Laws: April, 2003 - Number #16

China's Spring Festival began February 1, 2003, as an estimated 130 million migrants traveled from the coastal cities and Beijing to their interior villages of origin to celebrate the Year of the Goat for the month of February. China's outgoing premier Zhu Rongji warned that China could face destabilizing unrest if the government does not resolve problems with migrant workers, many of whom are not paid.

There are 94 to 130 million internal migrants in China, and their number is expected to rise-- the surplus rural work force is estimated at 150 to 180 million. Although rights for migrants in cities are improving, most migrants have little recourse if their urban employers refuse to pay them, since the migrants are away from the place they are registered. Almost all government spending is confined to people registered in the place where services are provided, so that public housing, education and health care services are frequently not available to migrants.

In January 2003, China's State Council promised migrants "legal rights" to work in cities, proposed that employers could be punished for discriminating against workers on the basis of residency, and proposed an end to making some urban jobs off limits to workers not registered in the city.

Beijing municipality allowed children born to local farmers after January 1, 2003 to be registered as 'non-agricultural residents." Students at vocational or technical schools, and senior high school students who hold agricultural residential permits can also convert their permits to non-agricultural ones. Finally, rural residents who have lived for at least two years in the Beijing municipality, or have bought land there, will be allowed to register as Beijing residents.

Some provincial governments have begun to encourage migration to jobs. Anhui province, eight hours northwest of Shanghai and poor, has 63 million people in an area half the size of Texas. A government agency provides training for women to be maids, charging them 100 yuan or $12 if the agency finds the woman such a job. The Anhui government has employment offices in cities such as Shanghai to find jobs for provincial residents. There are about six million Anhui migrants outside the province, remitting an estimated 24 million yuan a year..

Some 900 million of China's 1.3 billion people live in the countryside, and 30 million of them still live under the poverty line; if the poverty benchmark were raised to 200 yuan, there would be 90 million rural poor. Rural incomes were 55 percent of urban incomes in 1983, but only 35 percent as high in 2001--$285 in rural areas, and $845 in urban areas in 2002. Agriculture contributed 14 percent to China's GDP. China has a labor force of 740 million; the combined labor force for developed countries in Europe and North America is 430 million. China's labor force increases by 10 million a year.

A new Rural Land Contracting Law went into effect in March 2003, making it easier for farmers to transfer or lease -- but not sell -- their land, giving them an extra incentive to move to the cities.

After unrest in 1989, Chinese leaders launched infrastructure and similar projects in urban areas that had the effect of increasing rural-urban income gaps. For example, university professors' salaries rose ten-fold in the 1990s, and layoffs were delayed from money-losing state enterprises to minimize worker unrest.

Economy. In Guangdong province, which surrounds Hong Kong, there is a second border around the special economic zone city of Shenzhen, built in 1982 to prevent smuggling and illegal migration. China has five SEZs and two, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, have special internal borders around them.

Dongguan, an hour's drive up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, has 20,000 factories and 5.5 million residents, many of them migrants from elsewhere in China. Most of the migrants are women in their 20s who earn $100 a month. Many assembly lines have no workers with glasses because labor is so plentiful that there is no need for employers to trouble with applicants lacking perfect vision. The Pearl River delta exports as many goods each year as Mexico or South Korea.

China's top leaders, many of whom are engineers, have promoted massive infrastructure projects, including the world's largest dam, longest bridge, fastest train and highest railroad. The goal is to keep the economy growing rapidly, and to create enough construction jobs to maintain social stability. In 2002, infrastructure spending was 15 percent of China's GDP, or about what the US spent on health care- the infrastructure spending is often referred to as China's New Deal.

Infrastructure spending displaces people, and can lead to tension and migration. The 60-story-high Three Gorges Dam is displacing one million people, who receive $1,000 per family for new homes- many of those displaced say that they did not get their money because of corruption.

China has had the world's largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries, and seems poised to overtake Japan by 2020 with the world's second largest GDP. China in 2001 had the sixth-largest economy, after the US, Japan, Germany, the UK and France. As China grows economically, it is expected to grow in military and political power as well.

Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government reduced the minimum wages of 240,000 domestic helpers by HK$400 (US$51) a month, to HK$3,270, beginning April 1, 2003; their Hong Kong employers will have to pay HK$400 a month in taxes to subsidize the training of local workers. Maids have been demonstrating against the taxes, saying that their previous minimum wage, HK$3,670 ($470) a month, was already low, and was cut five percent in 1999.

Philippine President Gloria Macapaal Arroyo said that her government would take the Hong Kong government to court following steps to reduce the minimum wage of maids. She also announced in early March that the Philippines government will temporarily stop approving all new employment contracts for the maids until the minimum wage was restored to HK$3,670.

About 153,000 of the maids are Filipinos, followed by 70,000 Indonesians and smaller numbers from the other three countries.

Hong Kong has 6.8 million residents, with 74 percent of the 57,000 increase in 2002 due to immigration. Hong Kong will allow non-mainland Chinese foreigners to have an immigrant status if they invest at least US$833,000 (HK$6.5 million).

Taiwan. Taiwan had 305,021 foreign workers in January 2003, including 90,739 from Indonesia; 69,902 from the Philippines; 32,605 from Vietnam; and 11,742 from Thailand. A growing number of Taiwanese men are marrying foreign women, 85,000 in 2002, including 43,000 Vietnamese.

The Ministry of Interior announced on March 25 that foreigners and Chinese hoping to gain residency through marriage to a Taiwanese national would be interviewed by a new immigration council which will be set up in the coming months.

According to official statistics from the Ministry of the Interior, 87,000 women from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore came to Taiwan between 1994 and 2002 to marry Taiwanese men. The Straits Exchange Foundation says that another 148,000 brides arrived from China between 1993 and 2002.

Goh Sui Noi, "Beijing's peasants handed right to a better life," Straits Times, April 2, 2003. Tsai Ting-I, "Foreign spouses need to wait for residency: MOI," Taipei Times, March 26, 2003. "Premier preoccupied with rural areas, unemployment, poverty," Xinhua General News, March 18, 2003. "Philippines Threatens to sue HK Govt Over Maids' Wages," Associated Press, March 10, 2003.