“When it comes to Africa, the US and Europe think about aid, whereas the Chinese think about trade. They have a very organised vision of what they want,” says Deborah Brautigam, author of The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, from Washington, DC.

“Over the last five or six years there has been a huge increase in engagement between China and Africa across all fronts: trade, loans, finance, migration.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in Little Africa where, in among the city’s wholesale textile markets and electronics stores, black faces are almost as numerous as Asian. English is the common language of trade, though you can also hear French, Igbo (an ethnic language of Nigeria) and Cantonese.

There are at least 20,000 Africans, mostly from West African nations such as Nigeria, Ghana and Mali, living legally in Guangzhou, a city of about 12 million. The number could be as high as 150,000 if you include the many illegals and those temporarily in the city chasing business opportunities.

See also Brautigam’s comments on the article and more on Africans in China via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africans in China, diaspora, Ghana, Guangzhou, Mali, migration, Nigeria, trade
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[F]or all Mr. Xi’s celebrity wattage, the real manna began to rain down on Luotuowan after he and his entourage left. Money, quilts and pledges of government help have been pouring in from across the country. The government arranged for each household to receive $160 in cash, a bottle of cooking oil and a sack of rice, a precious commodity where corn gruel and corn cakes are often the main course.

That was just the beginning. A businessman from China’s northeast was so moved by Luotuowan’s suffering that he drove 500 miles with more cash and a carload of flat-screen televisions. A government work crew whitewashed the village’s stone walls, adding a band of turquoise paint for good measure.

Then came the government researchers, who were instructed to solve Luotuowan’s intractable poverty, perhaps by pursuing Mr. Xi’s suggestion that, with outside expertise, “the people can make yellow soil into gold.”

But whether the official visit by Mr. Xi, who was recently named Communist Party secretary and scheduled to be anointed president in March, will have a lasting impact on this isolated community — much less others like it — remains to be seen. The average per capita income here, about $160 a year, is less than half the official threshold for poverty, and it is a tiny fraction of the average urban income of slightly less than $4,000. Most young people have long since fled for jobs in distant cities.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Li Keqiang, migration, rural areas, rural development, rural poor, urban rural divide, urbanization, Xi Jinping
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Using surveys of 421 men and women in Beijing and testing their skills in economic games, researchers in Australia found those born after the 1979 policy were more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse. They also found them to be 23 percent less prone to choose an occupation that entails business risk, such as becoming a stockbroker, entrepreneur or private firm manager.

[…] Xin Meng, a co-author of the study who grew up in Beijing and left China in 1988, said she detects a different behavioral attitude among the only-child population compared with the previous generation. A 2011 incident where a two-year-old girl in southern China died after she was struck by two vans and ignored by 18 passersby caused a furor, with domestic media and Internet users criticizing Chinese society for a lack of morality.

“An incident like this is just unthinkable 20 years ago,” said Meng, a professor of economics at the Australian National University in Canberra. “If you’ve lived in the Chinese society for a long time, you can sense the difference as people become more individualistic.”

Lisa Cameron, another of the study’s authors, discussed the findings (PDF transcript) with Sarah Crespi on the Science magazine podcast.

Some have expressed reservations about the study, however. From Rebecca Morelle at the BBC:

Professor Stuart West, from the University of Oxford, said the study was “very interesting”.

However, he cautioned against some of the conclusions that had been drawn.

He explained: “They are making very strong claims about differences in behaviour for people born before or after 1979, and they are inferring it is all to do with the introduction of the one child policy in that year.

“The problem is that is a potential explanation for that data – but there are almost an infinite number of other explanations of anything else that could have varied with time: variation of socio-economic environment, prosperity, nutrition, political environment – anything.”

And from Louise Watt at the Associated Press:

Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas in Austin who studies these children, was puzzled that the study’s findings showed poor performance so consistently in virtually all measures. She said she would have expected a more mixed picture, and she hopes follow-up research is done.

[…] Careful studies done elsewhere that look for certain qualities in the only child find that “on average, they’re pretty much like everybody else,” she said.

A recent survey of 51,100 people by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the idea that Chinese society lacks trust, according to Xinhua. Its authors, though, point to a wider range of contributing factors including migration.

The Chinese public was given a “trust score” of just 59.7 points out of a total of 100, according to the results of the CASS survey conducted among residents in seven cities, including Beijing, east China’s Shanghai, south China’s Guangzhou, central China’s Wuhan and southwest China’s Chongqing municipalities.

The survey showed that residents in China’s central and western regions tend to trust others more than their eastern counterparts.

[…] Yang Yiyin, one of the survey’s organizers, attributed the lack of trust to migration, China’s transformation from a planned economy to a market economy and declining “family culture.”

“People are more concerned about trust, especially in a transformative period when a new system of trust has not been established,” said Yang.

Migration would not account for differences between the Australian study’s native Beijingers, but its role in loosening the traditional social fabric finds anecdotal support in the Wang Yue incident cited above by Xin Meng. In October 2011, The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore visited the Foshan marketplace where the accident took place:

Although many other families live in the market above their stores, there is little sense of community. Just as in countless other hardscrabble suburbs across China, the residents are mostly migrants, drawn from all over the country.

They have little in common, beyond their shared desire to make money and improve their lot. And in the evenings, they close their shutters and retreat into their lonely stores.

“It is quite sad that we don’t really talk to each other because we all sell different things,” said a 50-year-old woman who would only name herself as Ms Hu, from a store selling abrasive pads a short stroll away from the Wang’s shop.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, demographics, Foshan, little emperor, migration, moral vacuum, one-child policy, population control, trust, trust crisis, Yueyue
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As well as angering local rivals, these newcomers also raise the heckles of African governments who prefer Chinese migrants to be large-scale investors creating new employment rather than direct competition for established local enterprises.

[...]The influx of Chinese traders has corresponded to deepening China-Africa economic ties. But while major investments are planned, the migration of small traders is not.

[...]

The article also identifies the belief that, while many of the migrants are not part of Beijing’s official investment strategy, China may have found in Africa an opportunity to get rid of its less-desirable citizens:

Research carried out across five southern African countries by the Brendhurst Foundation, a South African think-tank, found that as “the poorest and least educated of the Chinese diaspora” Chinese small traders in Africa were “divorced” from Beijing’s Africa strategy.

Nonetheless, rumours circulate that China is using Africa as a means of getting rid of unwanted citizens. Indeed, Michael Sata, Zambia’s president, claimed while in opposition that Zambia was becoming a Chinese “dumping ground”.

To see video documentation of a Chinese migrant family in Zambia, see an Al Jazeera video from January, via CDT. For more on the controversial implications of China’s interactions with Africa, also see prior CDT coverage of the Chinese manager who was killed last weekend in a Zambian mine known for discordant ethnic relations, a recent documentary on China in Africa, a US secretary of state known for criticizing Beijing’s Africa strategy, or some voices approving China’s African campaigns.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africa, Africa investment, Africa relations, chinese diaspora, immigrant labor, migrant workers, migration
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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.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hukou, migrant labor, migrant workers, migration, urban rural divide
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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.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: children, elderly, hukou, Liu Xiaobo, migration, rural areas, rural migration, rural women
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Inland cities and regions are giving manufacturers alternatives to the nation’s 30-year-old manufacturing network of coastal factories, including huge assembly plants staffed by migrant workers. Thousands of inland projects have been completed or are under way.

Hubei Province, for example, launched some 2,332 projects in 2009 involving industries that left coastal regions. The combined value of these deals reached 112 billion yuan.

Still, it remains to be seen whether industrial migration is right for everyone. Companies hoping to find labor cost advantages by moving inland may be disappointed. And questions have been raised about the availability of land for new factories as well as environmental, government policy and competition issues.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: industrialization, labor, migration
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According to Vital Signs 2005“a new report by the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental nonprofit”China is now driving the consumption and production of almost everything, threatening to deplete the world’s resources…

China is in the middle of the largest rural migration in human history, with millions of its people leaving for mushrooming cities. With factories multiplying and car ownership surging, the cities’ air quality has plummeted.

Sixteen of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. The country is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide after the United States.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: consumption, migrants, migration, pollution
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© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chicago tribune, migrants, migration
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