Rough Justice for China's Migrant Workers

China's migrant workers power the country's economy - working in shopping malls, factory production lines, expat bars and a myriad other diverse, low paid occupations. They help increase urbanization, seen by the government as a key factor in economic growth. Typically moving from villages and small towns outside the major cities, they travel to major cities, taking menial jobs and sending their wages back home. Recently, however, it's become apparent that these much-needed workers are on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and seemingly are regarded as second class citizens in China's emerging class system.. Lacking any qualifications, and often  naive to the power-plays that have evolved in China's major economic and political hubs.

Earlier this year, Yuan Li Ya fell, or as some would have it, was pushed off the roof of a shopping mall in Beijing's Fengtai district. Officially recorded as a suicide, video footage emerged, along with accusations that the 22-year-old had been gang raped by six or seven security guards working at the mall.

Accusations of a police coverup, and general discontent stemming from the less than stellar treatment that migrant workers receive in the cities, culminated in a protest by workers from outside the city demanding answers from the Beijing authorities that brought the south of the city to a standstill. No answers were forthcoming, the local media doing little more than posting police briefings. The girl's family was eventually paid off with 40,000rmb, little consolation to Li Ya's cancer stricken father for the loss of his daughter.

On August 7th, a similar case was reported in Shenzhen, where a 13-year-old child had all allegedly fallen by accident from the roof of a factory dorm where she was apparently living with four other men. Since the legal working age in China is 16, questions were almost immediately being asked about what exactly the girl was doing sharing a dorm with four other men in a factory complex.

Local police have said that there had been no evidence of sexual assault, but questions still remain as to how the girl ended up in the factory, since she wasn't visiting friends, and how she came to fall out of the window to her death. Her father said that she had argued with a couple of other girls in the complex over laundry, there was nothing to indicated that the girl was suicidal.

Suicides aside, other cases, including the fire at a Jinan poultry factory highlight the low regard in which rural workers are held in. The fire, China's worst since 2000, claimed 119 lives, and injured over sixty other workers, who said that the emergency fire doors had been securely locked, leaving people on the factory floor no escape route. While accidents like this are on the decline, when they do happen, factory owners are often left unpunished.

Bar staff are particularly at risk from abuse, let alone the girls who find work as prostitutes in the pricey bars favoured by the sons of Beijing's elite. Commenting, like everyone else in the Chinese blogosphere, on Li Tian Yi, currently standing trial in Beijing for in yet another high-profile gang rape trial, Tsinghua University law professor Yi Yan You drew the wrath of Weibo by saying it was better to rape a bar girl than it would be to rape "a good woman". Presumably, a good woman being one who doesn't work for a living or get married to money. According to Yi, girls who work in bars area more likely to consent to sex than those fine, upstanding women like Gu Kai Lai, who probably don't get laid nearly as often, but definitely spend more time in prison.

Often both parents leave their rural home town in order to provide for their families, traditionally leaving their children in the care of their grandparents. Charity organizations estimate that 37% of all children living rural areas have parents working in a major city away from home. Reports have emerged of the sexual abuse that these "left behind children" suffer.

One such case in Ruichang, Jiangxi provoke national outrage in the press and in social media around the country. A teacher was arrested for molested seven pupils in his class, leaving them with STDs. In May this year, eight cases of sexual abuse were reported in a space of 20 days. Lack of any kind of sex education compounds the problem.

Speaking to the BBC, Wang Xingjuan, founder of the Maple Women's Psychological Counselling Centre said that "Some children are molested when they are about seven or eight, but they don't realise that they have been abused", observes. They are not comfortable with the situation; they are afraid and they know there is something wrong, but they put up with it". When faced with giving a sex ed class, many teachers do the bare minimum, and some even ask the students just to read their textbook at home. The legal code as it stands is far too lenient, providing little in the way of deterrent for would-be offenders. Having been found guilty of molesting four girls, a school principal recently had his sentence increased by six months to three years.

Numbering 262.6 million, the migrant worker population is something that the Politburo can ill-afford to ignore. The government has tried to placate them by announcing changes to make the draconian hukou system a little more flexible to allow people to work outside their home province and enjoy some social benefits.  In truth, the hukou is merely a membership card to a less than exclusive club.

It is, to say the least, not the most ideal of situations, especially considering the amount of blood that was shed supposedly in the name of the Chinese rural poor.  The communist system ideologically set out to ensure that all men are born equal, but the downtrodden migrant worker class in China is quickly finding out the hard way that some are born more equal than others.

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Human Traffic: China's Baby Sellers

A short sighted attempt at curbing China's exploding population has seemingly had more disastrous side effects than actual benefits.  Officially, the child trafficking problem in China is under control, and while there's patchy data to back that claim up, cases that outrage Chinese netizens emerge on a disturbingly regular basis.

Since the news broke of a Chinese doctor selling babies from her own maternity department there have been reports of nearly 55 similar cases, half of which involved the same doctor.  Her clients were willing to make just over three and a half thousand dollars for a child - she would dupe to parents into believe that their unborn children had serious health issues, congenital birth defects before passing the newborns to their new parents.

Despite repeated government crackdowns, the crime still persists, and in a testament to the size of the problem, more than 54,000 children have been rescued and 11,000 trafficking gangs “smashed” since 2009.  Previously, criminal gangs would focus on snatching young children, usually boys, from their homes and selling them on.  The new scandal, which implicates Zhang Shu Xia, the deputy head of the maternity department, compounds the distrust that Chinese people already have for the medical establishment.

The meager wages that government officials, including doctors, earn pushes the people who, in other countries, would be respected pillars of the community to commit such crimes.

Local family planning organization have been known to keep tabs on families that already have one child, and are rumored to be expecting another, snatching the babies soon after they are born - the profits raised help to fill the coffers that the officials plunder.  Spending most of their times wandering around neighborhoods looking for baby clothes hanging on washing lines, and checking for unregistered newborns, the baby trade is a lucrative one, and one that down on their luck local officials can't resist.  The government crackdowns have forced up the prices for illegally traded children, the going rate being about 90,000rmb.

The high prices and almost limitless supply and demand often means that the gangs, usually based in rural areas enjoy the protection of the officials whose nests they feather.  It's in such areas where the flow of babies for sale is difficult to stem. Orphanages rarely check where the children come from, and DNA samples aren't routinely taken.

A useful revenue stream for the orphanage, traffickers make good money selling through for illegal international adoptions. Scott Tong reported on the moneymaking scheme for Marketplace.org: "To meet the demand, Duan says he enlisted his wife and sisters to locate more babies. They started buying infants from a supplier in Guangdong province 600 miles away. They say this woman systematically collected unwanted babies from local hospitals."

This weekend, Chinese police succeeded in tracking down and rescuing twin girls, allegedly sold by Zhang to traffickers. The People's Daily, a state-run organ has been keen to play up the faultless efforts of the Chinese police, providing emotive, wall-to-wall coverage of the moment the couple were reunited with their newborn daughters - puffing up the official line from the Chinese government that the problem is now less rampant.  Parents wept and fell to the knees in front of the police officers who confirmed the child's identity by way of a DNA test.  At the time of writing, two senior officials have been fired at the hospital

Strangely for the typically publicity-shy police in China, embracing the Internet is helping bring the numbers of trafficked babies down.  Turning to the massively popular social media platforms, parents and activists have access to resources that they previously could only dream about utilizing.  The  police official who heads the anti-trafficking division, Chen Shiqu, has his own account, with close to three and a half million followers.  Initially using a pseudonym, Chen expertise on the topic soon led to his real identity being revealed online. By retweeting stories and leads from amateur activists and charity organizations, Chen hopes to raise public awareness of the problem, and help return stolen children to their rightful homes.

As one might expect in black market trading, the safety of the people being trafficked is not one of the major concerns.  In 2004, one the first cases to come to massive public attention featured the deaths of several babies.  Guangxi police discovered no more than 28 baby girls in the back of bus, all were less than 3 months old, and all had been drugged to keep them quiet.  At least one of them died from suffocation, and the others had turned blue die to lack of oxygen - they were all to be sold in Anhui province for the princely sum of $24 each.  In 2005, the first convicted child traffickers were executed in China.

With so many cases being reported, couple who legitimately adopt children are being forced to ask themselves some searching questions - often having to entertaining the idea that their child may have been traded on the black market.  Papers are falsified and certificates are forged, on an industrial scale.  With adoptions of Chinese children by American couples in decline, it may become much cheaper for Chinese parents to get the male heir, by hook or by crook, that their families demand.

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So Remember...Always Wear a Condom

China Geek provides an excellent summing-up(I'm pretty sure that's a word) of the ongoing “official implicated in the rape of a teacher”(original Chinese). A middle school teacher was plied with drinks, whereupon she was raped by the city rural land resources manager, Wang Zhong Gui. Typically, the police weren't really interested, claiming that “If he wore a condom, it’s not rape.”:

Recently, the topic “official implicated in the rape of a teacher” has been appearing on forums and has attracted a lot of attention. The person who made the post was the Huajuea City Middle School English teacher, 26-year-old Zhou Qin. She says that on May 17, 2011, the school principal ordered her to accompany 8 [government] leaders for drinks. After she was drunk, she was raped by the city rural land resources manager, Wang Zhonggui. What’s even more shocking is that according to what’s being said on the net, when Zhou Qin reported this to her local police station, the police said: “If he wore a condom, it’s not rape.”

The Shangaiist weighs in dryly noting that "when someone is a victim of robbery, do the police let the thief go free because the victim did not have a better lock on their door? If a person is beaten or killed, does the assailant get a weaker sentence because the victim did not defend himself well enough?"