China's Millions of Jobless Migrants

Abstract

27 GUANGDONG, CHINA—“With the Premier’s encouragement, we have exceeding confidence.” Zhang Wengui, 21, a peasant worker from Sichuan province, reads the slogan from a help-wanted board at the Likai Shoes factory on the outskirts of noisy Houjie Town, some 30 miles from Guangzhou, the capital of industry-heavy Guangdong province. Despite Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s reassuring smile in the photo that accompanies the optimistic pronouncement, Zhang still isn’t sure whether to pursue the job offer—it pays only $6 per day. It’s February, which means at least 130 million workers, like Zhang, have just arrived in Guangdong and other coastal provinces of China searching for jobs, signaling the end of a tense month-long return to their rural hometowns over the annual New Year’s break, known as the Spring Festival. Zhang Wengui’s dilemma is common: while this job promises only nominal revenue, there are painfully few posted on such billboards these days. Of serious concern, both to China and the world at large, is that an estimated 20 million workers who have left their rural family farms for the promise of work in urban and industrial centers may not succeed in finding new jobs, or holding onto their old ones this year. Last November, Premier Wen, concerned about declining employment statistics, visited Guangdong province, home to one of the largest concentrations of factories in the world. The Likai complex was one of many on his inspection list. Likai, together with around 500 other shoe factories in this small town, turns out each year some 600 million pairs of sneakers for Adidas, Nike, New Balance, and other global brands. Considering the world population of 6.76 billion—in a decade, Houjie Town alone produces enough footwear for every human being on the planet. During his Cambridge University speech on February 2, Wen was the target of a worn New Balance shoe thrown by a German graduate student protesting China’s human rights record. Chances are that very shoe was made in this town. The shoe-tossing incident notwithstanding, Premier Wen is a very popular figure in China. He is seen by his people as a sympathetic and responsive leader, not merely as the top Communist Party bureaucrat. Just seven hours after the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province (and long before any foreign media were able to reach the area), Wen stood before the collapsed school buildings at the epicenter of the catastrophe. His compassionate face and confident Michael Anti, a former reporter in The New York Times Beijing bureau, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University last year.