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Shanghai’s migrants are heading home for the holiday, but what awaits them?
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WHILE many office workers will work until before the Chinese New Year’s Eve (February 7 this year), a sizable portion of Shanghai’s population has already left the city.
Over the weekend, I went to a shop to buy sugarcane. I was a bit taken aback when a woman in her 40s took it upon herself to peel the sugarcane. She finished after several false starts and complaints about the task being “so tough.”
When an elderly female customer asked why she did not ask a man to help her, she replied “they are gone.”
I went to another fruit stand at a roadside market for oranges, and a woman vendor was warning a customer not to be choosy, since the goods on display were all she had in stock and no new supplies were on the way.
She then talked about her travel plans, good-humoredly mentioning that during the previous festival, she had to confine herself to the family home most of the time, for fear fellow villagers might find she had a second child with her.
This might have led to fines or other punishments. Recent changes to China’s decades-long family planning policy, though, now allow all couples to have a second child, so this festival promises to be more fun for her.
In a matter of days, this roadside space, which in other times required dozens of uniformed xiejing (auxiliary police) to keep order, will be virtually deserted, for many of the vendors and the xiejing would have left the city for home. Neighborhood supermarkets are already reporting marked increases in shoppers, which has less to do with the closure of these roadside markets than with the sudden unpredictability of many couriers services.
While having lunch with some colleagues last week, I mentioned a service that promises to deliver premium mutton fattened on pastures in Inner Mongolia right to your doorsteps at short notice. Several looked interested until one cautioned: What if the mutton fails to get delivered to your home before the festival?
It is advised that you abstain from ordering online during this period, as the city’s couriers will cope with lack of staff (“Couriers pare services, warn of holiday delays,” January 28, Shanghai Daily).
We have just survived a historic cold spell. With the lowest temperature dipping to minus seven, the snap deprived tens of thousands of families of water for days. More misery followed when an abrupt rise in temperature led to ruptured pipes and damaged water meters.
Making the rounds on WeChat last week was an image of the heavily bandaged hands of a repairman. Xinmin Evening News reported on January 28 that these hands belong to Qiu Tianpei, a repairman with a local water company. Qiu alone had fixed over 1,000 meters of pipes between January 24 and 26.
Only in the last paragraph of the Xinmin article was the story of Qiu divulged: He’s a 47-year-old migrant who, if it was not for the cold snap, would have been reunited with his family at his native home in Sichuan Province. “I think my wife and children will understand,” Qiu said.
When they are absent
Migrants are seen daily, but at no time is their existence more noted and valued than now — when they are absent. This means shops are closed and rubbish piles up. But there’s more to the story of these service providers who are vital to the functioning of Shanghai.
In the January issue of the “Shiyue” magazine was an article entitled “Village scene in the eyes of a peasant’s daughter-in-law,” by Huang Deng, a professor at Guangdong Financial Institute. The article depicts the social fractures taking place at her husband’s home in a village in Xiaogan, Hubei Province.
She describes the vulnerabilities of her rural family, how easily it could be crushed by debts, poor health or accidents. She described how a formerly prosperous brother-in-law (a small contractor) became bankrupt after the local government failed to pay him, and how one sister-in-law gave up her husband and daughter to become a nun.
The whole world is talking about China’s miraculous wealth — as well as the portion which should have trickled down to so many villagers.
It will take time for us to understand the full social costs of growth. Having grown up without parental love and care, the left-behind children of migrant workers — many of whom are now adults — are strangers to affection.
The once strong fabric of rural society has been much frayed by social dislocations. In her article, Huang points to the dilemma facing many migrants who, unable to find roots in cities, cannot return to their rural homes either. They are neither here nor there.
Thanks to their large numbers and cheap labor, China’s migrants have created a miracle of development that the whole world is marveling at. As the economy rebalances toward a “new normal,” we are morally bound to take stock, and assess the true costs of growth.
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