The In-Between World: New-Wave Migrants

By staff reporter HOU RUILI

Compared with the original generation of migrant workers, the new generation has a better education, greater expectations for their careers, and higher goals for their material and spiritual enjoyment; unfortunately they appear to have lower endurance levels for work. The profiles of the two generations of migrant workers are totally different and that is changing everyone’s expectations.

Showing off the fashions that contrast so strongly with the values of his hometown, a new-generation migrant worker visits his family on Spring Festival. China Foto Press

What a Child Really Wants

Migration splits families. Twenty-one-year-old Zhang Qianru left Shenyang in Northeast China right after her college graduation a year ago, to join her parents who run a small tailor shop in Beijing; they had been separated for 15 years. When Zhang Qianru was three years old, her father Zhang Wanxu left their village in Liaoning Province for Daqing City in Heilongjiang Province to work in a small machinery factory. Her mother stayed back, working as a cook for a brickyard in their village.

In the 1980s, China’s countryside began to divide general land use rights up among individual farmers. Many rural areas had surplus labor because of the shortage of land, and displaced farmers began to make their way in the world as itinerant laborers. At first, the migrant workers concentrated in township enterprises near to their rural villages, but by the 1990s China had entered an era of rapid economic development, and the boom lured migrant workers farther and farther from home. They began to flow to the southeast coast where the dense manufacturing industries offered work, especially in export-oriented enterprises, processing and textiles.

Until recently, these people made up a class of laborers commonly referred to as “migrant workers.” Zhang Wanxu and his family are typical. In 1988 they obtained 2.4 mu (1 mu = 1/15 hectare) of land per person. In Northeast China, farmers reap only one crop of rice a year. During planting and harvest seasons he had the helping hands of relatives, but after that the farmer had time on his hands. In 1992, Zhang Wanxu left his village and went out as a migrant worker, leaving the farm work and his young son and daughter in the care of his parents. Two years later, Zhang Qianru’s mother followed him to the same factory in Daqing to do manual labor. Daqing is a small city with petroleum mining to thank for its prosperity, and the income of migrant workers here is slightly higher than that offered by export-oriented enterprises in the southeast. Their monthly income of RMB 600-700 required ten hours a day or more to earn – without weekends off. As a truck driver, Zhang Wanxu often drove at night despite the severe cold. His only annual leave was a two-week break to join his children and parents.

China’s labor-intensive industry reached a critical mass and needed an abundance of cheap labor; the income gap between city workers and farmers just kept widening. In 1978 the income of urban inhabitants was 2.4 times that of rural inhabitants; by 2008, the disparity had reached 3.13 times. More farmers in economically backward areas moved to economically developed areas. The children of these migrant workers grew up unaware of poverty or the need to do any farm work because of the relatively higher incomes their parents earned in China’s burgeoning urban centers.