It was her first job in Beijing, the reason she had moved to the city from the countryside of Henan province. She turned around and pointed to another pile of rubble about feet away. A short time later, Tianle returned with three long-lost artifacts he had unearthed: The children were gone now, too. Many had moved away with their families — not just from the school, but from Beijing altogether. Peng, along with her son and husband, would soon do the same. Their life in Beijing had never been easy, but it had become much harder in recent years.
At the time, the population was It soon became clear that the government wanted rural migrants to go. Over the past three years, officials have embarked on an aggressive campaign to limit their numbers. Last year alone, Beijing demolished more than 23 square miles of illegal structures, an area about the size of Manhattan, according to government statistics. Most of the structures were owned or occupied by migrants, and many were built illegally and haphazardly.
Authorities targeted everything from individual fruit stalls, to steel shipping containers that migrants had turned into makeshift homes, to entire neighborhoods of six-story apartment buildings. The bulldozers razed dozens of migrant schools, too. The campaign picked up in November after an apartment fire killed 19 people, all but two of them migrants. By the end of the year, Beijing had 22, fewer people — no small feat considering that the city had grown by an average of , people annually between and Kam Wing Chan, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies Chinese migration, warns that the negative consequences of the eviction campaign could be severe.
He points out that Beijing still needs migrant workers to fill the low-paying jobs that keep the city running. If the workers disappear, the logic goes, the prices of everything from a bowl of noodles to housekeeping will rise. Urban industries like construction and sanitation are almost completely staffed by migrants.
Fewer migrants means fewer drivers for delivery and ride-hailing services. Peng was born in a remote, hilltop village called Guandimiao in Located in the southeast corner of Henan, Guandimiao consists of about 30 red-brick houses surrounded by terraced rice fields, patches of bamboo, and scattered vegetable gardens and tea plants. The nearest bus station is 12 miles away; the nearest train station, miles. Before Peng went to college, the farthest she had ever traveled from home was the local middle school. It was six miles up the road.
In the spring, when bright-red azaleas were in bloom, she would pick flowers on her walk home from school and place them in vases around the house. The scent helped cover the smell of pigs that wafted from a nearby pen.
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In , Peng enrolled in a three-year vocational college in Gushi, a small town 30 miles north of Guandimiao. But that was before she met Wang Long in the fall of Wang was a physical education student with a slender build, tanned skin, and a brash personality. After being introduced to Peng by mutual friends, Wang fell for her long hair and gentle demeanor. Peng never thought about moving to Beijing until Wang decided to do a teaching residency at a migrant school in the city during their last semester of college.
Wang had a cousin who worked there, and he knew that the principal, Qin Jijie, was a well-respected teacher from Gushi. Wang started work in March.
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A month later, Mr. Qin offered him a full-time job and said he also had one available for Peng. Wang called her to tell her the news.
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Peng wanted to be with him, but she struggled because her father disapproved of their relationship. He also thought Beijing was a dangerous city. Seven months later, during Chinese New Year, she and Wang got married. New factories were popping up everywhere, and migrant workers provided the cheap labor needed to fill them — to say nothing of their work building the expressways, subway lines, and train stations that made it possible for Beijing to expand so rapidly.
Cities across China were undergoing a similar transformation. Over the past three decades, million rural migrants have flocked to metropolises like Shanghai and Shenzhen in search of work. The Chinese government estimates that at least 3 million rural migrants will seek jobs in cities in In the mids, Beijing had fewer than half the number of migrants it has now. Many came alone and lived in crowded slums on the outskirts of the city.
They came to make money, not new homes. The community that formed around Zhiquan School was different, as was the neighborhood of crammed, single-story houses in which it stood: Other teachers expressed the same sentiment. Some people from our hometown weren't. In that situation, there was little they could do.
You can't take your boss to court if you yourself don't have residency status in this city, which most of us folks don't. And if you can't provide contractual proof of your claims, you can't sue, can you? Next spring, we will be back in the capital and placed on another project — I think it will be just like this one, with similar conditions. I don't think it will be anything different, because this was what we got on our first job in Beijing, last year.
This was an extra job for her. When the food was ready, she had to take it to them in the other building. I saw that she was busy, and said good-bye to them. Outside, I thought about Mr and Mrs He's fatalistic mindset. With no one to turn to and no resources to fall back on, they felt they must simply accept whatever was given to them. But I also knew about the sharp increase in the number of labour disputes in recent years see previous chapter — sharp even according to numbers from the Ministry of Public Security, which were probably conservative.
The China Labour Bulletin wrote about workers' growing awareness of their collective power: Workers proactively sought better pay levels, better working conditions, shorter working hours, and payment of overtime.
They were no longer prepared to suffer in silence or simply walk off the job as they had done in the past, but instead developed their own positive, innovative and usually effective solutions to their problems Workers have seen plenty of evidence from media reports, blog posts and word of mouth that strikes, protests, roadblocks and sit-ins are effective methods of achieving their goals, and they have greater confidence in their ability to defend their own interests by such means.
The first modern unions in China were formed in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in , in a country carved up by imperialist powers and warlords.
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Prior to this, guilds, established by the old handicraft industries, were the main form of workers' associations, developed during the Qing dynasty. Guilds were based on trade loyalty and internal solidarity among workers and employers, and were an obstacle to the development of organisations such as unions that operated in the interest of workers as a class. Although guilds were still prevalent in , the growth of large-scale industries had shaped a new landscape of working-class organization. The concentration of these industries brought a con- centration of the working class. As youths from the countryside migrated in large numbers to work in major cities, the system of province-based guilds and other old forms of organization, such as secret societies, eroded.
According to Jean Chesneaux, author of Chinese Labour Movement —, china's proletariat in the late s consisted of about 1,, factory workers and 1,, other industrial workers, and like the migrant workers today, they largely originated from the countryside, to which they were socially and economically tied. But widespread anti-imperialist sentiment quickly politicized many of these workers, despite their lack of experience in organizing. Since the May Fourth demonstrations in , workers' movements had always been based on two fronts: This focus was evident particularly in and When the May Fourth Movement began, workers were still the rearguard, rallying behind students and intellectuals for the 'development of national industries' and the 'promotion of national products'.
During boycotts of foreign goods, factory workers were encouraged to increase Chinese production. Soon, these workers began to realize their own collective strength and started to organize spontaneous strikes across the country. A distinct characteristic of their growing militancy at this time was solidarity: By April , according to the CCP, 2.
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Since its founding, the CCP had actively worked to raise the consciousness of the nascent working class. A main focus of the party's work was to combine 'the propagation of socialism' with the organisation of a labour movement. Schools were also set up for workers, to raise their awareness of the need to form trade unions.
On May 1, , the second National Labour congress was held in Guangzhou, and proclaimed the founding of the all-china federation of trade unions ACTFU , the first National Trade union organization in china. As one of the stated government goals is to reduce coal-fired homes, the authorities are entirely within their rights, no matter how ruthless it looks.
Beijing migrant worker evictions: the four-character word you can’t say anymore
People are taking away their belongings, filing out through the dark and cold corridors. Daxing is one of those 33 pilot zones. And the drive is hurting them too. Suddenly two cornerstones of the Chinese economic miracle seem to have come head to head: Jiang thinks that sooner or later the government will establish quotas.
And maybe, those who remain will have a Beijing hukou [household registration] and decent and affordable accommodation. The others will go far, far away from Beijing. Discarded items from evicted residents in Xinjiancun, Beijing. Topic Migrant workers in China.