MCLC: invited a migrant worker to a meal

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: invite a migrant worker to a meal
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Source: The Guardian (8/25/12):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/25/china-rural-migrants-mo
re-respect

COMMENT IS FREE
China's rural migrant workers deserve more respect from the city-dwellers
The people who make up half of China's urban workforce are marginalised
and patronised, yet they are indispensable
By Hsiao-Hung Pai

On China's Valentine's Day (the seventh day of the seventh lunar month in
the Chinese calendar, which fell on 23 August this year), 30 migrant
workers were taken by surprise when they were invited to a business
networking dinner by several college students in Shanghai who, during
their summer internships, had happened to see the migrants' miserable
working life on the city's construction sites. The move by the students,
who wore T-shirts saying "Invite a Migrant Worker to a Meal" was televised
as a primetime entertainment.

This says much about the social attitudes towards migrant workers, who
often come from the vast interior of the country. They make up half of
China's urban workforce and account for half of the country's GDP. They
are indispensable, and yet are the most socially marginalised group of
workers in China.

Yet rural migrants continue to suffer from deep-seated prejudice and
discrimination. Not only are they denied access to public services in the
cities due to the hukou (household registration) system, they are also
subjected to day-to-day exclusion and abuse. You see them being talked to
and shouted at like children in public places; you see them banned from
hotel lobbies and posh restaurants. And as an angry blogger pointed out
when observing open discrimination against rural migrants, he said that
the "No Dogs or Chinese" signs put up by western colonialists in the 1920s
and 1930s have been replaced by the "No Dogs or Peasants" signs at
shopping malls in the cities. How have these become acceptable?

Since Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up (gaige kaifang) era, the media
has led the way in manufacturing images about rural migrants and
reinforcing prejudice against them. The word "peasant" (nongmin) has
always had negative connotations, either implying ignorance and lack of
education or carrying a patronising tone, addressing passive masses
receiving benevolence from the rulers. Since the 1980s and 1990s, the
media began to widely use to the term "blind flow" (mangliu) to describe
rural-to-urban migration, portraying an irrational, senseless and
out-of-control migration of labour into the cities. This negative language
has long shaped public views and sentiments towards rural migrants and
further deepened the prejudice against them.

Nongmin is a permanent social status that entails someone's inferior
educational and cultural background as well as economic capabilities. As a
segregated social class, nongmin carry the subordinated status with them
wherever they migrate. I had a Chinese publisher questioning me about the
dialogue I wrote for a rural migrant when he discussed politics. She said:
"How can a peasant speak like that? They aren't intelligent enough to
analyse things that way." I also had a Chinese reporter saying to me:
"Don't trust what the peasants tell you; they would mislead you." Neither
of them has had any experience working with anyone in the rural
communities.

This raises the question about the media's distance and lack of knowledge
of the "rural" of which social imagery they have been shaping.
Interestingly, Owen Jones <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/owen-jones>,
in his Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, talked about a
similar process where the media lacks contact with and knowledge of the
class they are belittling. The media take on the role of demonising the
working class, Jones says, and providing moral justification for the state
to deny that class of entitlements.

Similarly, the Chinese media manufacture "inherent" moral deficiency and
characteristics of the nongmin in order to justify their lack of rights
and entitlements. Thus the idea that nongmin are inherently much less
intelligent and unable to make sense of their own reality; thus the idea
that nongmin are "a blind flow of labour crowding into the cities" and
they "create social and economic problems" for the urbanite. It is the
equivalent of the Daily Mail in the UK – Jones quotes the Mail's remarks
on the "council-estate working class": "These are the people who are
getting sentimental about a vicious killer; they have no values, no
morality and are so thick that they are beyond redemption."

And then see Chinese bloggers condemning migrant workers in Yunnan who
held a protest with their children holding placards "Hand over my parents'
sweat and blood money!" in order to claim back owed wages. One blogger
sneered: "What kind of parent would let their kids beg money for them?"

As China's rural migrants have had this class distinction stamped on them
permanently, the only way their demands for social justice and equal
rights can be justified is through the promotion of national economic
interests and the greater good. One way to advance the rural migrants'
case for better access to public services in the cities is to argue that
they could power consumer spending growth in China. As China Daily reports
<http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-08/21/content_15693053.htm>
this week, "The 230 million-strong migrant workforce drives China's
economy, but a lack of access to education, health and other services …
forces massive saving, restraining Beijing's efforts to shift growth's
focus to consumption from investment." No media are able to talk about
migrant workers' basic rights.

Social attitudes will take a long time to change in China, and the media
is guilty of delaying that change. Rural migrants need to be treated as
citizens, like everyone else, not as passive nongmin to be receiving
occasional goodwill and charity. Much more needs to be done than taking
migrants to a Chinese Valentine's dinner.