Jobless, Restless China: 20 Million And GrowingFebruary 20, 2009 at 11:46 PM EST
YUANSHAN, China — If future historians try to identify the day the global
economic crisis reached the tipping point, they might want to consider Nov.
15 of last year.
That was the day, after years of slowly battling their way out of poverty
as China's economy rapidly expanded, that 39 villagers decided there was no
more money to be made in the once-booming factory cities on the Pacific
Coast. So they packed themselves into 16 rickety three-wheeled tuk-tuks and
began a slow, two-week journey home from booming Guangdong province to this
speck of a place in the country's southwest.
Call it the Long Ride, a modernized and peaceful version of the Long March
retreat staged by Mao Zedong's Communist army 75 years ago. Only the
current retreat is being staged by China's army of suddenly jobless migrant
workers — an estimated 20 million of them and counting, a number larger
than the combined populations of Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. For
years they were the fuel that fed China's booming economy, but this
restless mass now poses a huge challenge for Beijing, which is openly
fretting about the possibility of wide-scale unrest.
Pu Qingsheng and his neighbours were in the vanguard of the movement.
Driving 17 hours a day for two weeks, in an open vehicle that couldn't
exceed 20 kilometres an hour, Mr. Pu drove his motorized rickshaw in convoy
with his neighbours from the port city of Shantou back to this mountain
village in Sichuan province.
Laid-off factory worker Wang Gang hoists a poster advertising his skills as
a CHECK amid a crowd of other recently unemployed men at a jobs market in
the city of Chongqing. Mark MacKinnon / Globe and Mail
Enlarge Image
Laid-off factory worker Wang Gang hoists a poster advertising his skills
amid a crowd of other recently unemployed men at a jobs market in the city
of Chongqing. (Mark MacKinnon/The Globe and Mail)
His wife and two teenage children spent the arduous journey packed in the
back along with their meagre belongings. They endured the exhaust-choked
highways and potholed back roads while crammed three across onto a metal
bench that looks designed for two. They paused once a day for a meal of
instant noodles mixed with borrowed tap water.
The Pu family felt they had no choice but to return to Yuanshan. As the
garment and toy factories that are the economic heart of Shantou shut down
last fall, largely because of slumping demand from North America, fewer
people were willing to pay even the small fee for a ride in Mr. Pu's
tuk-tuk. His wife and children, who all had low-paying jobs collecting
plastics for recycling plants, were told in October their services were no
longer needed.
"When the bosses started closing down the factories, our earnings couldn't
cover our expenses any more," Mr. Pu explained grimly. "Before the crisis,
a normal day's business would bring in between 50 and 60 yuan [$9 to $11] a
day. In October, it suddenly dropped to 30 or 40 yuan [$5 to $7] a day.
Sometimes, it was only 10 or 20 [$1 to $3]. Nobody wanted to take a cab if
they could walk instead and save the money."
The math was the same for everyone from Yuanshan. The 39 villagers had come
to Guangdong together at a time when it looked like China's economic
miracle would go on forever. Now, back home together in this village that
has neither paved roads nor a sewage system, they're trying to understand
what to do next.
In addition to the estimated 20 million, another 5 or 6 million migrant
workers could lose their jobs in the month to come. Some argue that even
those numbers underestimate the scope of what is happening.
As the months go by and the number of jobless mounts, there are rising
concerns that desperation could turn into anger. Scarcely a day has gone by
recently without a new warning from the government in Beijing about the
possibility of growing social unrest.
In the short term, organized action seems unlikely, largely because
independent trade unions are banned in China, leaving workers with nothing
to rally around in these hard times. While workers are involved every year
in tens of thousands of "mass incidents" (the official terminology for
strikes and protests; there were 87,000 in 2005, the last year they were
reported), nearly all have been isolated incidents that were quickly
brought under control by authorities.
For now, many migrants, such as Mr. Pu and his family, have returned to
their homes in the countryside, hoping to scrape by farming their tiny
state-assigned plots of land, just as they did before the boom times. But
with the Chinese New Year festival over, many more have returned to the
cities impatiently waiting for new jobs to materialize to replace the ones
they lost.
With the economic situation in freefall, many are predicting a jump in
crime. A top police official in Guangdong province told reporters this week
that he expected the public-security situation in the factory cities would
be "grim" as a result of the lost jobs.
"There will be more thieves, more crime. Everyone needs to eat and live,"
said Zhou Litai, a lawyer famous in China for representing migrant workers
in disputes with their factory bosses over pay and working conditions. Mr.
Zhou has seen his own caseload drop to just 10 a month from nearly 200, as
his client base was sent home without severance pay or, he says, even their
final paycheques.
Lost jobs, lost confidence
A six-hour drive southeast of Yuanshan, in a makeshift job centre deep in a
warren of backstreets in the chaotic Yangtze River port of Chongqing,
several thousand jobless migrants gather each day hoping to hear that the
economic crisis is over and the factories are hiring again.
The sight of a foreigner entering the room sends a jolt of desperate hope
through the crowd, most of them young men in dirty and tattered clothing,
who rush forward.
"What do you need, laoban?" a man in a threadbare grey sweater asked,
addressing me with the Mandarin word for "boss." His unwashed hair was
stuck to his forehead and he was clutching a hand-made sign advertising his
credentials as a cook. Another sweaty man in a red jacket pushed through
the crowd to take the would-be chef's place in front of me; he said he
could work as a driver.
Others shoved him aside, offering their services as waiters, security
guards, whatever was needed. Until the middle of last year, most of the men
worked in the east coast factory cities.
Even when I explained that I was a journalist rather than a tycoon looking
to open a factory, some wouldn't give up on the idea that I was there to
help them.
"We could go to Canada with you," one persisted, drawing laughter from the
others. "You could be our laoban."
These workers fit the profile of China's migrant population. According to a
soon-to-be-published study by the University of Chongqing, 60 per cent of
migrant workers are male and 80 per cent are between the ages of 20 and 45.
They went east for purely financial reasons. Despite often appalling
working conditions and lack of legal status in the cities where they
worked, migrants could often make 10 or 20 times more money in the
factories than in the villages. The money made everything else tolerable.
That trade-off is gone now, but for many migrants, going home, like Mr. Pu
did, isn't an option. Some have been away so long that they gave their farm
plots away to their neighbours. Others say they don't even remember where
their land is, or how to farm it if they did.
Many of the men in the Chongqing job market have visited the centre every
day for months, surviving on one meal a day and spending nights sleeping in
nearby hostels that offer beds at less than a dollar a night. Though local
restaurateurs came by from time to time looking for help, none of the
migrants reported landing a job that lasted more than a few weeks.
"Originally, I thought of going back to the coastal areas, but I saw on TV
[that the factories are not reopening] and they warned us not to just go
back there blindly," said Huo Liu, a neatly dressed 28-year-old father of
one who worked in a textile factory in the trading port of Ningbo until
last September. Since then, he's been trying to take advantage of
Chongqing's reputation as a centre for spicy Sichuan cuisine and reinvent
himself as a cook. But despite coming to the job centre every day for the
past five months, he has yet to find work.
"I really don't know what I'll do now. I have no confidence in the future
at all. I'll just come here every day and keep looking."
While Mr. Huo seemed resigned to the winds of fate, others in his situation
are starting to find focus for their mounting ire. One popular target is
the urban Chinese, whom they see as looking down on poorly educated
migrants from the provinces. And there's also growing discontent with the
authoritarian government in Beijing.
"They put up signs saying there are jobs, but this is a show for the
foreigners — there are no jobs," one worker shouted, perhaps referring to
a red banner slung from the ceiling that teasingly welcomed migrant workers
from the coastal cities back to Chongqing. "We welcome the migrant workers
who return to their home town to work here and start a business."
"We demand that Premier Wen Jiabao give us some money!" another worker
shouted, to hoots of derision. But no one wanted to put their name to that
statement.
Watching and waiting
What Beijing apparently fears is that the anger will manifest somehow into
a political force. Sun Chunlan, vice-chairman of the government-backed
All-China Federation of Trade Unions, claimed this week that police task
forces had been "rushed" to China's regions to ensure stability. "Hostile
forces within and outside China [are] using the difficulties of some
enterprises to infiltrate and bring trouble to rural migrant workers," he
charged.
In a bid to reverse the country's economic slowdown — and head off labour
trouble — the government in November announced a $585-billion (U.S.)
economic stimulus package and recently instructed firms to do whatever
necessary, including slashing salaries, to avoid further layoffs. The
state-sponsored trade union plans to offer vocational training and small
loans to jobless migrant workers, and the government has been furiously
working to restore a national social-insurance program that has been gutted
since China's still nominally Communist government began moving toward a
free-market economy in the 1980s.
While the overall numbers don't look bad when stacked up against the gloom
in Western economies — the Chinese economy is expected to grow between 6
and 8 per cent this year — they still represent a significant slowdown
for a country used to double-digit growth.
Worse news may be yet to come: Exports, the country's economic lifeblood,
plunged 17.5 per cent in January. The crisis puts in peril the government's
efforts to lift hundreds of millions of peasants out of poverty and to
close the staggering gap between the country's urban rich and rural poor.
What makes the layoffs so difficult to accept for China's migrant labourers
is that they have almost nothing to fall back on. Few Chinese have
unemployment insurance, health insurance or a pension of any kind. For
migrant workers, their social safety net was supposed to be their farmland,
though many are finding it hard to readjust to their old life.
"It does create some problems, some conflicts when they come back to their
villages from the urban areas. Because of the financial crisis, they cannot
foresee when they will go back to their original jobs and the people who
are using their houses and farmlands will not quickly move out," said Zhang
Zongyi, vice-president of Chongqing University and one of the authors of
the migrant labour study.
Ironically, one reason why the predicted unrest hasn't materialized so far
is the same Chinese trait often cursed in the West as a key factor in the
recent global collapse — this country's propensity to save the money they
earn rather than spend it. China's savings rate last year was a whopping 50
per cent, compared with about 3 per cent in the United States.
Whatever damage it did or didn't do to the global economy, the fact that
most Chinese have a store of saving for precisely such a moment means that
the situation, however grim, can be tolerated for a short while longer.
"Right now, migrant workers are still watching and waiting. They still have
savings to last for February and March," said Mr. Zhou, the labour lawyer.
That gives the government programs less than two months to kick in and get
the economy turned around, he said.
However, Mr. Zhou isn't confident that a rebound will happen in time.
"In 2009, the unemployment crisis will definitely affect public security,"
he predicted.
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