The Young Migrant Workers Art Troupe giving free performances for migrant workers in front of the Chaoyang District Cultural Center, Beijing. Students from schools for migrant workers sing on stage.	Sun Heng in his Migrant Workers Cultural Museum.	Migrant workers have contributed a great deal to the acceleration of urban construction.

ALTHOUGH he has become the head of the Home of Migrant Workers, Sun Heng still calls himself an “ordinary migrant worker.” The Home of Migrant Workers Cultural Development Center, the Migrant Workers Cultural Museum (opening soon), and the Tongxin Experimental School are all located in Picun, in the northeastern suburbs of Beijing. Picun, which lies at the juncture of three districts – Chaoyang, Tongzhou and Shunyi – is more than 30 kilometers from downtown Beijing, and is little known to most city residents.

The “Picun Phenomenon”

On my way to Picun, the taxi driver told me that some of his colleagues had been robbed in the Picun area, and that he himself was robbed once. “Leaving their villages for cities, some farmers cannot find good jobs and are reluctant to bear the hardships, so they steal and rob,” he said. Local residents frequently complain that social order in areas where migrant workers live has deteriorated.

The taxi driver told this reporter that he himself is a farmer from Tongzhou District, to the east of downtown Beijing. His father takes care of the 0.8 mu (0.13 acres) of farmland his family has contracted. These days, a large number of taxi drivers in Beijing are farmers from suburban Beijing. “Urbanites are reluctant to do this work because it is exhausting,” he said. But for all the extra hours and days he puts in, a taxi driver has a monthly income of RMB 2,000-3,000, higher than the average income of many urban inhabitants. Migrant workers from other parts of the country are not entitled to such jobs, since the local government reserves them for native inhabitants.

Picun is a small village whose native residents number a little more than 2,000. “Very few young villagers live here, since most of them have settled in the downtown area, leaving the elderly to take care of the old houses for rent,” said Sun Heng. This is common in villages on the urban fringe. The ratio of migrant workers to native inhabitants in Picun is 5:1, with nearly 10,000 migrant workers. But it is not the largest migrant workers’ community in Beijing. In Xiaojiahe Community, Haidian District, there are 4,000 native inhabitants and nearly 30,000 migrant workers. This is common in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Many suburban farmers rent their houses to migrant workers, living on the proceeds.

Upon entering the village, the first thing one sees is the garbage dump surrounded by a brick wall. Dust swirls through the air. “Many migrant workers live on this garbage dump,” said Sun Heng. Most of the migrant workers in Picun come from Henan, Anhui and Sichuan. They play different roles in the garbage treatment chain (collecting, sorting, treating and recycling). He said that Henan Province alone has 100,000 people living on garbage collection and sorting in Beijing.

Most of the houses in the village are made of red brick. Bigger courtyards are mostly rented by small factories and companies as workshops or warehouses. On metal plates affixed to factory gates are telephone numbers for recruiting employees. According to the tenants, house rents have doubled. The rate for a 15-square-meter room has risen from RMB 60 to RMB 120 per month, and the rent for streetside shops is set to rise again. Migrant workers have no choice but to accept the new prices, and one way of lowering the cost of lodging is to have more people sharing rooms.

On the street, small groups of young people dressed in fashionable clothes, such as jeans and sneakers, mill around. Some are workers on the night shift, while others are new arrivals from villages. The busiest street in the village is lined with small stores, barber shops and small restaurants. Migrant workers have divided up the professions. Some have rented streetside houses to run shops, and their customers are their fellow migrant workers.

Alleviation of “Cultural Poverty”

In 1998, Sun Heng was a middle school music teacher in Zhengzhou City, Henan Province. He was not satisfied with his ordinary life, however, so he decided to become a migrant worker in Beijing. Now, 10 years have passed. “I have worked in several professions: porter, tricycle driver, and salesman.” When he was at his lowest ebb, he was an itinerant singer in underground pedestrian passageways, playing a guitar for loose change. “I fully understand the hardships faced by migrant workers, because I have had many difficult experiences,” Sun Heng said. “Prior to that, I only knew what the media conveyed – that migrant workers violated the rules on setting up stalls and damaged the environment.”

When he was a street singer, Sun Heng sang for his next-door neighbors, who were vendors. “I realized I was not the only migrant worker in Beijing. In Beijing alone there are more than 4 million migrant workers.” Sun Heng decided he should do something for this group. He only had his guitar, so he began to sing for migrant workers at construction sites, and the response was beyond his expectations. “At first, I worried that they might be too dog-tired to listen to my singing, having labored for more than 10 hours. To my surprise, they sang along with me in the end.”

Sun Heng did not sing pop songs. Instead, he only sang songs he composed himself, all of which dealt with the lives of migrant workers. Songs he wrote, such as Be United to Demand Our Wages and Migrant Workers Are the Most Glorious, have been big hits with migrant workers. In 2002, he and several friends established the Young Migrant Workers Art Group. They have given more than 100 performances for migrant workers free of charge. Recalling their performances, not all of them went smoothly. Some employers did not believe the performances were free. Others said that even if they were, migrant workers were too busy to watch them, since they had to work long hours.

“The cultural life of migrant workers is dull after work. Young people are better off, since they are willing to spend money at Internet cafes and go window shopping. Older migrant workers prefer to sleep after work,” Sun said.

This situation is common with migrant workers around China. Zhang Bin from Shaanxi Province went with the Home of Migrant Workers on a volunteer service tour to Xiamen, where he got in touch with migrant workers from around the country. He found that although government-funded free training programs and tours organized by the labor departments are many, migrant workers had little chance to take advantage of them, since they had no access to television, radio and print media where such programs are publicized.

Gradually, Sun Heng became well known for his performances, and his scope of activities expanded beyond Beijing. “Finally, I found that it was not enough to give free performances. Many migrant workers would ask me what to do when they were denied their wages.” Sun Heng encountered new problems, and before long, he and the Home of Migrant Workers began to give free legal training classes and to build reading rooms and film projection halls. Their efforts have won them donations from Oxfam Hong Kong.

Sun Heng’s “Migrant Workers Cultural Museum” will open to the public soon. Although the museum is in a deserted factory building, many migrant workers come to do decoration work free of charge after work. Sun Heng admits that since the museum is in such an out-of-the-way place, he does not expect many visitors from downtown, but he hopes that more people will discover it through the Internet.

The Tongxin Experimental School is another achievement of his “extended business.” “I planned to take 50 students, but more than 100 came to register,” he said. In 2005, when the school was founded, his goal was to provide schooling for children of migrant workers living nearby. Now, the school has more than 400 students, from pre-school through grade six. Many children come from farther away. The desks and computers have all been donated by generous people. “All the teachers at this school come from other parts of the country. We pay them RMB 800 per month. No native teacher is willing to work for our school for such low pay,” he said.

“My greatest hope is that schools for children of migrant workers can continue operating,” he said. Like more than 200 other such schools, the Tongxin Experimental School is still unregistered. As long as it provides opportunities for children to study, migrant workers and their children do not care about its status. Since public schools cannot satisfy the educational needs of the 200,000 children of migrant workers, the education administration department has agreed to provide financial support to these unregistered schools.

Sun Heng has heard that the government will soon allocate RMB 100 million to improve the conditions of primary and middle schools. That is also good news for the children of migrant workers. Now, there are several dozen NGOs like the Home of Migrant Workers nationwide, offering help to this disadvantaged group integrating into city life, promoting community culture, and offering skills training and legal aid. All the staff members of these organizations come from rural areas, and most of them are former migrant workers themselves. But more and more college students, teachers and lawyers are also working as volunteers.