Erstwhile farmers working on a construction site happily count their hard-earned pay.	Migrant workers take on the jobs nobody else wants.	Henan arranges for local farmers to pick cotton in Xinjiang every year.

Henan has the biggest population of all China’s provinces, and is also home to the highest number of rural inhabitants. Of its approximately 100 million residents, 70 million are farmers, among whom 15 million earn their living from casual work in other provinces.

Li Shimin and his family live in a remote region of Henan, but their combined annual income for 2005 was nonetheless an impressive RMB 30,000 (US $3,800). It was earned partly from the family plot, but mostly from casual work taken on by Li, his wife and eldest daughter outside their home province. Xu Guangchun, secretary of the CPC Henan Provincial Committee confirms that: “Rural dwellers who find work outside Henan earn an accumulative RMB 60 billion per annum, which represents 7 percent of the provincial GDP.”

China’s redundant rural labor force numbers 450 million. Those that decide to be migrant workers do so because of insufficient arable land. They leave their families for months on end in order to do work, often within the construction industry and the transport trade, that is physically demanding and lacking in job safety and security. Yet Xu Guangchun believes that, for the time being, labor export remains the most effective solution to Henan Province’s unemployment problem.

Xu is himself the son of a migrant worker. His father originally cultivated rice, but left for the city at the age of 30, where he found loading and unloading work. Xu is consequently cognizant of the privations and poor conditions migrant workers and their families endure in order to subsist.

In addition to suffering physical exhaustion and poor pay, migrant workers are also subjected to social prejudice and an absence of legal protection. In 1995, Li Shimin’s mother fell ill. In order to pay for her medical treatment, he left his home and found work on a construction site in another province. Li Shimin’s boss agreed to pay him RMB 20 per day. He worked every day for three months, often doing extra hours, and earned a total RMB 2,000. But when, shortly before Spring Festival, Li asked his boss for due payment he was told that the company was experiencing cash flow problems, and that his pay would have to wait until its resolution.

As many similar labor violations have occurred in recent years, in 2005 the central government ordered the establishment of labor unions to protect the rights and interests of migrant workers. Henan has since set up many such organizations. They provide services to migrant workers, such as negotiating on their behalf in the event of payment defaults or labor disputes. The Henan provincial government has also compiled a pamphlet: One Hundred Questions and Answers on the Protection of Migrant Workers’ Rights and Interests, which acts as a farmer’s guide to modes of redress.

Since migrant workers are scattered throughout the country, managing them effectively is difficult. The Henan provincial government has recently made great efforts toward developing formalized labor export. Last year Li Shimin made RMB 2,000 working as a migrant worker on a government-arranged labor export assignment. “As it was organized by the local labor department, for once I had no fears of not being paid,” he recalls.

It was also last year that Li’s wife Wang Aihua went to Xinjiang as part of an organized cotton picking team. Wang Aihua and several thousand other seasonal workers from her county traveled on the same train, along with the medical team assigned to them. “I earned more than RMB 4,000 after working a total 58 days and picking 6.2 tons of cotton. It was my second cotton-picking trip,” says Wang Aihua. It was also through a local labor office that Li Shimin’s daughter Li Huiping found work at a shoe factory in Guangdong’s Haifeng.

Liang Hao, an EMBA (Executive Master of Business Administration) graduate from Tsinghua University and general manager of an IT company, recently made an investigatory trip to Henan’s Anyang. He discovered that farmers working locally earn RMB 300-400 a month at casual laboring jobs, whereas those that do similar work outside Henan earn RMB 800-900 a month. Consequently, most young, able-bodied villagers leave behind their wives, children and aged parents to work away. Liang asked a class of 45 children at one school he visited for a show of hands if both or either of their parents was working away from home, 31 children responded.

It was concern about children who are “parentless” for extended periods that moved Liang Hao to suggest that local governments upgrade their local investment environment and develop local enterprises. “Wherever I went, as soon as the local people heard that I was a business man, they tried to persuade me to make an investment,” reports Liang Hao. Henan farmers and their families would benefit greatly from a more developed local economy and industry, as more jobs and better pay would obviate the need for breadwinners to seek work away from home.

Xu Guangchun agrees that the main priority within constructing a new countryside is to develop the rural economy and improve its political, cultural and social infrastructure. Henan is a large province in whose rural areas economic and social development lags far behind that of other provinces. The net per capita income of its rural population in 2005 was RMB 2,871, which is RMB 384 lower than the national average. Uneven development is also a serious problem in Henan. In 2005, a survey made by the Henan provincial government revealed that 5 percent of its villages basically met the standards expected in the new socialist countryside: 15 percent had achieved a per capita net income above the national average, that of certain villages on the outskirts of large cities having reached RMB 10,000 -- higher than the urban average -- and 5 percent had a per capita net income lower than RMB 1,000. The homes of most of the villagers in the latter category are in mountainous and remote areas.

In 2006, the Henan provincial government activated plans to focus its poverty-reduction funds on the support of 2,000 poverty-stricken villages. Funds will go toward building roads, power grids, irrigation channels and telecommunications facilities. They will also be spent on developing local production projects and on necessary relocations from areas that provide no means of human subsistence.

The provincial government offers policy support that gives farmers the leeway to build a new life within the new socialist countryside. Certain villages and their inhabitants have wasted no time in developing local production and enterprises. Li Liancheng is now Xixinzhuang Village head and deputy to the National People’s Congress. Two decades ago, he started out on making his fortune by building greenhouses. He went on to invest in industrial enterprises, and has helped other villagers by explaining to them how greenhouse technology works and selling them shares in his enterprises at a low price. Xixinzhuang has since developed from a poor village into a provincial model for the new countryside. Its annual per capita income exceeds RMB 9,000 and its fixed assets amount to RMB 240 million.

Healthy enterprise is a main contributing factor to village prosperity. Henan’s Liuzhuang Village has the country’s largest flourmill and Xihuafeng Village owns the country’s largest instant noodle factory. Both have provided their own and other villagers with development opportunities. Xu Guangchun is optimistic that Henan will see the blossoming of many more villages like them.