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Chinese Success Story Chokes on Its Own Growth
December 19, 2006 11:33 PM
Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 19, 2006
SHENZHEN, China — When Zhang Feifei lost her job in this booming Chinese factory town, she was not terribly concerned. Jobs had always been plentiful in Shenzhen’s flourishing economy.
(Articles in this series are examining the phenomenal growth of Shenzhen from a sleepy fishing village near Hong Kong to a booming Chinese metropolis.)
Part 1: In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back (December 18, 2006)
Then Ms. Zhang, a 20-year-old migrant laborer, lost her identity card and was shocked to find that no factory would hire her without a bribe that she could not afford. Desperate for money, she ended up working in a grimy two-room massage parlor in a congested alley here, where she has sex with four or five men each day.
“I was terrified at first, and I was really embarrassed not even knowing how to use a condom,” said the soft-spoken young woman, casting her eyes downward as she spoke. “I didn’t have any choice, though. Little by little, you have to get used to it.”
Few cities anywhere have created wealth faster than Shenzhen, but the costs of its phenomenal success stare out from every corner: environmental destruction, soaring crime rates and the disillusionment and degradation of its vast force of migrant workers, Ms. Zhang among them.
Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing village in the Pearl River delta, next to Hong Kong, when it was decreed a special economic zone in 1980 by the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. Since then, the city has grown at an annual rate of 28 percent, though it slowed to 15 percent in 2005.
Shenzhen owed its success to a simple formula of cheap land, eager, compliant labor and lax environmental rules that attracted legions of foreign investors who built export-based manufacturing industries. With 7 million migrant workers in an overall population of about 12 million — compared with Shanghai’s 2 to 3 million migrants out of a population of 18 million — Shenzhen became the literal and symbolic heart of the Chinese economic miracle.
Now, to other cities in China, Shenzhen has begun to look less like a model than an ominous warning of the limitations of a growth-above-all approach.
While grueling labor conditions exist in many parts of China, Shenzhen’s gigantic plants, employing as many as 200,000 workers each, have established a particular reputation for harshness among workers and labor advocates. Monthly turnover rates of 10 percent or more are not uncommon, labor groups say.
The tough working conditions, in turn, have helped spawn one of the most important labor developments in China in recent years: large-scale wildcat strikes and smaller job actions for better hours and wages. The Guangdong Union Association, a government-affiliated group, said there were more than 10,000 strikes in the province last year.
Among Chinese economic planners, Shenzhen’s recipe is increasingly seen as all but irrelevant: too harsh, too wasteful, too polluted, too dependent on the churning, ceaseless turnover of migrant labor.
“This path is now a dead end,” said Zhao Xiao, an economist and former adviser to the Chinese State Council, or cabinet. After cataloging the city’s problems, he said, “Governments can’t count on the beauty of investment covering up 100 other kinds of ugliness.”
As the limits of the Shenzhen model have grown more and more apparent, other cities in China’s relatively developed east are increasingly trying to differentiate themselves, emphasizing better working and living conditions for factory workers or paying more attention to the environment.
“Some inland cities have started to provide migrants social security, including pension and other insurance,” said Wang Chunguang, an expert in class mobility at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “In Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, residency controls are loosening up and education for migrant children is getting more attention.”
Migrants do still arrive here, of course, drawn by the promise of work and undaunted by stories of the difficult life that awaits them. Some, like Ms. Zhang, who come here for the $100-a-month sweatshop salaries, end up trapped, literally too poor to leave. But many others quickly become disillusioned and return home.
Increasingly short of workers, factories recently have increased assembly-line wages by as much as 20 percent. But even so, critics say, Shenzhen’s boom has spread little wealth.
While the city is dependent on migrant labor to keep its factories running, onerous residency rules discourage migrants from settling here permanently and make it difficult for them to obtain public services from education to health care.
“The government has evaded its responsibilities toward migrant workers,” Jin Cheng, a member of an influential local civic forum, Interhoo, said bluntly.
The resulting rootlessness has fed a wave of crime of a sort hardly ever seen elsewhere in China. Gunfights, kidnappings and gang warfare are rife, and crime rates are skyrocketing.
Video features accompanying both part one and part two of this series can be found on the New York Times website. Click the link below.
Click to read the complete article
Posted at 11:33 PM
