Low wages, cruel bosses, no rights
GEOFFREY YORK
Globe and Mail 22 October 2004...Though often abused and neglected, migrants are the muscle of China's economic miracle. They build the skyscrapers and expressways, they make the cheap export goods, they drive the trucks and lug the steel and cement that has lifted China into its boom years.
They do the toughest and dirtiest jobs that nobody else will do. It is their labour that allowed China to become the factory to the world.
The flood of peasants into China's cities is the biggest migration in human history. Already, some 200 million have abandoned their impoverished villages to move to the booming centres. Another 500 million could be on the move in the next half century.
Yet their working conditions are often horrendous. Under the Communist system of residence registration, migrant workers are controlled by an apartheid-like system that discriminates against those who lack a city residence permit. A complex web of discriminatory laws and policies has made it almost impossible for peasants to obtain an urban residence permit, so most migrants have a semi-legal or illegal status. Lacking legal rights, they are easily exploited by ruthless employers.
They have no social or medical insurance, no unemployment or housing benefits, no trade unions, no education rights for their children, and no written contracts with employers — even though Chinese law supposedly guarantees these rights. They live in monitored and controlled compounds, where they must beg for permission to go outside. They sleep in crude dormitory rooms of 20 square metres, usually shared with 15 to 20 workers.
Many earn as little as $1 for a 12-hour day, far below the supposed minimum wage. They often work for six or seven days a week, sometimes for days and nights without a break. Most are paid only $60 to $125 a month — much of which goes to pay for their food and bed and the stacks of permits they need in order to work. Their wages have barely increased over the past decade, even as the cost of living rises. Without any unions, they must resort to violence or expensive lawsuits if a boss refuses to pay their wages.
Employers are legally required to pay the migrants every month, but they routinely delay their wages until the end of the year, when the migrants return home for the Spring Festival — and even then they find excuses to avoid paying.
More than 70 per cent of migrant workers are owed money by their employers, according to national surveys. An astounding $15-billion in unpaid wages is owed, primarily in the construction sector.
One sociologist notes that the unpaid migrants can be accurately described as slaves, since they toil at their jobs for nothing more than a dormitory room and a couple of meals a day. If so, China has at least 10 million slaves.
The unpaid wages are a mounting concern for Beijing, which worries they will become a source of social unrest...
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Some Google searching finds a goodly supply of reading and data. Among the trove:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PCG/is_1_20/ai_105659437Contemporary Minority Migration, Education and Ethnicity in China - Book Review Journal of Population Research, May, 2003 by Dudley L. Poston, Jr.
Robin Iredale, Naran Bilik, Wang Su, Fei Guo and Caroline Hoy, Contemporary Minority Migration, Education and Ethnicity in China. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2001. 296 pp.
In the People's Republic of China, there are 56 nationality populations: 55 minority nationalities and the majority Han. According to data from the 2000 Census of China, the minorities number over 105 million persons, representing nearly 8.5 per cent of the country's population. Although this relative number of over eight per cent is small, China's absolute number of more than 105 million persons belonging to ethnic minority groups is of some magnitude. For instance, China's ethnic minority population is considerably larger than the 76.4 million black, Native American, Asian and Latino minorities population counted in the United States in 2000. Indeed, if the minority peoples of China were a single country, they would be the eleventh largest country in the world. Surprisingly, non-Chinese scholars, including many demographers, know relatively little about the minority peoples of China, let alone their demographic dynamics. There is little competent, systematic and comparative research available about this siz eable population, particularly its patterns of internal migration.
The new book by Robin Iredale, Naran Bilik, Wang Su, Fei Guo and Caroline Hoy on Contemporary Minority Migration, Education and Ethnicity in China is an attempt to fill this void. Their book, which is another in the fine series of volumes on 'Migration Studies' being published by the Edward Elgar Publishing Company, focuses particularly on the rural-urban migration patterns of China's minority peoples, and considers also the migration behaviour of the Han majority.
There is a very small research literature on the internal migration of China's minorities. For one thing, there has been some hesitancy in China to even discuss, let alone conduct research on, the mobility of Chinese minorities. The minorities living in autonomous regions 'were expected to remain in the regions where special policies were in place to enhance their socioeconomic status. Theoretically ... [they] were not free to move without permission [of the government]' (p. 14). The research reported in this book is in many ways breaking new ground. Questions are addressed that have not been posed previously.
The empirical chapters cover the broad trends of migration between 1985 and 1990 of the minorities and the Han (Chapter 4); the effects on the Mongolian minority people of Han in-migration into the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (Chapter 5); the extent to which the out-migration of Tibetans from Tibet to other areas of China has aided the social integration of Tibetans in the mainstream of Chinese society (Chapter 6); the degree to which the increased internal migration of the Uyghur people (China's largest Muslim population) from their historic home in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region to other parts of China, particularly to Beijing, has led to their colonization (Chapter 7); and the degree to which increased geographic mobility to Beijing of the Uyghurs and other Chinese minorities has affected Beijing socio-economically. The empirical analyses use data from the 1990 Census of China as well as from a Sample Survey of Ethnic Minority Migrants that was conducted in 1996-97.
This book not only covers important demographic issues, such as those just mentioned, but also addresses some of the subtleties and complexities of ethnic identity in China. To illustrate, in China the minority populations are not thought of as races and, with but a few exceptions, are not distinguishable from one another solely on the basis of physical and anthropometric criteria. Their identification depends to a much greater degree on cultural and linguistic differences that over time have been relatively persistent. Despite this lack of physical and phenotypic differences that would distinguish them from the Han majority, many, but not all, of China's minority populations meet, more or less, the principal three criteria deemed by social scientists as important for being viewed as minorities. These are that (1) each group constitutes a small proportion of the country's total population; (2) each minority group exhibits an awareness that its members share a common culture as members of their group; and (3) each minority nationality has experienced some degree of discrimination from the majority.
As examples of cases not meeting these requirements, the authors note that the Uyghur nationality is 'in fact an artificial construct of the Communist party' (p. 20), and that the group is now striving to establish a self-awareness. Similarly, the Hui people are characterized by a 'wide cultural and religious diversity' (p. 19). The authors make much of the situation of ethnic definition in China, because, according to them, there are two definitions in China: 'self-definition by the ethnic group itself and definition by the state' (p. 19).
Demographers, particularly those interested in minorities and the social and political causes and consequences of internal migration, will learn a great deal in the several very different substantive chapters of this book. There is an occasional problem or mis-statement in the book. For example, on p. 96 they note that 'when out-migration and in-migration are summed, the result is net migration'; we know the sum to be gross migration; net migration is the difference. I had a difficult time getting used to seeing and reading numerals of 10,000 and higher without commas (e.g., the figure of 18,100 would be represented as 18 100). I was troubled by some of the analyses of their survey data because they contained too few cases for statistical generalization. But these are minor quibbles. This is an excellent book that will go a long way in introducing readers to many important and relevant demographic issues of the minorities of China.
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Australian Population Association COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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Kam Wing Chan, 2001. "Recent Migration in China: Patterns, Trends, and Policies," Asian Perspectives, 25(4), pp.127-155.
Kam Wing Chan and Li Zhang, 1999. "The Hukou System and Rural-urban Migration: Processes and Changes," The China Quarterly, Volume 160, Issue 1, pp. 818-855.
Kam Wing Chan, Ta Liu and Yunyan Yang, 1999. "Hukou and Non-hukou Migrations: Comparisons and Contrasts", International Journal of Population Geography, 5(6), pp.425-448.
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Migration. China "officially" has 114 million internal migrant workers who moved from rural to urban areas, and their number is projected to rise to 300 million by 2020. Shanghai has three million migrant workers; by comparison, the entire Irish migration to America from 1820 to 1930 involved perhaps 4.5 million people.(see also Japan and Korea in Migration News, and an earlier China summary, and another, which mentions the term 'da gong' ("a catch phrase for making a living away from their communities")The "largest movement in human history" has given China's cities male construction and female factory workers, but at costs that might spark protests. Most internal migrants do not have full access to housing and schools where they live, which is one reason they maintain links to their villages of origin, remitting $45 billion in 2003. As the household registration system is further loosened, an additional seven to 10 million migrants are expected to join the rural-urban trek, and to try to integrate the migrants, Shanghai has begun to issue local resident cards to migrants with jobs for 25 yuan.
Some 600,000 Chinese have left to pursue higher education since 1980, and an estimated 75 percent remain abroad, according to the Los Angeles Times on August 8, 2004. The number of Chinese traveling abroad as tourists is rising rapidly, and is projected to be 100 million by 2020, which would make China the number four source of international tourists, after Germany, Japan and the US.
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Population Migration and Economic Development in China by Jianjun Meng
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China Growth and Labour Migration (Edward Hugh) --and see referral by Stephen Frost
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this one not yet online:
Population and Development Review
Vol. 30 Issue 3 Page 467 September 2004
China's Floating Population: New Evidence from the 2000 Census
Zai Liang, Zhongdong Ma
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International Migration Vol. 42 Issue 3 Page 145 August 2004 Recent Trends of Emigration from China: 1982-2000 Zai Liang, Hideki Morooka
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White, M. & Z. Liang. Internal Migration in China 1950-1988 Demography, 33 (August 1996): 375-384.
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Migration From China (Journal of International Affairs)
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Cross-Border Human Flows in Northeast Asia By Tsuneo Akaha
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