Migration and Exploitation in China
Some days it seems like the story of China’s political economy begins and ends with relentless mobility of its workforce. This BBC article describes the novelty and expansion of crime by Chinese youth:
“Crimes committed by youngsters have been causing a growing amount of severe social damage,” the China Daily quoted Liu Guiming, deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research, as saying.
Young offenders were forming gangs and committing crimes “without specific motives, often without forethought”, he said.
These included theft, assault and rape, but also 22 new categories of crime linked to fraud and the internet.
Part of the problem was the breakdown of families caused by migration, Mr Liu said.
In hundreds of thousands of rural families, children are left with elderly relatives or friends while their parents travel to cities in search of work.
Meanwhile, at the site of yet another coal mine explosion, the locals argue that a migrant worker is a disposable worker:
A woman from the nearby village of Hongguang, who would only give her surname as Qiao, said the mine tended to hire migrant workers from other provinces rather than local villagers.
“Occasionally, a few miners may die in an accident, and the owners will pay compensation. Because the families of the dead are from far away, they don’t protest a lot. If they were local people, they would make trouble for the mine,” she said.
Note that the migrant miners had been moved to an area with (I’m assuming) its own underemployed labor force. The decision to hire out-of-towners was probably not made for lack of able bodies.
A cowed, uprooted labor force of absent parents combined with a generation of only children both fatherless and motherless doesn’t sound like a recipe for social stability, no matter how hard-driving the meritocratic elite might be.
What’s worse is that an unusually high proportion of these young people are male. This is bad both because young men commit a lot of crimes and they tend to stop doing so when they get married, which ain’t gonna happen in a society with a girl shortage.
— Gabriel · Dec 6, 06:31 PM · #
To expand on Gabriel’s statement, Xinhua News Agency officially estimates bare branches as 18 million young men. Take the usual China rule of thumb for official bad news and multiply by 5 and you get 90 million or so.
You’ve probably seen the news in the BBC site about China’s push to send impoverished young men to Africa to set up farms and seek their fortune. Ahem.
The problem for China is young men without wives are not merely criminal statistics but (historically in China) the nucleus of revolutionary power movements seeking to upend Emperors and grab the limited resource (women) for themselves. The most recent examples being the Communists and the Taipeng Rebellion. The way most societies have dealt with this is through war on neighbors to seize their land and women. Polygamist Muslim societies fit this example. China has historically not been that aggressive because of it’s size (too many troops abroad lead to revolution at home) and the difficulty in rugged SE Asia or desert Mongolia in seizing desirable land and women.
That seems to be changing and IMHO the demographics of China guarantee a war to conquer Taiwan, and possibly in other places. Africa is rich in resources and desirable land, has women, and is filled with weak governments and people who are beset by tribalism and “Big Man”-ism. What was good for British and French imperialists (troublemakers without women sent abroad to seek fame and fortune) is likely to be good for China.
China’s leaders probably are not stupid — recognizing 90 million young men without women are a nascent revolutionary movement, and so devising things for them to do elsewhere. Taiwan obviously first, but Africa second. The crime and violence the young men contribute are minor political considerations. No connected Politburo member wants to lose it all to the new Mao.
— Jim Rockford · Dec 6, 10:57 PM · #