A variety of reasons forces us into the diaspora, the most salient of which can be described as economic and/or political.
A Luganda childhood poem of sorts, "Ennaku Elaba Omusomi nno Ssebo ...", describing the hardships of life as a pupil back in our motherland applies here too. In the diaspora, we gladly perform tasks often looked down upon by natives to eke out a precarious a living, sometimes for a pittance by way of renumeration. To our relatives and friends backhome we are fabulously wealthy. On it goes ...
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Tide of China's Migrants: Flowing to Boom, or Bust?
July 29, 2003 By ERIK ECKHOLM
YIWU, China - Jin Xiaoqin epitomizes all that is going right in China.
Through 15 years of hard work and keen attention to the fickle global market for trinkets, she and her husband have climbed from street peddling to owning a plastics factory with 50 workers, all migrants from poorer regions.
This year, their hottest products are painted figurines of Jesus and Mary, sold to buyers from the United States and South Korea.
"The glow-in-the dark statues sell pretty well, but not as well as the painted ones," Ms. Jin noted, perusing her display in Yiwu city's vast wholesale market for small goods of every kind.
Her trajectory is multiplied by the thousands in Yiwu, perhaps the most sizzling city in the zooming province of Zhejiang, in China's southeast. With no obvious geographical advantage, Yiwu has within two decades grown into a metropolis with skyscrapers, an airport, a new glass and steel exhibition center and acres of industrial parks and housing estates now under construction. Enough Arabic dealers live in Yiwu year-round to support several Middle Eastern restaurants, including one with belly dancers, and a mosque.
Two hundred miles to the interior is Caijiacun, a broken farm village that functions mainly as a source of workers for Yiwu and other boomtowns. Caijiacun epitomizes the rural stagnation that could be China's most intractable problem.
"We pretty much lead a hand-to-mouth existence," said Cai Songquan, whose 24-year-old son, like most everyone else in the Jiangxi Province countryside who is young and able, left home while in his teens.
Linking these disparate worlds are the migrant workers, more than 100 million nationwide, men and women from China's interior.
They travel for work because they have no alternatives and because they dream of better days. In factories large and small, foreign-owned and domestic, they assemble computer parts or shoes or, as Mr. Cai's son did until he was laid off a few weeks ago from a factory in Yiwu, toys.
The migrants face numbingly low wages as they scramble to save for marriage and a home and, in their wildest dreams, a little shop back home. A clever and lucky few gain skills that help start them up the modern economy, on a long ladder.
The fate of migrants like Mr. Cai's son, along with that of relatives in the villages who increasingly depend on money sent home, is one of China's biggest unknowns.
Will large numbers of migrants, like those elsewhere, climb to lives of reliable earnings and respect, perhaps even seeing a child or grandchild make it to college? Or will many remain on a virtual treadmill, as the son, Cai Gaoxiang, feels he has been over the last year, watching as the meager pay for his labor has actually declined?
On such issues may hinge whether China hardens into extremes of wealth and poverty, as some fear today, or emerges as the middle-class country that everyone hopes for.
A tour from booming Zhejiang to the interconnected villages of Jiangxi provides evidence on both futures.
The Boom Trinket Supplier to the World
"Build the World's Biggest Supermarket, Construct an International Shopping Heaven!" reads the giant electronic sign at the entrance to what once was called the Yiwu Small Commodities Wholesale Market. Now, relocated in cavernous new four-story, air-conditioned quarters, the market has renamed itself, with no apparent hubris, the Yiwu World Trade Center.
Inside are thousands of stalls staffed by local factory owners and traders, offering an astonishing selection of hair bows and Christmas ornaments, key rings, plastic jewelry, lava lamps and every other made-in-China trinket that fill stores the world over.
Jin Xiaoqin, a lively woman in her mid-40's, waits for walk-in buyers and watches the fax machine in her booth. On the shelves are a dozen variants of Christian statuary.
"Ours is a typical Yiwu story," she said, "from small to big, from middleman to producer of goods." Her family moved from a mud house in the country to a four-story house in town, and from carrying goods on their shoulders to a motorcycle eight years ago and, last year, a van.
She and her husband were barely educated; their daughter studies marketing at a university.
The pace of growth in Yiwu, as in much of Zhejiang Province, is all the more remarkable because it is entirely home-grown - not, as in some regions, a product of General Motors, Panasonic, Compaq or other big multinational corporations that have transplanted factories along China's coast. Here, China's surging exports are visibly translating into middle-class status for large numbers of ordinary Chinese.
Illustrating how tightly Yiwu's development is bound with the supply of outside workers, while the official resident population is 640,000, a further 500,000 migrants live in and around Yiwu.
Buying and selling inexpensive goods was a tradition in the area, only partly suppressed in the Mao era, and Ms. Jin had trading in her blood. As a youth with her family in the late 1970's, as petty commerce was allowed, she crafted crude sunglasses. "You had to sell on the sly," she said. "Back then, selling sunglasses was considered decadent."
Her future husband roamed the country with an uncle, each carrying all the useful little products, like sewing needles and thread, they could carry in a blanket."They'd sell everything, come back to Yiwu and buy more, and go out selling again," she said.
Married in the 1980's, she and her husband moved from one local market to another, lugging goods on shoulder poles. They set up a permanent stall in Yiwu selling socks, then moved into handicrafts because "there seemed to be more market potential."
Four years ago they set up their own small plastics factory, concentrating on religious figurines after one foreign buyer brought in a mold and a big order.
Soon they developed their own molds, she said, and business "really took off last year."
They offer workers around $60 a month with room and board to an apparently endless supply of applicants.
The real problem, she said, is finding people skilled enough to paint the eyes of Mary and Jesus.
"You really have to paint the eyes just right," she said. "Foreigners care a lot about the expressions on the faces."
The Strugglers Wages So Low the Hungry Balk
Yiwu has built an imposing multistory job exchange where employers and job seekers can register, but out front is the real action and the raw face of the market economy. Hundreds of migrants, young men and women, couples with babies in tow, from Jiangxi and Hunan, and Henan, Anhui and Sichuan, mill about, some with signs advertising a skill.
A few prospective employers carry signs offering work but have no takers because the wages and conditions seem too onerous even for this hungry crowd. Waiting with some friends from his home province of Jiangxi on a recent day was Cai Gaoxiang, who has been doing factory jobs in Zhejiang Province for 10 years. Because of slow orders, he recently lost his last job, assembling swivel-headed dog ornaments that motorists put on their dashboards.
He was not feeling so good about that job anyway, he allowed. "The assembly work is really tough," he said. "And they've been pushing down the rates. We used to get 3.5 fen per toy but now they are just paying 2.5 fen." (One fen is a Chinese penny, worth less than one-tenth of an American penny.)
When the orders are high, he said. assemblers work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, and might clear $120 in a month. More typical is $90 a month and in a slow month, $50. "Often it's just not enough to get by on," he said.
Mr. Cai has worked in all the boomtowns of Zhejiang - Hangzhou, Wenzhou and now Yiwu - but never gained a long-term job or special skills. Still, he does not regret leaving home at 14. "There's nothing to do at home and everybody leaves to work," he said.
Mr. Cai has managed to save $2,000 but this is not enough to marry his fianc�e, from a neighboring Jiangxi village, who works in Yiwu in a socks factory and whom he sees once a month or so.
"My dream is someday to save enough money to return home and build a house and maybe start a small shop of some kind," he said. "Because in the end, if you are a migrant worker you suffer a lot of discrimination and you have a lot of unfair bosses. Even if you're sick, they make you work and the food is often not very good and not enough."
The Backwater The Poor Villages They Left Behind
Driving west from Yiwu, into the interior provinces, the boomtowns and entrepreneurial energy give way to tired land and resigned eyes. Two hundred miles and a half-century behind in technology is the village of Caijiacun, in the rocky hills of Jiangxi Province.
The villagers are taunted by distant sight of the recently finished cross-national superhighway. There is no nearby exit from the elevated road. Trucks whiz past carrying goods that may have been produced by this backwater village's sons and daughters, goods these stay-behinds will never see. The rutted track into the village is passable by tractor, motorbike or a half-hour walk from the nearest car-friendly road.
This region of rice farmers was the incubating ground for the Communist revolution. But that legacy has not brought industry or prosperity. Rice is still planted by hand.
Like much of central China, rural Jiangxi cannot hold its young people. In Caijiacun, 300 out of 700 residents have left for the cities and coastal regions, leaving behind the middle-aged, the elderly, children, the occasional mother. Sad-faced old women fan themselves at their doors while dogs and piglets roam the dirt paths.
"Life is not so good now," said Cai Songquan, 48, father of a migrant son and a married daughter. Mr. Cai is hardly the poorest villager in China: his home has a concrete floor, he somehow bought a color television and he has stocked enough soft drinks and beer to sell a few now and then. He shares his home with his wife and mother, usually accompanied by a posse of boys who watch TV while the older folks play dominos beneath a large Mao poster.
"You have to leave to make any money at all, but a lot of those who leave don't make much either," Mr. Cai said. "A few people run into a good opportunity and return with some cash," he said - the successes are visible in the occasional tile-covered house and shiny new motorcycle. "But a lot of the migrant workers just make enough to get by."
"I can't see how my son is going to do any better," he said, referring to Cai Gaoxiang in Yiwu. "He's always borrowing money from me so he can afford to go look for jobs."
Still, he had encouraged his son to seek distant work at age 14, he said. "It doesn't make any sense to stay in school if you know it's not going to get you anywhere." His daughter has married and, by rural tradition, provides no support to her parents.
Mr. Cai expressed a common ambivalence about China's recent history. Life is a lot better than in the old days, he said. "Back then you were lucky if you had a pair of pants. But compared to a lot of other people these days, life here is very hard for us."
"Life was poorer under Mao, but it was also more equal," he said. "These days there's more rich and more poor. Overall, I think it was better under Mao."
At her deceptively quiet stall in the Yiwu World Trade Center, Jin Xiaoqin kept an eye on the fax machine as she pondered her family's cheerier prospects, and their continued toil and frugality."We use the van both for family and for business," she said. "We won't buy a family car until our daughter graduates from university because we have to worry about tuition costs."
"Of course life has improved dramatically for us. We couldn't have imagined any of this 10 years ago. But for the time being, we want to use most of our money to build the business."
"And if you come back next year," Ms. Jin said, "Yiwu will be a different place still again."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/international/asia/29CHIN.html?ex=1060492689&ei=1&en=f993c19fb1843393
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