Endless Road in China: From Country to City and Back

Huayin, China—On a foggy, drizzling Tuesday morning in September, He Tianwu, 48, trudges up Huashan, one of the steepest mountains in China. He carries 150 pounds of oil and pork. Sweat and raindrops stream down his face, blurring his vision. Frequently, he needs to climb on his three limbs—Tianwu lost his left arm in a horrifying industrial accident 18 years ago. With each step, he risks falling from the 7,000-foot cliff. But this Shaanxi porter's aim is terribly clear—the Wuyunfeng Restaurant over half a mile away, at the end of a nearly 80-degree slope. There he will lay down these supplies and receive 56 yuan, or $8, in return for this grueling two-hour trip.

Tianwu's odyssey started after his wife died of congenital heart disease in 1989, the sixth year of their marriage. Twenty-seven years old and the eldest of four sons in a remote rural village in northern China's vast interior, Tianwu was left with two children—one five and the other still an infant—as well as $3,000 in debt, a crushing burden for the head of a family earning less than $200 a year. "There is a gold mine in the cities," folks told Tianwu. So, along with millions of other farmers, Tianwu spent the early 1990s traveling across China in pursuit of an elusive urban dream.

Recently, such dreams have approached a crisis, not of diminishing, but failed expectations that threaten to destabilize the labor system in China today.

Second-Class Citizens

Unlike other highly urbanized countries, rural migrants in China have little freedom. The household registration system, known as hukou, established in 1958, restrains those who live in the countryside from settling officially in cities, while depriving them of most "urban welfare" advantages, particularly government-sponsored services covering education, medical care and insurance. The hukou system was initially designed to keep farmers at home due to the shortage of new job opportunities in the city after the Soviet Union terminated all forms of industrial support to China during the 1950s. The system gradually evolved into what is now an invisible and all but insurmountable barrier for farmers to achieve equal rights as urban dwellers—even to this day. The result is a severely skewed dual structure between urban and rural life.

At the bottom of this two-class society is a mass of rural poor who are denied many urban jobs, except those that city residents are unwilling to take. The risk of accepting such onerous work does offer one advantage—the offspring of migrants are more likely to gain access to better-equipped public schools in the city. With better education, migrants' children might eventually achieve official urban citizenship.

The motivation to break the cycle of poverty spurs millions of farmers to make the frantic, often desperate leap from rural to urban life. The vast gulf between the urban and rural hukou, however, has become a constant—though, to outsiders, all but unseen—source of injustice and inequality for rural migrants.

"Because of the inequality of the identity, farmers don't expect the same treatment as urban residents," says Peng Xizhe, director of the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Shanghai-based Fudan University. Most migrants in the city end up going back home after working several years in urban industry, disgusted by the sweatshop system and the discrimination from every direction in the metropolis. "Chinese farmers have made a huge sacrifice in building this country," concluded Professor Peng. It's a sacrifice that goes all but unrecognized.

Perhaps of greater long-term significance for the stability of the entire Chinese social and political system is the reality that the inequities of this large-scale internal migration have been ignored by the nation's political leaders and top business executives—both scrambling to expand China's economic miracle on the backs of cheap, dollar-a-day labor. The legacy for China's cities, however, has been not just cheap human engines, but social conflicts and management challenges for the Communist Party...