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.
