Foreigners and locals in China both routinely but superficially interact with street vendors. One young researcher spent a few days with a street vendor family and wrote about it here, giving us a more intimate look at the lifestyle, struggles with the authorities, and living conditions of China’s street market migrants: Street Vendor Life in China

You can read about a similar project here: Thirty Days in a Fuzhou Barbershop

For more about street market migrants and the chéngguǎn (bylaw enforcement thugs), see: The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game and Making our neighbourhood more “civilized”

Millions of young Chinese are developing a sense of individualism. That’s one of the insights revealed in the pages of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. The author suggests that the previously unknown degree of personal freedom offered by factory work in a city far from one’s village is a big reason that migrants are willing to tolerate the conditions in the factories and the lifestyle that comes with it. She compares the suffocating social world of the village (and the traditional Chinese subjugation of the self to family and nation) to the new-found degree of independence in the migrant worker life:

When I read my grandfather’s diary, or watched the adults gang up on Min and her sister during a village wedding, I felt as if I were witnessing over and over where China went wrong. The concerns of the family and nation were overwhelming, and they trapped a great many people–millions upon millions–in lives they never would have chosen. …it was also why my father suppressed so much emotion. It had led my aunt Nellie to express her feelings through poetry, and it had driven Lijiao’s children to diminish the past. Only Zhang Hong had chosen to remember, and for him this memory had become a kind of torture.

And perhaps I, too, am more Chinese than I knew. Because now I understand all of them–understand why a person would choose not to tell her story, or be unable to tell it, or not admit to any feeling, because the emotion would overwhelm you otherwise. [p.382]

The Chinese countryside is not relaxing. It is a place of constant socializing and negotiation, a conversation that has been going on for a long time and will continue to go on after you are gone. Spending time in Min’s village, I understood why migrants felt so alone when they first went to the city. But I also saw how they came to value the freedom they found there, until at last they were unable to live without it. [p.293]

There was a lot to dislike about the migrant world of Min and Chunming: the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real. …their purpose was not to change China’s fate. They were concerned with their own destinies, and they made their own decisions. If it was an ugly world, at least it was their own. [p.383]

I’ve heard people point to the often sub-human treatment of strangers as evidence that individualism is on the rise in China. I think that’s backward; the way Chinese treat outsiders comes out of their communalism, not individualism (though individualism is certainly no guarantee that strangers will be treated well; and in certain contexts communalism can encourage great hospitality toward strangers — though obviously, not in China). And even the sprouting individualism described in Factory Girls still has a long way to go before it reaches the point of actually ascribing value to the individual (and I don’t at all assume that that is inevitable). Still, young people making personal life decisions based on personal, rather than other people’s, desires is a huge step.

Here’s some related stuff:

• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves
• Steve Jobs, Apple, China and Us
• Empty chairs: the pain of rural China’s Moon Festival

I don’t personally have any feelings about Steve Jobs and this comment ultimately isn’t about him. But I do have feelings about the interconnected world of the products we buy and the people who make them. So when we think about Steve Jobs, the Apple legacy, and how we all love Apple products (which are great, no question), let’s remember that — and here comes an unpopular bit of reality — the factories making our Apple products have to hang suicide nets on the buildings to stop the workers from jumping.

Just google “Foxconn suicide nets Apple”. Or see:

• 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?
• Inside Foxconn’s suicide factory
• Foxconn Rallies: Employees Pledge To Cherish Their Lives
  (Normally I don’t link to this trashy website — be ye warned.)
• Foxconn suicides
• The dark side of shiny Apple products
• Happy Chinese workers spell the end of affordable tech
• In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad (NYT)
• BSR: New York Times’ Apple-Foxconn article contains untruths, inaccuracies, and misleading info (Mac Daily News)

This collection of “family portraits” gives a visual representation to the pain rural Chinese families feel during the Moon (Mid-Autumn) Festival, which was today, and traditionally a time for families to celebrate together. Due to the unique nature of urbanization in China, the majority of rural families are split between countryside and city, and spend the Moon Festival apart. Usually it’s the old people and small children who are left behind.

“In an effort to bootstrap themselves out of poverty, many peasants have to embark on an arduous adventure alone in the cities and leave their families behind in the villages.”
[Link: Empty chairs become the pain of rural China, especially on Mid-Autumn Day]

Watching the street vendors and the chéngguǎn do their little dance at the street market near our apartment provides an interesting anecdote for two crucial Chinese cultural concepts: 人情 and 面子。

There’s a colourful, bustling, crowded and filthy street market near our neighbourhood (see here for more photos), and I suspect its days are numbered.

Every time I go recently in the late afternoon there are chéngguǎn (城管：”city management” by-law enforcers) cooperatively hassling the illegal vendors who choke the roads leading to the Jade Spring Road Vegetable Market (玉泉路菜市场). By “cooperatively” I mean it’s a big game. The chéngguǎn deliberately and obviously drag their feet. Their van inches around the corner at the far end of one street, giving the vendors plenty of time to yell, bundle up their stuff, and, sometimes laughing, sometimes running, make a show of clearing off. Or they cover up their produce and act like they’re just hanging out… next to closed boxes full of tomatoes. The chéngguǎn take their sweet time pulling around, parking, and getting out. Then they saunter up the street, and as soon as they’ve passed by the vendors roll their sacks back out on the pavement and re-stack their cabbages, fish, rabbits, fruit, or whatever. The day I took the following photo, three of the chéngguǎn were sitting on the side of the road having tea with a couple vendors who had boxed up their stuff and had it stowed away right there beside them. I would have taken their photo, but we had our daughter with us and they were smiling and making faces at her. In the picture below, a chéngguǎn (on the left) ignores a vendor who has obediently folded up her produce in blankets in a pile beside her. She’s just waiting for them to leave so she can uncover her vegetables and start selling again.

I have seen a chéngguǎn in this market get a little mean (it was the guy in the picture above, about 30 seconds before I took the picture), and it was when a cucumber seller decided to ignore him and not make a show of clearing off as he approached. That seemed to make this particular chéngguǎn a little angry and he lunged for the guy’s wooden vegetable box, which was quickly yanked out of reach by a rope and dragged off down a side street. No attempt to pursue, even though he would have easily had it in about two or three steps.

“Humanity” 人情 and “Face” 面子

I described all this to one of my Chinese coworkers, and he explained it with two terms: 人情 and 面子。 “Human feelings” 人情 is how he explained why the chéngguǎn carry out their orders to the absolute bare minimum ‘letter of the law’ degree, and how they can sit down and chat over tea with the same people they’re supposed to be hassling. They recognize a lot of these people, he said, and don’t want to stop them from trying to make a living; they personally couldn’t care less whether there’s a street market here or not. It’s nothing personal. But they have their orders, and the point of orders in China is to do just enough so that you can tell your superiors that you did them. The actual purpose of the order, the ‘spirit of the law’, is entirely beside the point, especially when your superiors are only giving you the order because their superiors gave it to them and they want to make their superiors happy because they’re working on a promotion.

The other key term he used was “face” 面子。 Why do they bother with the silly charade of bundling up their cabbages in full view of the chéngguǎn (who’s walking toward them maybe only a few meters away), and scooting off down an alley only to come back a few minutes later? It gives face to the chéngguǎn. It’s an acknowledgment of who’s in charge. Chéngguǎn can give these kinds of people all kinds of trouble if they want to; sometimes they can be brutal (see here, here, here and here). Sometimes the vendors fight back. The vendors are almost all illegal migrants near the bottom of society and without legal protection. They’ll yell and run and make a sincere effort to clear off as quickly as possible when they sense that they need to; they aren’t always laughing and you do sense fear sometimes, depending on the circumstances. But at least for now, in our particular street market, all the chéngguǎn require is a little “face”, a show of deference, a lack of defiance, tails between legs, and they’re satisfied.

These streets are easily the most lively (热闹) in our area, but with the consistency of the harassment, half-hearted as it appears, I bet it’s only a matter of time before this one goes they same way as the street markets near our old place.

There are more street market photos in the Our Tianjin 2010 photo gallery, which I just now finally finished uploading. So if you’ve seen it before there’s some new stuff (like sheep brains and an explosive dog). You can also see video of what it’s like to try and ride a bike through this market here: Tianjin Street Market Dash video.

Related stuff from the blog:

• Tianjin Street Market Dash video
• Our Tianjin 2010 photo gallery
• Before & After: Tianjin’s transformation at ground level
• Making Our Neighbourhood More ‘Civilized’

Related stuff from the web:

• Photos: chengguan officers blocked by hundreds of citizens for attacking several young men in Changsha
• A Killer the Nation Has Pity For
• A practical handbook for beating street vendors
• Chinese training manual offers advice how to beat offenders without leaving marks
• Above the Law? China’s Bully Law-Enforcement Officers

For every one Chinese skyscraper there are thousands of these guys:

I took this just before 9 this morning as I was walking from the subway to work thinking about how cold and brutal it was (-13′C with a sharp, dry wind). Remind me not to complain about my commute!

Migrant workers in China would be the bottom of urban Chinese society if they were actually included in society. They live a brutal parallel existence far from their hometowns, where the rural life they left behind was even tougher. Without the millions of migrants filling the factories and building the skyscrapers, there would be no new New China.

This is the original:

For another, happier Chinese-migrant-workers-in-the-back-of-a-pickup photo, see here.

Related Migrant Worker posts:

• Migrant worker CBC radio interview
• Who’s building the new New China?
• Meeting the migrant workers
• China’s fabled migrant workers migrate into our backyard
• Welcome to the City

Our first major international experiences were in Africa, and we still have a special interest in its places and peoples. This 24 minute video goes where the kids “think all white people are Chinese” and talks to an interesting cast ensemble: the ultimate Chinese migrant workers who’ve discovered that the real Africa isn’t exactly like the one they were sold in China, an Angolan government official who loves China’s “no strings attached” policy with regard to where the aid money goes, Angolan construction “helpers” who can’t pronounce their Chinese co-workers’ names, and some articulate young Angolans who believe that despite what it looks like, China’s involvement is not really helping their country.

(From The Current via CDT):

How authentically Chinese is a Chinatown in Angola? They have lǎowài singing Hotel California during drunken karaoke sessions.

Related Articles:

• Deciphering the Sino-Africa saga
• Audio slideshow: Africans in Guangzhou
• Uganda through the eyes of Mainlanders
• China colonizing Africa?

CBC’s China correspondent travels with his maid to her home village and presents her story on CBC radio. Like millions of migrants workers in China, she left her husband, sons, and home village behind to work in the city to be able to pay for her children’s education.

Download the mp3 from CBC (starts at 00:56 of the mp3).

I’ve been waiting a long time for a truckload-of-migrant-workers photo. Today I finally was in the right place at the right time with a camera.

This is a small truckload, as truckloads of migrant workers go. Legions of legions (literally) of guys like these — who prefer manual labour in the cities to the rural life they left behind — built and are building (literally) the new New China.

These guys are one of the major reasons why China can build so much so fast, and why stuff on store shelves in North America is so ridiculously cheap: migrant construction and factory workers exist in Dickensian conditions, and there are millions of them. This keeps labour costs way down, and lets China’s government/business elite pass (some of) the savings on to us!

And yes, that’s a McDonald’s (麦当劳 / mài dāng láo) in the background.

Cool experience on the way home this afternoon: We met our first two migrant workers, and they met their first two foreigners. Judging from the looks on their faces, I think they might still be in shock as I type this. Of course, the fact that I’m blogging about them might say something, too. Crazy world…

Anyway, we’d started chatting with one of our retired neighbours outside our stairwell, which is also right by the migrant labourers’ camp. (I took the photo at right while we were talking.) We asked him about the work they were doing on the roofs, and got more of an answer than we were expecting. He said that not only are they building fake roofs on all the buildings visible from the main road, but they’re also going to paint the sides of the buildings that are visible from the main road.

He said it’s because our neighbourhood is opposite the Sheraton (one of the ritziest public places in Tianjin) and during the Olympics lots of foreigners will be there and China wants the foreigners to see good looking neighbourhoods, not ugly ones with flat roofs. (Of all the things that could be changed to make things look better in the eyes of foreigners, the shape of the roofs never would have crossed my mind….) Then he went off about how China is still a poor country and not fully developed, and that spending money on projects like this is a waste when so many people need food. Jessica asked him if it was about “face” and he agreed and said, “Yes, it’s about looking good.” He pointed at their open air kitchen, saying that the workers don’t get meat; just cabbage and bǐng (饼 – Chinese biscuit).

While we were talking, two really young looking workers with a wheelbarrow passed by, staring at us. Then they backed up and stood just outside the circle of conversation, and stared at us some more before asking our neighbour first if we were foreigners (we have no idea why) and then if our neighbourhood had a lot of foreigners. We started talking with them, and although they had that shocked look – the one that you get when you discover that the exotic animal in the zoo can speak – they were really friendly, and just a little shy. 18 year olds, working long days far from home (one was I think from Henan province, the other from Hebei). They said we were the first foreigners they’d ever met, but wouldn’t shake my hand, saying their hands were too dirty. We chatted a bit, asked some of the basic questions that always get asked, and then I headed off to the vegetable market.

I’d already planned to talk to this group of migrants as much as possible, since I didn’t with the last couple crews that came through. I figured it might take a few times to really get things warmed up with them – we’ll see how it goes!

p.s. - I am continually glad that we decided to ditch the foreign ghetto that we’d been placed in by our n.g.o. and move into a regular Chinese neighbourhood (as in, a neighbourhood full of Chinese people instead of foreigners). Yes, the plumbing is bad, the toilet’s in the shower, and you get woken up in the morning by groups of old ladies slapping their thighs in unison (assuming the migrant workers hadn’t already started hammering into the roof directly above your bed at 6:30am), but even on the “bad” days, having a friendly community around is so worth it!