China's migrant workers need greater public empathy

Wang Yu Ying, 32, came to Beijing about five years ago from the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. But before she migrated to the capital city to earn a better living, Wang left her daughter of 10 months in her mother's care in Anhui province. also in the east where her mother lives.

Wang, a Chinese acquaintance and a waitress at a foreign-themed restaurant in eastern Beijing, has missed being with her daughter like thousands of other migrant workers who move to the country's big cities from small ones or the countryside for money.

She and her husband, who works as a chef somewhere in the city, live in a dormitory for migrant workers, and get to see their daughter once a year or so, during national holidays. The couple can't afford independent housing or other costs associated with raising a child in Beijing, Wang says.

Zhang Xitang, 40, a construction worker in Beijing tells a similar story. He came to the city from eastern China in 2004, and life's been rough ever since.

"You wake up at 5 am every day, often work without fixed hours and get low wages," Zhang tells me. His wife and children live in Shandong province, where he had left them.

Other such accounts are available in the media across China's major cities, not just in Beijing and Shanghai that draw the bulk of the 245 million internal migrant workers. At the end of 2013, they made up for more than one sixth of the country's total population of nearly 1.4 billion.

The average monthly income of migrant workers was 3,287.8 yuan (roughly $535) in April 2013, up 4.9 percent from the previous year, a recent government report said.

Their struggles remind me of India, my home country, where multitudes of migrant workers live in urban squalor with much less money than Chinese.

A Chinese colleague recently baffled me by saying he'd heard Indian migrant workers, many of whom go to cities from poor rural areas, blame karma for their plight.