Send to a friend | Contact us | Search | Italiano | 中文   

Millions of Migrants Exploited and Left Jobless

Even though the Chinese New Year will take place on January 26, it is estimated that over 10 million migrant workers have already lost their jobs and have returned home from the cities as thousands of companies are closing due to the economic downturn in China.

According to the World Bank, gross domestic product in China will grow only 7.5% next year, the slowest in almost two decades. This will create massive unemployment. Economists estimate that up to 20 million people may return to the countryside in 2009. According to the Chinese Ministry of Human Resources, China must create 24 million jobs annually to maintain social stability.

Over the past thirty years, about 130 million peasants left the countryside for the factories and construction sites of the cities in what the U.N. described as the biggest migration to have ever taken place in history. These migrants, the "floating population," faced discrimination and severe residency rules in the cities. Many of them were clandestine. They always managed to return home, at least for the Chinese new year, the most important Chinese holiday. Now millions are returning home to an uncertain if not tragic future, as the biggest migration in human history is going into reverse. Millions of workers who had been used by the merciless communist machine are now being abandoned by that same machine.

The communist leadership must now face not only the problem of unemployment, but their worst nightmare - the social unrest this high level of unemployment will create. Social instability is the communist leadership’s greatest fear. There will be millions of unemployed people in the countryside, in addition to the unemployed who choose to remain in the cities. Further, many extremely poor families in the countryside depended upon financial support from family members who worked in the cities – not to mention the over 7 million college graduates who will be seeking jobs, only to discover a stagnant and corrupt society which has nothing to offer them.

"The redistribution of wealth through theft and robbery could dramatically increase and menaces to social stability will grow," Zhou Tianyong, a leading Communist Party scholar, wrote this month in a newspaper article.

Andy Xie, independent analyst and former chief Asia economist for Morgan Stanley, explains: "It’s unlikely there will be enough work in the countryside. Big groups of unemployed workers hanging around are bound to be trouble."

"The government is quite nervous about the situation among migrant workers and the rural population. The legitimacy of the regime is based solely on its ability to improve people’s living standards. If it can’t deliver improvement, its legitimacy could be fractured." says Professor Wo-Lap Lam of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

One factory worker who lost his job may have eloquently summed up the attitude of the dictators: "No one cares about the workers in China. There’s too many of us."

Sources:

http://www.forexfactory.com/news.php?do=news&id=142308
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/05/content_10606970.htm
http://uk.reuters.com/article/burningIssues/idUKTRE5040IU20090105?sp=true
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=awmwBKgkvcj8&refer=asia
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aG8JAH3FwkmY&refer=asia
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hP4RRkNj5BH3kxePSAgX1tvJTMJg
http://uk.reuters.com/article/marketsNewsUS/idUKPEK10141020081230

Defend Human Rights - Boycott Chinese products