The EconomistNovember 30th 2019 China 41
E
ven in aChina filled with the shiny and the new, the southern
city of Guangzhou stands out. A generation ago it was a smoggy,
sweltering sprawl of factories and workshops, a bit embarrassed
by its history as a semi-colony of Western powers, who knew it as
Canton. Now Guangzhou aspires to be a hub of global commerce. It
boasts the 600-metre tall Canton Tower, an opera house designed
by Zaha Hadid and high-speed trains that can reach Beijing,
2,300km to the north, in just eight hours. Yet Guangzhou’s rise had
human costs. The province of Guangdong, of which it is the capi-
tal, is a hotbed of worker unrest, with 129 strikes and protests
logged this year by China Labour Bulletin (clb), a Hong Kong-
based monitor of workers’ rights. A growing number involve work-
ers reaching retirement age, who discover that—because they fall
through gaps in the welfare safety-net, or because employers
skimped on pension contributions—a meagre future awaits.
China’s migrant workers, who for 30 years have left inland vil-
lages and townships for coastal boomtowns, are growing old.
Their average age is now over 40. Nearly a quarter are over 50. More
than a tenth of all strikes, sit-ins and protests recorded by clbin
2018 and 2019 involved rows over pensions and social insurance.
The latest national survey on living conditions of the urban and
rural elderly, published in 2018 on the orders of the Communist
Party’s Central Committee, describes startling inequalities. About
100m retired Chinese covered by the unified basic urban pension
system, to which most full-time urban workers contribute, re-
ceived average monthly benefits of 2,600 yuan ($369) in 2016. But
about 150m retirees had to make do with a state pension scheme
open to both urban and rural residents. They received on average
117 yuan ($17) a month, a pittance even in a poor region.
There are 288m migrant workers in China, of whom 173m work
far from their home towns. In theory, they should enjoy the same
social protections as urban Chinese with permanent residence
permits who live in big cities like Guangzhou. They do not. Today’s
40- and 50-something Chinese migrants are a “lost generation”, ar-
gues Mark Frazier of the New School in New York. They fall be-
tween the oldest, pioneering migrant workers who were expected
to head back to the countryside in retirement to eke out a living
from tiny plots of land, and today’s 20-something workers, who
arelessinclinedto seek distant factory jobs and are more likely to
be covered by social-security protections from a patchwork of new
labour laws and insurance schemes. Few see the current system as
sustainable, amid gloomy statistics about falling birth rates and
the shaky finances of the main urban pension fund: the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences predicts it will go bust by 2035. Plans
are afoot to increase China’s retirement age, which is normally 60
for men, 55 for women in white-collar jobs and 50 for female blue-
collar workers, though the rules vary by region.
None of those plans will help a group of older workers who
spoke to Chaguan recently in Guangdong. The seven women and
one man showed hands too damaged by factory work to pour tea
without shaking. They shared stories of parental guilt after failing
to return home for two or three years at a time, leaving children to
be brought up by grandparents. Even during the spring festival, an
occasion for family reunions, there was valuable overtime to be
earned, said a 50-year-old woman from Hubei province. Besides,
returning to the village would have involved long train journeys
and buying clothes, shoes and other gifts for many relatives. “We
spent 20 spring festivals here,” she said wistfully. Unfortunately,
before she reached retirement age in September, she learned that
she could not draw her full pension in Guangdong because she be-
gan to make social-insurance payments after she was 40. If she had
local residency she could make back-payments towards the 15
years of contributions needed. As a migrant, her only option was to
return to Hubei, where her pension might come to 600 yuan ($85) a
month. She compared her fate to an old, bitter saying: “Unharness
the donkey from the grindstone, then butcher it.”
Another woman had worked at a handbag factory owned by Si-
mone, a South Korean firm, for nearly 20 years. She alleged that her
employer had failed to make the correct payments into a state
housing-savings fund that serves as a second pension for many.
After she complained, she said the firm had denied her overtime
and warned other workers to avoid her. Simone denies these alle-
gations. It says it takes employee benefits seriously and “strictly
follows” and even exceeds China’s labour-law requirements.
A people’s republic, for the benefit of bosses
The eight workers had varied problems, but all described a system
in which social stability is the authorities’ guiding obsession. That
preoccupation can offer workers slivers of power if they make just
enough trouble, perhaps by staging a respectful sit-in at a govern-
ment office or party-controlled trade union (China bans indepen-
dent ones). If enough workers complain, companies will often
“budge and pay”, one of the workers said. When they go further and
organise, for instance through social-media groups, repression
follows. In March, during meetings of the national legislature in
Beijing, some workers in Guangdong used social media to discuss
submitting a petition to the central government. The term “peti-
tion” triggered an algorithm. Police dragged workers from dormi-
tory beds and humiliated them with strip searches, Chaguan was
told. Other workers were reportedly evicted after landlords were
told they were “problematic” by officials.
Many of the hardships described around that table in Guang-
dong would cost only small sums to resolve. Alas, it would also in-
volve those who wield power deferring to the rights of individual
workers. Instead, those workers must navigate a ruthless system
in which they must plead and bargain for what they have earned. A
remarkable generation of migrants built the new China. They are
still paying the costs, in broken hands, backs and hearts. 7
Chaguan Heroic, expendable
The migrant workers who made China an industrial giant face a bleak retirement
