The 2010 census put the percentage of working-age women in the work force at 74. The figure stacks up well against other countries such as the United States and Australia, where about 75 percent of working-age women were employed in 2010. In Sweden, the female labor force participation for 2010 was 87.5 percent; France, 84 percent; Britain, 79 percent.

But China’s figure is high because it includes women working in the countryside, and unlike developed countries, nearly half of China’s population is still rural. The picture for urban women is very different.

China’s urban employment rate for working-age women fell to a new low of 60.8 percent in 2010, down from 77.4 percent 20 years earlier, according to census figures. The 2010 rate was 20.3 percentage points lower than that of men.

This troubling trend matters because the effort to move people from the countryside to the cities is a top policy priority of China’s new leaders — one that they see as crucial to boosting economic growth. [Source]

In BusinessWeek, Christina Larson makes a similar point and discusses challenges faced by women trying to move up China’s corporate ladder in a male-dominated corporate culture. Larson argues that China needs a movement similar to the Lean In movement launched by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg:

What explains China’s growing pay disparity? Wang Xiaolin, director of research at the International Poverty Reduction Center in China, told the People’s Daily that women more often chose to work in less lucrative industries. “Many female migrant workers stay at the low end of the service sector, such as working as waitresses in restaurants, while men take more positions in the manufacturing industry.” While this may be true, Wang’s explanation doesn’t sufficiently address the obstacles that college-educated professional women confront.

One hurdle may be the particular nature of China’s modern business landscape, which emphasizes guanxi—stoking a web of interlocking personal and professional connections. “Guanxi itself is such a male world,” explains Susan Brownell, an anthropologist specializing in China at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “Businessmen go to KTV bars and often patronize prostitutes together. It’s hard for women to share the same bonding experiences.” That’s why at least one successful female business owner, bowing to the fact that male clients expect to be wined and dined at karaoke bars and massage parlors (where there is at least the possibility of paying for sex), has designated a young man on her staff to take out clients on her behalf. Her solution is crafty, but it’s a depressing form of accommodation. “Successful women in China must develop tactics to handle the male aspects of guanxi,” says Brownell.

As both Hong-Fincher and Larson make clear, China’s rapid urbanization is hitting women especially hard as it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to find rewarding and lucrative work in urban areas. The women left behind in rural areas, meanwhile, are seeing some improvements in their lives as urbanization takes hold in society, but many challenges remain. Suicide rates of rural Chinese women, once among the highest in the world, have dropped considerably. But rural women remain largely powerless in Chinese society. From Eric Fish in the Atlantic:

By most measurable indicators, the lot of rural women has improved dramatically in the decade since Michael Phillips’ suicide study shocked the nation. In addition to the falling suicide rate, record numbers of women are attending college, rural healthcare has expanded greatly, and millions have been pulled from abject poverty.

But rural areas haven’t kept up with cities, and women haven’t kept pace with men. While per capita income tripled for rural residents from 2,253 RMB ($275) per year in 2000 to 6,977 RMB in 2011, incomes in cities nearly quadrupled from 6,280 to 23,979 RMB during the same period, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Rural women only earned 56 percent of what their male counterparts did in 2010, down from 79 percent in 1990. These gaps in money and power leave rural women vulnerable to exploitation.

Reliable statistics for sexual assault in China don’t exist, but Tsun-Yin Luo, a professor at the Graduate Institute for Gender Studies at Shih-Hsin University in Taipei, estimates that fewer than one out of ten sexual assaults are ever reported in China. “The patriarchal culture actually brings sexual violence to female victims,” she says. “Lots of victims of sexual assault feel ashamed of their victimization, and even if they don’t feel ashamed, their family ensures that they feel ashamed.”

Luo says that this disproportionally affects rural women, who don’t have the same access to information about their rights. “Women in the countryside tend to be left behind,” she says.

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Post tags: gender equality, migrant workers, rural women, urban rural divide, urbanization, women workers, women's rights
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Word of the death spread on the Internet in the days after the woman, whose surname was Yuan, was initially said to have committed suicide by jumping from a top floor or roof of the mall, called Jingwen, last Friday. Rumors on the Internet said Ms. Yuan, a migrant worker from Anhui Province, had been raped by private security guards in the mall, where she worked, and might have been thrown to her death.

A witness told The Wall Street Journal that the protest had swelled by 10 a.m. and had ended by 5 p.m., though a heavy police presence lingered on the scene. CDT’s “Sensitive Words” project also noted that photos of riot police and police helicopters had spread on Weibo, while footage of the demonstration had emerged on Tencent.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman had more on the protests:

A shopkeeper who gave his name only as Mr Li said that some police had arrived at around 10am, followed by around 200 people who paraded down the street shouting “Protest! Protest!”

The rapidly growing number of officers then closed the road for the rest of the day, he said. Photographs of the scene posted online showed hundreds of people on the street, although it was not clear how many were protesters and how many were onlookers.

One bystander said that officers had clashed with protesters, beating them and dragging them into vans.

While police said a preliminary investigation and autopsy did not indicate foul play, and that the woman did not have any interaction with other people during the hours before she fell to her death, the state-run Global Times reported that the demonstrators demanded a more open investigation:

Rumors have been circulated online that Yuan was gang raped in a enclosed room inside the building by seven security guards, which led to her suicide, or that they even pushed her out. Yuan’s mother visited the Dahongmen Police Station supervising the market but was not allowed to see the surveillance footage, some Web users said.

Leslie Hook of the Financial Times wrote that the protest, which halted traffic in southern Beijing for hours, “highlights mounting social pressures facing China’s leaders:”

The area where Ms Yuan worked is poor and is mostly populated by “outsiders” such as herself who work in the garment trading industry, according to residents. Scepticism of the police is widespread in China and many smaller protests across the country have been sparked by allegations of malpractice.

By Wednesday evening, the protest had dissipated amid heavy rain, but a large military presence was still visible, with dozens of parked buses carrying special forces, soldiers and police.

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Post tags: Anhui, Beijing, mass incidents, migrant workers, murder, protest, rape, suicide, women's rights, Yuan Liya
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Yuan Liya (center) “jumped” to her death on May 3. (Weibo)

Around 4 a.m. on May 3, young Anhui migrant Yuan Liya fell to her death from the fourth floor of the Jingwen Wholesale Market in Beijing, where she worked. The Beijing authorities insist that she committed suicide and have refused requests by Yuan’s boyfriend and family to make public the Jingwen closed-circuit video of her fall.

This morning, migrants from Yuan’s home town protested in central Beijing, triggering a massive police presence. Photos of riot police on the streets and police helicopters circling the protesters have circulated on Weibo. Footage of the demonstration is available, for now, on Tencent [zh]. Read more about Yuan’s case and the protest from CDT Chinese [zh].

• Jing+Wen (京+温): For Jingwen Wholesale Market.
• Yuan Liya (袁利亚)
• Dahongmen (大红门): Yuan’s family have brought their case to the Dahongmen Market police station.
• South Third Ring [Road] (南三环): Location of Jingwen.
• Muxiyuan (木樨园): Street blocked by police.
• helicopter (直升机)

Update: More images from the protest and screenshots of propaganda directives have been added to the photo gallery below.

All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.

Browse all of CDT’s collected sensitive words in this bilingual Google spreadsheet.

CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.

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Post tags: Anhui, Beijing, censorship, Internet censorship, migrant workers, Ministry of Truth, protests, Sensitive Words Series, weibo, Yuan Liya
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At The New York Times, Edward Wong summed up the sensitive social and environmental issues surrounding the mine, from which a leaked propaganda directive issued on Saturday warned domestic media away:

Ethnic tensions have played into the outrage over mining. Most of the mines in Tibet belong to large state-owned enterprises based in eastern China, and they mostly bring in ethnic Han managers and workers, shutting Tibetans out. Of the 83 miners buried by the Gyama avalanche last week, only two were Tibetan, according to official news reports.

Environmental concerns, though, have dominated. Scientists have documented significant problems brought by the ravages of the Gyama mine, which belongs to China Gold International Resources Corporation, a company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is a unit of the state-owned China National Gold Group.

A paper published in 2010 by Science of the Total Environment, a journal, discussed the impact of mining activities on the surface water in the valley, including on streams that feed the Lhasa River. The researchers found elevated concentrations of six metals in the surface water and streambeds in the middle and upper reaches of the valley. These “pose a considerably high risk to the local environment,” according to a summary; meanwhile, pools of heavy metals were “a great potential threat to downstream water users.”

Establishing the mine at Gyama resulted in the relocation of nomads who had roamed the valley and grazed their animals there. The forced settlement of nomads is a policy that Communist Party officials have been pushing for years in many parts of Tibet, despite the widespread resentment it causes.

chinadialogue, meanwhile, highlighted its own article from 2011 reporting local Tibetans’ protests at the mine’s environmental impact, and warning of the area’s seismic instability.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: migrant workers, mines, mining, mining accidents, natural disasters, nomads, Tibet, Tibet environment, water pollution
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Given the incredible diversity of China, the strategy of rule sketched out above has never worked for everyone or applied equally to all parts of the country. Many Chinese in rural areas have been frustrated by how long it has taken for the rising tide that was supposed to lift all boats to reach them, and large numbers of members of ethnic groups, most famously Tibetan and Uighurs, have never accepted the mythic notion that in 1949 the Communist Party, whose leaders treated them much like colonized subjects, had gloriously “liberated” all citizens of the People’s Republic of China from foreign control. A third key grievance driving the protests of 1989—anger at corruption and nepotism—has never gone away.

Most recently, an additional challenge has emerged: discontent among many of those who once seemed most ready to accept the post-1989 consumerist bargain, as long as it meant that life kept improving materially. After a series of tainted-food scandals and an ongoing pollution crisis, epitomized by the wretched smog that blanketed many cities this past winter, many who have been doing relatively well materially in recent years are now questioning whether their quality of life really is improving. They hunger for a government they can trust.

How can we move beyond the tendency either to underestimate the resilience of the Chinese Communist Party or fail to understand the important challenges it faces? Helen Gao, Leta Hong Fincher, Alec Ash, and Ross Perlin show us a valuable way to proceed, charting out an alternative path of analysis that will also be explored in later contributions to Dissent, which is committed to publishing similar behind-the-headlines reportage and analysis on China in future issues. These four deeply informed writers pay attention to the attitudes of ordinary people; to individuals who are neither part of the government nor locked into a directly antagonistic relationship to the regime; to women as well as men; to the young as well as the old, keeping in mind that for two thirds of China’s 1.3 billion inhabitants, Chairman Mao has always been dead.

Specific articles include:

- Land of Many Nationalisms by Helen Gao
- Women’s Rights at Risk by Leta Hong Fincher
- China’s Youth: Do They Dare to Care about Politics? by Alec Ash
- Chinese Workers Foxconned by Ross Perlin

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Post tags: ethnic minority, migrant workers, quality of life, social unrest, Tibet, wealth gap, women's rights, Xinjiang
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Rescue work was later suspended after geological experts found four cracks with lengths of more than 600 meters on the mountain top, posing risks of a subsequent landslide.

Rescuers were asked to retreat to the safe zone and wait for monitoring and evaluation from relevant departments.

More than 4,500 rescuers and 200 machines were working at the site to find the buried miners, said a spokesman with the rescue headquarters.Intermittent snow at the site, however, was hampering rescue efforts,

Another Xinhua report focused on the mine’s sole survivor, Zhao Linjiang, who was in Lhasa City when the landslide struck.

On Friday, he received a confusing call from his boss, who asked him to return immediately. On his way back to work, Zhao tried to call his relatives who also worked at the mine, but nobody answered.

When he got back to the mine, he found that it was no longer there. Instead, there was a mile-long pile of rocks in the place of the workers’ camp, and 83 workers, including his 23-year-old brother Zhao Malin and six other relatives, were nowhere to be found.

[…] Zhao said his phone rings about 40 to 50 times a day, mostly calls from the families of his co-worker relatives, who had once dreamt about bringing wealth to their families in the impoverished villages of Guizhou’s Xishui County.

Though life could be tough on the 4,600-meter-high plateau, the workers earned 8,000 yuan (1,288 U.S. dollars) to 9,000 yuan a month, roughly half the average annual income of people in their hometown, a victim’s family member from Guizhou told Xinhua.

The Hindu’s Ananth Krishnan surveyed online responses to the disaster:

While environmental groups and Tibetan exiled groups have long highlighted the adverse impact of mining project on the plateau’s ecosystem, Friday’s landslip also brought unusual — and unprecedented — criticism from Chinese bloggers, filmmakers and even singers. Television director Zhang Ronggui said he was “strongly opposed to the development of heavy industry and mineral resources in Tibet” in a widely forwarded post on Sunday on the Chinese Twitter equivalent Sina Weibo.

“It is the world’s highest and purest holy land, and I hope the government can leave a blue sky, clean water and white clouds for the next generation,” he wrote. His post, as of Sunday night, had been forwarded by more than 8,000 people.

Well-known singer, Zhang Yihe, in a message to her 339,000 fans, said: “I don’t understand why we have to dig up gold in areas that are above 4,000 metres. Why must we also build dams on rivers, including the Yarlung Zangbo? Why don’t we leave something for the next generation?” Other writers have also said the close relationships between local Communist Party officials and influential state-run companies have often resulted in environmental concerns and livelihood issues of local communities being ignored in mining projects, not only in Tibet but elsewhere in China.

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Post tags: Guizhou, landslides, lhasa, migrant workers, mining, mining accidents, mining industry, natural disasters, Tibet
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At about 6 a.m. on Friday, the disaster struck a workers’ camp of the Jiama Copper Polymetallic Mine in Maizhokunggar County, about 68 km from Lhasa, the regional capital.

By 8 p.m. Saturday, 3,500 rescuers and 300 large-scale machineries are working on the site, according to local authorities.

“The rescuers are conducting inch-by-inch search but they still cannot locate the missing miners,” said Wu Yingjie, deputy secretary of Tibet Autonomous Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China.

[…] Wu added that a one-meter-wide and 15-meter-long crack was formed at the mountain top, which indicated a possibility of subsequent disasters.

From the Associated Press:

Smaller landslides have already hampered rescue efforts, according to Xinhua, while damage to nearby roads slowed the delivery of heavy equipment. Many workers have reportedly been digging with bare hands while suffering from altitude sickness. Snow began to fall on Saturday afternoon, and temperatures of -3°C have interfered with sniffer dogs’ sense of smell.

A media directive from the Central Propaganda Department described the landslide as “natural”, but warned news organizations “without exception” not to “report or speculate on related sensitive issues.” Likely among these is the question of whether mining activity may have triggered the disaster. After a landslide killed 46 people in Yunnan in January, local suspicions fell heavily on a nearby coal mine despite an initial investigation which claimed that mining was not to blame for the disaster. 72 surviving villagers subsequently wrote to the State Council requesting that this conclusion be reexamined.

Another sensitive point is the ethnicity of the buried miners, only two of whom are local Tibetans. The rest are Han, mainly from nearby Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan provinces. Beijing has invested heavily in boosting Tibet’s economy, but the benefits have tended to flow to state-owned enterprises, and the jobs to incoming migrants, rather than to the local population.

Updated at 2:35 PST, March 31st: South China Morning Post reports the discovery of a second body, while the Associated Press provides more details on the mine operator:

The miners worked for Huatailong Mining Development. The company is a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based China Gold International Resources Corp. Ltd (TSX: CGG), whose controlling shareholder is the China National Gold Group Corp., a state-owned enterprise and China’s largest gold producer.

The disaster has spotlighted the extensive mining activities on the Tibetan plateau and sparked questions about whether mining activities have been excessive and destroyed the region’s fragile ecosystem. Criticisms, however, only flashed through China’s social media Saturday before they were scrubbed off or blocked from public view by censors.

[…] Btan Tundop, a Tibetan resident, noted the mining company’s dominance in the area in a short-lived microblog: “The entire Maizhokunggar has been taken over by China National Gold Group. Local Tibetans say the county and the village might as well be called Huatailong.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: landslides, lhasa, migrant workers, mine safety, mining, mining accidents, natural disasters, Tibet, Tibet development
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A one-room shack with a single, bare light bulb on a non-descript Beijing side street is 29-year-old Chinese migrant worker Zhang Xuefang’s best recourse to medical care.

Not recognized as a Beijing resident, she does not qualify for cheaper healthcare at government hospitals, and her hometown is too far away to take advantage of medical subsidizes there.

Like millions of other migrant workers, Zhang, on whose labor China’s economic boom depends, is forced into a seedy and unregulated world of back ally “black clinics” if she falls ill.

The issue highlights the two-tier nature of China’s overburdened health care system and goes to the heart of a heated debate about how to reform the contentious “hukou” system of household registration, a cornerstone of government policy for decades which essentially legalizes discrimination between urban and rural residents.

As the article notes, there are signs of looming hukou reform: see ‘Hukou Reform in Spotlight at NPC‘ and ‘8 Questions and a Podcast on China’s Urban Billion‘ at CDT.

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Post tags: health care, healthcare, hukou, migrant workers, rural urban divide
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Lu Qingmin, or Min, is typical of the migrant workers I met while researching a book in the factory city of Dongguan. Born in one place, working in another, and married into a third, they are as adept at moving between worlds as the frequent-flying global élite, with the difference that they have never left their home country. The Chinese government, which is good at transmitting edicts from Beijing down through the provinces to counties and villages, isn’t set up for people who don’t respect borders. Married migrant women are required to send home a certificate every year confirming that they are not pregnant; Min has never done this. Her older sister, who works in nearby Shenzhen, also has two children. The owner of an apartment that I rented in Dongguan from 2005 to 2006 had two children; so did a businessman who gave me a tour of the city’s karaoke bars. “Most of my friends have two children, except the ones who have three children,” Wu Chunming, a migrant who has lived in the city for nineteen years, told me. “In the villages now, having two children is standard.”

For so long a symbol of the authoritarian state at its most coercive, China’s policy limiting most families to one child is slipping into irrelevance. Last week, the government announced it would merge the National Population and Family Planning Commission, which has overseen the policy for three decades, into the Ministry of Health—a tacit admission that limiting births no longer requires the scrutiny and enforcement it once did. Most observers see this as a first step toward dismantling a policy that has already been rendered inconsequential by increased mobility, rising wealth, and the sense that stringent controls are no longer necessary. Wealthy Chinese can travel to the United States to give birth, which also confers the bonus of American citizenship on the child. Couples one step down the economic ladder may have a second child in Hong Kong, Macau, or Singapore. Families with two offspring are commonplace among the country’s millions of mobile entrepreneurs; an estimated 150 million rural migrants enjoy similar freedoms. Even in the countryside, where heavy penalties and forced abortions were more prevalent in the past, officials are loosening their grip. In my conversations with rural Chinese people over the past several years, it has become clear that fines that were once prohibitive are now just a nuisance—a couple of months’ wages, rather than a lifetime of savings.

China newz interviews Chang about her book and how things have changed for the migrant workers she portrayed in recent years:

china newz: Do you still keep in touch with Min and Chunming?

Leslie T Chang: Yes, I am in touch with both of them.

china newz: How have their lives changed since your book?

Leslie T Chang: They have both continued to pursue their own paths. Since the book came out, Min married a fellow migrant, had two daughters, and lived for a while in his family’s village with him. She and her husband subsequently returned to Dongguan on their own to work in a construction crane factory. They recently moved to Huizhou, another city in Guangdong province, where she works in the purchasing and finance department of a small cellphone factory. Now her husband, two daughters, and parents-in-law are all together in the city. Chunming has changed jobs five or six times since the book came out. She now works in sales and training for a chain of traditional-style tea houses. She is still unmarried and looking for love and a suitable husband. My book is actually being published in China this month, so they will finally be able to read the book in full. I am very curious to see what their responses will be.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: family planning, migrant workers, one-child policy
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China’s new leaders are planning a system of national residence permits to replace the household registration or ‘hukou’ regime, a government source said, a vital reform that will boost its urbanization campaign and drive consumption-led growth.

[...]In a speech to parliament on Tuesday that laid out the blueprint of the new leaders, outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao said hukou reforms should be accelerated to drive an urbanization effort that he said would underpin economic development.

[...]Wen said consumption was the key to unlocking the full potential of domestic demand in the economy and would reduce excess, inefficiency and inequality. It would also help deliver growth of 7.5 percent in 2013 – a level China barely beat in 2012 when growth eased to 7.8 percent, its slowest pace in 13 years.

An op-ed in the South China Morning Post has more on Wen’s urbanization-themed work report at the NPC, and outlines the shortcomings of previous attempts to reform the system before offering policy advice for successful hukou reform:

In addition to the city-level system, a metropolitan-wide hukou system could also be launched. In Shenzhen, the newest of the mega cities, fewer than 20 per cent of the population have local hukou; increasing this figure should be a social development priority.

Guangdong could try a new breed of metro hukou for the Pearl River Delta. The 50 million urban residents in the top six delta cities – Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan , Foshan , Zhongshan and Zhuhai – have similar income levels. So a new class of metro hukou, allowing full mobility within the delta area, could be offered. This would further improve the economic and social cohesion within the region.

Beyond the regional level, a national hukou system, allowing limited mobility across major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, could be considered at an appropriate time.

In 2011, China’s urban population passed 50 percent, and the central government projects that it will reach 60 percent by 2020 – the steady flow of rural workers to China’s cities is set to continue. China.org.cn reports on an NPC delegate who stressed the need to make migrant workers permanent residents in the cities that they work:

Ma Xu, a Beijing delegate to the first session of the 12th National People’s Congress (NPC) said during a speech that he hopes the term “migrant worker,” low-income individuals who leave their rural hometowns in search of work in larger urban areas, will no longer be relevant within five years.

[...]Ma stressed the importance of permanently moving migrant workers into urban areas. He saidthat the government needs to take into consideration the development of human resources of the floating population, with the migrant workers as the greatest group, in its urbanization plan, so as to make history the word “migrant worker” in China within five years.

To reach this goal, special funds need to be allocated to create a occupational skills training system for migrant workers with programs designed to help them start their own businessnesses.

Ma suggested that the integration of new city dwellers should be included in China’s urbanization plan, and detailed plans should be designed as soon as possible.

One oft-covered symptom of China’s dysfunctional hukou regime is a lack of public schooling for the children of migrant workers. The children who aren’t left behind in the countryside rely on unlicensed schools whose future’s are anything but certain. Another recent report from the South China Morning Post profiles the Xiangyang Primary School, a school for migrant children in Beijing:

Founded four years ago, the Xiangyang school has an enrolment of about 700 pupils from migrant families. The school’s principal, Luo Chao , said the school receives no financial support from the local government because they have not been able to obtain an operating licence from local authorities. In 2006, a freeze was placed on the issuance of licences for schools that cater to migrant children, but the schools are still allowed to exist and are even subject to safety and hygiene inspections.

Already struggling to keep the school open with a lack of public funding, Luo said he must charge pupils very low tuition rates because most of their parents are low-income migrant workers. He said the school charges students just 130 yuan a month for lunches, even as inflation pushes food prices higher.

“We know we might not be able to meet [education] standards, and pupils would be better off at public schools or government-funded schools,” Luo said. “But the fact is, we’re still sought after by parents. We’ve done the government a favour by providing pupils with the schooling that they have failed to deliver.”

Reporting from another of Beijing’s migrant schools, one they may soon be razed to make room for new development, CNN notes that local political and economic concerns stand in the way of national level hukou reform:

“The government is trying. They’re definitely making efforts, they realize that this is a big problem,” William Nee of the China Labour Bulletin said. “The problem is the finances of the health care scheme and education are all done at the local level, so I think it’s very difficult for the government at the national level to say, ‘Okay, let’s just reform the hukou system’.”

The political cost of reforming the hukou system is onerous. “The mayors and party secretaries of many major cities are concerned that if hukou is freed up, there will be a huge fiscal burden in providing services for these migrants,” said Yukon Huang, senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment and former World Bank director of China.

“If you ask the residents, the established residents of the major cities, they would say I don’t want more people coming, this may mean fewer job opportunities for us,” Huang added.

Also see a New York Times “Letter From China,” in which Didi Kirsten Tatlow looks at one migrant’s life and the difficulties that have come with urban living.

For more on migrant workers and the hukou system, see previous CDT coverage.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hukou, left-behind children, migrant labor, migrant workers, NPC 2013, urban rural divide
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With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a self-styled citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

[…] A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t give up my sources or the videos.”

[…] Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, largely relies on whistle-blowers to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site, which is called People’s Supervision.

Zhu’s “characteristic bombast” may seem excessive, but is at least in part a matter of self-defense: by courting attention from traditional and social media, he hopes to deter attempts to silence him. That he credits Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption speeches, the Chinese Constitution and his own love of country with inspiring his activities may confer some measure of additional protection.

Nevertheless, his crusade has cost him. He has chosen to end his marriage, he says, rather than see his wife, a P.L.A. officer, suffer retaliation from his adversaries. “To be honest,” he told The Times’ Jonah Kessel, “I would like to tend to the big family in sacrifice of the small family.”

Kessel has also posted outtakes from their conversation on Vimeo, including an extended account of a recent police visit to Zhu’s Beijing home. Chongqing authorities appear determined to contain the sex tape scandal by acquiring Zhu’s remaining videos, but as in the recent New York Times hacking attacks, identifying sources seems to be their primary goal. From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

Powerful interests were searching for his sources, he explained over lunch last Friday [January 25th]. Police detained one contact in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where the scandal had erupted, Zhu said. They traced a second source to Henan province, hundreds of miles away, and had questioned that person at least twice.

Two days after that conversation, the police showed up at Zhu’s home in Beijing. They banged on his door Sunday night and demanded that he come with them. He refused but reported to a police station Monday morning, where he was held for more than seven hours. Police officers from Chongqing pressed him to hand over five sex recordings he hasn’t made public and to tell them the identities of his informants. They threatened that “if you don’t present evidence, you will be in violation of national law,” according to Zhu’s account.

The pressure on Zhu suggests that despite Communist Party rhetoric about an all out campaign against corruption, limits remain. The party’s leader, Xi Jinping, said shortly after being installed in November that failing to crack down on corruption would risk the downfall of the state. But while Beijing has dismissed some wayward officials and canceled extravagant banquets that stoked resentment among average Chinese, it so far seems set on keeping a tight grip to keep the process from spinning out of control.

Undaunted, Zhu has offered a cash reward to anyone who can verify the identity of a state-owned enterprise president allegedly caught on one of the videos. Meanwhile, the woman in the videos was formally charged with extortion last week, though she too has been hailed—perhaps less plausibly than in Zhu’s case—as an anti-corruption crusader. From Keith Zhai at the South China Morning Post:

“Zhao was officially arrested on December 31 for extortion,” Zhang said yesterday, adding that she had been “brainwashed” by a company she left in 2009 to secretly record herself having sex with officials to give the firm leverage. “After all, she was young and a victim herself.”

[…] Zhao has drawn support on social media, with internet users hailing her as a heroine for exposing corrupt officials.

Many have compared Zhao’s case with that of Deng Yujiao , a hotel waitress who in 2009 stabbed to death a local party official in Hubei and wounded another after they tried to force themselves on her.

Deng was charged with assault, rather than murder, but walked free on grounds of diminished responsibility after having received widespread support from the online community.

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Post tags: anti-corruption, Beijing, bloggers, Chongqing, citizen journalism, citizen journalist, constitution, corrupt officials, Deng Yujiao, extortion, journalistic ethics, lei zhengfu, migrant workers, muckraking, PLA, sex scandals, Xi Jinping, Zhu Ruifeng
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“Many children meet their parents once a year or even years, therefore some of them have both physical and psychological problems,” says the photographer.

Liu, who spent the summer at NYU as a 2012 Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow, was raised in a rural village in Shan Dong Province and is currently based in Beijing, having personally migrated to a city along with his family years prior. Beijing Railway Station, which serves as a gateway for millions of migrants to the capital, is in close proximity to his apartment, giving the photographer a unique view of the daily flood of fresh-faced migrants entering the city.

[…] After photographing family members left behind in the countryside, the photographer returned to Beijing and photographed rural migrants in their workspace. In a conceptual twist, Liu reunites family members photographically. Parents, at a construction site or sausage factory, stand beside towering portraits of their children back home, creating a visual contrast—a collision of rural and urban—and a bridging of that chasm of familial separation within a single frame.

Deborah Jian Lee and Sushma Subramanian reported on the socially corrosive effects of Chinese labor migration at Foreign Policy last year, describing its emotional toll on the country’s estimated 58 million “left behind” children. But another set of images at People’s Daily Online (via Adam Minter) presents the other side of the story, combining photographs of migrant workers with graphs of their often steeply climbing incomes.

See also Huang Qingjun’s photo series Belongings, which views China’s economic changes from a different angle, via CDT.

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Post tags: migrant labor, migrant workers, photographers, photography, rural areas, rural children
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They have occupied factories and taken to the streets. But Chinese workers chose a more unusual form of protest when they highlighted their unpaid wages by dancing Gangnam Style outside the nightclub they had built.

The construction workers from Wuhan said they had concluded it was the only way to draw attention to their problems.

[...]The leader of the dancers, who gave his name only as Mr Lu, told the Wuhan Evening News that in total 40 workers were owed 233,000 yuan (£23,300).

“There have been many creative protests over the last few years. Younger workers in particular are very media-savvy and clued-in,” said Geoff Crothall of the Hong-Kong-based China Labour Bulletin.

For a picture of the PSY-inspired protest, see Chinese-language coverage.

As workers in Wuhan dance Gangnam Style, LinkAsia relays video footage from a CCTV broadcast showing more drastic methods of protest over unpaid wages, which in more than one case included suicide:

ChinaSMACK has translated Chinese news coverage and subsequent netizen commentary on the migrant worker in Guangzhou who detonated a suicide bomb while demanding his wages:

At 3:53pm this afternoon [January 18], an explosion happened in an apartment building in Guangzhou’s Tianhebei Road Dushi Huating Community. Upon report, Guangzhou Police quickly dispatched police officers and firefighters to the scene to handle the situation, evacuate the surrounding people, and immediately take the injured to the hospital for emergency treatment.

According to the preliminary investigation by the police, in the afternoon, a man arrived at a company in Tianhebei Road Dushi Huating Community to ask for his salary, then detonated the explosive strapped to his body. The man died of his severe injuries. At present, this incident has already caused 1 death and 7 wounded. Police are currently investigating this incident.[...]

Meanwhile, China Daily reports on a ruling by the Supreme People’s Court that may work to help migrants receive their due compensation:

A judicial interpretation that went into effect on Wednesday aims to defend migrant workers by preventing their employers from defaulting on their wages.

A judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), China’s top court, clearly defines specific applicable situations in which employers who default on wages can be sentenced to prison for up to seven years.

A 2011 amendment to the Criminal Law classifies failure to pay laborers properly as a crime, specifying a prison sentence of three to seven years for employers whose failure to pay their employees results in “serious consequences.”

However, the “serious consequences” are not specified in the law.

[...]The payments mentioned in the interpretation refer not only to employee wages, but also to bonuses and overtime pay.

However, employers can have their penalties relieved or be exempted from punishment entirely if they render payments to their employees before being prosecuted, the interpretation said.

The interpretation is hoped to discourage wage defaults, especially those that impact migrant workers.

For more on migrant workers, unpaid wages or Chinese interpretations of the Gangnam Style meme, see prior CDT coverage.

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Post tags: Gangnam style, judicial action, migrant workers, protest, protests, Supreme People's Court, unpaid wages
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Around a third of the capital’s 20 million population are migrants, but many of their families become split by rules requiring their children to go to their “home” provinces — even if they have never lived there — sometimes for years, to study for and take the test, which varies by location.

[...] ”Either you let the country share in your education resources or you accept the reality that outsiders are stuck in your education gutter,” said Du Guowang, a 12-year Beijing resident from Inner Mongolia.

[...] But bigger cities are less willing to share residency or benefits, fearing doing so would burden their already strained resources and spur a new influx.

[...] Despite years of lobbying national and city education officials, the migrant parents in Beijing have received noncommittal answers — along with occasional warnings. Their website, where they posted their demands, stopped working recently.

Meanwhile, Chongqing has allowed migrant children to take gaokao in the city. Xinhua News Agency reports:

Chongqing is the latest metropolis to ease the household restriction on migrants attending gaokao, following Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces.

Outside the pilot regions, the exam restriction is still in place, although children of migrant workers can take the nine-year compulsory education (from elementary to high schools) without household restrictions.

[...] Wang Boqing, president of MyCOS, a Beijing-based higher education consulting and outcome evaluation company, said that the move would definitely boost equity of schooling but was more than that.

“It’s really about the rights of people. Migrant workers pay taxes and contribute to government revenues. So universities in cities where they work should be open to them, because these schools all receive funding from governments,” he said.

See also China to “Speed Up” Hukou System Reform, via CDT.

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Post tags: college entrance exam, education, hukou, migrant workers, public opinion, social inequality, urban rural divide
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The Gini coefficient, an index measuring income inequality, was 0.61 in 2010, based on a survey of 8,438 households by the Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance, a body set up by the Finance Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. The survey also estimated the urban jobless rate in July 2012 was 8.05 percent, almost double the official figure.

[…] “China’s wealth gap is so prevalent between regions, sectors, and urban and rural that it’s impossible to see a meaningful decline in the Gini coefficient in the short term,” Gan Li, director of the Chengdu-based center and a professor at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, said at a briefing in Beijing today. “Depending on market forces alone can’t resolve the gap and China must change the structure of income distribution and rely on massive fiscal transfers to narrow such a yawning disparity.”

Higher fiscal revenue and a bigger share of state-owned enterprises’ profits could give the government about 3.8 trillion yuan ($610 billion) a year to spend on income redistribution, said Gan, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the long run “China needs to beef up funding for education and reduce inequality of opportunity to lower the income gap,” he said.

Although higher than expected, the new figure may still be too low. From Chen Dujuan at Global Times:

Zheng Xinye, a professor at Renmin University of China, told the Global Times Sunday that the real Gini coefficient may be even higher than 0.61, since the super-rich are hard to reach for surveys.

“The widening income gap was caused by restrictions that kept small and medium-sized companies from entering high-profit sectors, as well as by employment discrimination,” Zheng said. Data showed that the wage gap between finance and agriculture, which earn the highest and lowest wages respectively, has widened to a ratio of 4.2 in 2010 from 2.24 in 1997.

Zheng said that low standards for labor and environmental protection have increased the wealth of the rich at the cost of the health and income of the poor.

[…] Greater urbanization will ease the income gap, Pan Jiancheng, deputy director-general of the China Economic Monitoring & Analysis Center of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said at the survey release press conference, noting that China needs to boost economic transformation and improve social security.

The Gini coefficient is not a definitive or comprehensive measure of inequality, however, its widespread use arising in large part from its simplicity and convenience. Mark Gimein described the measure’s limitations at Slate (via Trey Menefee) in 2008:

[…] Measuring inequality, or what most people think of as inequality, is not simple. And, perhaps more importantly, the standard measure of inequality tells us a lot less about poverty than we might think or hope.

To see why, let’s look a little bit into the mathematics of inequality. The Gini index is a number that expresses the proportion of income that goes to people on various steps on the economic ladder. In a country in which everyone has exactly the same income, the Gini coefficient will be zero. On the other hand, in a country in which all the income goes to one person, the Gini coefficient will be 1, and the Gini index will be 100 (technically, it’ll never reach the perfect 100, but it’ll be incredibly close). In real life, the United States has a Gini index of 45, and Norway’s is 28.

[…] The problem here is that Gini index alone does not yield enough information to indicate what proportion of a country’s people are poor—even if we know the country’s total income. A measure omitting that crucial concept doesn’t get to what people really mean when they talk about inequality. Take it out, and most of the rhetoric about inequality loses its soul.

Comparing the Gini coefficients of countries at different stages of development is also problematic, as Tsinghua University economist Wei Jie explained to People’s Daily Online in 2006.

At The Wall Street Journal, Tom Orlik described the study’s findings on unemployment:

The survey represents the most ambitious attempt yet to map China’s labor markets, household income and asset ownership—areas where the official data are widely regarded as inaccurate or deficient.

Employment is a hot-button issue for China’s ruling Communist Party, with the risk that high levels of joblessness could trigger destabilizing unrest. At the end of 2008, severe job losses for migrant workers helped prompt the government to unleash a massive stimulus package.

[…] Despite a significantly higher rate of unemployment than reported by the government,China’s labor market still appears to have weathered 2012′s growth slowdown relatively well. A loss of around 4.5 million jobs for China’s migrant workers in the past year has taken their unemployment level to 10 million, still well below the 23 million out of work in 2009.

That the official figure seems inaccurate comes as no great surprise. Last month, Caixin’s Zhang Huanyu pondered the official urban unemployment rate’s mysterious steadiness since the start of 2010:

The urban unemployment rate announced by the government has remained at 4.1 percent from the start of 2010 to June 30. Even during the worst of the global financial crisis in 2009, the figure climbed to only 4.3 percent.

When I talk to government officials and scholars, they unintentionally reveal the importance they attach to the statistic. But the fact the figure barely changes is a sign its accuracy can be doubted. Unfortunately, this is true of many statistics released by government agencies in China.

[…] The National Bureau of Statistics once promised that starting in 2011 it would release more accurate unemployment figures, but so far we haven’t seen them.

In March, bureau director Ma Jiantang was asked about the unemployment rate and said: “From the research we have done, the gap between our data and the real situation is narrowing.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: gini coefficient, income gap, inequality, migrant workers, social stability, unemployment, urban population, urban rural divide, wealth gap
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