Chinese Migrants Return to Rural Roots
Laid Off by Struggling Factories in Distant Cities, Laborers Find Few Prospects Back Home

By Lauren Keane
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 2, 2009; A08

 

WANZHOU, China -- By the time their train pulled into its final station, Deng Hongshu and his teenage son had been standing in a packed aisle, shoulder to shoulder, for 38 hours. Like many of their fellow migrant laborers on Train 1009 from Guangzhou, they were out of work and headed home.

Their boss at the American Overseas Fur Factory laid off half of his 300 workers without pay for three months. He tried to be reassuring: Americans will start buying again after the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, he said. Come back to your jobs then.

So Deng, a 43-year-old man with shaggy hair, kind eyes and an easy gait, and his son, Yixin, 17, packed their belongings into two small red duffel bags and began the three-day journey from Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, to their home in the mountains high above the Yangtze River in central China. They are among the millions of workers who have powered China's economic juggernaut, but now they are retreating to their rural roots.

Their future is uncertain. Many do not know whether they will have jobs again in the factories. What they will do back home without work is equally unclear, but their expectations have been raised by years along China's prosperous eastern coast. Many say that after a break at home with their families, they will head right back to the factories to try their luck again.

"What choice? There is no choice," Deng said. "Of course I'm going back, if not to Shenzhen, then somewhere else. If we stay here and farm, we can eat but we make no money for anything else. At least back there, there's the possibility of work when things get better."

Deng and his son had spent most of the past four months standing knee-deep in hot vats of dye, an animal skin in one hand and a spear in the other. They picked the skins from a pile in a corner and plunged them into the steaming liquid, then fished them out again with their spears and hauled them, heavy and dripping wet, to a drying rack across the room. Despite factory-issued rubber boots and thin cloth masks, they said, workers sometimes lost their footing or passed out from the fumes.

The Dengs chose to work overtime, 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, for the equivalent of $6 a day plus overtime pay of $15 a month. When news of the layoff came, the Dengs did what the father had done nearly all his adult life and what his son is learning may be his future: They picked up and moved on.

As their rusty green bus from the train station wound its way along the northern edge of the Yangtze River, Deng said he had always been a migrant. He moved the family -- his wife and two sons -- to Lhasa, Tibet, in 1987 to open a watch-repair business there; as his skills improved, so did his business, with which he supported the family for nearly 20 years. He made the equivalent of $190 a month and frequently traveled around China, searching for contacts and evaluating the business climate in other cities, sometimes staying for months.

"Cellphones put me out of business," he said matter-of-factly, looking out the window at the river. "No one uses watches or clocks anymore." In 2006, no longer able to make a living on his own, he moved his family back to his home town and joined the ranks of laborers at export-driven factories in the south.

He bounced around in 2006 and 2007, looking for a good match, back when jobs were plentiful and the world was worrying about an impending Chinese labor shortage. When he landed at the fur factory in July, he thought he had found such a good deal that he persuaded his son to leave his job assembling computer monitors in Dongguan, a town in Guangdong province to the north and one of the hardest hit by the export slowdown, to come join him. That was five months ago.

High up in the mountains now, the Dengs disembarked into a noisy traffic circle, shouldered their bags again, flagged down a cargo truck as it raced by and clambered into the back. The elder Deng settled in among several burlap sacks and plastic tubs in a corner, his red bag between his knees. His son stood and popped his head over the top edge to look out as the truck began a climb on a one-lane road deeper into the mountains. Hair flying, he squinted calmly into the wind.

"This life is a no-win for families," Deng said, gesturing quietly at his son. "You have to have someone at home, taking care of your parents when they're old or your children when they're young. And you have to have someone out earning money, because you can't earn it here." He sees his wife once a year now; she is home caring for his mother, who is blind, and his brother's family, which cannot make ends meet on farming income.

"There are no jobs worth having back home. It's either work there or farm here," he said. Unlike many of his fellow laborers at the factory, whose farms have been converted to industry or housing, he said, "at least we have land to come back to -- not that we can make a living working it anymore."

Local governments are worried that hamlets such as Deng's village on the outskirts of Wanzhou won't be able to absorb the returnees. They have begun to implement job creation and retraining programs. But Deng insisted that he would leave again no matter what. He said there's something about the freedom and independence of migrant work that has always attracted him, despite all the uncertainty -- or maybe because of it.

"My father loves to wander," the younger Deng piped in.

He was vague about his own plans: "I'll think about it when I have to," he said. "I heard there's a sweater factory that will teach you to knit patterns with a computer," he said. "You work for free until you master it." He paused. "I think that would be okay."

His father looked at him. "I tell him he can do anything he wants, as long as he can support himself," Deng said. Pausing, he lowered his voice: "Because I can't help him."

After half an hour, his son pounded his fist on the top of the cab. It stopped, and he helped his father hop out. The youth flagged down a motorcycle, climbed on the back and loaded their bags onto his lap. His father wanted to walk the last mile home.

Their village has been almost entirely rebuilt in the past 15 years from the money sent home from the factories. Almost every house along the main lane is handsome and new, with multiple floors built from cement and colored tile with sturdy windows; the one older earthen house that remains near the center of the village seems a jarring relic.

Everyone Deng passed in the lane greeted him with delight: old men bent over their walking sticks, young mothers chasing their toddlers, and young men cutting vegetables outside their houses in the afternoon sun. "You're back!" they said. "Did you make a lot of money? Back so soon, you must be rich!"

Deng just smiled and shook his head.

Their homecoming had none of the emotion one might have expected for a family with two of its three members gone for months or years at a time; Li Zuoxiang, 37, the wife and mother left at home, simply said she'd grown used to their coming and going.

They celebrated with lunch at their newly purchased wooden table, round and sturdy with eight matching stools: porridge, stir-fried cabbage from the garden, Sichuan bacon and onions. No talk of work while eating -- a house rule.

But later that afternoon, their journey over for the moment, Deng returned to his uncertainty.

"Part of me doesn't want to go back to Dongguan," he acknowledged. "Maybe I could find a job a little closer to home, at least. See my wife more often. I'm not old yet -- I could work another 10 years." His voice trailed off.

Deng sat perched on a wooden stool outside his handsome home, looking out to the lane that runs through the village. The oblique afternoon light glanced off his angular face as the sun sank behind a low hill.

With the calm of a schoolteacher explaining to a roomful of pupils, he turned his left palm upward and touched his right index finger gently to the center.

"The only character to describe migrant workers is nan," he said, tracing in even strokes the Chinese character for "difficult, not good" into his palm. "If we stay, it's hard. If we go, it's hard. Sure, this life has always been this way. But it's especially tough now."

Researcher Liu Liu contributed to this report.