No wonder then, Peng said, that around 7,000 labour disputes have been reported in Beijing each month. His figure is not far from the statistics given by the Beijing trade union’s law department, which said the number of workers filing grievances with the Beijing municipal authorities reached 80,000 for the year 2009.16 According to the trade union, Beijing’s Labour Dispute Arbitration Committees (LDACs) were understaffed and had a backlog of cases. Each dispute now took around ten months to resolve, very often in favour of the employers. The Beijing courts have also reported seeing an increase in labour disputes for the same year – a total of 4,506 labour cases were heard. Nationwide, courts heard a growing number of labour cases from 2008 to 2010. Resolving them became one of the most difficult tasks for the Chinese courts during the peak of the economic crisis. Wang Shengjun, head of the Supreme People’s Court, said that courts across the nation handled 295,500 labour dispute cases in 2008, 317,000 in 2009, and then 207,400 in 2010.17 He noted that a large proportion of these disputes involved back wages, nonpayment of overtime and insurance contributions.18
And lawsuits do not always end justly. A high level of incompetence in the courts has been reported in Shenyang. In July 2007, Wu Guangjun, a worker at Liaoning Cotton and Hemp Company, filed a lawsuit against the company seeking reinstatement of his employment contract. After a ‘talk’ with the company, the Huanggu district court in Shenyang told Wu that the court could not accept his case. Wu revisited the court and was told the same thing by the judge himself, and offered no justification. Wu couldn’t get a written copy of the rejection ruling, and was unable to appeal to a higher court. By April 2008, Wu had sold his house to meet the costs of his numerous petitions, which had received no response. Eventually, he became homeless and was seen camping out on the streets of Shenyang. This was a direct result of the failure of institutions and legislation to protect the basic rights of workers.
‘With so many labour disputes, it’s obvious what is happening,’ said Peng. ‘Why doesn’t the government do something to stop the unregulated security middlemen?’
‘These underground security firms are run by criminals,’ Qiang replied. ‘Criminals are the reason the police receive their pay and keep their jobs. Without criminals, the police can’t justify their good salary. They work with each other – they need each other to survive. I am sure you know that these underground firms feed the police with never-ending bribes.’ Tianhe Antai, Peng’s first employer in Beijing, was notorious for that, in fact.
‘As if they gave a damn!’ said Qiang, downing another cup of baijiu. ‘Without migrant workers, Beijingers would starve.’
Eventually, their colleague Mr Li joined in as well. ‘We definitely need to be given more respect and more rights,’ he said quietly.
As we drank more and more baijiu, Peng began asking me about London and whether security guards have a good life over there, in a ‘world-class city’, as he called it. I told him about a place in east London I knew quite well called Canary Wharf, guarded by hundreds of non-British security guards employed by dodgy agencies, to which he listened with wide-open eyes. ‘Really, sister? Are most of them also migrants? From where? Surely they’re not earning peanuts like us…’
Peng toasted me near the end of the evening. ‘Sister, I hope that when you return to Beijing one day, you will see that I’ve got myself a more senior position at work and have done something better with my life,’ he said. ‘I truly hope that conditions will improve for us all.’
2
Earthquakes in Bohemia:
Life and Death in Sichuan
The footsteps of Sichuanese migrant workers can be found everywhere in China – in the factories, down the coal mines and brick kilns, on building sites in every metropolis. Rural poverty in Sichuan, the country’s fourth-largest province and western China’s largest source of migrant workers, has driven 20 million peasants to the cities. Among them, more than 11 million have left the province entirely.
Numerous government programmes have attempted to deal with Sichuan’s poverty. The ‘8–7 Plan’, launched in 1994, sought to eliminate absolute poverty within seven years. Whether that goal was reached depends on the definition of ‘absolute poverty’. China’s criteria for rural poverty reflected one of the lowest thresholds among developing countries. In 1986, the ‘absolute poverty’ line in China was 206 yuan per year. In 1988 it was raised to 1,067 yuan, then to 1,196 yuan in 2009, 1,274 yuan in 2010 and 2,300 yuan in 2011. The raising of the poverty threshold has put three times as many people below the line: since 2011, 128 million among the rural population.
Back in 2005, a five-year plan was launched to reduce the income gap between town and country, which had increased dramatically as a result of the reform and opening up. Yet the gap has continued to widen. Rural per capita income remains below subsistence level: by official measures it was 4,140 yuan (£350) in 2008, less than a third of urban per capita income, and all of the Sichuanese migrants I met were earning below this level. Meanwhile, what the state considers the problem of ‘superfluous labour’ has worsened in rural areas over the years: Lacking state social security provisions for their elderly, peasant families create their own by having more children, in defiance of China’s one-child policy. The government has lost count of the scale of the problem. In the 1990s, when it roughly estimated 200 million unemployed in rural China, 50 percent of rural Sichuan’s workforce was described as ‘superfluous’.
I set out for Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, just a few months after the 8.0 degree earthquake of 12 May 2008. The Information Office of the State Council placed the province’s death toll at 69,197, with 374,176 injured and 18,379 missing. Wenchuan and Beichuan, at the epicentre, had suffered the most. At least 60,000 Wenchuan residents were missing and there was little hope for their survival; nearly half of Beichuan’s 20,000 residents were dead. Even today, the government has not released a final death toll for Wenchuan, and meanwhile other natural disasters resulting from the quake, such as landslides following rainstorms, have killed more people, and fifty sources of hazardous radioactivity have been discovered in Beichuan’s affected areas. When I arrived in August 2008, four months after the quake, residents were still waiting for the local government to clean up the rubble. Between May and June more than 600,000 Sichuanese migrant workers left their badly needed jobs nationwide to visit their families. Life, they knew, was not short of natural disasters – which would always be accompanied by man-made catastrophes. But it was only acceptable to speak of the first.
I had been to Chengdu before, in 1997, and I remembered it as a haven. Known as a city of poets – a bohemian city – its relaxed atmosphere was a welcome change from the constant social struggle that many visitors feel elsewhere in China.
Chengdu sits in a sheltered basin surrounded by mountains, far from the Yellow River Delta where the dominant Han Chinese culture has historically been centred. Through the centuries these conditions attracted poets and writers, most of them travelling hermits, the most famous being Li Bai, whose family migrated from Central Asia and settled in Sichuan. Famed for his wild lifestyle and his unrestrained, individualistic literary style, a style unknown in the court-influenced writing of ancient China, Li Bai came down in legends as a Chinese Robin Hood (xiake). He helped the poor as he travelled with the money he begged from the rich; he caroused and played his lute (dombura) to accompany his poems.
We drink face to face in the midst
of these mountain blossoms,
one glass after another, and another;
Let me go home, I’m no longer sober;
In the morning I shall return with my dombura.
Sichuan was never far from his mind – many of his poems describe his delight in the beautiful landscape and his joy in the music of others, including his famous ‘Listening to the Sichuanese monks’, in which he describes feeling overwhelmed by the monks’ performance of music in the misty Emei Mountains:
For me, he waved his hand,
strumming and sounding
like