Migrants: Long march to nowhere

Migration in China indicates the systematic discrimination against rural citizens

            MASSIVE migration in China reflects systematic discrimination against rural dwellers and the state's failure to respect, protect and fulfill the economic and social rights it claims to prioritise.

A much-discussed feature of the China of the last two decades has been the massive movement of people, mostly from the countryside towards the cities. The numbers are staggering, with estimates of those working away from home every year ranging from 100 to 200 million people. This huge migration is widely seen as an expression of the growing freedom of the Chinese people to move where they wish and better their lot in the process. While there is some truth in this perception, the reality is more grim.

Tens of millions of these internal migrants should rightly be considered internally displaced people, as they have been forced to leave their homes due to poverty, official neglect and lack of opportunities, resulting in large part from discriminatory development policies that have concentrated the nation's wealth in its coastal cities and institutionalised systematic discrimination against rural people.

The first phase of distorted development began soon after the founding of the People's Republic in the 1950s, with the launch of policies to extract "surplus" from agriculture to fund industrialisation and support a welfare system in the cities. Contrary to popular belief, cradle-to-grave welfare was never universal in China-only urban residents enjoyed such benefits.

This division between city and countryside was entrenched through the hukou system of household registration, which fixed each person to a particular place of abode and put them into either the urban or rural category. Some Chinese commentators have compared the discrimination against rural people in China under the hukou system to the treatment of blacks in apartheid-era South Africa. Still in existence today, it has become a caste-like system based on inherited status that largely determines people's opportunities in life.

For sale: health and education

            While there was some provision of basic health care and education to rural people through the commune system during the Mao era, after the land was redistributed to individual farming households in the economic reforms that started in the late 1970s, collectively-funded health and education provision fell into disrepair. Devolution of financial responsibilities meant even less redistribution of wealth than before, and the poorest areas were left with the least resources to spend on meeting economic and social needs.

This has led to a situation where in the poorest parts of rural China, medical services are often virtually non-existent. By 1998, only 9.5 percent of people in China's countryside had any kind of health insurance, and 60 percent of health spending was disbursed for 15 percent of the population, who live in cities and/or work for the state. With fee-for-service medicine the norm in the countryside, illness had become one of the most important factors in pushing families into extreme poverty. Infectious diseases such as schistosomiasis have made a come-back as preventive systems to combat their spread have fallen into disuse.

Education has also suffered. Officially, China reports very high primary school enrollment rates of over 98 percent. But these figures are simply not credible given the low rate of education spending-government expenditure was only at 2.87 percent of GDP in 2000-and the fact that a large proportion of the total goes to higher education. Central and provincial government spending on primary and lower secondary schooling amounts to only one percent of education spending, so poor rural areas have to meet education costs without aid.

School fees are routinely charged throughout rural China, although according to China's Compulsory Education Law, nine years of schooling should be free of charge. Parents often cannot afford to send all their children to school, and so girls frequently drop out. The complete absence of safety nets for rural children is demonstrated most graphically by the plight of children orphaned by AIDS in rural Henan Province, which has been hard hit by the disease. In some of the villages where many adults have died, orphaned children have had to drop out of school because no one can pay their fees.

Those rural children who, despite the odds, manage to complete secondary education face open discrimination in entrance to higher education. Since many more university places are available to urban youngsters, rural applicants have to get higher scores to gain admission.

Worst affected by the lack of government provision for economic and social rights are those parts of China that are dependent mainly on agriculture, with no successful local industries providing alternative employment and revenue. In these areas, bloated local bureaucracies feed themselves exclusively through extorting taxes and fees from local farmers at rates well above the permitted five percent. High taxes and unreasonable levies have been a major cause of growing unrest in rural China in recent years.

Uneven development encouraged

On the macro-economic level, reform-era liberalisation policies which replicated on a regional level the dictum of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to "let some get rich first"-China's version of trickle-down economics-exacerbated the distortions left over from Soviet-style industrialization.

As China opened up its economy in the late 1980s and 1990s, a selected group of cities and economic zones along the coastal seaboard were allowed to adopt more liberal economic policies, to retain a larger proportion of their foreign exchange earnings and to offer preferential tax rates to foreign investors. Inevitably, these areas became magnets for both foreign and domestic investment, and the state made little attempt to redress the imbalances through investing in the interior or in agriculture.

Although rural incomes grew quickly in the early 1980s as productivity rose after the revival of family farming, this was short-lived. Rural dwellers now earn only 35 percent of the incomes of their urban cousins. More than 50 percent of the population is being supported by the 16 percent of GDP earned through agriculture. Many living in the villages would hardly survive-or be able to pay their taxes-without the remittances sent from the tens of millions of migrant workers who labour away from home, in domestic service, construction, on the factory floor, in mines and in all kinds of low paid, low status jobs.

Rural-to-urban migrants in China's largest cities are treated like guest workers who have crossed national boundaries: the hukou system means they do not have the right to settle in the cities. They are subject to routine official violence, intimidation and extortion, and may be deported by police if they do not obtain a sheaf of permits making their temporary stay in the city "legal." Detention for "repatriation" has tripled in the last ten years, with more than three million people being held in this way per year. And migrants are ineligible for many of the benefits that urban residents still enjoy, including free education for children, health insurance, social security and subsidised housing.

Migrants' tenuous legal status in the cities means that they are also routinely subjected to abuses by private actors, such as employers who ignore the country's labour laws and landlords who ask for higher rents from migrant tenants. The lack of access to official protection was demonstrated in graphic form in the weeks before China's most important annual holiday, the Lunar New Year, this year. In Beijing, disgruntled migrant workers picketed new-minted developments they had helped build holding hand-lettered placards reading "I want my wages." In Jinan a man died after setting himself alight because he had been unable to obtain his pay and in Shenzhen a number of leaders of migrant construction teams threatened to jump off the top of buildings in a desperate effort to obtain back pay for their workers. According to official media reports, some migrants had not received their wages for as long as two years, and an estimated three quarters of migrant workers had difficulty in getting their wages on time.

Lip service to equality

            Alarmed at the migrant worker protests, early this year the central government issued a circular calling on cities to end discriminatory policies towards migrant workers and to ensure that their labor rights are protected, including prompt and full payment of wages. But no mention was made of eliminating the discriminatory policies and regulations, national and local, that underpin the abuses of migrants' rights by public and private actors.

Inequality has been among the top concerns of this year's annual session of China's National People's Congress, and the government has, once again, pledged to address the widening wealth gap. 

What was not discussed at the Congress meeting is the fact that long-term government policies that discriminate against rural residents in virtually every aspect of life have a great deal to do with the extent of inequality. The glittering cities that are the symbols of China's success represent the concentration of the nation's wealth to benefit a few, while neglecting the rights of the many.