There is a basic living subsidy that the laid-off SOE workers are entitled to receive for up to three years, but this is lower than the minimum wage. The monthly minimum wage in Shenyang is 700 yuan. For workers with families to support, the subsidy isn’t enough to live on even in the short term. As a result, some have started to seek work in the private sector or tried to set up their own small businesses if they’ve managed to accumulate any capital. Others, in their thousands, have opted for a more ambitious project: migrating abroad, seeking work in South Korea and Europe, including the UK.
Among the unemployed I met in Shenyang there were also migrant workers who had lost their land in their home villages. Some of these migrants had left the countryside as a result of local government land seizures. Nationally, these official seizures of land for commercial or industrial use have driven an estimated 70 million peasants from their farms and have been a major cause of peasant pauperization.11 In Liaoning province alone, millions of peasants are estimated to have been affected. Land grabs in Liaoning are related to government debt. Eighty-five percent of local government borrowers in Liaoning could not afford their interest payments.12 Banks were willing to loan to them in the first place because there is a huge amount of land that the local authorities can grab. It is modestly estimated that 23 percent of the total loans to local governments in China depend on sales of appropriated land for repayment.13
Although farmland was decollectivized through the 1980 Household Registration Act, and peasants given rights to till and manage allocated parcels of land under contract with the village production team, all of that land remains state-owned, and can be transferred only through expropriation by the state. Since the early 1990s, local governments have been seizing peasants’ allocated land and converting it to industrial and commercial use to fuel economic growth. This has increased steadily as a direct result of the uncontrolled growth of property development and the anarchy of the market since the reform and opening up. And although local authorities are required by the Land Administration Law to compensate peasants for expropriated cultivated land, in practice peasants’ petitions against the loss of their homes and farmland are almost always ignored.
When peasants protest, they are often attacked by armed thugs sent in by the local authorities. In March 2011, police officers and hired thugs attacked a group of 300 peasant protesters in Fuzhou. Ten of them were beaten up and injured; in 2004, peasants were protesting against land seizure in Sanchawan village in Shanxi province and many were seriously injured by rubber bullets; in June 2005, six villagers of Shengyou in Hebei province were killed by hired thugs; in May 2009, Yingde villagers near Guangdong province were attacked by armed police; one villager suffered brain damage and was left paralyzed.
Hence the migration into cities like Shenyang, where they scramble for the few jobs they can find. Many migrants to Shenyang arrived during the worst of the recession in 2009, when manufacturing and service industries in the city were seeing large layoffs of migrant workers – an estimated 0.4 million lost their livelihood then. Even so, Shenyang tempts migrants with a manual labour wage that averages 1,200–1,500 yuan per month, higher than other cities in the region.
Li Long, twenty-nine but older looking, weathered from years of farm work, stood out among the job seekers I saw for his energetic manner, his keenness as he talked to other migrants, while he walked up and down the streets of Lu Garden with his shirt rolled half up to relieve the heat. He’d come from Yuelai, a village in Heilongjiang province with 600 households – a fair size. But most of the villagers had nothing but small, fragmented plots of land to work on, and in recent years many had left for surrounding towns in search of work, though many of those soon returned after being laid off. He himself had been a farmer, with less than an acre of arable land, and what he could earn in a year – 1,500–2,000 yuan – was such a pittance that he’d moved to Shenyang, where he’d worked as a loader and general labourer for two to three years. But now he had been jobless for several months. He lived with two other job seekers from Heilongjiang, and they often came to the labour market together. He would wait around Lu Garden for the whole day, if no work came up. When he got tired, he would walk to the bridge and sit on it, watching the crowd. ‘I’m always ready to put up with hardship,’ he said. ‘Poor Mom and Dad, they are still tilling the land, at their age… I feel so incompetent. It’s so hard to survive in Shenyang.’ Even when he was employed and sent his income home, it had not been enough to support them.
Two months after I left Peng in Shenyang, I was staying in a guesthouse in Beijing. I’d just come back from a short trip to visit Ying, a Chinese who had returned to his hometown, Handan, from London. The train journey had exhausted me. At five minutes to midnight, the phone rang. It was Peng.
‘Did I wake you up, sister?’ he asked.
‘Not at all!’ I replied. I’d been kept awake by the calls from the local saunas anyway – the reception kept putting them through to the rooms. The female callers, mostly rural migrants, would offer ‘special services’ – a massage and sex – if a man answered, but would hang up without a word if they heard a female voice.
‘How have you been?’ I asked.
‘I’m not good. Not good at all. Couldn’t find any work at all in Shenyang,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried really hard in the past month. Since you left, things have got considerably worse and most people have given up their job search in Shenyang – sixty out of a hundred migrants have returned home to their villages. I’ve hung around here long enough. But no sign of a job.’
‘I’m so sorry, Peng!’ I said, not knowing how to reassure him. ‘What are you planning to do now?’
‘I’m going home, back to Fuxing. I’ll help out on the farm for a while…and see what happens. I can’t stay in Shenyang anymore – I’m going mad! And everyone’s leaving. I am dead scared, sister. I don’t want to end up like Ah Shan.’
There was a pause.
‘You know Ah Shan?’ he asked.
I struggled to remember.
‘You met him in the Lu Garden labour market,’ Peng said. ‘Ah Shan couldn’t live with the pain and shame of staying jobless for more than six months. He took his own life – just a week after you left. One day, he just jumped into the river right by the labour market and drowned himself.’
I was speechless. I really didn’t remember Ah Shan. He must have been one of the many job seekers who had gathered when I talked to Peng. Peng described him as an honest man, ‘although you probably wouldn’t notice him in a crowd.’ Peng was obviously upset about the death. He’d spent days searching for work alongside Ah Shan and they must have built up a friendship. For Peng, friendship meant a lot. He was trying to hold back his tears as he spoke. I advised him to return home for a break and told him to call me whenever he needed to talk. Then we hung up.
The next day, he returned to Fuxing on a three-hour bus trip. Going home didn’t turn out to be much of a break. His father, who had never left to work in the city, did not sympathize with him. ‘Other villagers’ sons can make money in the city. Why can’t you?’ he nagged. The accusation was hurtful, but Peng ignored it because he didn’t want to talk back to his dad. He tried to justify staying in the village for a while. But it wasn’t yet harvest time and there was little farm work. So he spent some time cleaning the front yard and sorting the farmhouse storage for his dad, and cooked dinner for him every evening. ‘Have you learned a few dishes in Shenyang?’ his father asked, not knowing that Peng had never had time to cook during his time in the city.
Two weeks later, his father got on his case again, and this time he was much harsher: ‘If you don’t move your ass and go work in the city, we won’t be able to survive.’
Peng packed his bag and left home the next morning. Shenyang was the only large city nearby. He had to return to the Lu Garden labour market, which held nothing but memories of failure and Ah Shan’s suicide. How could his father understand? ‘I am just like his working buffalo,’ Peng told me.
One day, waiting around Lu Garden in the early morning, Peng met a recruiter