Introduction

Chapter One Introduction Another dawn blowing dust in my face In a strange city, I unload my bundle of dreams. The skyscrapers are taller and denser than the trees of home. The bridge neon lights are like leaves, Like drops of acid dew in the moonlight, This cannot moisten my chapped lips.... Here I must bid farewell to a rhythm of life Which is as slow as the yellow cow plowing. I must speed ahead as fast as a car To chase the moment And build a life from reinforcement steel, and concrete, And drips of sweat.... -‘I Work in the City’, extracted verses from a poem byYu Chengda1 In the three square kilometer factory complex enclosed by high walls, no wind can blow in. But they were gone in the wind. Also gone is the value of labor that I doubt if exists. -Words by Yang Wei after serial worker suicides in Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory2 These excerpts were written by two of the millions of Chinese domestic migrant workers, commonly known as nongmin’gong or contractedly min’gong (literally peasant worker) in Chinese. These melancholy verses vividly portray the displacement and bewilderment of Chinese migrant rural laborers in the fast modernizing urban society. Due to the hukou (household registration) regime,3 which discriminatorily defines rural residents as outcast from urban citizenship, these migrant workers retain identification with the peasantry, a political-economically as well as culturally disparaged category, regardless of 1Translated by Rachel Murphy and Cited in Murphy (2002). Original source: Zhongguo Nongcun Qingnian (China Rural Youth), 2(1996), p.29. 2 ‘Beifeng chuizou de laodong he shengming’ (Labor and lives gone in the wind), Gongren Ribao (Worker’s Daily), 2010.05.22, p.5. 3. For a detailed discussion on the hukou system and its social ramifications, see chapter 6. 1 their real occupations. The sheer gravity of their presence in the urban society as a massive labor force and the dualistic reality of a caste-like hukou regime and concomitant appalling discrimination and deprivation it has brought about migrant workers have led to huge contradictions, both physically and symbolically. Migrant workers in the reform era As widely known, China, the world’s most populous country, has been undergoing unprecedented transformation since the late 1970s when the reform that has created the so-called ‘Chinese miracle’ started. Yet the stagnation of political reform in contrast with economic change has led to a general condition of ‘citizenship poverty’ in the Chinese society, especially for marginalized groups as migrant workers. During this period of some thirty years, millions of rural peasants released from socialist collective farming teams in the agricultural reform have become migrant workers floating between their ancestral rural villages and developed urban areas, where they work as builders, waiters, maids, cleaners, vendors, and the like, performing all the so-called ‘dirty and hard jobs’ which most of the native urban inhabitants would not deign to undertake. By the end of 2010, according to official statistical data, there were 242.23 million migrant workers in China (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2011), constituting the largest migrating population in human history. Every year, during the period of chunyun (literally spring transport, referring to passenger transport around the Chinese lunar new year), the sheer massiveness of this group is phenomenal and highly visible when most of them congregate at train stations all over the country, desperately trying to board a train that will take them back to their home villages to celebrate the Chinese new year and the long-awaited annual family reunion. After a two week stay, until the Lantern Festival which marks the end of the celebration, they shoulder their backpacks and join the army of migrants returning to the cities. This momentous scale of passenger transport has been described as ‘China is going home’ or ‘leaving 2 home’ by popular media’s exaggerated but vivid narration. This stunning phenomenon has not only become an enduring symbol of the dilemma of China’s social transformation, but also an enduring subject of media and cultural spectacle. Figure 1.1 Migrant workers during chunyun, 1993, Chengdu4 Since its inception, spontaneous rural-urban migration has captured great attention from the public, the government, and the media as well, within and without China. The annually increasing number of migrant workers and the consequent problems concerning this relatively new phenomenon5 since the 1980s, (especially after the start of all-dimensional marketization reform in 1992, when the then paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping paid his famous southern visits to frontline cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai), have been at the forefront of public discussion, media coverage and governmental policy making. 4 Source: http://blog.voc.com.cn/blog_showone_type_blog_id_538431_p_1.html, retrieved on March 11, 2011. 5This does not mean that migration is a new thing in contemporary China. Even in Mao’s socially static but politically restless era, large-scale migration involving millions of people took place all over the country. But compared with what has been happening since the reform, the former was in large part passively motivated by ideological indoctrination or was the result of government mobilization. For example, in the Cultural Revolution, millions of urban young people migrated to countryside or mountainous areas, responding to Mao’s calling that knowledge youths should make contributions to the revolution by learning from and working with peasants. As to the passive migration in Mao’s era, see Lary, D., 1999. 3 Evolving from a strictly controlled rural-urban dual household registration system (hukou) embedded in Mao’s centrally-planned economic and totalitarian political system, China’s current population mobility regulation is a mix of paradoxical elements where the hukou regime plays a core role. The hukou system was initiated in late 1950s by the communist government and has been functioning as a de facto internal passport system that binds with their places of birth. It has been used as a tool of controlling population mobility between countryside and cities as well as between different administrative areas. It was also an effective way of strictly supervising allocation of social resources in a command economy, closely bound up with people’s identities, social status, resources, and chances of social mobility. This policy has divided the country into two distinct worlds: the rural and the urban. The hukou issue has long been a focus of fierce criticism and debates in the reform era, and a key factor in public contention about migrant workers in the media, academic and policy discourse After years of fierce struggling between migratory peasants and the state’s suppressive apparatus which aimed to police the potentially purportedly subversive ‘min’gong chao’ (waves of migrant workers), peasants have won the right to move to and work in the city. But at the same time, in a short term they have no hope of gaining urban hukou and thus having access to fundamental social welfare rights in the urban society. This means the state essentially guarantees no protection of the fundamental citizenship rights of migrant workers. Migrant workers have been left in an extremely under-privileged situation and constantly subject to economic and cultural discrimination and deprivation. This situation has caused profound social consequences and problems concerning unjust treatment to migrant workers, such as arrears of wages, poor and unhealthy living conditions, exclusion by the local communities, unaffordable medical expense, difficulties in children’s education, and the like. 4 In a country where modernity, with the developmentalist promise of a better future through economic growth, has been insinuating itself into every nook and cranny, it is ironic to see images of migrant builders climbing up scaffolds and threatening to commit suicide just in order to get their delayed salaries. The increasingly fractured and unjust social reality as epitomized in the case of migrant workers thus has presented huge challenges to the very legitimacy of the party-state’s nominal socialist creeds and its new political discourse of ‘constructing a harmonious society’. These challenges need to be resolved not only political-economically but also symbolically. Migration and media studies Media and relevant symbolic systems play consequential roles in social exclusion and inequality. The Chinese party-state in the reform era, needs to symbolically lubricate and legitimize the unpleasant reality based on systematic exclusion of migrant workers from urban citizenship, relevant discriminatory treatment of urban and rural hukou holders, and oppressive political economic apparatus targeting boundary breakers like spontaneous migrant workers. It is the combination of both political economic and symbolic marginalization of migrant workers that well serves the dominant rationale of developmentalism and the needs of vested interest groups (in this regard, including mainstream urban society mainly consisting of elite strata of middle class, officials, and other new rich groups) in the reform period. Implicit and explicit representations of migrant workers in popular media discourses as alien and mute ‘Other’ have conjured either vigilant gaze and preemptive policy reactions from the urban society patronized by state power or purported ‘saviors’ who volunteer to speak for the incapable and

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