Chinese Women Migrants and the Social Apartheid
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Local/Global Encounters
Chinese Women Migrants and the Social Apartheid
AU LOONG-YU AND NAN SHAN
ABSTRACT Au Loong-yu and Nan Shan examine the conditions of the women among the 150 million migrant workers who have left the rural areas in search of jobs in China. They underline that fierce social regression has accompanied Chinese enormous economic growth where women migrants particularly are exploited in ‘the ‘world’s greatest sweatshop’. They argue that hukou system or household registration has proved to be as useful to ‘capitalist construction’ as it once was for ‘socialist construction’. It now acts a powerful force for pressing down the wages of rural migrants and preventing them from getting better jobs in the cities. KEYWORDS hukou; export trade zones; state sector; resistance; social divisions
Introduction China has experienced high growth rate for more than two decades.1 The achievement, however, has been made at the expenses of the environment and the working people. The capitalist market reform resulted in a thorough shake-up of the economy, especially the state sector. More than 30 million workers in the state sector were sacked, a scale never seen in history. Over the past ten years, the active urban working population has grown to 200 million, but its composition has changed greatly. The number of workers in SOEs (state-owned enterprises) shrank from 112 million in l995 to 69 million in 2003. The number of workers in collective enterprises declined from 35.5 million in 1995 to 9.5 million in 2003.2 The old working class declines in both numbers and strength. At the same time, 150 million rural people have left the land and roamed the country as migrant workers in search of employment, the overwhelming number of them ending up working in EPZs (export processing zones) with wages so low that workers are barely able to sustain themselves, and with little social security. This great social transformation can be summed up in this way: good, secure jobs have been eliminated and replaced by bad and insecure jobs. This represents a great social regression. At the same time, a new working class is born that have immense implication for China. Development (2007) 50(3), 76–82. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100408
Loong-yu and Shan: Chinese Women Migrants In the face of such a tremendous social regression, women workers are doubly pathetic. As early as 1987, when the first wave of downsizing in the state sector began, women workers accounted for 64 percent of those sacked. Accompanying the downsizing was a fierce propaganda campaign to portray women as an inferior sex because of their ability to bear children ^ it is simply economically not viable to employ women, claimed the elite. Not only were women workers sacked, but young women, including recent college graduates, have been repeatedly rejected for interviews with employers simply because they are women. Even if they are able to find employment women’s wages are lower than those of men. In 1990, wages for women were only 77.5 percent of those men, an
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