Eating Bitterness

I told my brother the other day that I was reading a book about migrant workers living in Xi'an that just came out last month - Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China's Great Urban Migration by Michelle Dammon Loyalka.

"Wow, that's esoteric," he said.

"Yeah," I responded, "I think the author wrote this book especially for me."

He laughed.

It's true, a book about migrant workers and China's rapidly developing economy set in my Chinese home city of Xi'an is right up my alley. When I heard of Eating Bitterness on Twitter a few weeks ago, I knew it was something I had to check out.

After having read the book, I don't think my brother's and my initial reactions were correct, though. The book is not esoteric. There's nothing technical about the sociology of urban migration or anything inside baseball about Xi'an in it. The book is about human beings trying to make their lives better. Anyone can relate with that.

Seeing that there are more than 100 million migrant workers in China right now taking part in the largest human migration in the history of the planet, this book is something anyone can and should read. It gives great insights into a truly massive demographic of the world's population.

 

Dammon Loyalka for her book embeded herself in the lives of migrant workers working and living in a city village (城中村) on the outskirts of Xi'an's High-Tech Zone. She shadowed a number of different types of migrant workers for weeks at a time. In her afterword, she said she spent upwards of three weeks, on and off, with each person she profiled. Because of her tireless shoe-leather journalism, an intimate portrait of each character's hopes, joys, and fears is painted for the reader.

The characters in her book are as follows:

1. The Veggie Vendors  

2. The Impenetrable Knife Sharpener 

3. The Teenage Beauty Queens 

4. The Ever-Floating Floater 

5. The Landless Landlords 

6. The Nowhere Nanny 

7. The Opportunity Spotter 

8. The Big Boss

Each one of these migrant workers with countryside roots living in the big city show a remarkable ability to "eat bitter" (吃苦). "Eating bitterness," the title of the book, is a phrase that Chinese people use to describe one's ability to deal with hardship.

A farmer toiling the fields during flood or drought in ancient China had to eat bitterness. A young girl sold to a warlord to be a concubine had to eat bitterness. Nearly everyone in every part of China had to eat bitterness under Mao.

Even today during China's economic miracle with all of its glitzy skyscrapers and black Audis, many in the bottom-rung of society have to eat more than their fair share of bitterness. China has come a long way in the past thirty years, but not everyone is enjoying the fruits of their hard labor equally. Dammon Loyalka's book shows how life is for those at the bottom of today's China trying to follow their dreams and trying to make life better for their families.

I really liked getting to know each one of these characters Dammon Loyalka introduced. Although I liked all of these stories, my favorites were #2, #3, and #6.

The Impenetrable Knife Sharpener was probably my favorite character in the book. Wang Quanxi is an illiterate old man trying to scrape by a living in Xi'an by riding his bike around advertising that he'll sharpen whatever knives you have for a couple yuan each. He lives in complete squalor so that his fixed costs are as low as possible and he can send back nearly everything he makes to his family living in Henan.

I particularly liked this passage where Quanxi spent hours sharpening knives for a restaurant:

An owner of a restaurant intentionally screwing over this old man, who broke his back making sure his knives are sharp enough, out of three yuan (or $.48) really hit me. There were plenty of times in Xi'an where I argued with a motorbike driver over two yuan or someone selling vegetables over .5 yuan. That's certainly different than reneging on an agreed upon price, but getting to know Quanxi makes me question some of the energy that I put into nickel-and-diming people with so much less than I have.

Despite any attempts to get good prices with the migrant workers I encountered while living in China, I was constantly taken aback by the migrant workers I saw everywhere when I lived in Xi'an. Whether it was a little old lady pulling a wheelbarrow down the bike path of a street or construction workers literally building the new China, I was always aware of that a great number of people in China have incredibly difficult lives.

Eating Bitterness gives me a lot more context for those images of migrant workers that I have in my mind. Knowing the stories behind at least a handful of those faces is really valuable, in my opinion.

I really liked Eating Bitterness. Much like Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, it really opened my eyes to a group of people in China that I was very aware of but didn't know with enough depth. Eating Bitterness is written beautifully and is full of great information. I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to look beyond the gaudy GPD numbers and see the full picture of China's rapid development.

Migrants in the Big City

There were two every-day experiences I had in Xi'an that I'm going to try to describe below. Both stories involve observing migrant workers in Xi'an. The episodes were nothing out-of-the-ordinary from every day life in China, but they struck me rather deeply.

*****

During our last week in Xi'an, Qian and I went out to eat with one of her old 同学 (classmates) and her classmate's husband. We had a wonderful seven course meal of 川菜 (Sichuan cuisine) together. The restaurant was 热闹 (lively), the conversation was flowing, the classmate's husband and I downed a few beers each, and all of us were content.

Despite being relatively early, just a little before 8:30PM, our friends had to go home since they had their three month-old baby at home with its grandma. We walked outside the restaurant, which was near the long-distance bus station in the 明德门 section of Xi'an, and determined that we needed to ride bus 18 to get back to Qian's parents' apartment.

We stood at the stop waiting for bus 18 for several minutes. One usually doesn't have to wait more than five minutes for a bus in China. So as we continued to wait and wait, I went over to the bus map/schedule displayed at the stop. I saw that the bus had stopped running at 20:30 and that it was now 20:38. I told Qian and her friends that we'd probably missed the bus. Unfazed, they suggested that we wait to see if there was one more bus on its way.

The sun had just set and the energy that permeates Chinese nights was building. The ground we stood upon was filthy, both from litter and from spilled oil from the motorbike repair shops that dotted the neighborhood. The air smelled of 孜然烤肉 (cumin and assorted herb-flavored BBQ meat skewers) and I could see groups of people eating food and drinking beer in half-full 川菜饭馆 (Sichuan restaurants) the size of rental storage spaces.

The area where we were standing was gritty, if one is being generous, or rundown, if one is being less charitable. We were on the edge of 八里村, one of Xi'an's biggest 城中村 (city villages). Nearly every store front around us had a neon flashing sign displayed out front with the characters 住宿. These characters were advertising a temporary place to live. 住宿 are kind of like a hotel. They are very cheap and of a very low standard, though. A middle-class Chinese person is not going to stay in a 住宿. The people in these 住宿 next to the bus station are migrants, hence their close proximity to the long-distance bus station.

8:44... 8:46...

As we stood there, I became less engaged in the conversation. Maybe I was growing tired of trying to keep up in Chinese. Maybe I was getting impatient. I stood a bit apart from them as they continued laughing and talking.

I turned towards the busy street in front of us and saw two young men speaking with a 电动车 (an electric motor bike the size of a Vespa) owner. The two men had obviously just stepped off of the long-distance bus in Xi'an. Each carried over-sized plastic rucksacks full of who knows what. Each appeared slight in physical appearance; they looked like thirteen year-olds in eighteen year-olds' bodies.

One sported an unsightly, thinly-grown mustache that was more a result of not shaving than a fashion statement. The other wore a loose-fitting suit that hardly fit his under-developed body. I could not figure out how old either of the two men were. I suppose my guess would be twenty-two years old, but that would be give or take five years in either direction.

It's normal for entrepreneurial-minded 电动车 owners to wait next to bus stops offering rides. The owners of these vehicles will exhort those waiting for the bus to quit waiting and just jump on the back of their vehicle. That's exactly what this 电动车 owner was doing with the two men. The 电动车 owner had a strong physical appearance and sported a 板寸 (a squarish haircut popular amongst middle-aged to older Chinese men).

8:48... 8:50...

I couldn't really hear what the two men (were they brothers? cousins? friends?) and the 电动车 owner were saying. Maybe they were speaking a dialect, maybe it was the noise on the street, or maybe my Chinese just isn't that good. But I wasn't processing what was being discussed. I didn't have to comprehend every word to know that the 电动车 rider was trying to convince them that they'd missed their bus, that he knew where the two guys wanted to go, and that they should jump on his bike.

There was a bit of resistance from the two men. They didn't want to pay this guy if they could just spend a couple RMB and get on a bus. They talked amongst themselves. They stared into the distance hoping to see that last bus roll in front of them. You could tell that they were helpless, though. Just as a salesman about to complete a deal, the 电动车 owner was dominating the conversation. They only lasted a few more moments before finally conceding. Their defeated body language showed that they didn't know their surroundings and needed to be taken away.

The men grunted a few noises to each other and then began handing their bags over to the 电动车 owner, now their ride. The thin man somehow lifted the bag that looked to be as heavy as him and put it on the front, flat platform that was between where the driver of the vehicle sits and the handle bars. It took several seconds for them to figure out how to get the huge sack loaded and balanced onto the bike. The man with the moustache then loaded his smaller bag on top of the first. The gaunt man then jumped onto the back of the bike. The driver took his position. Then the moustached man got onto the very back of the bike, nearly hanging off the edge of the bike, sandwiching his gaunt friend between himself and the driver and the driver between the gaunt man and the cargo up front.

电动车 are electric. They are not powerful. They are smaller than a motorcycle. It was quite a sight seeing this thing loaded up with three passengers and a significant amount of cargo up front.

The driver silently turned on the vehicle and it slowly started to pull away. After getting the bike's momentum up to a few miles per hour, the driver was in complete control.

Off into the night they went. I can only guess where those two men, fresh off a bus from the countryside finally in the big city, were heading and where they ended up.

*****

The next night after seeing the scene described above, Qian and I ate dinner at her parents' house. We then set out to the heart of the city for drinks just inside Xi'an's South Gate.

We headed out of her parents' apartment at about 7:45PM. It was a hot evening. We debated whether to spend the extra 1 RMB each to ride on an air-conditioned bus or whether we'd tough it out on the normal, open-air, bus. We decided that we'd just take the first one that came.

K800, the air-conditioned bus, came first. We boarded it to find that much of the bus was empty. We had seats to sit down upon. Air-conditioned buses are usually less crowded than normal buses because of their higher fare.

Qian and I sat across from each other on the parallel seats just behind the driver that are perpendicular to the rest of the riders, who are facing forward. I sat in the seat just behind the driver and Qian sat in the second of four seats on her bench.

I had my iPod Shuffle playing in my ears, which was often the case when out and about. Lost in the music, I took in the scenery we were driving by. I had to turn around from my seat to see the south city wall. I remember contorting my body to get a better view of the glorious sight that was the sun setting over one of China's most beautiful attractions.

As we moved along the outside of the city wall approaching the South Gate, the man sitting next to Qian in the first seat on her bench blurted out something to the driver. I hadn't noticed him before he made that noise. I was awaken from my aural and setting-induced trance and saw that Qian was sitting next to a shaggy man probably about thirty years-old (again, give or take) in the suit that every construction worker in China wears.

One of the first things I saw about him was that he only had four fingers on his left hand. That's not something I usually notice. I mean, who counts other people's fingers out on the street? I'm not sure how, given his clenched fist, I noticed this, but one of the first things I processed about the man was that he was missing a digit on his hand.

I missed what he'd shouted. I could tell it was something to the driver, though. The driver had apparently missed what he'd yelled too since all I heard from up front was a loud, "啥?!!" which is what a northern Chinese person slangily says for, "What?!!"

The nine-fingered man repeated himself. This time I caught it: "到交大电脑城了没?" or, "Are we at the Jiaoda Computer City yet?" I couldn't really make out what the driver said, but he surely said, "No, it's still several stops ahead" since the Jiaoda Computer City (a computer market) was still several stops in front of us.

The man paused for a few seconds. He put his weight onto his right foot and he held onto the support bar that was next to him. He was in between sitting and standing. He looked confused. After being in limbo for a few seconds, he stood up and started to walk to the back of the bus towards the exit.

Qian stopped him and said, "我们还没到。你还有几站。" or, "We're still not there yet. You still have a few stops to go."

The man then retraced his steps and sat back down next to Qian where he'd been sitting.

He spent the next several minutes, until we got off of the bus, holding onto the support bar that was next to his seat staring out the front of the bus perched between sitting and standing.

We got off of the bus before he did. I'll never know if he got off at Jiaoda Computer City or not.

*****

I can't say exactly what the meaning of these two stories are. I'm not sure why they struck me as they did or why I'm sharing them on my blog either.

I suppose it's just that the "migrant story" in China fascinates me. Tens of millions of people every year move from farm to factory or city. Hundreds of million have done so over the previous decades and hundreds of millions will over the coming decades. It's a remarkable story.

I'd been wanting to write this post for several days. I was even more inspired to get it done after reading the following piece: How I was treated on the subway when I was doing fieldwork as a migrant worker, a blog article by Tricia Wang (h/t @niubi). Tricia is an anthropologist/sociologist doing research on migrant workers in China. It is a really nice supplement to this post. Her writing, about being perceived as a migrant worker on a subway, fits in nicely with what I tried to describe above.

Not Enough Workers

You'd think that with all the people in China, there'd an endless supply of labor. There's not.

From The New York Times:

GUANGZHOU, China — Just a year after laying off millions of factory workers, China is facing an increasingly acute labor shortage.

As American workers struggle with near double-digit unemployment, unskilled factory workers here in China’s industrial heartland are being offered signing bonuses.

Factory wages have risen as much as 20 percent in recent months.

Telemarketers are turning away potential customers because recruiters have fully booked them to cold-call people and offer them jobs.

Some manufacturers, already weeks behind schedule because they can’t find enough workers, are closing down production lines and considering raising prices. Such increases would most likely drive up the prices American consumers pay for all sorts of Chinese-made goods.

Rising wages could also lead to greater inflation in China. In the past, inflation has sown social unrest.

The immediate cause of the shortage is that millions of migrant workers who traveled home for the long lunar New Year earlier this month are not returning to the coast. Thanks to a half-trillion-dollar government stimulus program, jobs are being created in the interior.

But many economists say the recent global downturn also obscured a longer-term trend: China has drained its once vast reserves of unemployed workers in rural areas and is running out of fresh laborers for its factories.

Read On

It's astounding that there are labor shortage this year whereas last year after the Chinese New Year there were as many as twenty million migrants without work. China's economy is incredibly nimble and fluid.

China's response to the economic crisis has, if nothing else, kept its wheels spinning. Their response is probably creating housing bubbles, over-developing commercial real-estate, and causing a number of other unforeseen issues, but they're at least doing something. I hate to go all Thomas Friedman and espouse the virtues of one-party rule, but China is not experiencing the gridlock that the polarized US is. And during these turbulent economic times, that is worth a lot.

The work shortages highlighted in the article above relate back to the post I made a few days ago. China's economy is no longer so coastal-focused. The opportunities for migrants used to be largely centered in cities like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and other boom towns along the coast. More and more though, there are increasing opportunities on the interior of the country.

With low-level employees having more power and money, this article states that inflation and higher prices of goods are possible. Whatever the macro-economic hiccups could be, I see migrants having more choice and opportunity in their work as a good thing. The migrants of China perform back-breaking, monotonous labor far, far away from their home towns for very little money. I'm all for them having the chance to make a little more money, have, possibly, better working conditions, and live better lives.

You Are Now Free to Move About the Country

China will begin instituting policy that should help the people on the fringes of society better integrate.

From The Washington Post:

Image taken in 2006 along the 长江 (Yangtze River)

BEIJING -- China will grant young migrant workers more social service benefits and help them rent or buy homes in smaller cities, a government adviser said Tuesday.

For decades, China has restrained migration by linking access to low-cost public services like health care and education to a person's registered place of residence. The system means rural migrants in Shanghai, Beijing and other big cities are deprived many essential benefits and services.

Han Jun, a senior research fellow at the Development Research Center, a think tank that advises China's Cabinet, said a policy paper released last month made it clear that the government is "striving for substantial reform of the household registration system" to allow migrants, especially younger ones, to register in cities.

However, the reform plan aims to get migrants registered in cities and townships close to their home villages - not expensive places like Beijing or Shanghai where migrants flock for construction and service sector jobs.

"A farmer would have to live several lifetimes before he could afford an apartment in Beijing," Han said. "This reform will be mainly focused on moving rural migrants into smaller cities and townships."

Read On

This policy shift should help the swelling of the country's largest urban centers - Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. These cities are already megalopolises. Cities that large really don't need to get much bigger. I suppose cities can theoretically grow forever, but at some point, 10+ million person cities just become too much to handle.

I see, and I think the China government sees, a great opportunity in the coming years and decades to develop its second-tier and third-tier cities.

Chinese cities are broken down into "tiers." I've heard these tiers referenced many times while in China. I just did a quick Google search to find lists of these tiers, but had a hard time coming up with much (not sure how to search for this in Chinese on Baidu).

I finally found a blogger who's done the research and who has compiled a list of China's tier system though. From the "Eric in Beijing" blog's "Which Tier is Your Chinese City?" post:

First tier
* Beijing
* Guangzhou
* Shanghai
* Xian (what are they smoking?!)

Second tier
* Changchun
* Chengdu
* Chongqing
* Dalian
* Guiyang
* Haikou
* Hangzhou
* Harbin
* Hefei
* Kunming
* Lanzhou
* Nanjing
* Ningbo
* Qingdao
* Sanya
* Shantou
* Shaoxing
* Shenyang
* Shenzhen
* Suzhou
* Taiyuan
* Tianjin
* Urumqi
* Wenzhou
* Wuhan
* Xiamen
* Xian
* Zhuhai

Third tier
None of the articles I looked at listed the third tier cities by name. By process of elimination, if you're in a Chinese city that's not listed as first tier or second tier, then you must be in a third tier city.

Fourth Tier
The sticks.

I agree with Eric that Xi'an is not a first-tier city. It isn't. It's a solid second-tier city.

Do you recognize many of the second-tier cities on that list? Unless you've lived in China or have a vested interest in China, you probably don't. You should get familiar with them though. The development of China's second-tier cities is going nuts and these cities are the ones that are going to really boom in the coming years.

Second-tier and third-tier cities will largely grow by people coming to them from the countryside. Like the rest of the world, very few people want to continue living in rural areas. The pull of cities is just too appealing. Rural Chinese are doing whatever it takes - working in factories, restaurants, and menial jobs - to get to cities.

Providing benefits to migrants leaving the countryside is a huge step in the right direction for China. I understand the reasons why every Chinese person in the countryside couldn't, and shouldn't, leave the countryside at once. The pressure on resources and space and jobs would just be too intense. Conceding that, China's 户口 (hukou) system is brutal and needs to be reformed.

The title of this post - You Are Now Free to Move About the Country - is the tagline for America's Southwest Airlines (what many consider to be the best airline in the States). The Chinese are not completely free to go wherever they want. But they appear to becoming freer. And the freedom to move is a freedom that every person in the world should have.

China's Missing Girls

The lecture I saw at the University of Kansas' Confucius Institute - "Out of the Shadows: Family Planning and Identifying the 'Missing Girls' in Rural China" - was very good. The presenter, Dr. John Kennedy from KU, has done most of his work in rural Shaanxi Province (Xi'an's Province). So that made the talk even more interesting for me.

I'll highlight some of the main points he had last night.

- The 2000 census published in the People's Daily said that there are 116.86 males born for every 100 females. The number is much higher in rural parts of the country though. He had a rate of 123 boys for every 100 girls in Shaanxi Province.

- The ideal number of children for a Chinese farmer is two boys and one girl. This number will allow the family name (姓) to live on and also give the family plenty of resources for a successful family farm.

- Young men are needed to take care of elderly parents. There is no retirement in China's countryside. Old people basically work until they die. If a family doesn't have a son, the daughters will be married off and nobody will be there to take of the parents in their final years.

- Kennedy talked about visiting "bare sticks" villages. "Bare sticks" (光棍儿) are men who cannot find a wife. There are a lot of factors that go into a man being a "bare stick" - ie. being too poor to be an attractive candidate for a woman - but one of the main reasons there are so many is that there simply aren't that many women in villages. He described "bare sticks villages" as being 100% male villages where men work day after day at a factory or on farms with no wife or family. And, of course, no hope for things to get better.

- The farmers and villagers, particularly women, from the countryside who sell fruit and vegetables in cities were discussed. I liked this section because I vividly remember the women on the streets near my apartment selling fruits and vegetables. Dr. Kennedy explained that those women usually travel into the city three or four days at a time, sell their produce to city folk, head back to their family's farm with money, and then do the whole thing again a couple days later.

- Dr. Kennedy, in his time in northern Shaanxi, came across a family with five children. After getting to know the father and having some baijiu with him, the father told him that of his five kids, only two are "registered." The other three 不存在 - don't exist.

Dr. Kennedy's main point was this: There are a lot more unregistered girls living in rural China than the official numbers of the media says there are. He gave three reasons for the out-of-whack sex ratio:

1. Abortion
2. Infanticide
3. Unregistered girls

Whereas the western media and even a lot of academics think one and two are the main culprits, he thinks that the unregistered girls situation is not well-understood and, thus, under-reported.

There are, in fact, lots of reasons for families to keep girls. No family wants to kill babies. Women can be of use around the farm and aren't simply "another mouth to feed." And ultrasounds (which are illegal) and abortions are often too costly for farmers to have.

There are also reasons for local cadres (party officials) to turn their blind eye to unregistered girls. The main things that cadres are responsible for are as follows:

1. Social stability
2. Economic development
3. Birth rate kept down

As long as the local villagers are happy and the cadre can keep his numbers down, then harmony should be achieved (and promotions for the cadre should be had).

There are a lot of questions/issues that go hand-in-hand with the issue of unregistered girls: What do they do when they're adults? How can they become legitimate? Education? He believes that until the phenomenon of unregistered girls is better addressed, these issues will continue to be a problem.

It's important to try to understand the issues that exist in China's country side. As great as it was talking with people like Zachary Karabell and Robert Compton, they, admittedly, don't know a whole lot about rural China. Their experience in China is in the cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen where economic growth is taking place. Seeing that China is such an agrarian country and that more than half of its population is still farmers, learning more about China's countryside is necessary for having a deeper understanding of China.

Living in the Shadows

At the end of 2008 and in the first few months of 2009, I wrote a lot about the plight of Chinese migrants. There were a lot of media reports about the millions upon millions of migrant workers who were either struggling to find work in Chinese metropolises or who had simply returned to the countryside dejected.

I haven't seen too many reports about migrants in recent months. I have to assume that most of the millions struggling at the beginning of 2009 eventually found work. The last figure I saw said that there were (only...) four million still looking for work. So it appears as if the crisis of unemployed migrants from last winter is not too severe right now.

I got an email from someone at The Global Post the other day. They directed me to some recent reporting that they've done on Chinese migrant workers entitled: Living in the Shadows. I suggest you click that link and go check out what they've put up over there. The videos, in particular, give the viewer a fascinating glimpse into the daily struggle of those on the edge of China's growth.

Migrants' Families

Over the past several months, I've talked extensively about the problems of migrant workers and their work. Here is an article talking about the problems that arise when migrant workers go away to work.

From AFP:

Photo from Xinhua

MINGCHUAN, China (AFP) — Like millions of Chinese children, 16-year-old Song Yuedong sees his parents just once a year.

As China's army of migrant workers toil to build their nation's future, children like Song live with relatives, often knowing their parents only as voices on the end of a phone.

Shy, wearing an American basketball tee-shirt and sporting the fuzzy beginnings of a mustache, Song looks like any teenager anywhere in the world.

He lives with his grandparents in the farming town of Mingchuan in Anhui province, one of China's poorest regions which since the 1970s has been a major source of the cheap labor that has fueled the nation's explosive growth.

More than 130 million people like Song's parents have left their farms for work in China's cities -- in their case a factory in neighboring Jiangsu province.

They come home once a year for the Lunar Chinese New Year holiday, the traditional season for family reunions.

"When they come back, I am very happy because I can finally see them after such a long time," Song said.

Read On

Growing up in a stable, two-parent home, this is a very sad story to me.

While it's great that poor farmers in China's countryside have had the chance in recent years to earn more money and learn more skills than they ever would have staying on the farm, there are some drawbacks to making it out of the countryside. Especially if the entire family can't go to the city.

Walk into any small canteen restaurant in Xi'an and you are very likely to see teenagers working as the waitresses and in the kitchen. I've seen some children that look very young working in kitchens. I reckon a lot of them are in their early teens.

And as for adult migrants, they are everywhere. Go anywhere in any Chinese city and their presence can be felt.

When migrants take advantages of the opportunities to leave the countryside, there certainly are opportunity costs when making that decision.

China, which now has tens of millions of children who hardly know their parents, will certainly feel the effects of this phenomenon in one way or another as these children go into adulthood and the parents of these children leave the workforce and go into retirement.

No New Stimulus Package Announced

Despite market rallies yesterday based on speculation that China would announce a fresh new stimulus package today, Premier Wen didn't announce any specific plans for new money to be injected into China's economy.

From The New York Times:

BEIJING — Warning that China faces “unprecedented difficulties and challenges,” Premier Wen Jiabao outlined a barrage of construction, increased subsidies and economic measures on Thursday aimed at continuing his nation’s modernization despite a world financial crisis.

He also indicated that China’s leaders would seek to begin a fundamental shift in their economic strategy by encouraging citizens to spend and consume more goods, as in most Western economies. China’s startling growth has been driven so far by exports and abundant spending on roads, dams and other infrastructure projects, a trend that experts say cannot be sustained in the long term.

But in a long speech to the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, Mr. Wen did not explicitly announce any new spending to combat the financial crisis beyond the $585 billion that China committed to spend in November.

China’s stock market rose about 6 percent on Wednesday, and other global markets also advanced, on speculation that Mr. Wen would announce still more economic stimulus spending.

Instead, he said that while 2009 would be a year of “arduous tasks,” China’s economic strategy was sound and the nation’s fundamentally positive outlook was unchanged.

Read On

It's obvious that the rest of Asia, as well as the rest of the world, are looking to China as a barometer of the world economy. Seeing that China is being viewed as one of the important players in the economic crisis, there are many reasons to be concerned.

Rural migrants are finding nothing to do except return to farms, homelessness is on the rise, and those living in the countryside are cutting back on eating meat.

From The Washington Post:

As tens of thousands of manufacturing companies have collapsed amid slowing demand due to the global economic crisis, the laid-off workers can no longer find jobs in the cities. For many, returning to their rural roots is not a possibility because their families' farmland has been sold off to make room for shopping malls, office high-rises and apartment complexes -- leaving them with no safety net. Even those lucky enough to have kept their farming plots have been hit hard by a drought -- the country's worst in 50 years, according to the government -- which has affected up to 80 percent of the land for winter crops.

"The drought has had a big impact on farmers. Some villages are out of food," said Lu Xuejing, a professor at the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing. The impact has been especially pronounced in the nation's northwest, in provinces such as Gansu, where high temperatures combined with sparse rainfall have dried up riverbeds and killed wheat crops. This convergence of factors has meant the unthinkable for a country that in recent years has enjoyed double-digit growth in gross domestic product: As many as 10 percent of China's 130 million migrant workers face what Renmin University professor Yao Yuqun calls "bread-and-butter issues." They are having trouble putting food on the table because "they no longer have farmland, and they lost their jobs in the cities," Yao said.

Read the entire article

Outside of the common folk who are facing "bread-and-butter issues," the more globalized parts of China also appear to be hurting badly. Foreign investment is down by as much as 40% in former boomtowns, bankruptcies are cracking global supply chains, and the cheap goods which had flowed out of China's factories for years have stopped streaming out of the country.

Indeed, there seems to be little hope to me that "we've hit bottom" or that "things are about to turn around."

Resilient Migrants

While southern China has had its share of issues since the Chinese New Year, northern China has, so far, been able to avoid any serious problems with restless migrants.

From Newsweek:

Over the last 30 years, as its economy has raced ahead, China has witnessed the world's largest internal migration, with some 250 million farmers and others abandoning its impoverished heartland in search of factory work and a better life on the coast. Now, as the economy slows—exports for January plunged 17.5 percent compared to the same month last year—many of those factories (including nearly half of the toymakers in the Pearl River Delta) have shut down, and unemployment is thought to have hit 10 percent. That's sending threatening waves throughout Chinese society. Among the most worrisome effects: some 20 million migrant workers have returned home, flooding areas where able-bodied youngsters were recently a rarity.

Perhaps hardest hit is hardscrabble Henan Province, whose population is thought to account for a full 10 percent of China's newly jobless. Local officials say some 2 million unemployed workers (out of a total population of 94 million) came home to stay during late January's Chinese New Year holiday, the traditional time for paying off—and laying off—workers. The real number is probably much higher, and it's sure to grow further as layoffs mount. Already it's producing great anxiety among Chinese officials, who have begun warning of civil unrest in unusually stark terms. The fear is that jobless workers—many of them young men—will band together and turn to violence or crime.

Avoiding those dangers by reabsorbing and redirecting these masses won't be easy. But if Henan is a guide, local governments are off to a good start, and may even manage to turn the infusion of new (or returning) blood to their advantage. Henan officials are working on a two-track strategy: first, finding jobs for as many returnees as possible, which generally means reexporting them by posting ads and hosting recruiters from elsewhere. Second, Henan is looking for ways to retain the best-qualified returnees in order to boost the province's depleted workforce and develop new businesses.

Read On

Even those who are not getting any cut of these infrastructure projects or training and are struggling to find anything to do with themselves are not anywhere near a "tipping point."

From Reuters:

ZHENGZHOU, China (Reuters) - Whatever the uncertainties as jobs vanish for China's migrant workers, two things seem clear: they will become neither rebels nor farmers.

Officials estimate that 20 million rural migrants are already out of work, fuelling fears that idle, frustrated young men will turn to protest and sow instability that could throw China's economy badly off course.

The global financial crisis has sent Chinese growth tumbling to below 8 percent, a level widely regarded as a minimum for China to create enough jobs for those entering the workforce.

A key plank of the government's strategy to mitigate the threats posed by job losses has been to encourage the unemployed to return to the countryside, where incomes are low but most have a piece of land to call their own and keep themselves fed.

A few weeks into peak job-hunting season after Chinese New Year, the back-to-the-farm plan has come up short. But Beijing's protest nightmare is not becoming a reality.

Read On

These articles show to me just how resilient a lot of these laborers really are. After being cut off from their "ticket out of poverty" (working in factories), they just get on with life and keep going.

I'm curious to see how long this grace period of "getting on with life in a difficult situation" for North China's migrants lasts though. It could very well be quite protracted or it could be another couple months.

If Beijing's economic stimulus package were to keep enough people busy, it doesn't sound like these migrants need much to stay happy. I'm pretty sure they'll be satisfied as long as they have a job they can toil at everyday and a small wad of cash to take home each month.

But if a large number of people are forced to return back to the farm because there truly is nothing going on for them, frustrations will surely build. Returning to the farm just won't do for most of them.

Handling these millions of unemployed migrants throughout all of China will be a huge test for China. As China's President, Hu Jintao, said in December:

"Whether the pressures can be turned into a driving force and the challenges turned to opportunities ... is a test of our ability to control a complex situation, and also a test of our party's governing ability," Hu said.

Hu is indeed right about the severity of the economic crisis and its impact on China. The coming year and the Party's ability to manage the the crisis will surely be be a more difficult and exhausting task than organizing the Olympics or managing run-away growth over the past couple decades.

Notice Hu in his quote talking about turning "challenges into opportunities." I had a lengthy discussion about this fallacy a few weeks ago. Through a bit of research I discovered that, in fact, the Chinese word for crisis is not a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity.

Life would be so much easier if "crisis" had an intrinsic "opportunity" aspect built into it. But alas, it doesn't. The coming year is going to be very difficult for everyone and there will be no guarantees for anyone.

Fake Chic

China's fake goods' markets, or shanzhai, are getting more sophisticated and innovative.

From Reuters:

BEIJING (Reuters Life!) - It's time to ditch the designer goods and adopt fake fashion, say some Chinese, as "sham glam" takes the world's most populous nation by storm.

Though previously shunned as unsophisticated, fake products increasingly have their own chic appeal in China and a fashionable moniker -- "shanzhai."

Literally meaning "mountain fort," the term "shanzhai" is applied to everything from knock-off trainers and mobile phones to lookalike celebrities and television shows, and refers to the remote, maybe lawless locations they traditionally get made in.

And the popularity of these goods seems sure to grow as China's economy slows along with the rest of the world and real designer products spin out of the price range of more Chinese.

Many "shanzhai" goods sport altered names, trying to tread a fine line between imitation and straight-out fake, and cost much less than their above-board, well-known brand-name equivalents.

Samsung goes to Samsing, Adidas goes to Odidoss or Avivas and Hike, Like or even Mike substitute for Nike, with the U.S. sports wear firm's mark at times reversed and given an extra flourish.

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I've spoken at great lengths about Xi'an's fake goods' markets. They really are everywhere. You can buy fake Nikes from literally dozens of places around town. In fact, it's harder for me to think of where you can actually buy real authentic pairs. There are places selling the legit western products, but they're fewer and farther between.

This article is interesting where it talks about the difficulty and, often, unwillingness of law enforcement officials to prosecute the the peddlers of fake brands.

There truly is an acceptance of fake goods in Chinese culture. So much so in fact that it's hard to see if and when the culture of fake products will ever end.

That's not to say that every Chinese person endorses the buying of fake goods though.

Jackie, for instance, does not like having fake products. She'd rather have fewer real, quality products than several fake knock-offs for the same price. Jackie refers to the fake clothing as "farmer fashion." By this, she means that only farmers and people from the countryside find the fake clothes and their poor-quality exciting and fashionable.

One aspect that I've thought about recently relating to fake clothing and electronics products is this:

A lot of fuss has been made in the past about Nike's use of sweatshops and terrible labor practices. If Nike, a western company selling expensive products, is considered to have questionable labor policies, one can only imagine what the Chinese-run knock-off counterpart to Nike's practices are.

These fake products' factories can't possibly be pretty sights.

And the Reckoning Begins

Economic numbers came out today in China. Just like the rest of the world's, they are not pretty.

From Reuters:

BEIJING (Reuters) - About 20 million Chinese rural migrants have lost jobs as the nation's economic growth has faltered, a senior official said on Monday, promising policies to boost incomes and a softer approach to potential unrest.

Chen Xiwen, director of the Office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, told a news conference that a recent survey showed 15.3 percent of the 130 million migrants moving from villages to cities and factories had returned jobless to the countryside.

Adding this year's 6 to 7 million new entrants into the rural labor market, Chen added, China will this year have about 25 million jobless and potentially restive rural unemployed.

...

Yiping Huang, chief Asia economist for Citigroup, said even that number could double if government stimulus plans fail to offset slowed exports and general gloom.

"It is a big number coming from an official source but a lot of people are expecting even bigger numbers," Huang said of Chen's estimate.

"These are pretty difficult to check reliably, but people are talking about 30 or 40 million eventually."

China has about 750 million people in its countryside -- more than the combined populations of the United States and European Union -- and their incomes and willingness to spend will be crucial to government efforts to boost domestic consumption.

Read the whole article

China's Newest Export

This is an interesting twist on the economic crisis.

From McClatchy Newspapers:

Cheap labor has helped China become the world's top producer of a variety of consumer goods, including televisions and DVD players and apple juice and clothing. So it seemed only a matter of time before China would come up with a new export: the laborers themselves.

Recruiters come to hamlets around counties like this one in Sichuan Province in southwest China and offer salaries double or triple what workers can make at home.

"They said, 'If you go abroad, you can earn a lot more,' " said Yang Mingxian, whose husband traveled to Saudi Arabia to work on a construction project late last year. "He just did it for the money."

However, Beijing is discovering pitfalls in looking after workers overseas. A scattered few are getting killed in terrorist attacks. Others have been kidnapped or encountered peril in their host countries. Still others say they've been cheated by the companies that hired them and faced sudden deportation back to China after they lodged complaints.

Read On

Theoretically, going abroad to work as a Chinese migrant could be a good idea. Making money in a more valuable currency and having the opportunity to sent that money back home would be great for migrants struggling to find work.

But like a lot of get-rich schemes, this one is not as great as it sounds.

The problems that your average Chinese person could encounter abroad in the Middle East or Africa are mind-boggling. As the Chinese guy says at the end of the article:

"We don't want to go back to the (Persian) Gulf area. If something happens, they show guns," he said as more than a dozen villagers gathered around.

"If you steal things, they cut off your fingers," Feng said, making a reference to Islamic law that drew astonishment from his listeners. "If you look at a woman for longer than three seconds, they can call the police to take you away."

Of course, the way things are going at the moment for rural migrants in China, there are probably going to be a lot more downtrodden and frustrated farmers getting suckered into taking the bait on these trips abroad.

Urban/Rural Disparity Intensifies

It is becoming clear who is being hit hardest and where it hurts most in the current economic crisis.

From The Associated Press:

SHANGHAI, China (AP) — The politically divisive income gap between China's affluent citydwellers and its huge farm population expanded to its widest level ever last year as the economy slowed, putting millions of rural migrants out of work.

Agriculture Ministry statistics show the gap between average urban and rural incomes expanded to 11,100 yuan (about $1,600) in 2008, with the ratio between the richer city residents to those in the countryside rising to 3.36 to 1, the state-run newspaper China Business News reported Friday.

The ratio was 3.33 to 1 in 2007, with the gap then at 9,646 yuan (about $1,400).

While the statistical difference seems small, the trend suggests the economic slowdown is foiling efforts by China's communist leaders to close the long-standing, sensitive wealth gap between the cities that have prospered since economic reforms began 30 years ago, and the villages that have lagged behind.

Read On

It makes sense that those who have been living a comfortable life will be able to ride out the decline that we're currently encountering in relative comfort. It also makes sense that those who've been scraping with newly found riches in factories and migrant work will quickly fall once their services are no longer needed.

A friend of mine told me that he saw a TV program on Xi'an's local channel this week about migrant workers coming home to villages in southern Shaanxi Province. The program said that this one particular village has received an influx of workers returning home after being laid off in factories throughout China. Apparently, many of those workers were bringing skills, technology, and ideas they'd learned in factories with them back to the countryside.

For the sake of everyone involved, I hope that this report from China's state run television has some semblance to reality and is not simply propaganda. It could be a silver lining in, what will surely be, a dark time for millions upon millions of people in China's countryside.

A Profile in Reverse Migration

The following article is a lengthy profile on a young migrant worker and the current state of flux that she and China's migrants are in as the world economy crumbles. I recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole article.

From Der Spiegel:

The promise of prosperity lured Quan Xiaoju from her home in rural China to the assembly lines in the bustling city of Guangzhou. Now, like countless other migrant workers, she is heading back home as the jobs dry up and China's boom comes to an end.

As she bids farewell to Guangzhou, a city of nine million people, there is hardly enough time for a wistful look back -- at the teeming crowds of migrant workers with copious amounts of luggage in front of the city's train station, or at its bold downtown highway, built on stilts, and still packed with cars despite the economic crisis.

The crowd pushes forward relentlessly, literally forcing Quan Xiaoju to enter the station. Xiaoju, a petite migrant worker, quickly places her belongings -- a black-and-white plaid suitcase and a small plastic bag -- on the conveyor belt at the security checkpoint before being pushed onward, then up an escalator and into one of the enormous waiting rooms.

China's global factory is shedding its slave-like workers, cost-effectively and efficiently, almost as if they too were products on an assembly line. They sit in long rows, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting for the trains that will take them back to their home provinces, to the places they once left for China's industrial east, lured by the promise of prosperity. Xiaoju (her name means "Little Chrysanthemum") finally has time to catch her breath and look around. She has a few more minutes left before her northbound train to Hengyang, in Hunan Province, is scheduled to depart.

The station is busy as it would normally be before the Chinese New Year, when companies in Guangdong Province -- the enormous export factory that borders Hong Kong and includes the burgeoning large cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan -- collectively send armies of migrant workers home on vacation. But this time the exodus is involuntary and unforeseen, and likely to last for an extended period of time -- and the mood is understandably gloomy.

Read On

Xiao Ju's story breaks my heart. The circumstances of her existence is so bleak:

A daughter of poor farmers born into China's dying countryside. Goes to the big city to work in a factory where she's given the opportunity to slave away for miniscule sums of money. Then one day she's told to go home. Not because of any problem of her creation. But because nobody wants the shoddy jewelry she makes anymore. She then has nothing left to do but return back to the bleak rural poverty of her home village.

It's even more gut-wrenching when you think about the millions of people like Xiao Ju who are in her exact same predicament.

At the end of the article, Xiao Ju laments that the life she dreamed of one day having in Guangzhou is gone. But she seems confident that one day she'll have the chance, again, to find work in a southern Chinese factory.

Ironically, in Xiao Ju's life, slavery in a factory is freedom. Working seven days a week with toxic chemicals making low-quality goods for pennies an hour is the beacon of hope in her, otherwise, doomed existence.

Such is the tragedy of China's rural migrant population.

China's Exports Plummet

This isn't good news for China's economy, which is utterly dependent on its exports.

From Reuters:

BEIJING, Dec 6 (Reuters) - China's exports for November fell in value compared to the same month last year, the first such decline in more than 7 years, a Chinese business newspaper reported on Saturday.

Citing an unidentified source, the 21st Century Business Herald said that according to estimates from customs authorities, China's exports in November were worth "over" $100 billion and imports worth over $70 billion, marking declines in both.

The report said the fall in November exports marked the first such monthly fall since June 2001. In November last year, China's exports were worth $108 billion.

The Chinese-language report cautioned that its trade numbers were "the product of a partial collation and may have omissions."

Read On

This shouldn't be too big of a surprise, really.

From January through June of this past year, 67,000 factories in China closed their doors. Yes, you just read that right. It's not that 67,000 employees lost their jobs. 67,000 factories closed in the beginning of 2008.

And that was before the economic crisis grabbed headlines in September. The official numbers, when released regarding what is going on now, will surely be mind boggling.

Many of my ex-pat friends here in China, knowing that I'm American, have been joking with me about how screwed America is with the crisis. I just laugh and say, "You know what, everyone's f*^%ed. If you think China or England or Australia or Canada is going to get through the coming months and years unscathed, you're a fool."

When having these discussions, I constantly think about a poster advertisement that is up on the walls of the private English training school I manage. It contains quotes from a number of famous western people. My two favorite quotes are:

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." - Andy Warhol

"The future belongs to those who prepare for it today." - Malcolm X

Now I think it's pretty cool that these, rather quirky, quotes made it on to one of the official posters of my school. The Andy Warhol one doesn't really fit in with what I'm talking about here, but the Malcolm X one does.

I'm amazed at a lot of the nonchalance that people are having about the economic disaster that is currently engulfing the world. So many people I encounter don't seem to be attempting to wrap their minds around the absolute insanity which is going on on a daily basis.

Maybe people are just putting their heads in the sand and not paying attention. Or maybe the people who've been ribbing me don't understand the connectedness which defines our current, globalized, economy. Or maybe they're all the sane ones and I'm the one who's lost touch with reality.

For the world's sake, I hope that they're right and my pessimistic view on the near future of our world is wrong.

X's quote here gives me inspiration at this time of great uncertainty and fear. I feel as if I prepare myself for what I believe is going to happen in the coming months and years ahead, then I believe I'll be better off for it.

At the moment, I'm trying to manage my way through the stages of grief that come with the realization that the world I'd been imagining my young adult to be like just isn't going to come to fruition.

For the time being, trying to understand what is going on on a daily basis and the ramifications these actions are going to have in the future is my way of preparing myself for what is in store for us.

AIDS and China's Migrant Workers

On the spreading of AIDS amongst China's poor.

From Reuters:

BEIJING, Nov 30 (Reuters) - The new face of AIDS in China is a shy man with a heavy provincial accent, a weathered face and the rough hands of a manual worker.

Zhang Xiaohu, a character in an educational film for migrant workers, is part of a trend that worries Chinese officials: the potential for AIDS to spread among the estimated 200 million rural migrants driving the country's rapid economic expansion.

AIDS in China has, to date, mostly been limited to drug users, gay men, prostitutes and the victims of reckless blood-buying schemes in the 1990s.

By the end of 2007, China had about 700,000 people with HIV/AIDS -- 0.05 percent of the total population -- health officials said on Sunday, ahead of World Aids Day the next day.

"The epidemic is lowly prevalent in general but it is highly prevalent among specific groups such as migrant workers, and in some regions particularly remote areas and the countryside," said Wang Weizhen, deputy director of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment at the Ministry of Health, according to state media.

Read On

Migrant workers in China often will leave their home for months or years on end. It's not surprising, as the article goes on to say, that in big cities like Beijing there are more and more people and places beginning to cater to the new inhabitants of those cities: ie. cheap prostitutes.

Prostitution is endemic in Xi'an. Within a twenty minute walk of my apartment, there are literally dozens of places one could go to get prostitutes. I know this from the pink lights emanating from seemingly every hair salon once night falls, not from the experience of actually having visited the women myself.

I might be completely off base here, but it seems to me as though prostitution is more acceptable in Xi'an than it is in the cities I've lived in in America: Kansas City and St. Louis. It is very possible that I'm just oblivious to America's prostitution, but I'm sure that the prostitution that goes on in the mid-west cities I've inhabited is not as blatant as it is in Xi'an. Between the loose women in dance clubs and the pink-lit salons dotting Xi'an's streets, there are literally endless opportunities for those looking to buy sex.

Since I've never visited these women, I'm not 100% sure about how much they cost. But one night in a taxi, the driver was telling me that they could be had for 50RMB, or about $7.

The plethora of cheap prostitutes found in China's enormous cities combined with millions of men working hundreds of miles away from their homes does indeed sound like the perfect recipe for debauchery and a public health crisis.

China's Slowing Down

The Chinese are not immune to the global financial meltdown.

From Reuters:

DONGGUAN, China (Reuters) - Like tens of millions of young Chinese before her, Yu Juan left China's hinterland for factory work near the coast four years ago with the dream of getting rich.

An acquaintance from her hometown of Dazhou in Sichuan province told her about an exporter in Dongguan, an hour-and-a-half north of Hong Kong, that was hiring.

The Hejun Toy Factory was large, Hong Kong-owned and paid well and on time. It also had an imprimatur that Yu and others working there thought was a virtual guarantee of job security: a stock code.

"At that time, we considered this company good because it was listed on a stock exchange," she said.

Last week, however, Hejun's owner, Smart Union Group, closed the factory gates, suspended its shares and said provisional liquidators had been appointed.

Read On

In today's globalized economy, it's not surprise that the world's financial problems will affect everywhere.

I'm really curious to see what happens in the coming months. New shopping malls, apartment blocks, houses are going up everywhere in Xi'an. These days still, on the surface, appear to be boom times in China.

When I see this rampant consumerism flourishing, I can't help but wonder will happen if a world recession, or maybe even depression, is looming. Chinese people are just starting to whet their materialistic appetite. A quick economic turnaround would be ugly.

Deadly Mine Explosion, (Yawn)

I see so many of these reports on a daily basis in the news that I'm not even sure that it is really worth noting. But hey, twenty-seven people are twenty-seven people.

From AFP:

BEIJING (AFP) — Twenty-seven people were killed and six injured Thursday in a coal mine explosion in northeast China, state media said, the latest disaster to hit the nation's notoriously dangerous mining industry.

The gas blast occurred at a mine in the city of Fuxin in Liaoning province, one of China's main coal-producing areas, an official surnamed Li at the Fuxin local work safety bureau told AFP.

The official Xinhua news agency said 27 people had been confirmed killed as rescuers found the bodies of the last three missing miners, and six others were injured.

The explosion took place on Thursday morning when 41 miners were working in the mine, Xinhua said.

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The article goes on to say:

Nearly 3,800 people died in Chinese coal mines last year, according to official figures, although independent monitors say the real figure is likely to be higher as many accidents are covered up.

So if you take 2007's 3,800 coal mining deaths divided by 365, you get an average of 10.41 deaths a day.

I suppose today's explosion which killed 27 isn't really that significant or out of the ordinary.