From banned workers to people with social problems
The late American anthropologist Clifford Geertz once described a result of "agricultural involution", which was caused by internal pressures due to population growth, as increasing labor intensity in the paddy fields. China's agriculture faced the same problem, and its farmers were bound to the farmland for thousands of years.
The reform and opening-up in 1978 unfolded the process of "reverse-involution", which resulted in surplus population that could not be absorbed into agriculture and the mass floating population.
The main strength of the floating people is the migrant workers, whose history can be divided into four stages.
In the first stage, at the start of the reform from 1978-1985, migrant workers were prohibited. The Chinese government enacted laws in 1979, 1980 and 1981 to control the employment of the rural population.
In the second stage, from 1985 to 1992, enterprises in towns emerged in large numbers, which characterized the urbanization of China. These enterprises absorbed most of the surplus labors of the farmland.
During this period, migrant workers were "leaving the farmland without getting away from their hometown" and the Chinese government began to ease control of its household registration system, the hukou. Thousands of migrant workers began flooding into the cities.
Unfortunately, most were repelled by the cities' residents who called the migrant laborers mangliu (blind-floating population).
In the spring of 1992, the third stage began. Numerous labor-intensive industries were established, especially in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. In this period, migrant workers became be the main force of industrial workers. By 2002, there were 94 million migrant workers in China.
Increasingly, in the fourth stage, social problems linked to migrant workers emerged, covering unpaid wages, transportation, social security, gender discrimination, education of offspring and mental problems.
During this period, from 2002 to 2008, migrant workers attracted the attention of governments, the media and scholars.
Many researchers began to focus on migrant workers; some of them began to empower the migrant workers with their research. The academic efforts encouraged the migrants to speak for themselves and large numbers of performance groups, organized by the migrant workers, were set up in cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen.
Overall, the flow of the Chinese migrant workers was propelled both by the surplus population generated by the agricultural reverse-involution, and by labor-intensive industrial policies of the past 30 years, during which they were transformed to be industrial workers.
The next stage lies in the transformation of the industrial structure and the adoption of new agriculture methods, which may affect the destinies of migrant workers.
The author is the vice-director of Media Research Center, Institute of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
(China Daily 06/01/2011 page13)
