The
20-year-old Li has no plans to go home. Unlike older migrant workers who came
to earn money for a few years before returning to their villages, the new
generation intends to stay, envisioning a life in the neon-splashed cities.
For
China, the shift presents a challenge: How to integrate the new arrivals into
already overburdened cities. An agrarian society for thousands of years, China
is on the cusp of having more urban than rural dwellers for the first time.
“People
my age think, what would I do in the countryside? I don't know how to do
anything!” Li says in the simple dorm room she shares with two other women in
Dongguan, a southern coastal boomtown near Hong Kong. Frilly underwear is
draped in a corner and hair clips hold back makeshift privacy curtains on the
bunks.
“I
remember once we were growing wheat at home, it had just sprouted and it looked
just like grass. I couldn't tell the difference so I pulled it out,» she
recalls. “My mom was so mad, she said, how could anyone not tell the difference
between wheat and grass?” Li started working in factories at 14, dropping out
of seventh grade to help support her parents, sister and brother.
In a long
concrete room above an Internet cafe, she and about 60 others toil under bare
fluorescent tubes, occasionally calling out to each other in their singsong
Sichuanese dialect above the din of clacking, thumping sewing machines.
She sews
lining into unfinished bra cups, earning 20 cents for every 12 pieces. In a
good month, she'll make about $225 — that's roughly 14,000 pieces sewn during
shifts that begin at 8 a.m. and don't end until 10:30 p.m.
The
workers, almost all women, get one day off a month, the day after payday so
they can send money home. After that, they might browse at a nearby department
store.
Of an
estimated 150 million migrant workers in China, 90 million are under 30 and
they are driving one of the most significant demographic shifts in the
country's history.
The
government forecasts that China will be majority urban by 2015. About 47
percent of Chinese, or 622 million people, were living in cities at the end of
2009, up from 36 percent in 2000. Some estimate the number could rise to 1
billion by 2030.
“Traditional
migrants were like migratory birds, and felt like both a farmer and a worker,»
says a report released last year by China's official trade union umbrella
group.
“They
identified themselves as visitors in the city.» A 2008 survey of migrants under
30 found that 56 percent planned to buy a house and settle in the city where
they worked, according to the China Youth Research Center.
“They are
more accustomed to urban life than rural life,”the trade union report says. “They've
never been hungry, never felt the cold and never had to worry about food or
clothing. They can't 'eat bitterness' like their parents.» In Dongguan, older
migrants stick out with their sun-beaten faces and shabby work clothes, toting
their possessions in fertilizer bags and plastic buckets hung on bamboo poles.
In
contrast, it's hard to distinguish young migrants from their urban
counterparts. Li sports short black shorts over black tights, working the pedal
of her sewing machine with high-heeled boots trimmed with faux fur. She has two
red studs in one ear, cuffs with thin chains on the other. A silky scarf peeks
out from under the collar of her puffy red coat, which keeps her warm in the
unheated factory.
“My
parents say I've been working in the city for so long that I don't look like a
country girl anymore,» Li says.
“I tell
them, people learn and they change. You want to become a better person and keep
moving forward.» China's cities still treat migrants as second-class citizens.
Under the country's “hukou» registration system, for example, migrants are
considered residents of their rural hometowns. So as “visitors» to a city, they
often face higher medical and school fees and can be cut off from subsidized
housing and other social services.
“Society
should give equal opportunities to people of all levels,» says Wang Chunguang,
who studies migrant issues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Bill
Clinton became the U.S. president; a Chinese migrant worker should also be able
to become a top cadre, a president, a government minister. It shouldn't be that
the children of migrant workers can only become migrant workers.» The
alternative, he warns, is growing social pressure from a marginalized class of
poorly-educated, poorly-paid workers unwilling or unable to return to the
countryside.
“Americans
talk about the American dream ... China needs the Chinese dream,” he says.
Already,
last year saw a wave of large-scale strikes over pay and working conditions, a
sign of an increasingly confident labor force. But wide-scale upheaval is
unlikely as long as the migrants continue to make money and feel they have
opportunities, predicts Leslie T. Chang, author of “Factory Girls,» which
examines the lives of young workers.
“Some of
these people will become middle class and some will become a new urban working
class,” she says. “But they are very different from the traditional working class
associated with state-owned enterprises. This is a new working class that’s
very independent, very mobile and really on its own.» It's impossible to say
exactly how many migrants have settled in cities, because of their transient
nature and still shallow urban roots. But statistics show growing numbers in
the cities, coupled with new migrants leaving the countryside every year.
The
migrants themselves hesitate to say they'll never return to the farm; without
job security, their small plots of land are their only insurance.
Still,
it's clear China's villages are slowly dying.
When Li
returned home to her misty mountain village for the recent Lunar New Year
holiday, there were fewer children setting off firecrackers and fewer dots of
light from houses on the adjacent hillside.
One by
one, families in southwest China's Sanxing village are moving to the nearby
town or even further away, leaving plots covered in weeds between tended
patches of vegetables.
“Over
there, there's four empty houses, there's a lot of them like that,» Li says,
gesturing past the dirt road next to her family’s three-story brick home, which
was built with her and her siblings' factory earnings. “The ones who came back
for the holiday, they're living in town, they don'’t come back to the village
anymore.” Li makes the trip to Sanxing once a year at most. After a two-day bus
trip, it's a 40-minute ride on the back of a motorcycle along a deeply rutted
dirt path. When it rains, the only way to get to the clutch of 26 families is
on foot. Here, her family farms on less than 1/6th of an acre (1/15th of a
hectare), not enough to feed even themselves.
“Of
course I want the young folks to stay in the city, it's better there. It's hard
living in the country,” says 56-year-old Li Weishu, her father, noting that
only grandparents and small children remain. “We don't have much land, this is
a mountain area and there isn't enough to live on.” A visitor might see rustic
charm in the sturdy hand-knitted clogs worn by elderly women, green fields of
winter vegetables, homemade salt pork hanging from kitchen rafters and cooking
stoves fired by dried corn husks.
“No,” Li
says, a bite in her voice. “This place is backward and poor.” She has lost her
taste for the spicy food of her hometown and prefers the milder flavors of
southern Chinese cooking.
Sometimes
she slips into Mandarin instead of her native dialect, prompting her mother to
question when she will forget her own parents.
At the
factory, Li's day clicks ahead with every unit of 12 pieces. She beams as
factory manager Miao Linglin hands her a thin stack of 100 yuan notes. Most of
it will be sent home, and after living expenses, there's not much left for
herself.
Anyway,
there's no time for cruising Dongguan's noisy shopping arcades. After a 14-hour
work day the women rush back to the dorm to get hot water that's only available
for 20 minutes a day.
Li,
parked on her stool in front of the sewing machine, dreams of a future in which
she owns a home in the city and has a stable job working only eight hours a
day.
“Even
though I'm from the country, I want to improve my life and be like people in
the city,” Li says. “Everyone yearns for that kind of life. I yearn for that
kind of life too.”
