The Short March

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Life in China's Suburbs

The Floating Factory

China's move to the suburbs is critical not just to the country's economic future, but also to its politics. As the retired city planner said, there is nothing more important to the central government than making sure economic growth continues, and that the benefits of that growth are spread widely. More than anything, this is what gives the communist leadership legitimacy. All across China, towns like New Songjiang are built on the backs of migrant workers — people who have moved from other provinces to earn better money as construction workers. An estimated 114 million workers in China now are migrants, and roughly 15% work on construction sites throughout the country, usually far from their home towns or villages. Unlike manufacturing work, where millions of unskilled workers have full-time jobs, the migrants building China's suburbs simply move on to the next site when one is finished, as if they worked in a floating factory. Making sure there is a next one, therefore, is critically important.

In New Songjiang, indeed, most of my neighbors are here-today-gone-tomorrow migrants, not middle-class Chinese. Henry Ford famously developed the assembly line to make cars so cheap that his workers could afford one. That's not what's happening here. The people building the houses of suburban Shanghai have no real chance of ever owning one.

Consider Qiu Haiyan, 22, from Henan, a province in central China with an average per capita income of $1,100 per year. She first found her way here working on a barge that carries bricks up the river that flows past our house. Qiu has the build of an Olympic weight lifter, with thick, powerful legs, and she and other work-gang members would offload the bricks on a wide wooden plank attached to a rope that they would sling across their shoulders. The subcontractor who built our development estimates he used about 70,000 bricks at Emerald Riverside. Qiu and her work gang delivered all of them.

For lugging bricks 12 hours every day, in Shanghai's suffocating summer heat and stinging winter's chill, Qiu earned 1,500 renminbi (about $200) per month before she managed to get a job — and a raise — at a construction site not far from Emerald Riverside. Now she makes about $220 per month and, she says, the work is not as backbreaking. "We work about 12 hours a day," she told me one recent evening, sitting outside a big worker's camp, "and get one day off a week." I asked if she, like so many migrants, has family back home, and whether she sends money back to them. She nodded. "I support my mother and father and my aunt; they were farmers but are too old to work now. I try to send them something every month or two." She had last seen them two years ago, she said. And when would she see them again? She shrugged. "I guess when I can't find another job here."

The camp she lives in is typical of those housing migrants in the more prosperous cities across China. In a two-story building made of concrete slabs and thin aluminum sheets that seem no sturdier than cardboard, there is no heat, no water, and the workers, around 400 in all, sometimes live four to a room. It is freezing in the winter, stifling in the summer. Most of the workers are men. They cook their evening meals on small electric water heaters and, during summer and fall, after work they sit outside and smoke or play cards and drink beer; it's a hard life, and the workers find diversions wherever they can. One day last winter when our house was under construction, I noticed some Chinese characters scrawled in the dust underneath a windowsill. I couldn't read them so I called over to my wife to see if she could. She laughed. It was an important message: it named a local karaoke club as the place to go "for good prostitutes."

Hu Jintao, China's President, has said repeatedly that the gap between rich and poor is one of the government's central concerns. In New Songjiang, the reasons for his insistence become obvious. Theoretically, migrant workers are supposed to receive some health-insurance benefits from the companies that hire them. But many, particularly day laborers who hook up with small contractors, do not. I spent one evening a few months ago in the emergency room of the huge, modern hospital in New Songjiang. In the space of about three hours, five construction workers were admitted, including one who had tumbled three stories from an apartment building under construction. He survived, but had broken his back. I asked two of his co-workers whether he thought the company they worked for would pay his medical bills. One of them replied, "Probably not,'' and said if need be they'd take up a collection for him among fellow workers and hope that his family from neighboring Anhui province might also chip in.