MIGRANT WORKERS IN CHINA.docVIP

MIGRANT WORKERS IN CHINA China is now experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010) —a number equivalent to two thirds the population of the United States four three times the number of people who emigrated to American from Europe over a century—have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million new people join the legions every year. The number is expected to reach 250 million by 2012 and surpass 300 million and maybe reach 400 million by 2025. According to 2010 census figures Chinas migrant population now numbers 221 million, or 16.5 percent of all citizens. A government report issued in 2011 said more than 100 million more farmers would move to urban areas over the next decade. Between 2000 and 2010 an estimated 116 million people from Chinas hinterlands migrated to the booming coastal cities in the hope of finding better lives. Andrew Jacobs wrote in the New York Times, “Known derisively as “waidi ren,” or outsiders, the migrants are the cut-rate muscle that makes it eminently affordable for better-off Chinese to dine out, hire full-time nannies and ride new subway lines in places like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. According to the Beijing Bureau of Statistics, more than one-third of the capital’s 19.6 million residents are migrants from China’s rural hinterland, a figure that has grown by about 6 million just since 2000. “The middle class hates to see that kind of poverty, but they can’t live without their cheap labor,” said Kam Wing Chan, a professor at the University of Washington who studies China’s rural-migrant policies. [Source: Andrew Jacobs, New York Times August 29, 2011] Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories. They include men and women and couples with children. Men often get construction jobs while women