A Floating City of Peasants
Reviewed by Malia Politzer
In 2005, there were 191 million international migrants, or people living outside their native countries, according to data from the United Nations. Compare this to as many as 210 million Chinese migrant workers moving from their rural homes to cities, and it's easy to see why some immigration experts call it the largest mass migration in human history.
This colossal internal migration—an integral facet of the China story—is the subject of journalist Floris-Jan van Luyn's book, A Floating City of Peasants: The Great Migration in Contemporary China. A Dutch journalist who spent nearly six years living in and reporting from China for the Rotterdam-based NRC Handelsblad, Mr. van Luyn tells the stories of the people behind China's rapid economic growth, following them from the faltering economies of China's rural heartland to the metropolitan boomtowns of Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. Once in the cities they do the work that the urban population will not do—construction and manual labor, cleaning, childcare, working in the dish rooms at restaurants, garbage collection and factory work.
Through more than a dozen intimate vignettes, the author paints human portraits of the people who are often spoken of only in statistical terms. We meet Chunming, a 16-year-old-boy who runs away from home in order to join an uncle in Beijing, earning money by scavenging urban trash. Then there are Cai Lulu and Yi Congcong, two children sent to the cities by their parents to earn income by selling flowers; and Yang Chun, a 23-year-old woman who works in the textile factories of Shenzhen.
China's rapid growth has pulled millions of people out of poverty in an astonishingly short period of time, as economic liberalization and rapid urbanization has led to a wealth of opportunities in cities. It should come as no surprise that rural workers seeking better economic prospects are moving to cities en masse—where they not only earn more than they would working in rural regions, but are also able to send some of their newfound wealth back home in the form of remittances.
Women are among the largest beneficiaries of urban opportunities: Factory jobs, often preferring to hire women—who are seen as more dexterous and obedient than men—present uneducated woman with a means to financial autonomy far beyond any they would find in rural regions. Interviews with factory workers in Shenzhen show that many of these women—young, unmarried, independent—find in their labor financial independence and self-respect.
Yet Mr. van Luyn also finds that peasants pursuing these economic incentives often walk the fine line between opportunity and exploitation. Women, though often beneficiaries of urban opportunities, are also the most vulnerable: While those lucky enough to secure factory jobs find economic empowerment and self-sufficiency, many others—lured to remote regions with false promises of legitimate work—find themselves coerced into sex work at bath houses, karaoke bars and brothels.
The reality peasants seek to escape is darker still. Much of Mr. van Luyn's book dwells on the rural problems peasants face at home: Illegal land seizures and lack of private property ownership prevent peasants from taking advantage of real-estate opportunities. Despite recent attempts by the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing to relieve pressure on peasants by officially abolishing the agricultural taxes, they still suffer under heavy (often illegal) local taxes forced on them by corrupt officials.
The author discloses a series of narratives illuminating how commonplace it is for development and infrastructure to be obstructed by corruption—roads that fail to be built, large central funding schemes that fail to reach their intended beneficiaries. In one particularly horrifying account, Mr. van Luyn introduces Li Lusong, a 20-year-old man who is abducted, beaten—nearly to death—and has his tongue partially cut out in order to silence him when he persists in petitioning local officials to build a new school.
This paints a dreary, but incomplete picture. Though he dedicates a cursory chapter to the economic incentives driving migration, the bulk of his book focuses on the push-factors behind migration—corruption and the absence of an independent judiciary and rule-of-law. While these problems certainly exist, this approach obscures the primary factor driving migration, economic opportunity. Entirely absent from his analysis are any substantive suggestions on what can be done to make life in the countryside more economically feasible.
Certainly, there remains much of which to be critical. Though the government has loosened many of the restrictions posed by hukou (hereditary household registration issued at birth), migrants are still required to transfer their hukous to cities in order to access worker protection or benefits—an expensive and time-consuming process corrupt officials often use to extort money from migrants.
The children of workers holding rural hukou are not entitled to urban education—forcing migrants either to leave their children behind, or to simply to leave them uneducated. And rural hukou holders do not have access to health care or social services in the cities where they work, and are sometimes exploited or abused by both employers and the police. Meanwhile, employers, aware that migrants are often unable to take complaints to police, wait months to pay migrants, or do not pay them at all. In 2006, President Hu Jintao estimated some $12 billion were still owed to migrants.
Implicit in Mr. van Luyn's book is a critique of a system that necessitates such mass migration for peasants who are unable to secure a promising future in their hometowns. But he also realistically accepts that as long as cities provide better economic opportunities than those found in rural regions, “the peasant invasion is inevitable.” At the end of the day, migration might be a growing pain of China's rapid growth. But what will shape China’s future is the way Beijing chooses to deal with this migrant population.
Ms. Politzer is a freelance journalist based in China.
