Chinese Whispers: are China's internal migrants second class citizens?

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🗓️ 14 November 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

When the city of Zhengzhou, home to the world’s largest iPhone factory, locked down recently, some of its factory workers had nowhere to go. Hoping to escape Covid restrictions, many of them walked miles along motorways to their hometowns, their journey captured by video and shared on social media in China and out.

This episode is all about China’s migrant working class – poorly paid and often poorly educated people from the countryside who go to cities like Zhengzhou for better lives. There are hundreds of millions of these so-called ‘internal migrants’, making their story an important part to understand if you want to understand modern China.

Even now, 'on average urban residents are making at least more than 2.5 times the income as the average rural resident', Professor Cindy Fan tells me on this episode. She's an expert on Chinese migration and population patterns at UCLA. Most commonly, migrants will send their earnings back to home villages and towns, where they have left behind family members. Often, children are being looked after by grandparents while the parents are earning away from home.

Cindy and I discuss the role played by these migrants – often unwelcomed in the cities but vital for urban areas to develop, grow and function. We go deep into the hukou system – household registration – that gives urban residents rights and privileges that migrant workers cannot access, making them second class citizens. But ultimately, as the Chinese are wont to do, many migrant workers make the system work for them. They don't necessarily want to swallow urban life wholesale:

'Rural migrants are pretty smart... Yes they are victims… but at the same time, they are also weighing their options, they’re also strategising. They’re not just passive.'

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:31.4	Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to
0:36.3	journalists, experts and long-time China
0:38.2	watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering
0:43.4	of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the
0:47.8	Chinese see these issues? When Zhengzhou, home to the world's largest iPhone factory, locked down recently. Some of its factory workers had nowhere to go.
0:58.3	Hoping to escape COVID restrictions, many of them walked miles along motorways to their hometowns.
1:03.6	Their journey captured by video and shared on social media in China and out.
1:08.0	This episode is all about China's migrant working class, poorly paid and often
1:12.3	poorly educated people from the countryside who go to cities like Zhengzhou for better lives.
1:17.0	There are hundreds of millions of these so-called internal migrants, making their story an
1:21.7	important part to understand if you want to understand modern China. What are their lives like?
1:27.1	I'm joined today by UCLA's Professor Cindy
1:29.3	Fan, an expert in migration and population patterns. Cindy, thanks so much for coming on to Chinese
1:34.9	whispers. First of all, I just wanted to check the numbers with you, because I saw one estimate that there
1:39.7	were 250 million internal migrants in China in 2015. At that point, that was a sixth of the population.
1:47.0	Is that number still up to date? Well, yes, first of all, Cindy, it's really wonderful to be on
1:53.0	your program. And to your question, yes, there are various estimates that people have come up with,
1:57.9	but 250 million sounds about right. And I would say that between
2:03.0	2015 and now, that number may have actually increased even some more. And I mean, this is just an
2:09.9	incredibly large population because I'm speaking to you from London, and that's more than four
2:14.7	times the population of the UK. And these are people, I want to talk in this
	...

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