The Financial Times writes about a new propaganda campaign, in the wake of the Spring Festival transportation disaster, calling on migrant workers to celebrate the New Year at their workplaces rather than at home:
In Guangdong, the southern Chinese manufacturing heartland that is home to about 19m migrant workers, radio talk show hosts this week began broadcasting a surprising commentary…
With the crowds still massing and anger rising, the talk-show hosts on Tuesday morning swung into action, propagating an unheard-of line of argument. Wouldn’t it be better, they suggested, for the would-be travellers to celebrate the new year at their factories instead, with their “worker friends”?
Such an argument is not an easy sell. Staying in Guangzhou would leave them far from their parents and, in many cases, children whom they are struggling to support and often see only once a year. So the talk show hosts appealed to the migrants’ acute sense of thrift. After all, most are in the Pearl River delta, the so-called “workshop of the world”, solely to make money and support their families in the poorer, undeveloped hinterland…
The propaganda push was capped by Wen Jiabao, the premier, who travelled to numerous cities, first in snowed-in Hunan, where he addressed stranded travellers packed into Changsha railway station, before going on to Guangzhou.
