“Migrant workers from the countryside have a different way of thinking
and it’s not okay. I can’t accept it. They are not very educated, nor are they
cultured. They are backward and uncivilized,” explained Uncle Cao, the
pot-bellied, chain-smoking, spiky-haired owner of a noodle restaurant in the
old city of Nanjing. He shrugged and threw up his hands. “Meibanfa,” he sighed, shaking his head. Meibanfa is a frequently used Chinese phrase that
means there’s nothing that can be done.
My
face tingled as I slurped my steaming bowl of knife-shaven noodles with beef.
His 7-year-old daughter shyly poked her head out from behind the kitchen door
and retreated instantly when we made eye contact. She was curious to see the
first foreigner that had ever eaten at her father’s restaurant. Uncle Cao added,
“I’m not willing to be friends with peasants because you simply can’t be
friends with someone who is on a different level economically with you. It’s
not balanced. It’s like the old Chinese proverb: ‘Things
of one kind come together, and people of one group crowd together’ (wu yi
leiju, ren yi qunfen).” He coughed and spit on the
ground, blowing smoke in my face.
This is the story of what happens when
people of two groups crowd together in the old city of Nanjing.
After market-oriented economic reforms were
initiated in 1978, household income, rather than the work unit, began to
determine residence in Chinese cities. As more city officials gradually began to embrace
free-market values in the 1980s and 1990s, the property market became
semi-privatized and local governments began leasing land to property
developers. The resulting housing boom in China gave rise to the popularization
of gated communities, widespread demolition and eviction campaigns, and urban
zoning policies that encouraged
socio-economic spatial segregation. As a result, sections of
traditional urban areas that remained untouched by property developers
became dilapidated and largely inhabited by low-income and marginal
populations, namely migrant workers and lower-status urban residents.
These remaining sections of the old city are
the Chinese equivalent of slums, known as “urban villages,” where neighborhoods
of neglected housing await demolition and redevelopment. One such
community is Old Nanjing, where the
original urban fabric of the Ming dynasty remains. The charming,
meandering alleys of Old Nanjing are too narrow for vehicles. The streets are
lined with laofangzi, or old houses, as the locals call the
one-story dilapidated homes that lack toilets and showers. The laofangzi
usually feature central courtyards, slanted roofs, wooden frames, concrete
floors, and ladders leading up to lofts.
In
December of 2011, I moved into a laofangzi in Old Nanjing in order to conduct
field research on urban redevelopment, socio-spatial segregation, and local
identity during a 10-month research grant from the Fulbright US Student
Program. Despite my initial cultural shock with the public squat toilets and
the crowded, communal bathhouses, and the neighbors’ disturbance with my
preference to drink cold water and eat sunny-side up eggs, I have become part
of the local and the migrant communities in Old Nanjing. The two communities,
however, are distinctly separate from each other.
The
locals of Old Nanjing have a strong collective social identity, which is
partially expressed by their preference to only speak the local dialect with
one another. They attach importance to the fact that their grandparents grew up
in the same house they live in now and that their grandparents were friends
with each other.
My
next-door neighbor, Big Sister Chongyang, explained, “If our grandfathers were
friends, then of course we have to care about each other. If you’re in a
high-rise, you’re not going to care about your neighbors because you probably
moved in less than 10 years ago. Honestly, the same goes for the migrants here.”
The friendships between the locals run deep, as many will keep their doors
open, swap babysitting responsibilities, and invite each other over for dinner.
They attribute this to their previous generation’s friendship and therefore to
not extend this friendship to outsiders.
An
increasing number of migrant workers from the countryside are moving into Old
Nanjing to rent or squat in the abandoned laofangzi, but the locals do not feel
the same type of connection with them as they do with the other local
Nanjingese. Most of the locals admit that they would never enter into a
friendship with them.
Grandma Wang, my neighbor and a life-long
resident of Old Nanjing, insisted that the relationship between the locals and
migrants in Old Nanjing is quite simple: “We just don’t interact with migrants.
We don’t talk to them; they don’t talk to us. I’ve never been a friend to
someone from the outside before. There’s no point in being friends, and I don’t
know them so we would have nothing to talk about with each other,” she laughed,
shaking her head and looking confused as to why I would consider a friendship
with a migrant.
Rural
migrant workers, known in China as the “floating population,” are second-class
citizens in the eyes of the people, the law, and the state. Defined as those
holding a rural hukou,
or household registration, but living in a city, these temporary urban
residents are estimated to total around 160 million. Susceptible to sporadic
expulsion, denied basic legal rights, and lacking access to health care and
education, migrants are essentially considered to be immigrant guest workers in
their own country.
Migrant
workers are the subject of social discrimination and ridicule. They are widely
considered by urbanites to be uncultured and bad mannered. It is a crude joke
to call someone a nongmin,
a label for migrant workers that literally means “peasant,” as it implies
boorishness and ignorance. Comedy routines poking fun at uneducated migrants
are popular features on television. The migrant is almost always a short, tan,
wrinkled, bucked-teeth farmer who cannot speak standard Mandarin and does not
understand various aspects of the modernized urban life, such as public
transportation.
As
China continues to develop as
the world’s second largest economy, attention is turning to its political,
social, and economic fragility
that is rooted in the widening gap between the rich and the poor. According to researchers at the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, China’s Gini coefficient, a number between 0 and 1 that
measures the statistical dispersion of income inequality, rose to 0.496 in
2006, beyond the 0.4 danger level.
While
the economic development gap between the rural and the urban is relatively well
documented and acknowledged by the central government, the poverty of migrant workers from the countryside living in the
cities remains concealed. While they hold rural hukou and reside outside the
reaches of their rural jurisdiction, they are not the responsibility of the
city governments where they live. Therefore, some officials view migrant workers as potential threats to political,
social, and economic stability.
The
migrant workers living in Old Nanjing are no exception. Local officials
frequently conduct inspection of homes to confirm that migrant residents (and foreigners,
as I personally discovered) have registered at the local police station. Some locals blame the migrant population for
a recent increase in crime.
Uncle
Cao maintained that the relatively recent increase in petty theft in Old
Nanjing was caused by the members of the migrant population that cannot find
work: “Migrants are extremely
poor, so they cause trouble and commit crimes. Some just have no other way to
feed themselves, but some of them are lazy, and so they just steal stuff or
cheat people,” he told me.
My
neighbor Big Brother Guo is constantly concerned about my safety, telling me
not to go out at night. “You know we are all so concerned about your safety,”
he revealed. “That’s just because there are a few thieves around. I just want
you to know that those kinds of people are all migrants. Nobody native to Old
Nanjing would ever do that.”
The migrant population of Old Nanjing has not formed a cohesive
sense of community or identity, as some groups have done in larger migrant
cities like Beijing or Guangzhou. Although the majority of migrants living in
Old Nanjing come from Anhui Province, a poor, landlocked province about
4 hours to the west with a primarily agricultural sector, most still do not
speak the same dialect and the language barrier is significant. Moreover,
because the migrants are scattered around the neighborhood among the locals and
migrants from various regions, they do not have a sense of collective social
space.
When
I asked migrants if they have friends in Nanjing, their answer is always a
resounding “No.” Their attitudes mirror Grandma
Wang’s and the rest of the locals’ attitudes: they express no interest
in making friends in what they regard as a very temporary location and look
confused when I ask them about it. The migrants also do not express a wish to
make friends among the other
migrants. Their lives in Nanjing are temporary.
According
to Kam Wing Chan, a geographer at the University of Washington, one of the
greatest myths that persists about China today is that the country’s increasing
trend toward urbanization will result in a large, consuming middle-class and
continued economic growth. He argues, “With meager wages and no chance of
legally settling in the urban areas, they [migrants] also lack an incentive to
invest in the future in the city. They will not spend on major appliances in a
place that does not want them. In fact, most migrant workers have little
purchasing power that would position them even to dream of any decent housing
in the city.”
As
Uncle Cao told me, “I can’t
depend on them [migrants] because all they want to do is work here and then
take the money back home. So what if a few years down the road I need them to
help me out with something, but they’ve run back home? Then what use do I have in
being friends with them now?” As a result, social networks that provide the
backbone of civil society are not being cultivated. As long as rural hukou
holders are unable to obtain legal permanent residence in the cities, China’s grasp
at modernization will remain elusive.
The astonishing growth of China’s cities
looks good on paper, but does
not yet include the economic
development that normally accompanies urbanization.
With some observers predicting 400 million rural residents will move to the
city in the next 15 years, the clash between urban Chinese and migrants is
potentially explosive.
No comments:
Post a Comment