Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [4]
Migrants are the rural elite. They are younger, better educated, and more enterprising than the people they leave behind. The city people’s name for them—liudong renkou, floating population—suggests an aimless mob, but most migrants leave home with a work objective in mind, in the company of a relative or fellow villager who already knows the way. And most of today’s young migrants don’t come from the farm: They come from school. Farming is something they have watched their parents do.
Migration was an accidental consequence of economic reforms. In 1958, the Chinese government set up a household registration system that assigned each person rural or urban residency. City dwellers were allocated jobs, housing, and ration coupons for food and other necessities; residents of the countryside, with none of these privileges, were stuck on the farm.
In the late 1970s, reforms allowed farming households to sell part of their harvest on the market rather than supplying it all to the state. Agricultural production soared. Suddenly, food was available in local markets across the country, and rural residents could survive independently in the cities for the first time. A 1984 government directive permitted farmers to settle in small market towns; to be on the move was no longer a crime. Migration picked up speed, and by 1990, the country had sixty million migrants, many of them drawn to the booming factories and cities of the coast.
Today China has 130 million migrant workers. In factories, restaurants, construction sites, elevators, delivery services, housecleaning, child-raising, garbage-collecting, barbershops, and brothels, almost every worker is a rural migrant. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, migrants account for a quarter of the population; in the factory towns of south China, they power the assembly lines of the nation’s export economy. Together they represent the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century.
Yet the government has been slow to acknowledge the reality of migration. For years, migrants in the cities had to dodge the police; those caught without residency permits were fined or sent home. Finally in 2003, the State Council, China’s cabinet, issued a comprehensive document calling migration key to the country’s development. It banned job discrimination against migrants and advocated better working conditions for them and schooling for their children. On the brick walls of rural villages, pro-migration slogans appeared: GO OUT FOR MIGRANT WORK, RETURN HOME TO DEVELOP. LABOR FLOWS OUT, MONEY FLOWS BACK.
Migration is emptying villages of young people. Across the Chinese countryside, those plowing and harvesting in the fields are elderly men and women, charged with running the farm and caring for the younger children who are still in school. Money sent home by migrants is already the biggest source of wealth accumulation in rural China. Yet earning money isn’t the only reason people migrate. In surveys, migrants rank “seeing the world,” “developing myself,” and “learning new skills” as important as increasing their incomes. In many cases, it is not crippling poverty that drives migrants out from home, but idleness. Plots of land are small and easily farmed by parents; nearby towns offer few job opportunities. There was nothing to do at home, so I went out.
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Long afterward Min would remember the first time she went to the talent market, puzzling over its details like a dream she could not interpret. On a Sunday morning in February 2004 after she had quit the Carrin factory, she went to the market and spent four hours there. She was nervous.