Migrant workers in China

America calls itself the land of opportunity. China says it will take care of its own. Regardless of the truth behind these ideas, they are fundamental to understanding the mythologies of their respective governments. One of the core documents the Chinese government uses to “take care of everyone” is a social security card that is far more powerful than its American counterpart. While a social security number in the US is a de facto national identification system, the Chinese version is essential to access the welfare system covering health care, maternity leave, pensions, unemployment compensation and worker’s compensation payments.   In late January, China released the latest annual data

As the largest shopping bonanza in the world kicked off on November 11, a small but persistent complaint served as a reminder: Please remember to be kind to the delivery people.  With the State Post Bureau predicting a daily average of 490 million packages will be shipped across China during the sales period, delivery companies are going through a stress test on how to handle the mountains of packages bought by people online.  Alibaba said that it saw an average of 583,000 orders per second on Tmall.com – its largest shopping platform – just 4 seconds after midnight on November 11. Alibaba is the parent company of Inkstone.  The sheer volume of transactions means peak season for delivery wor

At a suburb area in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, hundreds of migrant workers were standing, sitting or squatting next to a temporary bus stop, with their bags, suitcases, kitchen items, sewing machines, refrigerators, and air conditioners.  They were not fleeing a natural disaster, but a sluggish manufacturing industry that could not offer the jobs they had before the coronavirus pandemic.  Some had arrived in the manufacturing hub in southern China from Hubei province, where lockdowns have been lifted over the past weeks. They had quickly made the decision to leave, as the economic opportunities they had arrived in search of no longer existed. The scramble for labor as China sought

Provincial governments in China’s east coast manufacturing hubs have begun arranging buses, trains and flights to bring migrant workers back to factories as the country desperately tries to restart production halted by the coronavirus outbreak. Local authorities have been urged by President Xi Jinping to kick-start economic activity after an extended Lunar New Year holiday, but many businesses are finding one key component missing – workers. At least two-thirds of China’s nearly 300 million migrant workers had not returned to their jobs as of last Friday, according to estimates from China’s transport ministry.  Passenger traffic has not picked up either, with only 13 million people recorded

The Chinese billionaire featured in the Netflix documentary American Factory has defended his country’s labor practices by criticizing unions, saying they hurt efficiency.  In China, American Factory prompted a wave of soul-searching about the human costs of the country’s economic success and the rise of super-rich entrepreneurs such as Cao Dewang, who owns factories at home and abroad.   The film, backed by Barack and Michelle Obama, documents what happens at two factories owned by Cao – one in Dayton, Ohio and the other in Fujian, southeastern China. Cao is a main character of the documentary, in which he comes across as a pragmatic Chinese businessman bringing jobs to America’s Rust Belt.

Chinese internet users have joined an online protest to support children who were forced to move out of one of Shenzhen’s biggest migrant neighorboods. Following calls from a performance artist called Nut Brother, WeChat users are sharing pictures of evicted migrant children, in order to pressure the government into finding new schools for them.  In China’s megacity of Shenzhen, home to some of the country’s biggest tech firms, so-called urban villages have housed successive waves of migrant workers and their families for decades. In a pattern repeated across much of the country, such neighborhoods, which provide cheap housing and services, are being gradually demolished to make way for mode

For American audiences, the Netflix documentary American Factory reveals the life of US workers on Chinese-owned production lines.  But for Chinese audiences, the film serves as a reminder of the human costs behind China’s rise as a manufacturing superpower.  The film, backed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s new production company, documents how Chinese auto-glass company Fuyao built a factory near Dayton, Ohio, where thousands of workers were laid off when General Motors closed its plant in the Rust Belt a decade ago.  Fuyao brought not only new jobs to Ohio, but also the high expectations and harsh management that are customary in factories across China. It most notably spent more than $1 m

China’s army of migrant workers, a source of cheap labor that underpinned the country’s growth into the world’s second-biggest economy, is becoming older and less mobile, according to the Chinese government’s latest annual survey. A report published by the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday showed that China had about 288 million migrant workers at the end of 2018, a rise of 0.6% from a year earlier.  That number includes 116 million workers who took local non-farming jobs without actually leaving their hometown. By China’s official classification, these workers still count as migrant.  But among the 173 million who actually migrated, there were 810,000 fewer workers leaving their home

It’s been 10 years since he worked at a carmaker, and Zhu Beibei still remembers the acrid stench of rubber tires. Then 19, it was his first job out of technical school in Wuhan, central China. He was paid 900 yuan ($134) a month and there was a lot of overtime. He quit after six months. “I had to wake up at 2pm and work until at least 10am,” Zhu, now 29, told the South China Morning Post. “Every day I worked like a robot.” After he left, he bounced around various jobs, including selling farm produce, before a friend asked him if he had ever flown a drone. He had not, but after five days of training he became a certified drone pilot and joined a pesticide-spraying drone company. Today, Zhu

On an otherwise unremarkable Saturday in a central Chinese city, hundreds of workers at the world’s largest iPhone assembly plant lined up to quit their jobs. In the years since robust sales of the iPhone turned Apple into one of the biggest companies on the planet, the workers in the city of Zhengzhou had never seen anything quite like this: a slowdown in the demand for their labor. “In 2017, we were churning out iPhone 8s. I was thrilled that I could work 11 hours every day and didn’t take any leave on weekends,” said Haixia, a worker at the factory, which is owned by the contract manufacturer Foxconn. But the days of plentiful overtime, she lamented in an interview in late February, are o