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February 20, 2017

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Chongqing’s slowly fading army of porters

DAYS before the Spring Festival, Lao Huang, or Old Huang, returned to Jie Fang Bei, a commercial center in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality.

His mates were surprised to see him because Huang, 65, was suffering from high blood pressure and got hospitalized for three months.

He was back in the hope of making some quick money before the start of the Chinese New Year, the most important festival in the country.

Huang is one of the so-called bangbang jun, or bamboo pole army, which is unique to Chongqing. A common sight in the city till some few years ago, they are essentially low-paid but hardworking porters, who use long bamboo poles to carry heavy loads on their shoulders.

Known as the “Mountain City,” Chongqing is crisscrossed by rivers and mountains. For decades, the city has relied on this army of porters for manual work.  

Between the end of 1980s and the beginning of 1990s, there used to be as many as 400,000 of them.

“It’s actually difficult to give a specific figure because these bangbang did not have any license or were officially registered,” says Qin Jie, a scholar who has been studying and writing about this special group of people for many years. 

No one really knows the full name of Lao Huang. Most of them are called out by their nicknames or just simply Bangbang. 

The payment is bargained before a deal is made to carry the load.

“They are the typical farmer-to-worker kind. Now, with the pace of economic development, they are a gradually fading group,” Qin says.

According to her, about 80 percent of bangbang are over 50 years old.

Born in an underdeveloped rural village in Sichuan Province, Huang’s memory of childhood is filled with hunger and strife. His wife left him and their 3-year-old daughter when he worked as a coal miner.

It was around that time that Huang, at the relatively older age of 42, came to Chongqing and became a porter.

“With no money, no education and no professional skills — being a bangbang was the only way I could feed my little daughter,” says Huang. “Bangbang usually take to the trade as they have no other choice. But doing heavy labor brought quick money. Also, there’s no fixed working time like in a factory or an office.”

Huang has been a bangbang for 23 years. His daughter is now married with a 5-year-old son. With his savings, Huang bought the young couple a small apartment in the town. He now tries to make money to pay off the loan in installments — about 100,000 yuan (US$14,550) a year.

“Many times in the past 23 years I wanted to throw away the pole .... but I couldn’t,” says Huang, who has struggled to make a life for himself and his family while also experiencing the changes and development of the city that has been his home for over two decades.

Making a living as a porter is getting harder and harder now. Huang usually waits for clients at commercial centers like Jie Fang Bei or at the Chao Tian Men wholesale market. 

Some days he spends the entire morning waiting, and only finds work late in the afternoon.

On the day he decided to return to Jie Fang Bei, a store owner asked him to carry two packs of paint materials from the shop at the corner of Wuyi Road to Hong Ya Dong — about 50 kilograms over 2 kilometers. The payment was settled for ridiculously low 10 yuan.

Age has also caught up with Huang. After years of carrying heavy loads over his shoulder, the back is beginning to hurt.

Lifting 100kg used to be easy but not anymore. He suffers from high blood pressure but can’t afford the hospital expenses.

“I manage between 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan every month,” he says. “The best time was when I could earn 5,000 yuan — sometimes even 10,000 yuan. But those good days are gone,” he says ruefully.

After a day’s work, he returns to his “cell” — a partition of a bedroom with a single bed in an old area on Zhonghua Road.

Huang was forced to move here after the previous shanty town where he lived with other bangbang was marked for demolition. There are plans to build a financial tower on that spot.

Huang pays 400 yuan a month as rent for the new place, which is considerably higher than the previous place. But that is the cheapest he can afford in this changing times.

With the development of urban transportation and logistic industries, the porters have been a slowly vanishing group since the early 2010.

“Actually they cannot be called bangbang anymore, but ‘transporters’ or ‘carriers.’ They do all the carrying and transporting — sometimes on their long poles, and sometimes on carts,” says Feng Xin, who runs a cloth shop in a big wholesale mall at Guanyin Bridge.

Feng still relies on porters several times a day to move her goods from the truck to her store on the 10th floor of the mall. The payment is usually 10 yuan for each delivery in daytime and 30 yuan at night.

“All the goods are packed in big bags of 50 to 80 kilograms each — I definitely won’t be able to lift them myself,” says Feng. “Bangbang are very important to me.”

But Feng’s business has been taking a hit from the online vendors — and hurting the bangbang jun too.

Young people prefer to call delivery companies or simply take a cab rather than hire porters to carry their packages.

“There are more choices for transportation now than before. And people also have more options for delivery as well,” says Feng.

The real tragedy is for the last group of bangbang jun — they are too old to do other tasks. The younger ones find jobs in factories or as security guards than being a bangbang.

“The bangbang jun will soon fade into history. They will disappear sooner or later,” says Qin.

“When they can’t carry those heavy goods, and with no savings or social insurance, how will they survive?”




 

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