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The Economist
May 5th 2018
41
1
W
ANG FENG is a 28-year-old cook in
Beijing. But he was not born in the
capital so, under China’s household-regis-
tration (
hukou
) rules, he is not treated as an
official resident, even though he and his
wife work there and have a four-year-old
daughter. One freezing night last Novem-
ber, he returned home to discover that the
city government had declared many of
their area’s tenement blocks unfit for resi-
dential use and had given the inhabitants
24 hours to get out.
The event quickly became notorious.
The overnight eviction of Beijing’s “low-
end population” (a term used in official
planningdocuments issuedby some ofthe
city’s districts) attracted worldwide con-
demnation. Queues of young families
snaked away from the condemned blocks,
heading back to the towns and villages
where they were born. But Mr Wang (a
pseudonym) and hiswife balked at return-
ing without jobs to a village where they
had neither the experience nor the desire
to farm. Instead they headed to another
part of Beijing to start over again. He says
his monthly rent is now far higher: “I can’t
save anything. But at least I have a job and
will stay as long as I can.” If he leaves, he
says, it will be because he wants to, not be-
cause the government has told him to go.
Mr Wang belongs to a new generation
intensive jobs, first in towns and later in cit-
ies. Their cumulative numbers reached
280m in 2017 (the rate ofgrowth is nowtail-
ing off). In 2010 party documents began re-
ferring to a “new generation of migrants”:
those born since 1980. Some are offspring
of earlier migrants and have lived in cities
all their lives. Others have left the country-
side in the past decade. This group has
more than 90mmembers.
The two generations are very different.
Many of the early migrants were born at a
time of mass starvation and were raised
during the chaos of the Cultural Revolu-
tion (1966-76). Theirdetermination tomake
good in the cities was intensified by child-
hood memories of poverty and suffering.
And if they did not succeed, at least they
still had land in the countryside and expe-
rience of farming so they could return to
scratch a living in the fields.
Aiming high
Members of the younger generation are
children ofDeng’s reforms. Theyhave nev-
er worked the land. A study published in
2009 in the Beijing-based
Economic Re-
search Journal
said the younger migrants
wanted “personal development”, unlike
their parents who were focused on more
basic needs. The new generation, it con-
cluded rather snobbishly, “is no longer
of people from the countryside who have
moved to work in cities. Over the past 40
years, hundreds ofmillions have done this,
providing the blood, sweat and tears of
China’s economic miracle. The Commu-
nist Party has often congratulated itself
that such a vast movement of people has
happened without mass unrest. But those
such as MrWang who have left rural areas
more recently challenge the party’s sense
of security. They face a wider range of pro-
blems than earlier participants in the rural
exodus. They are dissatisfied with their lot
and have little to lose. Theymay prove less
quiescent than their predecessors.
When observers of China think of
threats to the party, they often focus on the
rapid growth of the country’s newmiddle
class. At some point, surely, China’s
wealthier millions will demand a more
open, accountable and even democratic
government, just asmiddle classes inother
countries have done. But many Chinese
analystsworry less about the kind of insta-
bility that occurred during the student-led
protests of1989. Rather, they fret about tur-
moil createdbymembers ofa social under-
class: poor workers in the cities whose
family ties are rural.
After1978, when Deng Xiaoping started
to open up the economy, huge numbers of
farmers began flocking to fill new labour-
Internal migrants
The bitter generation
BEIJING AND GUANGZHOU
Angryyoung city folkwith rural backgrounds threaten social stability
China
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