TOILERS WHO ARE ‘SPOILERS’: Migrant workers who slaved to build Beijing’s Olympic structures have been banished from the city

A kind act by a little-known painter in south China’s Guangzhou city has become something of a Chinese cause céèbre at the Beijing Olympics. Su Jian’s story made front-page news in major newspapers. Several television channels had it on prime time bulletins.

Four migrant workers could watch an Olympic event at the futuristic Bird’s Nest, thanks to Su. For them, it was a “dream come true”. They may have worked on the construction of some of the Olympic facilities in Beijing. But buying a ticket for an Olympic event was simply beyond them.

The painter made it possible. He decided to paint a picture, auction it and buy tickets for them. He paid five such workers to work as models and drew them on oil and canvas. When the painting was done — he called it Them — he auctioned it, raised a little over 3,000 yuan (US $4,400) and bought them Olympic tickets.

Four of the workers had their “dream” fulfilled. A fifth, Wang Hangtao, from central China’s Shaanxi province, had no such dream. He was happy with the money he got working as Su’s model. As for watching the Olympics, he will have none of it. “I can’t afford to be away from work. I have to continue working to feed my family,” he was quoted by the media as saying.

The zeal of the Chinese media, all of it official, in publicising the story of the migrant workers at Bird’s Nest was understandable. It was yet another touch to the huge image makeover that Beijing — and China — has gone through in the run-up to the Olympics. It was, more importantly, an answer to the charge that China hushed up the deaths of at least 10 workers during the construction of the Bird’s Nest.

There are no official estimates of such deaths or other accidents during the construction of Olympic venues.

Tibet, Tiananmen, 1989 and Falun Gong have been around for a long time to damage China’s image. But the latest spoilers are the migrant workers. In a way, they are a worse problem because of their numbers and because they are a domestic problem, not one inflicted on China by the hostile international community.

For human rights groups, the foreign media and even the small pro-democracy forces within the country, the state of the migrant workers — variously estimated between 150 million and 200 million — has become synonymous with the state of injustice, exploitation and human rights abuse in the country.

Beijing and other Olympics-hosting cities packed off these workers to their home provinces well before the beginning of the Olympics. All construction was stopped in Beijing to clean up the city’s air. The authorities were also anxious to rid the cities of this huge army of ill-paid, ill-treated and potentially restive migrants who could spoil the Olympic party.

But sending “them” off to their distant homes did not quite solve the problem. The migrants’ story kept haunting the powers that be, thanks to human rights groups and foreign journalists. Last year, Amnesty International published a devastating report on the plight of China’s migrant workers, accusing the government of grave human rights abuses against them.

One of the unkindest cuts came from dissidents at home. On the eve of the opening of the Games, 40 prominent Chinese democracy supporters posted an open letter online, calling the world’s attention to the problem of China’s migrant workers and other victims of an increasingly pro-rich system.

Referring to the many new Olympics facilities, the letter said, “We know too well how these glories are built on the ruins of the lives of ordinary people, on the forced removal of urban migrants and on the sufferings of victims of brutal land grabbing, forced eviction, exploitation of labour and arbitrary detention.”

It is not that China’s rulers themselves do not know all these. In fact, they know too well how big a social and even political threat these dispossessed, disinherited army of workers can be for communist rule.

Warning bells were rung by none other than the former Prime Minister, an acclaimed economist, Zhou Rongji. At a session of the National People’s Congress in 2003, he warned that planners and policymakers had to tackle the problem of migrant workers or face huge risks of social instability.

That was easier said than done. The problem would simply not go away as long as China stuck to its path of frenetic urbanisation. And there was no hint that things were going to change.

“It’s an inevitable process,” an analyst at a government-affiliated think tank told me in Beijing. He traced the origin of the problem to the days even before the current spell of massive urbanisation. “It all started with the gradual dismantling of the loss-making state-owned enterprises in the late 1980s.

Workers who were laid off with little compensation suddenly found themselves on the move to other cities in search of jobs and income. Then, you had these special economic zones coming up in the Pearl River delta in the south. New factories came up almost every month and with them new masses of migrant labour from all over China”.

Of course, the size of the migrant workers and their mobility increased manifold as new cities began sprouting and old cities continued expanding through the 1990s.

An inevitable process, one would think, that has happened all over the world throughout history — villages becoming towns and cities, farmers turning into industrial workers. The poor conditions of the lives of workers in industrialised cities of the first generation like Shenzhen or Guangzhou were pretty much the same as the lives of the English working class in Dickens’ novels. The cities and the new employers amassed fabulous wealth, but it all passed by the workers who created the wealth. Straight out of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

But China’s migrant workers have to struggle with problems that the first generation of the working class in Europe did not face. They build the cities, their roads, apartments, stadiums and every other facility. But they have no right to live in the cities they build.

China has had a household registration system since the 1950s that bars villagers from living in cities. Of course, they will come to the cities to work on construction sites. They can live in tents or some other shabby accommodation the building contractors would find them on the dingy outskirts of the cities. But, living permanently in the cities is not for them.

Worse, their children cannot enrol in schools in the cities. If they open bank accounts in the cities, nobody quite knows what may happen to their money when they move to other construction sites in other cities. And while they live in the cities, they cannot hope to get any help from the police, the courts or anyone else. Let alone their own children, they themselves are nobody’s children — they are a new underclass, the wretched of the good earth of New China.

No wonder their plight has caught the attention of the world — and of a new group of Chinese dissenters. For the government, which has “social harmony” as its new mantra, it’s a potentially explosive situation. Hence the frantic calls in recent months and weeks to mend things for migrants. New laws are being passed. Official media are calling for an end to the half-century-old hukou (household registration) system and do other things to make life a little easier for the migrants. Shenzhen made a beginning earlier this year, offering housing and other rights to them.

Officially, all these are in the interest of building a “harmonious society”. In reality, the moves only reflect the government’s and society’s worries.

The worries have affected even common people and neighbourhoods. In the street behind my apartment complex in northeast Beijing, the neighbourhood committee has put up banners warning residents against robbers and burglars.

“This is the first time we’ve had such warnings,’ a Chinese colleague told me. “All this is because of migrants from other cities.” Even the worst critics of China generally agree that Beijing is one of the safest cities in the world. But things are changing — not all for the better. Today’s China may be relentlessly pursuing Deng Xiaoping’s advice, “To get rich is glorious.” But it has also meant nothing is inglorious on the way to getting rich. The most inglorious thing is to be as poor as a migrant worker.