Pan Yi: When China is rising, are Chinese workers losing China?

Pan Yi: When China is rising, are Chinese workers losing China?

Editor's Note: If rural land and other means of production and living are enclosed, farmers are forced to become cheap Labor force is a classic enclosure movement; then, hollowing out the countryside at a spiritual level, making farmers long for urban lifestyles, and actively abandoning rural traditions and values ??can be called spiritual enclosure. Pan Yi believes that it is precisely under the combined effect of the two methods of land enclosure that Chinese farmers have nowhere to escape and nowhere to go, so they can only survive by going out to work. This vicious cycle brings a series of cruel life experiences to migrant workers and inevitably leads to a politics of anger and resistance.

I am never happy no matter where I go. No matter where I go, I can't calm myself down, I can't keep myself mentally balanced.

——The autobiography of Asin, a 32-year-old wage earner who works in a factory that supplies toys to Disney

If the first generation of female factory workers experienced torture and anxiety and physical pain, and screamed like the female worker Aying, turning her body into a weapon to fight against an era. Then at the beginning of the new century, the second generation of migrant workers had already made up their mind to take action and launch a collective struggle.

The increasingly complex struggles of China’s new working class have reached the second generation of workers. In his classic book The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson wrote: Class formation is “a dynamic process” that depends both on subjective initiative and objective conditions. It embodies historical relationships. concept. World labor history tells us that the formation and maturity of the working class are often realized among the second and third generations of migrant workers who enter industrial cities. The limits of torture, difficulty, and dissatisfaction in working life do not appear to the first generation of workers, but to subsequent generations. This is the process of proletarianization, which transforms agricultural labor into industrial workers in the cities by stripping them of their means of production and subsistence; in fact, this is a theme that runs throughout the history of world capitalism.

As China gradually becomes the world’s factory and an industrialized society, it has reproduced a common phenomenon in the history of world capitalist development. However, the reason why China is special is that its proletarianization process is unique: in order to integrate China's socialist system into the global economy, although migrant workers came to the city, they could not stay in the city. Because the new working class was deprived of the right to live where they worked, industrialization and urbanization were for them two very unrelated processes. In short, it is the spatial separation between urban production and rural reproduction that shapes the proletarianization process of Chinese migrant workers.

In this way, there is an unfinished proletarianization process (or semi-proletarianization), which leads to a deeper and deeper sense of incompleteness among the second-generation migrant workers. , that is, become "migrant workers" ("quasi" workers or "semi" workers in industrial society). Migrant workers, troubled by a sense of incompleteness, often fall into a state of physical and psychological wandering. In our research in Shenzhen and Dongguan over the past ten years, almost all workers—mostly between the ages of 16 and 32—had the experience of changing jobs after working for one year or less. Most people have been working in the city for several years, but only a few think they have a chance to stay in the city. For the second generation of migrant workers, the door to urban and industrial civilization is still closed. Migrant workers have nowhere to go and nowhere to return. Just as a workers' poem expresses: "You say your life is destined to wander." If you choose to work, you are destined to end up being nothing. , because you are neither a farmer nor a worker. You will always be a migrant worker, someone caught between a farmer and a worker—a social identity that is always unfinished.

Asin’s Story: Internal Injury of Class

Asin was born in 1977 and grew up in the reform era. After failing the college entrance examination for the third time in 1998, Asin decided to give up re-study despite his father's objection: "I know some people re-study seven or eight times without success, and finally collapsed. I can't go on like this, maybe I should try something else. There’s a way out”. Assin also felt ashamed that he had been relying on his sister for financial support. Asin's sister went to work in Shenzhen after graduating from junior high school in 1994.

Working outside the home can not only earn money to support the family, but also cultivate a person's personal independence and help him achieve freedom. Farmers generally aspire to work in cities and pursue freedom, and this desire is becoming increasingly strong among the new generation. In China, proletarianization is largely self-driven. Asin was born in a village in Henan with more than 200 families. Almost everyone in the village who has reached working age has gone out to work, and more than a dozen families have even moved their families to other places.

In 1998, Asin finally found a job in a small factory in Shenzhen. Labor conditions here were as brutal as in other factories. After the probation period, the salary increased to 8 yuan per day. This small factory is responsible for producing TV antenna converters. Here Asin works from 7 am to 11 pm every day, with only half an hour's break at noon. Even more unbearable than the intense labor was the way the overseers treated the workers.

Once, the supervisor asked Asin to move a welder on the ground. The welder has just melted so it's very hot. Asin was a novice and did not know the dangers involved, so he picked up the part without wearing gloves. As a result, all the fingers were severely burned. Asin recalled, "The supervisor was standing nearby at the time. He laughed and watched me get hurt, and did not help me treat the wound at all. After he finished laughing, he ordered me to do other things." After working at the factory for seven days, Asin was fired.

The reform has given this generation the freedom of movement, and they can freely choose whether to work for foreign companies or private companies. Reforms unleashed this generation's desire to change themselves, but in order to realize this desire, they had to sell their labor to factory bosses. This is no longer a secret. The dialectic of reform is that on the one hand, reform liberates farmers and turns them into a labor force; on the other hand, reform restricts farmers' freedom in industrial cities. Assin is free to leave or continue working. But as soon as he began to make free choices, he immediately found that he had lost the freedom to move forward or backward. He is a stranger in the city, a permanent passer-by. He quickly lost his sense of "home" and felt he had nowhere to go.

Asin continued to tell us about his first job in the factory:

On the seventh day, several fellow workers who worked together couldn't stand it anymore and planned to resign. One of them asked me to come along. But I didn't agree. I want to keep working until I get paid. We talked at the door of the workshop for about ten minutes. Later, the boss saw it and said something to the supervisor. When I returned to the workshop, the supervisor said to me, "You don't have to come tomorrow" without asking any questions. Then I told the fellow worker who introduced me to the job that I was fired. After working for seven days, they were supposed to give me 49 yuan, but they didn't give me a penny. The fellow said, "How dare you ask for money! It's good that you didn't get fined."

Asin worked for seven days and left the factory with his luggage without getting anything:

I did not have a temporary residence permit during that time. I was wandering on the streets, afraid to take the main roads or alleys for fear of being robbed. I had nowhere to go at night, so I had to go to the cinema... After 11 o'clock, the cinema started showing night movies, and the tickets only cost 3 yuan. So this screening room that can accommodate 100 people became a place for forty or fifty people to sleep. Sometimes there are so many people sleeping that I can’t even stretch my legs. We had to leave at 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning. In this way, I slept in the movie theater for more than 20 days until I found the next job.

Asin’s story represents the first experience of most migrant workers working in the city. Amin, a female worker who works in an electronics factory in Shenzhen, said, "What I learned from my first job is that we don't have our own rights. The boss has the right to ask you to leave, but you have no rights at all."

The point of no return - a new form of enclosure

"Jump, jump, jump, some people say that what I dance is the dance of survival

Jump, jump , jump, what we dance is pain and anger...

Who is going to twist off our personality and dignity...

These thin and thin arms

Wriggling and struggling helplessly in a foreign land"

——"Rewriting Grasshopper" was written by a young worker in 2006

In the spring of 2000, he worked in Shenzhen for two years Years later, Asin decided to return to his hometown. He told us, "Even though I work hard every day, others still don't treat me as a human being. I can't see a future in the city. What else can I hope for? I have no money and nothing else to rely on. I would rather go home." . Assin has no place in the city, and he sees no future or prospect in continuing to stay.

Two generations of the working class have always been faced with a difficult choice, whether to go out to work or stay in the countryside. According to a 2007 survey on the employment situation of returning migrant workers by the Development Research Center of the State Council, in 301 villages in 28 provinces, returning migrant workers accounted for 23% of the total number of migrant workers. Among workers, 16% participated in the establishment of rural enterprises or started farming.

Asin told us about his return to his hometown:

When I returned home, the village was busy sowing seeds. I'm excited about the plans I have in mind. I contracted a piece of wasteland and prepared to do something. I couldn't sleep even at night, always thinking about my plan in my mind. If I could expand the scale of planting cash crops, I would make a fortune and prove to my parents and other villagers that returning home was a good choice.

Asin began to mobilize relatives and neighbors, and some people provided him with tractors and labor. He can probably get 20 acres of arable land for his business plan. Asin decided to grow watermelons because the fruit was easy to manage and popular in the market. However, as often happens in rural areas, there are unforeseen circumstances. Due to the heavy rain for days, the watermelons ripened too quickly and rotted in the fields before they could even be sold. Asin’s father was experienced and well aware of the risks of agricultural production and market fluctuations, so he opposed Asin’s contracting plan from the beginning. Behind Asin's back, he persuaded others to withdraw their land. In just a few months, Asin spent thousands of yuan in savings.

Asin’s experience is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Among those migrant workers who decided to return to their hometowns to start small businesses, less than half eventually returned to the countryside.

And of those who eventually returned to their hometowns to farm, most we saw in Shenzhen and Dongguan failed.

Asin had no choice but to leave his hometown again. This time he came home badly hit. But I could only bury the pain deep in my heart and come to Shenzhen again alone. On the train bound for Shenzhen, he accidentally learned that making templates in Shenzhen was very profitable, so he entered a factory that produced handicrafts, with a monthly salary of 800 yuan. After the probationary period, the salary increases. In his third year of working at this factory (2002), Asin was already earning 1,700 yuan a month. Sometimes you can earn 3,000 yuan with overtime pay.

Asin is very lucky to be able to become a skilled master and earn a higher salary. But, for some reason, he never found happiness at work. If the pursuit of material rewards is the common appeal of the working class, then for Asin, this appeal is no longer that important. Work has lost its sense of meaning for Asin and caused rifts in his life: "No matter where I work, I am never happy. My heart can never calm down. I always feel that I should do something big."

The choices before the second-generation migrant workers are very limited: "When I came out to work, I missed home. But when I came home, I wanted to come out to work again." Only a small number of migrant workers are willing to return to their hometowns for development, but like Asin, they cannot go back. Most second-generation migrant workers have realized that they "cannot develop" if they return to the countryside and they will never "go back". For migrant workers, "there is no money to be made from farming" has become a common sense. In fact, the cost of building a new house, the expenses for marriage, education and medical care, and the purchase of daily necessities are all the money earned while working. In addition to three meals a day, the social reproduction of labor, including housing, clothing, education and medical care, almost all depends on the money they earn from working.

On both the material and spiritual levels, rural areas have been hollowed out. The second generation of migrant workers grew up in an era with relatively good living conditions. Their horizons are broader and they are more interested in what color their hair should be dyed and what style of clothes they should wear. However, once they embark on a journey to work, It would be difficult to find the way home. Migrant workers in their teens and twenties, regardless of gender, usually don’t know how many acres of farmland their families have or how much money they can make from farming. They are more eager to find ways to stay in the city. They know that working part-time (working for a boss) is not a long-term solution, so many people dream of becoming a boss one day. The unfulfilled personal expectations of second-generation migrant workers and the endless frustrations they encounter when traveling between rural and urban areas inevitably lead to anger and dissatisfaction with nowhere to vent.

Conclusion

Reform has reshaped China and turned China into the "world's factory". At the same time, the reform also reshaped the new Chinese working class politics. Following a special path of proletarianization, the second generation of migrant workers has gradually become aware of their class status and will participate in a series of collective actions. The quasi-social status of the second-generation migrant workers makes them more angry and dissatisfied than the first-generation migrant workers. They realize that they have been completely cornered: they cannot stay in the city, and they cannot return to their hometown. The spiritual and physical “enclosure” is closely connected with the unfinished proletarianization process of Chinese migrant workers, and is caused by the spatial isolation between urban production and rural reproduction.

The reason why Asin’s story is representative is that his story deepens our understanding of rural life and workshop struggles. Asin's rough experience is both personal and contains profound social significance. His experience is related to both the factory and the countryside. Asin's assertive father tried his best to prevent his son from returning to his hometown to start a business, which may be special. However, in terms of returning to his hometown to start a business and ultimately failing, Asin’s experience is similar to that of many migrant workers. Failure forces them to go out to work again, a process that never ends, and the process of proletarianization can never be completed. This forms a vicious cycle: Reform and the dual division between urban and rural areas have stimulated people's desire to escape from the countryside, but after escaping, migrant workers can only work hard in factories. When they encounter setbacks at work, they often The idea of ??returning home came up. But for migrant workers who have returned to their hometowns, they have nowhere to go and can only survive by going out to work. This vicious cycle brings a series of cruel life experiences to migrant workers, inevitably leading to a politics of anger and resistance.

Hope to adopt