COVER STORY The Grapes of Wrath
The economy has been expanding madly, but not fast enough to stave off a gigantic wave of joblessness. The human toll is grim—and the threat to China's stability looks increasingly dire.
The beacons of prosperity in China—Shanghai, Beijing, the Pearl River Delta—are irresistible to residents of the impoverished interior provinces. But when they make it to a place like Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong, the bright lights grow less attractive. Lian (not her real name) is one of more than 5 million migrant workers here in China's richest city. After two years in a local sweatshop making TV transformers, she and 50 of her 160 co-workers quit when their boss decided to move them to even bleaker premises. Lian, now jobless and without welfare, is sharing a room with her 16-year-old brother, who hopes to go to school. "Sometimes I despise this place, this city," she seethes. "Everybody's out for money." Taking the 1,500-kilometer train ride home isn't an option. A year ago her father gave up the ghost of the family farm; the last she heard he was working in construction in nearby Dongguan. Maybe she shouldn't have quit. The $3 a day was better than nothing.
Lian is an economic refugee, part of one of the largest migrations in human history. More than 100 million people have abandoned the dirt-poor countryside, with 30 million alone heading to the Pearl River Delta, mostly to find low-level factory jobs. They do so illegally: China uses a draconian residential permit system to keep people in their places. That exposes economic migrants to exploitation by ruthless factory bosses. Li Liming, a 24-year-old from the southwest province of Sichuan, has worked six years in factories along the Pearl River Delta. He remembers his first job on a Dongguan production line when he was fresh from the countryside, netting more than a dollar a day. "Sometimes it was 30-hour shifts. The only way you could get a break was to faint," he says. "People would turn their eyelids inside out to stay awake."
Workers at Shenzhen's Zhufeng Electronics Factory—some of them in their early teens—endure 90-hour weeks, more than twice the legal limit, making telephones for export to South Korea. They live in a company dorm: a 10-square-meter room sleeps nine people in eight beds. The sole decoration is a tiny wall calendar suspended by telephone wiring. When a group launched a strike last month, says a worker from Hubei, "The boss said, 'If you're not going to work, then get out of here.' We said we'd leave as soon as we got our backpay, and he replied: 'And if I don't pay you, what are you going to do about it?'" Forging ahead with the strike, they were denied meals, were rebuffed by the local labor bureau, and eventually evicted from the dormitory. The worker from Hubei holds a sweat-stained copy of China's Labor Law, 2000 between her hands as she speaks. "We haven't got our money. Now we have nothing to eat, nowhere to live."
These gritty factories and cramped dorms are where China's grapes of wrath are fermenting. Shenzhen-based researchers say the plants, though multiplying quickly and for the most part profitably, are paying less now than in 1992—largely because so many workers keep streaming in from the countryside. And while Beijing has taken steps to revise the nationwide residence permit system to give migrants access to social services, the results have been slow in coming. For now and the foreseeable future, migrant workers are China's largest group of disfranchised citizens.
Li Liming isn't sure what he'll do next. He has a small amount of money and a friend he can stay with for a few weeks. But, he says, "I want to try and do something for myself." Sitting on the corner of a busy intersection at dusk, eyeing the gray Shenzhen skyline, he adds, "I have nothing to my name," quoting the title of a popular song that became a post-Tiananmen anthem of destitution. "Working in factories these past few years, I've come to realize there's no way to get ahead. The factories are crazy places, and being stuck in there month after month you lose all grasp on the outside world." One fact Li and his fellow migrants know all too well: they can't go home again.
