Adrift and in Exile Within: The Lived Experience of China’s Migrant Workers

Introduction

The social history of China, since the fall of the Qing dynasty, has not progressed along predictable trajectories. At periodic intervals, there have been societal inflections marked by a change of course towards a different future. Like in the early 1980s when a seemingly stable and long-existing social arrangement known as socialism began to dissolve. Most notably, the dismantling of the rural communes, which until the late 1970s held back the peasant population in the countryside by providing them home, livelihood, and a familiar social world. But the gradual disintegration of the socialist-era planning institutions, which began earlier in the rural areas as manifested in the breakdown of rural communes, created a new set of social realities. With the government’s attempt to introduce agriculture-based economic solutions, such as the household responsibility system, failing, China’s agrarian social world was all set for a structural change. The most noticeable among these changes was the emergence of a new class of Chinese proletariat called the migrant workers (nongmingong), unattached to the rural economy, who moved out of the rural areas and entered the cities for employment, mostly without the state sanction. Their collective breach of the state regulatory regime on rural-urban migration, the hukou system, and the social and economic outcome it produced is a fascinating, yet poignant story of China’s ever-changing historical courses.

The rural counties in post-socialist China of the 1980s were a harsh place to live in. For many rural residents, therefore, to survive amidst the grinding scarcities meant leaving the villages to become itinerants, or in other words, migrate to the cities and find employment. Be it in construction sites, factories, warehouses, or repair shops, they were driven by the desire to find cash wages. In the 1990s, when China was emerging as the ‘factory of the world’ driven by Foreign Direct Investments in the Pearl River Delta towns in southeastern Guangdong province, the cities of Shenzhen, Dongguan, Zhuhai, Foshan and Jiangmen became attractive destinations for rural migrants. Thus began one of the largest internal migrations in history. By the late 1990s, an estimated 200 million rural peasants left their home villages and counties to enter the cities to work in non-agricultural industries.

The story of China’s migrant workers has been well written about. There exist both in Chinese as well as in English rich ethnographic narratives, labour market studies, statistical accounts, and official documents. Besides, the migrants’ world of labour and personal lives has inspired many literary expressions in the form of novels, autobiographical narratives in social media, documentaries, television dramas, and well-known films. Drawing from some of these sources, I try to reconstruct some aspects of their lived experiences. This article elaborates on four issues that I consider as the defining conditions of rural migrants’ life worlds. The first is migration. In China, the processes of leaving the rural areas and entering the cities for employment is not an exercise of free will. It entails negotiations as well as evasion of the state sanctioning regime of the hukou system, which continues to cast a long shadow over the lives of rural migrants. Secondly, the lifeworld of migrants in the cities is confined to territorial bounding, as their accommodation in workers’ dormitories has integrated worksite and housing that denies them mobilities. As newcomers to the cities, the migrants typically suffer from a sense of loss of belonging. This aspect of how they are coping with the longing for a community and social fraternities by tapping into native-place affinities is elaborated in the third section. A tragic part of migrants’ life is the non-payment of wages after long months of toil in the construction sites and export industries. The last section will examine the recurring issue of wage arrears that has left millions of migrant workers devastated. The concluding section will be a note of postscript to reflect upon the current update on whether the migrant workers’ life has changed, and if so, how far.

The lives of China’s migrant workers are stories of human resilience. A majority of them were forced to endure conditions that demanded extreme perseverance in an unfamiliar social milieu, where they found themselves in the cities. In many ways, the migrant workers’ life has a poignant semblance to the characters portrayed in Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life (Sanxia Haoren). They are adrift in search of someone or jobs, estranged from family; they remain outsiders wherever they sojourn; exploited by employers or deceived, they survive their ordeal with stoic resilience. Like the story of Han Sanming, a miner from Shanxi province returning to Fengjie, an upstream Yangtze town in search of his lost wife. Fengjie is set for demolition as it will be submerged due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The town is actually a dilapidated ruin. The people Han Sanming makes acquaintance with in Fengjie, like him, are drifters and itinerants in search of work or someone. Despite their different personal stories, they are all bound together by a common experience of estrangement, wandering, life in ruins, and stoic acceptance of life’s destiny.

Rural–Urban Migration and the Long Shadow of Hukou

For the peasant migrants in China during the early decades of the reforms, leaving the rural areas and entering the cities was an enterprise fraught with difficulties, where they encountered the state-instituted barriers against territorial mobility. The main reason was that the rural-to-urban migration was regulated through a population administration system called the Household Registration Regulations, commonly known as the hukou system. Under this system, China’s population was divided into two administrative segments: the agricultural and the urban. People who are born in rural areas are registered as part of the agricultural household (nongye hukou), and those who are born in urban areas are registered as part of the non-agricultural household (feinongye hukou). In China, the Household Registration, or the hukou, is not simply a population census or a citizenship document. The administrative region of your birth can shape the life destinies of an individual, because a person with agricultural hukou is not allowed to migrate to the urban areas or cannot be employed in the urban industries without the state-regulated sanctions.

This system originated in the early 1950s when the new Communist state was trying to stabilise the sudden surge in population growth in the urban areas and also to maintain agricultural production after years of social turmoil. The influx of rural peasants into the urban areas in the early post-revolutionary years was a concern for the new government, as it affected social stability in the cities. So, in official parlance, these unregulated population flows were pejoratively referred to as “blind flows.” In 1958, China’s legislative body, the National People’s Congress (NPC), adopted the People’s Republic of China Hukou Registration Regulation, making internal migration subject to institutional controls. Luo Ruiqing, the then Minister of Public Security, stated that one of the important aims of this regulation was to prevent the “blind flow” of rural people to urban areas (Young 2023).

Henceforth, rural-to-urban migration required the state sanction stipulated in the form of three permits: an ‘employment permit’ from the Labour Bureau, an ‘enrolment permit’ from a school, or a ‘permit granting inward migration’ from the Public Security Bureau. In the 1970s, to further reinforce migration control, many municipal authorities set up migrant shelters to temporarily detain migrants who had entered the cities without valid approvals. But as the economic reform years progressed, it became compellingly clear to the Chinese authorities that the urban industries required the rural migrants to sustain the labour-intensive manufacturing. Since the late 1990s, there has been considerable easing of the control regime of the hukou regulations. Municipalities such as Beijing and Chongqing, and Shenzhen with Special Economic Zones, initiated local-level hukou reforms to remove some of the stringent household registration requirements.

China’s hukou system, perhaps, is a widely misunderstood institution outside. Partly because much of the Western accounts portray it as an instrument of state control designed to prevent rural-to-urban population mobility, and hence a discriminatory injunction that denies rural people their rights. It is therefore pertinent to note here that the hukou system has a wider purpose than migration control. As Chan and Zhang (199) have argued, “it was part of a larger economic and political system set up to serve multiple state interests.” In the context of China’s socialist redistributive goals, the hukou system functioned mainly as a welfare allocation system. For the rural residents, it provided land allocation and rice allowances, and for the urban residents, it provided employment in the urban work units (danwei), housing, access to medical care, and education. In the cities, the discrimination that the migrants faced was that they were excluded from the urban rationing regime, as Solinger (1999) calls it, which included jobs, transportation, electricity, water, and cheap food. This exclusion pushed the rural newcomers into the extreme fringes of urban society, where they were forced to live a life in exile. The Public Security Bureau officials who were responsible for implementing the hukou regulations tended to regard the “blind streamers” from the countryside as a social source of disorder in the cities. So, the peasant migrants of the reform decades were often met with an unfavourable institutional attitude. Since rural residents were registered as members of an agricultural household (nongcun hukou), those who migrated to the cities for employment remained people without a fixed residence status, part of the “floating population” or transients without legal rights in the cities.

By the early 1990s, the gender composition of the rural-to-urban migration began to change significantly. Early migrants in the 1980s were mainly men between the ages of 20 to 40 who possessed certain fortitude to toil in extremely demanding labour in sectors such as construction, mining, brick kilns, warehouses, repair shops, etc. But with the advent of Western capitalism into the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in the eastern Chinese factory towns for export manufacturing of electronics, garments and apparel, and toys, the ranks of migrants were joined by an increasing number of young unmarried women referred to as dagongmei (working girls), whose labour struggles and tribulations are vividly documented by Pun Ngai (2005). The labour exploitation of the Chinese dagongmei, Pun Ngai argues, is structured along class and gender lines as they are subjected to triple oppression by global capitalism, state socialism, and family patriarchy.

Workers’ Dormitories, Territorial Bounding, and Bare Lives

The metropolitan cities of Shanghai and Beijing, and the factory towns of Dongguan and Shenzhen, are promising lands of opportunity. For the migrant workers, these are aspirational cities where, if they can find employment, it is the beginning of a new journey in life. But when it comes to actually experiencing the city, it is a very different story. Because the promise of the cities has been confined to the spaces of work—a construction site, factory, warehouse, catering places, entertainment venues, etc. Once a migrant worker is hired, his or her lifeworld will be subject to what can be called a territorial bounding, where their mobility outside the worksite and the possibility of interacting with the local residents or generally experiencing the city will be restrained. The reason for this condition is the type of group residence provided by the companies to the migrants and their limited access to cash income. Since the late 1990s, a new type of residential infrastructure sprang up in most cities of China, where labour-intensive industries such as construction and manufacturing were growing faster, and also in the factory towns where Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) was inducing a new wave of export manufacturing.

The Chinese cities in the 1990s and 2000s had a melancholic grey appearance as they were going through significant physical transformations. Most of the cities became practically large construction sites over which hovered a grey haze of dust from the construction work. It was a common sight in those days, as this author recalls, to see a blue and white temporary lodging of typically three floors made of synthetic plank and steel bars next to the construction sites. It is in these ‘workers’ dormitories’ that the migrant workers’ lives were confined. The dormitories and construction sites formed some kind of enclosures where the migrants’ working life and private home life were spatially integrated. In fact, this type of spatial arrangement helped the construction companies and the export manufacturers to ensure the regular rhythm of work, as the migrant workers would be routinely transiting between the worksite and residence. Chris Smith and Ngai Pun have called this work-residence spatial integration a dormitory labour regime where internal migrants are accommodated and socially embedded. They characterise it as “a highly paternalistic, coercive, and intensive production system in which workers’ lives are dominated by the employers.”

Dormitory residence imposes two types of restrictions on the migrant workers. At one level, it functions as a physical enclosure that confines their mobility within. Be it the export manufacturers or construction companies, the employers will exercise control over the workers’ time, where the idea of time divided between work, home, and leisure is no longer available to the migrants. The pressure of project schedules or export targets makes companies maintain a production level where overtime is the norm. So the labour becomes an extended activity that stretches across longer hours. The migrants are then only left with just enough time to rest and reproduce their labour power to be spent the next day. The extended work creates conditions of unfreedom even if the overtime work is voluntary.

Secondly, migrants usually have limited access to money income. In the construction sector, this situation arises because of the wage payment schedule, which is typically at the end of their one-year work. During the intervals, the workers are given a small amount to meet their necessities. The result is a prolonged existence of frugal life without money for non-essential expenses or leisure. In the dormitories that provide food, the workers are forced to be content with steamed buns, rice, and cabbage.

Thirdly, the factory management in the export sectors is a quasi-state that has established a disciplinary regime that closely regulates workers’ lives. To take control over working time, the management has a strict schedule for workers’ days in the factory as well as in the dormitory. The well-elaborated time rule, which details when to report, duration of lunch break, washroom breaks, and when to leave, is to be followed strictly and without relaxation. As in a territorial state, the management has elaborate instrumentalities and personnel to surveil and enforce the rules. The origins of time discipline regulating labour, elaborated in the context of the Industrial Revolution by E. P. Thompson, were perfected by Guangdong factory managers a century later.

A frugal existence largely tied down to the worksite–dormitory reduces migrants’ social being to bare life.

Native-Place Identities: Longing for Belonging

Living in the unfamiliar cities far away from their native places, and separated from families, the migrants are deprived of social ties that offer them the consolations of personal affinities. They try to overcome this sense of brooding alienation by tapping into native-place affinities shared by migrants from the same provinces or regions such as Sichuan, Anhui, Hebei, etc. So, when the Sichuanren (the people from Sichuan) meet in Guangzhou factories, it instils and revives a sense of belonging they share as people from the same homeland. At a personal level, it also helps them to secure membership in a community of Sichuanese in the host cities. Native-place affinities are a deeply bonding reservoir of personal attachments. China’s labour histories often record how migrants from the same province seek to create a community of their own in the host cities through personal networks, associations, self-help groups, etc. When migrants from the same province interact, they can converse in more culturally fulfilling regional dialects where the intended nuances of their speech or expressions are never lost. So is the case with culinary preference that can fulfil the urge for a well-acquainted palate. The story of how Sichuan restaurants make such a noticeable presence in nearly all cities in China is because the migrants from Sichuan could not miss their strongly flavoured cuisine for too long a time. While living in Guangzhou, I had an occasion to be among an evening gathering of people from Hebei in a Hebei dining place, where I could see how the suppressed urge for native dialect and palate finds such a fulfilling expression when migrants from the same province meet.

Sweat, Hope, and Betrayal: Wage Arrears

Why were the rural migrants willing to take up work in faraway cities, knowing too well that work in construction sites, mines, or export industries would be gruelling, sometimes even hazardous? As described in the private letters of female migrant workers, the working conditions are oppressive even in the export industries in Shenzhen (Chan 2002). It is difficult to comprehend the personal urge that drove them into a life of toil, sweat, and sacrifice. Behind their audacious life decision lies an economic calculus focusing on money wages, which can be used for purposes beyond the simple reproduction of their labour power. In their collective consciousness and in personal motivations, monetary wages occupy a vitally important position. Supporting family, children’s education, life improvements, or accumulating sufficient funds for a new home—the list of personal aspirations can be many. Therefore, even a slight unpredictability in wage payment by the employer can seriously upset their personal calculations, the foundational rationale for becoming migrant workers.

Despite this crucial calculus shaping labour migrations, many companies defaulted on wage payments to their workers. Throughout the reform decades, non-payment of wages and wage arrears were reported from many industrial sectors. Although there remain variations in terms of periods of arrears, amounts due, and the reasons for defaults, wage arrears became a serious problem affecting China’s industrial peace in many cities. When the migrant workers are denied their due wages, it is not only the pain and misery they go through that deeply hurt them, but also the humiliation and sense of loss of personal value in the eyes of family members, as well as the community. In some of the industries, like in construction, workers are recruited through labour contractors (baogongtou) who have personal as well as native-place-based networks among the rural migrants. When the labour contractors default on their wages, the workers feel a deep sense of betrayal by someone in whom they had placed their personal trust. The interpersonal ties between the migrant workers and labour contractors are shaped by China’s cultural milieu, where personal trust is a highly valued social bond. The violation of that social bond is a betrayal unforgivable in the eyes of the migrants. The labour contractors who have embezzled workers’ wages or defaulted payment are called the “black-hearted” contractors, some of whom, like the one in Maoming in Guangdong, have been caught by the law and sentenced to a prison term (Xianning News Network, 2019).

Migrant workers resort to a variety of collective actions when their employer defaults on wage payment. In her accounts about workers’ life in the factory towns in Guangdong, Hsiao-Hung Pai mentions an incident of an attempt at mass suicide by migrant workers. When a beer company defaulted on their wages, thirty migrant workers from Hunan province climbed up central Guangzhou’s Haizhu Bridge in a desperate act of collective suicide by jumping off the bridge. Throughout the reform decades, non-payment of workers’ wages has been reported from many of China’s industrial sectors. The most notorious case was the construction sector, where the peculiar payment schedule and the system of subcontracting periodically left migrant workers without their annual wage before the Spring Festival.

The portraits of migrant workers outlined above are testimonies of human endurance behind the story of China’s miraculous economic growth. But in today’s China, those moving testimonies are overwhelmed by enthralling fables of middle-class prosperity and modern urban life. For the Chinese city elites, the stoic image of Han Sanming from Still Life, as a representative metaphor of a labouring migrant, has faded away into a distant past in their otherwise delightful lifeworld. Similarly, the official rhetoric about economic development seldom alludes to the migrant workers as the builders of a prosperous China. Yet, China’s social history of the reform era will attest to the resilience of the migrant workers, as the true makers of gleaming cities.