| |
A SUDDEN crisis that emerged last year has quickly thrust the problem of China’s rural labourers onto the world stage. China is a manufacturing nation: the advanced manufacturing industry of China’s costal regions attracts a truly incredible amount of labour power from every corner of the country. For a reasonably long period of time, the problems of rural labourers have been thought of as merely a domestic issue and, when I have communicated with a few European China experts, I have been surprised that they haven’t taken any interest in the phenomenon of rural labourers. So to what extent is rural labour an international rather than a domestic issue? The tensions created by the current economic crisis may have brought this issue to a head. According to official releases, there are now more than ten million unemployed rural labourers, though this problem was already on the government’s agenda. Unemployment among rural labourers is always a big issue, particularly around Spring Festival, the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress—the Premier worries away, academic circles argue away, and the media constantly reports on it. The methods of the Office of Statistics do not take into account any kind of statistic or indicator of unemployment rates among farmers or rural labourers because, legally speaking, all peasants have land and if they go to the city to work that merely counts as a temporary migration of labour. Once the city’s demand for labour has been met, as the reasoning goes, they can return to the land to work. The land itself is their guarantee and so city governments do not need to bear any responsibility for their social provision.
This group of up to 100 million people did not even have an agreed name until 2005, when various terms like “vagrant”, “outside labour”, “service labour”, and “people’s labourer” all found their way into official documents. Only in 2005 and in the “Study on the Distribution of Rural Labourers”, published by the State Department Research Group, did they start to become known as “rural labourers”. The State Department also offered an official explanation for this term. In the English speaking world, the group is called “migrant workers” but obviously this term cannot entirely reflect this group’s special characteristics: they come from outside; when they find temporary work, their working conditions are unfair; the work they find is comparatively arduous; of the one hundred million or so workers the overwhelming majority comes from rural areas in the interior. I think that the reason why their rights and interests are accorded less primacy has to do with their status as outsiders, a status that is decided by their residence permits. In this army of people we can include the work force that has migrated from the countryside, the unemployed workers from the cities in the interior and also those university graduates, who move to the cities, who have little connection with the type of work and level of culture with which they must deal. A local Dongguan man who finds temporary work in a factory cannot be regarded as a “rural labourer” because he is, in fact, from Dongguan.
Chinese social policy towards the countryside has gone through three extremely important steps since 1956. From 1956 to 1978, China went down the road of the people’s communes, based on the Soviet model where they were called “collectives”. The fundamental reason why people’s communes failed is because, from policy design down to policy implementation, they embodied the despotism of the policy makers and a disdain for the rationality of the market. The failure of these large scale social projects was ultimately due to the ideological utopianism of the Party and disrespect for science. In this kind of social structure, the people (particularly rural people) lost their right to choose as rural people did not have the right to refuse to cooperate with the direction of society.
In 1978 the success of the reform in rural policy was down to the fact that it endowed rural people with the right to choose. Under the household cooperative contract system, rural people were able to decide their form of business according to the market—rural people would make contributions to the state and the commune and they could keep the rest for themselves. To a great extent this policy released the productive forces of the countryside. By 1990 however, the government started to collect high taxes in the countryside. Heavy taxation and the Chinese financial downturn meant that all the prosperity the countryside had under the contract system was lost once more and those three rural problems emerged: the suffering of rural people, the poor countryside and the struggling rural industry. The government’s increasing exploitation of the countryside meant that rural people had no option but to leave their homes to make a living and this gave rise to the whole issue. The trend of the 1990s towards large-scale temporary work was the “Made in China” success story, but from another point of view, it is the story of the Chinese government’s failure to deal with employment in the countryside. Because the supply and demand of labour were very unequal, regional governments, particularly those into which labourers flowed, ignored the benefits of this new group. The public, though, learned of the countless tragedies of temporary labour through the media. The picture that emerged was that of contemporary Chinese society’s extremely immoral policy plan, namely a strong focus on GDP, regional protectionism and the existence of a two tier society. There has already been some resistance from rural labourers, like strikes, road blockages, suicides and attacks on property and society, and there are signs of trouble brewing, like abandoned children, land lying idle and rural criminality. This constitutes the second challenge facing the transformation of the Chinese countryside.
Even though rural labourers are able to move around, this kind of mobility could be said to be “moving in chains”. When they enter a city, some of these people are already second generation labourers, but there is no system whatsoever to guarantee their rights and interests. More seriously, after they have entered a city they are even farther from the countryside. If at some point the standard of life in the city is threatened and these people are without work, then this can cause tensions in society. Misfortune came as 2007 drew to an end—and it came extremely quickly. In the first half of the year, Guangdong regional government was unable to implement industrial changes because of a shortage of labour and in the second half of the year the financial crisis struck. Orders to the factories declined and government employment strategists faced...
[ End of sample | Please purchase the magazine for full articles ]
|
| |
Huang Yan was born in September 1969. In 2007 he graduated with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the College of Politics and Public Affairs at Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou. His research interests are the politics of employment and non-governmental organisations. He is now an assistant professor at the Department of Public Affairs at the Huanan Normal University. |
|
back to top ▲
|
|
| Issue 6.3 |
|
Remembering—
A Shared Duty
|
|
|
