9 - Migration and Contention in the Construction Sector

Summary

The second decade of the Deng-led reform brought up bittersweet memories of the Great Leap Forward, when Da Fo's famers were promised that the changeover to the commune would deliver a better life, only to be flattened by a dwindling food ration and exhaustion from overwork in the collective fields. The disbanding of the collective was more than welcomed by villagers, many of whom equated reform with permission to rescue themselves from the restrictive and demeaning labor regime of the Mao era. With reform, Da Fo's farmers were quicker to rise for work each morning, more eager to engage tilling and petty trade, and more hopeful that each day's increment of labor would distance them from the damage of the past.

This hope was still alive in the mid-1990s. But, as we have seen, fifteen years of reform had resulted in a renewed tax burden, another radical assault on procreation, and a rise in tuition payments – all piled onto, and entwined with, the fines, bribes, and extortions of Liangmen township leaders and public security forces. By 1995, Da Fo's farmers were working longer and harder to feed the rent collectors of the reform-era political system, and daily survival was again encumbered by a single-party state whose agents were undermining democratic institutional experiments and closing down avenues of supposedly legitimate remonstration. Fortunately, the existential dilemma of Da Fo's farmers was not as dire as in the Great Leap, for they now had the option of exit: they could flee with minimal penalty. Flight, therefore, became the order of the day. Increasingly, as the second decade of reform wore on, Da Fo's hard-pressed farmers joined in the greatest internal migration in human history, supposedly stimulated by the pull of reform policy.

PUSH FACTORS

By the early twenty-first century, approximately 120–130 million rural migrants had left the countryside to find work in emerging towns and cities benefiting from China's economic boom. Of the forty million migrants laboring in the construction industry, nearly 70 percent were of rural origin. Few of them held the residential permits required to stay in the cities without police harassment.