the making of the Chinese travelling classes

This is a good piece by Malcolm Moore on the men and women who are actually building China, but I’ve got one quibble:

Unskilled, but hardworking, the migrants slotted into the thousands of construction sites and factories around south and east China and today migrants make up more than 70 per cent of China's builders, 68 per cent of its factory workers and 80 per cent of its coal miners. It is migrants who have transformed the country, churning out cheap goods for the West and erecting the skyscrapers that wow foreigners.

But we’re not really talking about migrants here unless you define the Chinese countryside as a different country to the city. What you actually have here are the laobaixing, the nongmin, or, to be vulgar about it, the working classes. And it’s not just this article. Nearly everything you read on this subject in China seems to concentrate on the fact that people have traveled from one place to another to do the heavy labour as the defining thing about them rather than the work they have to do.

Obviously, the abuses inherent in the hukou system make good story material, as do the crammed trains when everybody goes home for New Year. But factors like this are attendant on industrialization in lots of countries: hence the Duke of Wellington’s famous remark about the railways – that he didn’t like them because they caused the working classes to move about unnecessarily. But it’s hardly definitive.

Comments

[Cian]

I would have thought all places. How do people imagine that cities came into being, or enlarged so dramatically, if not for migration...

In the US there were periods during the C19th where a sizable chunk of the workforce was constantly on the move, using the railways to move to the next job/city.

[johnf]

A La Wobblies, an equally feared and volatile workforce, travelling up and down the US on the freight trains.