could carry on like that for years, and bring in good income for my parents. I was really naïve then.’
‘Time went by, and soon she became tired of me. One day, three months later, at the end of our session, she told me that she wouldn’t be seeing me again. She said my job was over. And she never called again. From other security guards at the bar, I heard that she’s picked another boy, from the countryside, to replace me. She’s got a new lover.’
His story was unusual; the majority of China’s three million sex workers are still migrant women, most of them peasants between fifteen and forty years old. I had received those calls from female sex workers in the hotel saunas in Beijing, but in fact these women were in every city, selling their services in karaoke bars and shopping malls and on street corners as well. Shenzhen, with the highest number of migrant sex workers, has more than a thousand of these ‘karaoke bars,’ where more than 300,000 women are estimated to work. The majority of them are from Sichuan.
Then the subject of the earthquake came up again. Yuan Gang, a middle-aged man who’d been a railway worker in Shaanxi province when the earthquake hit – spoke about how his house had collapsed, how his wife and three children were put into temporary housing, and how the compensation he had been entitled to was withheld, for no reason. ‘Knowing the past record of our local authorities, we believe our compensation is being permanently withheld!’ he cried. He was shivering with anger, and people in the crowd began to nod.
Encouraged by Yuan Gang’s open denouncement of the local government, others began to speak up about their own experiences with it, and their frustration. A white-haired, frail-looking man in his sixties, named Xue, who had accompanied his job seeking son to the labour market, had been listening at the edge of the crowd, nodding repeatedly at the things people were saying. Now he spoke, too.
‘Rulers in China know about the power of those from the countryside,’ he said. ‘China’s history is all about how the peasantry has been burdened and oppressed, and how each time they rose up to overthrow those in power. But then those new rulers would oppress the peasant masses again, until our anger could not be contained any longer and boiled over, once more, into a revolution.’
The crowd was silent as they listened to him speak.
‘We peasants brought the Party into power. Without the power of the peasantry, China wouldn’t have defeated the imperialists and the corrupt Kuomintang.’
Now the crowd around him cheered.
‘But once they came into power, we became burdened and exploited again! Because, they said, our Motherland needs to grow fast and catch up. Industrializing China and increasing output was the only thing they wanted from us in those years,’ he said. ‘And do you know what we peasants had as our reward in the decades that followed the Revolution?’ He paused, and I waited for him to continue. The crowd was rapt.
‘Poverty! Did they ask the peasants if they wanted to be collectivized in the early 1950s? Peasants just took the orders from the top. They had no right to say no. Around 130 million peasant households at that time were turned into around 7 million mutual-help groups, and then into 700,000 agricultural cooperatives. This was for the peasants to produce on a mass scale, and then produce more! And more! All for the nation! But not for our livelihood! And then those at the top used the Hundred Flowers movement in the end, to put down half a million peasants who opposed the collectivization. 1
‘But they didn’t stop there. I’m sure you know of the Great Leap Forward in 1958? That mad policy played with peasants’ lives and turned cooperatives into over 50,000 people’s communes in a short time. They used the communes to take whatever they wanted from us! We must produce and produce, and devote whatever we had to the nation! Peasants had truly become propertyless! But what could they say? It was the state, the Motherland, that needed our input, down to the last piece of steel in our house and the last metal coin in our pocket! Millions of peasants died of starvation as a result of inflated production targets imposed by the so-called people-loving local cadres in the Great Leap Forward. And they carried on with their power games – all the way through the Cultural Revolution! And what a revolution!’
The crowd laughed, clapping and cheering, encouraging him to go on. The gateway of the City East Labour Market was becoming a soapbox, and a true orator had emerged. Xue went on, ‘My parents weren’t even allowed to grow their own bloody melons in those wild days of the Cultural Revolution. That would be a very bourgeois thing to do – to grow your own food and eat it. You had to remain propertyless, as propertyless as everyone else. We must rejoice in our equality of poverty! That’s the principle upheld by our great leaders!
‘But some were much more equal than the rest of us. Those were our local officials. They did what they pleased, imposing extra taxes on top of our existing agricultural taxes. People started to wonder: Has there really been a revolution?’
The crowd was murmuring now, and the noise grew.
‘Now we don’t have the agricultural taxes anymore, but we are still heavily burdened. We still have many charges and fees to pay. And who are we to ask them why? Also, our little plots of land can be seized by the authorities for other uses, and as cities are booming and expanding, that’s a growing trend. Will we be left waiting for some compensation for that, too? And we are now talking about not being paid compensation for the earthquake? This is just part of what local officials do.’
Yuan Gang chimed in, ‘The laws in this country aren’t for us.’
As I was scribbling furiously, trying to take down Xue’s speech, a small stone hit me on the side of my head. A man shouted at the crowd from a distance, ‘Do not talk to her! Stop talking to her! She is a spy! A spy!’ Rubbing my head in shock, I looked around.
The man was in his thirties, medium height, thin, wearing a white T-shirt. Was he a plainclothes police officer? Or simply a nationalist passer-by? I had no idea. But the crowd of workers was disturbed by his assault and his ‘warning’. They began to whisper.
The man didn’t give up. ‘Spy! Spy! Go away!’ he continued to shout.
I had to say something – all this was happening because I was there – so I defended the crowd’s right to remain. ‘This is a public space, and we are staying here to talk,’ I said.
Everyone around me clapped and cheered. It was obvious that they wanted to continue telling their stories. The stone-thrower looked embarrassed and quickly left the scene.
Later that day, I went to the North Station, a smaller labour market where rural job seekers gather. When I got there, I noticed many Yi waiting just outside. Some of them could be distinguished by their traditional colourful costumes – the women wore embroidered dresses, the necklines stitched with silver flowers. Some were sitting on their luggage, waiting for the next train home. Others were hanging around for job offers from local recruiters, although there didn’t seem to be much action. The only visible placards advertised an ‘earwax remover’ and a ‘blind masseur’ who performed their services in the alleyway next to the station.
I also noticed the presence of the police as soon as I entered the station. They seemed to be patrolling the area around it too. Their presence made the atmosphere different from other labour markets – the job seekers seemed uncomfortable and looked around constantly to observe the movement of the officers.
I wondered what had made North Station a public-security issue. It looked as insignificant as thousands of other small stations around the country. Then I saw that the officers’ eyes were fixed on the Yi workers. Ten minutes later, I saw two cops, batons in hand, chase a woman in traditional costume and her child out of a street café. The woman had apparently been having lunch with her child when the officers stormed in, shouting ‘Get out! Get out!’
The frightened woman spoke a few words in Yi language, a Tibeto-Burman variant, but did not dare resist the order. She took her child and fled the station area. The police had made no attempt to search or arrest her. It seemed they simply wanted to frighten her. I went up to the officers and asked what the chase was about. They ignored me and walked away. I was told by other onlookers that this happened all the time. But how did they justify it?
‘They say Yi have a bad reputation for dealing drugs. Every Yi person is a suspect,’ one man said.
I witnessed the same police surveillance and harassment at the South Station, also a labour market frequented by Yi residents from rural areas. When I visited, Yi job seekers had gathered to wait for the local recruiters. They looked restless and too worried to talk. A Yi woman told me, ‘The police are always around, scrutinizing our movements. They can stop and search us whenever they like, without a reason. They have no respect for us at all.’
Nationalism has always been part and parcel of ‘Chinese socialism’. Chinese socialism originated not in Marxism but in an eclectic amalgamation of intellectual trends current at the beginning of the twentieth century, including republicanism, anarchism, voluntarism, and populism. At the time, many Chinese intellectuals were being educated in Japan, where they were introduced to Western reformist and radical thinking, and the Western order came to be seen among the Chinese intelligentsia as the ideological model for nation building, which eventually gave the nationalist New Culture Movement its anti-traditionalist character. But that movement, which lasted from 1915 to 1919, was largely liberal, Social Darwinist, and youth-oriented – not Marxist – and Chinese intellectuals did not openly support the Bolsheviks.
Not until China’s betrayal by the Allies at Versailles in April 1919 would this change. China had entered the First World War on the Allied side, on the condition that all German spheres of influence in Shandong province would be returned to China following a victory, and Chinese intellectuals even began to see their participation in the war as the emergence of China as a nation-state. ‘The time had come [to establish] the Chinese nation, which with its enduring civilization encompassed the culture and history of Asia, and for its glory to rise again in the near future,’ wrote Li Dazhao, a leading intellectual at the time.2 But at Versailles, instead of rewarding China as promised, the Allies granted all German rights and privileges in Shandong to Japan.
On May 4, students amassed in Beijing for a demonstration, launching the national anti-imperialist movement that would come to be known as the May Fourth Movement. Demonstrators criticized the incompetent warlord-run government for failing to resist China’s humiliation at Versailles, and May Fourth also marked the beginning of the growth of a fervent Chinese nationalism. The Chinese working class – there were over three million industrial workers in the 1920s – was a new social entity, its members largely from the countryside, and their participation in strikes and anti-imperialist actions would be their entry into political life. In his essay ‘Youth and Villages’, published in 1919, Li Dazhao, one of the movement’s leading theoreticians, wrote of a necessary union between the country’s youth and its peasantry: Though the peasants embodied a movement’s revolutionary energies, they needed to be awakened by the young, who in turn would learn from the peasants the means of liberation. From the May Fourth Movement, with its populism (taking the peasantry as the base for socialist revolution and society) and voluntarism (emphasizing the role of the young intelligentsia), emerged the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), established in 1921.
The growing nationalist movement, which cut across classes, would eventually turn against the workers. In 1920, the Comintern in Moscow conceded the possibility of an alliance with a nationalist bourgeoisie in colonial and semicolonial countries, and under the stewardship of Stalin and others, a United Front was formed between the CCP and the Kuomintang, the bourgeois nationalist organization founded by Sun Yat-sen. In 1923, a proposal was passed at the third conference of the CCP that allowed communists to become members of the Kuomintang, and for the Kuomintang to be considered part of the ‘revolutionary alliance’ of the four classes.
This would turn out to be a disastrous mistake on the part of the CCP. As the labour movement grew in strength, with many trade unionists being CCP members, the Kuomintang grew nervous and in 1927 massacred tens of thousands of workers and trade unionists, destroying China’s labour movement and sending the nascent CCP into retreat in the countryside. There, they found their base among the peasantry and sharpened their vision of Chinese socialism. In the ensuing battles with the Kuomintang in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘Chinese socialism’ developed to become what it largely is today: collective, though party-led, and ultimately aimed at ending foreign invasions, maintaining national sovereignty and establishing an independent republic.
Marxism was largely absent from the beginning. Anti-imperialism and nationalist resistance – backed by a coalition of social classes – drove the 1949 Revolution, and the ruling class used patriotism to mobilize this bloc of the four classes for nation building after 1949. Since then, Chinese socialism has become a reactionary ideology of the state, markedly in its suppression of dissent. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping stated that ‘the only goal of socialism is to make our country strong and wealthy’ – essentially collapsing the difference between Chinese socialism and nationalism.
Throughout my time in China, I could see this everywhere I looked. Not only is there blatant public prejudice against minority migrant workers, there is also little institutional protection for them. No existing legislation ensures punishment of discrimination against ethnic minorities. Racial crimes are not even recognized. There are no statistics on the number of racial attacks and incidents. Some companies offer better pay and working terms to Han Chinese than to migrants who are also ethnic minorities. Other firms have taken children from impoverished minority communities in rural areas and made them work for a pittance, as in Guangdong. But the most important minority issue for the authorities is crime control. In late 2007, the Guangdong public security bureau highlighted ‘public safety’ as the most important aspect of ‘migrant worker management’. I saw how migrant workers in the cities are physically segregated from the rest of society. In public places, such as the train stations, they are put into a special queue for peasant workers (nongmin-gong), to be dealt with separately. I asked a station staffer in Guangzhou why. He replied, ‘You never know what problems they will cause…and there are too many of them.’ Public security officers often walk up and down these queues armed with taser guns, in case of trouble. Despite all this ‘public safety’ management, in reality it is the migrant workers’ personal safety that is in jeopardy.
The frustration of the villagers affected by the earthquake lingered in my mind. I wanted to see for myself just how slow the reconstruction process was. I decided to go to Wenchuan. But in inland China, thinking about visiting a place is one thing, and getting there is another. No trains went to Wenchuan, though it was only about four hours’ journey northwest of Chengdu. I called the bus station.
‘There are no buses going to Wenchuan. The road is closed,’ I was told. ‘Even the taxis can’t go there. The roads are still under reconstruction.’ This was four months after the earthquake, but after all, a lack of transport had been the main reason given for the delay of rescue immediately after the disaster.
I decided to travel to Dujiangyan, sixty kilometres northwest of Chengdu. From there, I was told, it would be a three-hour trip to Wenchuan. Although the roads were in poor condition, I thought a taxi driver might well say yes if I paid a bit extra.
Dujiangyan, a tourist resort, was once chiefly known for its 2,200-year-old irrigation system, built in 256 BC, under the provincial governor Li Bing, to harness the wild Min River. It was an impressive engineering project using a central dam and artificial islands to split the Min into an inner stream for irrigation and an outer channel for flood control. The irrigation stream is still in use today. But Dujiangyan is now famous not only for its ancient history but also for the terrible damage it suffered during the 2008 earthquake. Five schools and a city hospital collapsed along with other buildings and all were still under reconstruction at the time of my visit.
When my then partner John and I arrived at Dujiangyan after a forty-five-minute bus ride, we were confronted by ruined buildings and piles of rubble. The streets were so much quieter –few signs of tourism after the quake, obviously. I asked around for taxis. No one wanted to go to Wenchuan. ‘It’s not permitted. All roads are closed,’ the drivers all said. Eventually, I had to give up the idea of ever getting there.
On to Plan B: A visit to Juyuan Middle School in Juyuan village, on the outskirts of Dujiangyan, 110 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre. Chinese media had reported 250 students and teachers killed; the international media put student deaths at 900. Sixty parents of children buried under Juyuan Middle School attempted to deliver a petition to the local authorities in June 2010, asking the government to launch and publish an investigation, and were instantly arrested by the police for crimes of ‘subversion’. Meanwhile, local courts wouldn’t take up the cases, and lawyers have been warned by the authorities to stay away. Huang Qi, an activist who demanded an official inquiry, was detained on June 2008, then sentenced on 23 November 2009 to three years in prison for ‘illegal possession of state secrets’. In early February 2010, Tan Zuoren, another activist, who had investigated the deaths of children in a number of schools that had collapsed, was jailed for five years for subversion.
Juyuan looked like a postwar village. Not a sound along the street. I asked John to walk away in another direction, to avoid attracting attention, since he is white. He went off to see a river that runs alongside the village, while I walked slowly toward the ruins of the middle school. I saw a few villagers sitting on benches outside their residence.
‘Is that the Juyuan Middle School?’ I asked them, pointing to a huge pile of rubble circled by a metal wire fence.
They looked slightly worried. One of the two women replied. ‘Yes, that’s where the school was. It will be rebuilt on another site a mile away.’
‘Is it being constructed at the moment?’ I asked.
‘No. The building work hasn’t started yet,’ the woman answered. ‘It’s been four months already.’
‘Do you know why there’s a delay?’ I asked.
One of the men became cautious. He raised his eyebrows and said: ‘You are supposed to report to the local authorities first before talking to any of us.’
‘Have you been told not to talk to people from outside, then?’ I asked.
‘Yes. You report to them first. If they permit you, then you can come back to talk to us,’ the man replied.
I walked on, toward the school. It was a horrifying sight. Its four-storey buildings had collapsed completely, like a spilled box of matches. There was only rubble, surrounded by metal wires around the site. Nothing had survived.
But this was not the work of a natural disaster; this was a man-made catastrophe. At the time of its original construction (the east side was built in 1988, the west side in 1995), the building had been certified as meeting the standards of China’s 1978 Construction Earthquake-Prevention Guidelines. However, following the quake, construction ministry expert Chen Baosheng told the Southern Weekend that there had been many fundamental problems with the building of the school. The plank boards pulled from the wreckage ‘were like something that someone just hurriedly put through a wire-drawing machine, without considering its load-bearing capacity, so that when the layers pressed against each other, the thing naturally just collapsed’.3 The steel main beams had been considerably smaller than normal, and the school’s prefabricated architectural structure was poorly equipped to deal with earthquakes.
‘[In this type of structure,] the steam beams don’t have connecting beams,’ said Chen. ‘So when an earthquake hits, the connectors between the walls and the beams, the area between the posts and the boards, and the connectors between the boards all get severely damaged. It’d be surprising if such a building didn’t collapse under the force of a strong earthquake.’
Yi Ancheng, the former principal of Juyuan Middle School, revealed that the school’s classrooms had been made from cement and gravel stone dating back to the 1950s. When construction began in 1986, she had applied to the village party secretary for funds to construct a new classroom building, but her school was granted only 10,000 yuan for the project. In the 1990s, when construction projects were put under the management of the education department of the municipal government, which became directly responsible for the projects’ quality control, the department’s engineer simply borrowed the blueprints from another school, Congyi, and changed the name to Juyuan Middle School, in order to save cash. After that, the Juyuan village authorities passed the building job to a local contractor. ‘As the village government only had a budget of 10,000 yuan, the cost of the construction had to be minimized as much as possible, and the contractors still wanted to squeeze a profit out of it, so you can just imagine what the resulting quality was,’ Yi said.
In 1998, another principal of the school, Lin Mingfu, filed a report on the dangerous condition of the building with the Dujiangyan education department, claiming that it had serious flaws. He was told to use steel wires to secure the part of the roof that was about to collapse. These few wires, as it turned out, were the only things that were holding the building together when the earthquake hit.
Lin Mingfu said that the four-storey classroom building had been constructed to satisfy the national aim of the ‘nine-year compulsory education’ initiatives. He noted, ‘If the higher levels of government had a demand, our local leaders had to promise to carry it out.’ The government’s demand for another building at Juyuan Middle School had to be met, despite the village’s lack of sufficient funds. In this situation, cost-cutting was inevitable. All of the elementary schools that collapsed in Dujiangyan had been built in 1993–94, the middle of the period of ‘nine-year compulsory education’ initiatives.4
I pointed my camera at the rubble and took a number of shots.
‘What are you doing over there?’ said an aggressive male voice behind me. I turned round and saw two police officers. Knowing what this could mean and certainly not wanting to lose my photographs, I pretended that I knew nothing about the site that I was photographing.
‘What is this?’ I asked innocently. They were fooled. Another mindless tourist.
‘It is just a collapsed building. Please leave. There is nothing here for you to tour around,’ one of them said, waving his hand to invite my immediate departure. They also found John with his camera, and asked him to leave the area, too.
We walked on past private houses and shops and realized that all the other buildings in the village had survived the earthquake. They stood strong and intact. The Juyuan Middle School had been the only building hit.
Out of sight of the police officers, I tried to chat with a fruit seller, Mr Zhu, at the edge of the village. Here is what he said:
The surviving students out of the 1,000 at Juyuan Middle School have been moved to study in a school at another village. My neighbour’s niece is among the survivors. The contractor, Juxing Construction, that built the school also built the hospital in Dujiangyan city centre, and as you probably know, that also collapsed. It was no coincidence. But where is the investigation? The authorities dared to ignore our wishes to find out the cause of the tragedy. We all know that the local government helped make this tragedy possible. But you can’t trace the responsibility here, can you? Not if you are resourceless peasants. The company director of Juxing disappeared immediately after the quake. No one can find out where he is. The local government allows few to come into the village, because they don’t want the truth to get out.
Throughout Sichuan, the local authorities have tried to stop international journalists from visiting the collapsed schools and the nearby areas.
In December 2008, the Chongqing Daily News wrote the following report:
A group of migrant workers have travelled thousands of miles on improvised motor tricycles. They all worked in a plastic factory in Dongguan, Guangdong province. Recently, their boss suddenly disappeared, taking all the factory’s money with him. The workers decided to go home without being paid. They found ten discarded motorcycles in the factory and refashioned them into three-wheeled mobile homes … When the riders were stopped by Chongqing traffic police on an expressway yesterday, they had been on the road for ten days.
This happened just after the financial crisis hit the West. Guangdong, in the manufacturing south – the factory of the world – was seeing a significant decline in the number of orders from multinationals, and Chinese investments in US financial markets had shrivelled up. China’s exports had declined by 15.2 percent since 2008; in March 2009 they were 17.1 percent lower, down to $90.45 billion. (During the same period, China’s imports dropped by 43.1 percent. The country’s foreign direct investment also began to decrease from 2008, falling by 5.73 percent in the last month of that year.) With a third of China’s economy based in exports, many Hong Kong–run and local manufacturers were going bankrupt, and when I arrived in Chengdu, half of all toy factories and one third of all shoe factories in China were being shut down in the south. Employers were fleeing as their factories closed down, one after another, all over Guangdong.
But local governments sided with the companies. The Guangdong provincial procurator instructed its officers not to arrest factory employers suspected of ‘white-collar crime’ and in January 2009 Guangdong’s justice department announced ‘Six Nos’, rules that established protections for businesses, in order to ‘help enterprises through the economic crisis and promote enterprise development’: no freezing company assets ‘at random’; no monitoring or closing down company finances ‘at random’; no blocking enterprise communications; no reportage or news coverage that damages enterprises’ reputation; no ‘casual’ arrests of company chiefs; no measures that would have negative impact on enterprises’ production activities. Currently, there is no law in China to punish employers who flee without paying wages. In most cases, migrant workers can do nothing but return home with empty pockets.
By January 2009, an increasing number of Guangdong’s migrant workers were heading home, to Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei. Despite the official statistics showing the national unemployment rate at 4 percent, the real figure was much higher. The majority of rural migrants are not registered in the cities. In Sichuan province, the unemployment rate was now said to be 4 percent, and 3 percent in Chengdu. These figures did not include migrant workers, either.
In the spring of 2009, I went to Jintang county, two hours south of Chengdu. By then 70,000–80,000 people had returned from Guangdong province, following the continuous layoffs and closure of factories since winter 2008, and the streets felt bleak: There were few residents around, and little trade in the shops. Even fewer rickshaws and unlicensed taxis were parked along the street. Many of the unlicensed cab drivers were migrants who had returned home from Guangdong. I spoke to one of them, Mr Zhong, as he scouted for potential customers on the main street.
Mr Zhong, in a strong Sichuanese accent, told me that he worked as a security guard in a company called Yin Yu Lights, the largest manufacturing firm in Heshan city, in the Gonghe township in Guangzhou. The company is part of the Hong Kong Zhen Ming Li Group, with a head office based in Hong Kong, and it employs over 10,000 people from all over China, including a large number from Jintang and Jianyang in Sichuan.
Zhong had moved to Guangzhou in 1997, the year of the handover of Hong Kong. At that time, people felt that things were looking better down south and many were heading that way, and more than a hundred visas were issued each day for travel to Hong Kong. (These visas were still required to control migration from the interior.) Zhong was young and willing to take low-paid work, but for the next ten years, he earned only 700–800 yuan (£64–73.5, $111–127) a month while working twelve to thirteen hours a day, seven days a week, with only two days off each month. His requests for a wage increase were turned down repeatedly until early 2009, when his pay was raised to 1,360 yuan (£124.9, $215). Workers also had the cost of food and accommodation deducted from their wages, though these were supposed to be covered. There were then no written rules to protect the workers, so the company could change terms as they liked, and often did.
In 1999, Zhong became depressed by these conditions, and many of his colleagues felt the same. They resented being treated like another race. They wanted a raise, and discussed among themselves what they should do to get one. One of them broached the idea of a strike, and people became excited. They knew that it would be illegal, but they also knew that stopping work was the only way to put pressure on the management to implement changes. At the same time, they had no clear idea exactly how it should be done. After all, they’d never had the experience.
