Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish: to whose voices is the Chinese Communist Party listening—the capitalists' or the workers'? Chris Richards tunes in

New Internationalist, Sept, 2004 by Chris Richards

SHE is only 36 years old. Yet when you look at her, you know that every part of her is wearing out. Her whole body sags.

Sometimes she works all day and through the night into the early hours of the morning. After all, there are many costs that come with living in the city. And she has many people in her family to support.

Li Siuling is a migrant worker: just one of 130 million who have left their rural communities to find work in the prosperous eastern cities. The money that she and others like her send back now makes up more than half of the income of the peasants and rural workers in the Chinese hinterland.

Suiling was only 15 when she left Anhui province, not far from Shanghai. It was soon after her father had died. On offer in the city were the menial, dangerous or difficult jobs that are always poorly paid. At first she worked in a restaurant, making 100 yuan ($12.10) a month while the city citizens working with her earned five times that amount. Then she sold clothes, earning 350 yuan ($42.35) while her urban colleagues took home 900. It was just one of the prejudices that she has had to face.

There are four others. After 20 years--like most Chinese citizens who move away from the household where they are officially registered--she still pays an annual fee for a temporary residence permit. Effectively, it registers her as a second-class citizen within her own country. It deprives her of a vote in local elections. It deprives her children of the right to free education. It exposes her to harassment from a police force strapped for cash. Indeed, the police came to her house around midnight once, demanding to see her permit. When she produced it, they tore it up in front of her. Then they fined her for not being able to produce her documents, and jailed her when she wouldn't pay.

The fifth prejudice cursing migrant workers has largely escaped her. Many who have lived in the city for as long as she has done are often unmarried and socially dislocated. But she has a husband--a migrant worker like her, from her province.

Li Siuling lives in Beijing. In Guangzhou, the capital of the southeastern province of Guangdong, I sit at a table with seven representatives of the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) to find out whether her story is a common one here, too. Yes, they say, except that after seven years of working in Guangzhou, migrant workers can apply for permanent residence and the social entitlements that go with it.

They tell me that in March last year, Sun Zhigang--a young man from a northern province who worked in a Guangzhou garment company--was taken to a police station because he didn't have a temporary residence permit. He later died from the beating he received there. The public outcry that followed has led to reform of, but not an end to, the system of citizen registration.

The new face of labour

Migrant workers now form the country's main industrial workforce. There are an estimated 20 million of them presently in Guangdong alone. And they are in high demand. China is the factory of the world's manufacturers, and this province is one of its main production lines.

The transnational brands pouring from Guangdong's factories read like a corporate who's who. Economic growth here is staggering. It took Britain most of the 19th century to increase its per capita income by two and a half times, and Japan from 1950 to 1975 to improve its by six. Guangdong's per capita income since 1978 has increased 60-fold. A promotional book about the province says that by 2002, the amount of the province's import and export transactions with countries around the world totalled as much as that of Russia and twice that of India. (1)

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The road from the coastal city of Shenzhen (another economic power-zone within the province) to Guangzhou is just over 200 kilometres: a virtually uninterrupted line of factories. A grey haze folds over the horizon. At the halfway mark, the factories seem to take up all the space that the eye can see--blocks after blocks after yet more blocks of grey cement and grey corrugated iron line up into the distance. Inside the larger factories 20,000, 30,000, even 70,000 people work. To an entrepreneur, this must be nirvana. To me it looks like hell.

Capitalism speaks

Taking this journey, the conclusion that corporations have freedom to speak and be heard in this country is inescapable. Local authorities here have been given special powers to govern their own economies. They have long ago learnt the language that attracts investment: special economic zones, tax havens and neglected labour regulations.

So too the Chinese Communist Party, whose government has nurtured this new culture. In November 2002, Jiang Zemin--the country's President at the time--announced that entrepreneurs would henceforth have both membership and a voice in making decisions within the Party. This only formalized what had already been happening. In the Forbes magazine list of China's 100 richest in 2002, a quarter said they were CCP members, (2) and nine were delegates to China's law-making body, the National People's Congress. (3)