On a sweltering night in July 2011, 17-year-old Zhang Juanzi arrives at her farmhouse in the remote village of Silong in Hunan province. Despite the cramped 12-hour van journey from Shenzhen, the young girl bounds past the wooden doors to wake up her 5-year-old brother, Zhang Yi, whose face scrunches in the flickering light. He is thrilled by her arrival, but when he sees his mother, Huang Dongyan, he recoils into his sister’s arms. He will not look at Huang, who is squealing at him, begging him to say “Mommy ….”

Huang and her son have a strained relationship, one damaged by Huang’s absence. It has been months since they last saw each other. Her son seems to view Huang as a stranger who visits once or twice a year and demands his affection. Huang blames the country’s housing registration policy, or hukou system, for their broken bond. The hukou system denies social benefits to China’s some 150 million rural migrant laborers who move to urban areas for work. Because of this policy, migrant workers like Huang are forced to leave their children behind in the village to receive schooling, health care, and other necessary services.

Roughly 58 million children like Yi are left in China’s countryside without their parents. This might be economically necessary, but it is emotionally disastrous: Chinese University of Hong Kong researchers found that adolescents left behind in their villages were more likely to engage in risky behavior such as binge drinking, and have increased thoughts of suicide. The children separated from their migrant parents are also more likely to have learning disabilities and psychological problems, says Zhang Ping, a researcher at the Psychological Science Institute of Guangdong Province. In school, they lack focus; at home they lack guidance.

Xinhua photographer Liu Jie poignantly captured the problem of divided families last year in a set of group portraits in which absent family members were represented by empty chairs. See past posts on CDT for more on labour migration and the hukou system.

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Post tags: hukou, migrant workers, rural migration, Shenzhen, urban rural divide, Zhang Ping
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Chen weaves a fascinating story, detailing the attempts of successive Shanghai governments to “clean up” the city by eliminating straw-hut shantytowns, and the resistance those efforts sparked. Hut-dwellers formed an association and submitted petitions arguing for their right to preserve the community, even offering to pay taxes and thereby making their residence legitimate. In one late-1930s confrontation with the Shanghai Municipal Council (composed of British and American representatives overseeing their countries’ territory in the city), the hut-dwellers accepted that some shanties would be demolished, but successfully negotiated that their owners would be compensated for their loss.

In the 1930s, observers of the shantytown dispute recognized that “The city’s prosperity had been built on the backs of these rickshaw pullers, peddlers, and laborers” and it was therefore unfair to treat them so dismissively. Today, we see that once again, China’s cities have filled with migrant workers who occupy a precarious place in the urban hierarchy: while urbanites appreciate their labor, they are less enthusiastic about the migrants’ presence in their cities.

But as in the 1930s, rural-to-urban migrants are unlikely to give up easily. The hukou reform that would facilitate this push to build a better life in the city will almost assuredly be hard-won, but judging from the life sketches that Loyalka draws, China’s migrant workers are up for the fight. They are, after all, quite familiar with what it means to eat bitterness.

See more on China’s migrant workers via CDT.

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Post tags: book reviews, history, hukou, migrant workers, Shanghai
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Mr. Zhou, 47 years old, lives under the Sandong Bridge in Chongqing. He does not think there is much worth complaining under such living conditions. “We suffered from wage arrears before, but this is no longer a problem now,” He smiled,“We get 20 kuai (yuan) every day for meals and there’s always meat.” He is pretty content with things as they are now ….

There’re 3 arches of 100 square meters and they hold sometimes more than 40 people. They’ve installed lights, water, and the public toilettes and bath houses pitched with canvas. Crude and simple, people respect each other. Men have a drink together after work while women chitchat about the day.

Some workers live on the site because they have to keep an eye on the heavy equipment, while other workers live usually under the bridges. “It’s not cold during the winter, but it’s really hash when it’s summer”, explained Li Mei, “Yes, it’s not as good as being at home, but since we are all from the rural areas, we’ve been through tougher days. Some dwellings back at home are even worse than this. Anyway, we didn’t hear much complaint around.”

A set of pictures taken by Sim Chi Yin in Beijing last year shows the bleak situation of another group of city outsiders: petitioners living on the streets or in shacks, sometimes for years, while trying to present their grievances to the central government. From VII Photo, via Kathleen McLaughlin (@kemc):

At one end of the chilly underpass, a young girl wailed. Her father, Liu Guojun, limped over as quickly as he could with a bowl of sweet potatoes he had picked up at a wholesale market’s rubbish heap and roasted over a street-side stove. He hoped it would get her warm.

With his mentally ill wife and three young children in tow, the 47-year-old electrician spent weeks under a bridge near Beijing’s Southern Railway Station at the start of this year (2011), trying to ward off winter with a few blankets, canvas sheets and cardboard.

They have a home in China’s central Henan province — over ten hours’ train ride from Beijing — but were forced to sleep rough in the capital in order to right what they see as a terrible wrong.

See more via CDT on the hardships facing migrants, the violence facing petitioners, and the hukou registration system excluding both groups from urban society.

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Post tags: homeless, hukou, migrant housing, migrant workers, petitioners, photos
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China’s government has published long-awaited regulations allowing millions of migrant workers from the countryside to obtain permanent urban residence permits — and therefore access to public services — in small and medium-sized cities.

[...]The Chinese government has come under mounting public pressure in recent years to reform its hukou–or household registration–system, under which all of its 1.35 billion people are divided into urban and rural residents and allocated public services accordingly.

Most of the estimated 200 million migrant workers in Chinese cities are still registered as rural residents, and therefore don’t qualify for access to urban public services including health care and schooling for their children.

City planners have long seen the system as a way to prevent the formation of slums and to avoid footing the bill for migrants’ welfare. Many experts now see it as an impediment to necessary urbanization and a potential cause of social unrest.

An article from Xinhua explains the State Council’s announcement:

In cities of county-level or below, people who have stable jobs and residences may apply for permanent residence permits, along with their spouses, unmarried children, and parents, according to a State Council circular posted online late Thursday.

In medium-size cities, people who have stable jobs for three years, stable residences, and have paid social security insurance for at least one year, can also apply for permits to live in the city permanently, the circular said.

That means many of China’s millions of migrant workers may be formally accepted as urban residents, giving them more access to public services including welfare housing and medical insurance, which are currently only open to holders of permanent residence permits in many cities.

For more information on migration in China, see China’s Changing Migration Patterns, via CDT. For a view of the life of migrant workers in China, see Dumplings for Sale, also via CDT.

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Post tags: hukou, migrant labor, migrant workers, migration, urban rural divide
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It’s 4am. Children’s footsteps patter outside, water pours from a faucet, pots are pulled out. I overhear Li Jie. “We barely have enough to buy meat for tonight’s dinner. I hope we have return customers today.”

I’ve been living with Li Jie and her family for a few days. She is one of the 200-300 million rural people who have made their way to cities in the hope… I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Usually newspapers finish it with “in the hope of a better life” or “in the hope of securing a job.” Maybe I can finish it by the time I tell you about a day in Li Jie’s life ….

I met Li Jie four years ago. She is 43 and belongs to the Miao ethnic group. She was always outside the same subway stop selling hand-sewn clothes and purses made in her village. She had her 2-year-old son tied to her back and all her wares were laid out on a large sheet she could roll up at any second if she needed to run. In between selling, she had to breast feed her son and take him to pee and poop in a garbage can nearby.

Despite the grim picture painted by the article, only a relatively short section was removed by the State Council Information Office. Wang posted the censored passage separately on her blog:

Officially know as City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau (城市管理行政执法局), it is not really clear what the chengguan are supposed to do. But what they are known for doing is making migrants’ live miserable in cities across China. There are many stories of chengguan beating vendors, smashing their products or food, and taking bribes. It is also common to hear about chengguan killing street vendors …. [contd.]

In another post at That’s Shanghai, Wang explains her work on the use—and non-use—of technology in China and Mexico. For more examples, see ‘Sleeping in Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users‘ and ‘How I Was Treated on the Subway While Doing Fieldwork as a Migrant Worker‘, via CDT.

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Post tags: censorship, chengguan, hukou, Miao, street vendors, urban rural divide
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The quest of most rural people for an urban hukou, as I understand it, is a search for identity. This notion includes many aspects of human dignity, such as pride, wealth, equality and respect, which rural migrants once believed they could get from China’s urbanization.

But the tragedy of China’s urbanization is that rural migrants are in the city rather than of the city. They are the most likely workers to be laid off in the competitive labor market. They cannot catch up with soaring house prices. They have to pay much more to send their kids to school in the city. Even as they desperately pursue an urban identity, they find themselves further and further away from their original goal.

So if they can get a sense of security and welfare in their rural hometowns, why bother going to the cities? The implication of college students giving up urban hukou is simple: City identity is no longer as attractive as it once was. But potentially, this process of deurbanization can help release the pressure of big cities, and raise the quality of life in both rural and urban areas. 

In August, Kam Wing Chan of the University of Washington wrote in the East Asia Forum about the complexities of China’s urbanization process and its unrealized promises of economic growth. See also recent CDT coverage of China’s rapid urbanization and the plight of the rural poor left stranded as urbanites race ahead.

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Post tags: college students, hukou, labor markets, migrant, rural development, urbanization, wealth gap, welfare
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Due to the massive urbanization process, the traditional pattern of agrarian life in which men farm and women engage in the weaving and spinning has been tweaked in many rural regions in China. However, restrictions and discriminatory policies on family register (hukou) system, housing, education and other social security have rendered it very difficult for an entire family to relocate from the country and gain a foothold in the city. In an effort to bootstrap themselves out of poverty, many peasants have to embark on an arduous adventure alone in the cities and leave their families behind in the villages.

… According to a study by China Agriculture University, currently 87 million people are left behind in rural areas, which include 20 million children, 20 million senior citizens and 47 million wives of migrant workers ….

The Mid-Autumn Day, a traditional Chinese festival to celebrate harvest and family reunion under the full moon on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, falls on September 12 this year. During the ten days leading up to the festival, Liu Jie, a photographer with Xinhua News Agency, trudged from the north of Shaanxi province to its south, and took dozens of family photos of rural residents, where the backbones of the families are missing, and empty chairs sit in their places.

The image of an empty chair became politically loaded following last year’s Nobel Prize ceremony, in which a seat was left unoccupied to mark the absence of imprisoned prizewinner Liu Xiaobo. The Southern Metropolis Daily raised eyebrows soon afterwards with an enigmatic cover image showing three empty chairs and five cranes.

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Post tags: children, elderly, hukou, Liu Xiaobo, migration, rural areas, rural migration, rural women
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China’s capital city ranked 72nd out of the world’s 140 most livable cities in Economist Intelligence Unit’s semi-annual survey, released earlier this week, upping Shanghai, Dalian and Shenzhen. Hangzhou, known as a picturesque retreat for the rich, didn’t crack the list.

Suzhou, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, came in second among Chinese cities, at 73rd place, followed by Tianjin, on the northeast coast, at 74th place. Shanghai ranked 79th; Shenzhen, 82nd; and Dalian, 85th.

The ranking was greeted with widespread ridicule and disbelief: The Financial Times’ Kathrin Hille felt that the EIU’s conclusion “would be funny if it wasn’t so sad …. Perhaps more than any other city in China, the capital is … a place where only a minority of residents enjoy full economic and social rights.” A prominent example is the ongoing demolition of many of Beijing’s schools for the children of migrant workers, for whom mainstream education is generally inaccessible. From The Economist:

China’s system of household registration, or hukou, makes it very difficult for migrants to gain access to urban education and health care. But the urban economy relies on migrant labour, and some cities have been much more adroit than Beijing in providing schools. Shanghai claims last year to have become the first city in China to provide free education for all migrant children, mostly in state-run schools, with some in subsidised private ones.

Beijing is far less keen to embrace them. Chu Zhaohui, of the Ministry of Education’s Central Institute for Educational Research, says Beijing could afford to accommodate all of its more than 400,000 migrant children, some 40,000 of whom have little choice but to use unlicensed schools. But he says the city worries that it is growing unsustainably large. Figures last year showed that Beijing’s population, including nearby towns and villages, had reached 20m, up nearly 45% on a decade earlier, and exceeding the city government’s estimate for 2020.

The fear of a soaring population has already inspired officials to attempt, a few months ago, to close down, again “on safety grounds”, cheap accommodation favoured by many migrants. Tian Kun, a lawyer who has been trying to help the migrants, says that forcing them out will exacerbate social tensions in the capital. The parents of the school-deprived children, he says, “are filled with hate”.

See also ‘China Takes Aim at Rural Influx‘, via CDT.

Ai Weiwei recently wrote at Newsweek that “cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.” The article was ripped from hard copies of the magazine in China, but remained accessible online. From The Telegraph:

“Ai Weiwei’s piece for Newsweek, his first in defiance of the Chinese gag order on him, was a cry from the heart in which he likened Beijing to a vast prison. It ran on the last page of the magazine, and the Chinese censors ripped that page out in every issue,” Tunku Varadarajan, the editor of Newsweek International told The Telegraph ….

“We had flagged the piece on the cover, too, but they left the cover alone, so it delights me that astute readers will have seen the coverline, noted the ripped page, and then gone straight to the Web to read Ai’s courageous piece,” added Mr Varadarajan.

Also on the negative side, though more mundanely, Beijing topped IBM’s “commuter pain” list last year, level with Mexico City.

On The Economist’s Prospero blog, however, a more optimistic Q&A with Tom Scocca delves into his experiences in the city, which formed the basis of a book, ‘Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future‘:

What was the most jarring thing you noticed about the transformation of Beijing?

The government made communal, substantive changes to the infrastructure—new subway lines appeared, giant developments went up—but there was also the hilariously superficial stuff. In 2008 smooth, greyish-silver, aluminium panels would go up over all the storefronts to just square off the building alignment. These weird scrims were put over air conditioning units to unify building facades. It was the little details, impossible to worry about and difficult to make any real headway against, that they set out to fix.

One thing that really did happen was with the escalators. The convention of stand-right walk-left had not existed at all so they painted a line right down the middle of the escalator and put up signs. For some reason, with that, people just picked it up. Maybe New York should take note?

What makes Beijing the capital city of the future? What works about it?

It’s a combination of things, some good and some not so good. China lacks a certain stability unlike America, which has just settled into this almost Panglossian outlook: we have the best rail system that we could therefore it’s stupid to try and make high-speed rail work; we can’t change our health-care system because it might be worse. But this is not the history of the United States. Most of America’s history consisted of stitching stars on the flag as fast as we could—but what would happen now if someone proposed that we should add a state? At the moment we have a perfect round number of states. It is like we’ve achieved the end of history. In China I don’t think they’ve ever had the notion that they’ve reached the end of history.

Sources:

What’s the Capital of the World? – More Intelligent Life
Washington, Capital of the World – More Intelligent Life
Beijing, Capital of the World – More Intelligent Life
Delhi, Capital of the World – More Intelligent Life
Beijing: China’s Most Livable City? – China Real Time Report – WSJ
Beijing: the most liveable city in China, for whom? – FT.com
Beijing’s migrant workers: School’s out – The Economist
China censors Ai Wei Wei’s Newsweek interview – Telegraph
Mexico City, Beijing top list for worst ‘commuter pain’ – latimes.com
The Q&A: Tom Scocca, author – The Economist

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, Beijing 2008 Olympics, cities, dalian, Hangzhou, hukou, London, migrant education, new york city, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Tianjin, urban rural divide
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Though the quality of education they offer may be questionable, private schools like Red Star are often the only option for the children of low-skilled migrant laborers, who for the most part are ineligible for the free public education available to legal Beijing residents. Known derisively as “waidi ren,” or outsiders, the migrants are the cut-rate muscle that makes it eminently affordable for better-off Chinese to dine out, hire full-time nannies and ride new subway lines in places like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen ….

To manage the huge population flows — and its own fears — the government relies on an internal passport and registration system dating from the Mao years that ties access to education, health care and pensions to the birthplace of a person’s parent. The hukou system, as it is called, has created a two-tiered population in many Chinese cities: those with legal residency and those without.

Though urbanization is a central tenet of the party’s latest five-year economic plan for the country, Mr. Chan says, the 250 million rural migrants who are expected to move to cities in the next 15 years could become a source of social unrest unless the hukou system is reformed. “Having that many second-class citizens in Chinese cities is dangerous,” he said ….

Resistance [to reform] comes from factory owners who want migrant laborers to remain insecure and cheap to exploit, and from urban elites who fear an even greater deluge of migrants from the countryside if it becomes easier to live in the city. But the most formidable opposition may be that of local governments, which worry about paying for the health care, education and other benefits that migrants and their children would qualify for as legal residents.

Meanwhile, Caixin reported that education spending in Beijing is soaring, with some middle schools charging up to 87,000 RMB a year, and parents spending an additional 30-80,000 RMB on private tutoring.

For more on the migrant schooling issue, see ‘Migrant School Demolished, Parents Furious‘ and ‘Yu Jianrong on Closing of Migrant Schools‘, via CDT. Internet cafés have become an unlikely alternative source of childcare for migrant workers, while also providing some opportunities for informal education: see Tricia Wang’s presentation ‘Sleeping in Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users‘, also via CDT.

Yesterday it was reported that a staff member at a daycare centre for children of migrant workers in Shanghai had attacked eight children with a boxcutter.

Sources:

China Takes Aim at Rural Influx – NYTimes.com
Survey: Beijing Middle School Education Spending Soars – Caixin online

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Post tags: hukou, migrant education, schools, urban rural divide
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Parents of migrant students were dismayed to find that over ten of the school’s buildings had been razed to the ground on August 15, only three days before the New Hope School for migrant children in northwest Beijing was set to start classes. The parents were not informed prior to the event.The local authorities demolished the school after its contracts allegedly expired. A school official said that some buildings had already been razed while the government had not yet notified them about some others. There was no time to inform parents before the destruction, the school representative said. The school has over 790 students, and parents are worried about how to keep their students in school, since enrolling at public schools is complicated, difficult, and even impossible for some parents due to stringent regulations. The New Hope School had specifically served the children of migrant laborers, who historically have not been allowed to attend schools in Beijing because it is not their official residence.

The Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin notes that many other migrant school demolitions loom, and that proposed alternatives are inaccessible and inadequate:

Around 30 private schools, set up to provide a basic education for the children of migrant workers in Beijing, have been ordered to close, leaving nearly 30,000 students with an uncertain future as the new school year begins, the Beijing News reported today.

The affected schools are all located in the outlying districts of Daxing, Chaoyang and Haidian that have been home to migrant worker families for many years, even decades, but are now under increasing pressure from property developers as the city expands ever outward.

Most of the district government closure orders issued in June cited illegal construction, illegal operation and safety concerns as the reasons for closure, although many schools had been operating technically illegally for many years without any government intervention.

For context, see Millions of Chinese rural migrants denied education for their children, from The Guardian last year:

Despite spending more than half his life in Beijing, Hu does not enjoy the same access to health, education and social services as his neighbours. And because the hukou – registration – is inherited, neither do his children.

“I wish my kids could go to a state school,” says Hu. “Parents always wish their children could receive a better education.”

The contradictions of the hukou system, designed for a 1950s planned economy, become more painful with every year of China’s development. About 140 million rural migrants are now working in the cities, where average incomes are more than three times than those of the countryside. Migrants have fuelled the country’s spectacular growth but not reaped the benefits. And once they become parents, they face an unpalatable choice.

Fifty-eight million children are left behind in the countryside by parents who hope that relatives will raise them lovingly. Another 19 million remain in the cities – where they are, in effect, second-class citizens. Both groups have poorer academic performance and more behavioural problems than their peers.

Sources:

Migrant School Demolished, Parents Furious – Caixin online
Nearly 30 migrant schools in Beijing ordered to close – China Labour Bulletin
Millions of Chinese rural migrants denied education for their children – The Guardian

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: demolition, hukou, migrant education, schools
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