NYT

In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back



Shenzhen, China, was founded in 1980 as an economic model city. Its proximity to Hong Kong has made it unusually open to outside influences.


By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 18, 2006
SHENZHEN, China — When residents here in southern China’s richest city learned of plans to build an expressway that would cut through the heart of their congested, middle-class neighborhood, they immediately organized a campaign to fight City Hall.


Housing costs in Shenzhen have been growing by about 30 percent a year. A buyers’ boycott was organized, to the authorities’ displeasure.


Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway. It became a landmark in citizen efforts to win concessions from a government that by tradition brooked no opposition.

And it was no accident that the battle was waged in Shenzhen, a 26-year-old boomtown that was the first city to enjoy the effects of China’s breakneck economic expansion and that has served as a model for cities throughout the country.

Increasingly, though, with its growing pains multiplying, Shenzhen looks like a preview, even a warning, of the limitations of the kind of growth-above-all approach that has gripped much of China.

Shenzhen’s 28 percent average annual growth rate since 1980 is likely to stand as a record in China for some time, but the price of this phenomenal success is painfully evident. Throughout most of the year its skies are thick with eye-burning smoke. Street crime is high. And the workers it has drawn so effortlessly in the past from the countryside are becoming harder to recruit, as their options increase elsewhere.

But Shenzhen may also herald more promising changes. Possibly the greatest force taking shape here is the quiet expansion of the middle class, thicker on the ground here than perhaps anywhere else in China. This middle class is beginning to chafe under authoritarian rule, and over time, the quiet, well-organized challenges of the newly affluent may have the deepest impact on this country’s future.

“Many people laughed at me, because they don’t have confidence in the government,” said Qian Shengzeng, a 62-year-old former rocket scientist who led the movement against the expressway. “They think the government is hopelessly rotten. However, our view is that maybe there is a remaining sliver of hope, and the government needs to be pushed.”

In newly rich Shenzhen, as in much of China, social change is being driven by economic transformation and, more than anything else, property ownership.

Red-hot real estate markets have given birth to a new class of people, known as mortgage slaves, because the financial burden of buying into the middle-class dream of home ownership has suddenly become so great. The new property owners have poured their energy into everything from establishing co-op boards to spar with landlords, to organizing real estate market boycotts to force down prices.

Others, meanwhile, have begun running for office in district-level elections, where they hope to make the city government more responsive to their needs, though, like governments at every level in China, the ultimate power here rests with Communist Party officials.

Shenzhen has also spawned a local research group known as Interhoo, an independent association of civic-minded professionals who discuss municipal policy issues, publish position papers and quietly lobby the government over development strategy and other issues.

“In the past five or six years there are signs that new politics, economics and culture are emerging in Shenzhen,” said Jing Chen, a scholar with the China Development Institute, a local research group, and a member of Interhoo. “There is an awakening of awareness on public issues. The 6,000 members of Interhoo discuss these issues and have published books that have had a great influence over the government.”

Academics and others who study the city’s development say it is no surprise that Shenzhen is emerging as the cradle of movements like this. From the start, its proximity to Hong Kong has made it unusually open to outside influences. The city is also new, founded in 1980, and populated by migrants who contribute to a culture of greater individualism and risk-taking than anywhere else in China.

Even with all of this political activity, China is a long way from participatory democracy, even at the local level. Yet a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says that Shenzhen’s expanding middle class now accounts for about 10 percent of the city’s population of 12 million — a higher percentage, most here believe, than in any other city in China, though reliable figures are hard to come by. As the middle class grows, civic leaders say they expect to see a steady growth in citizen involvement.

“This is a process of struggling for our interests,” said Jiang Shan, a computer software expert who works in advertising. “It’s difficult, with serious obstacles from the administration and pressure from the powerful. In the long term, to have a good outcome we have to speed up education about law, including election law.”

More than most, Mr. Jiang knows how hard that fight is. Together with a small number of other middle-class Shenzhen residents, he has been at the forefront of a battle to turn what has been a symbolic neighborhood elective office into a real force in people’s lives.

It started when Mr. Jiang filed a series of lawsuits to try to resolve a number problems related to property management. After a string of defeats, he sought help from his local representative, only to discover that the man was a party to one of his lawsuits.

“It was only then that I realized that according to the election law, if I could get enough votes in the community, I could become a representative myself,” Mr. Jiang said. Or so it appeared.

Mr. Jiang began sending out hundreds of short messages with his cellphone to seek backers for his candidacy. He printed campaign cards, which he distributed in the neighborhood to encourage residents to vote.

When he had enlisted enough support he tried to register his candidacy, but he was turned away by officials who told him he was not a Shenzhen resident and therefore could not even vote locally.

On the eve of the election, Mr. Jiang filed suit over the denial of his voting rights. Three days before the trial was to begin, registration officials tried to force their way into his apartment. He agreed to meet them outdoors, whereupon the officials informed him that they would allow him to vote. Minutes later, court officials showed up telling him he could be a candidate if he dropped his lawsuit.

Mr. Jiang refused, saying the process was too tainted for him to participate, and his lawsuit was later dismissed. In another part of town, another resident sought election to the local district council, only to see the number of eligible voters double after the close of registration. Saying it was a clumsy attempt to fix the outcome, the candidate, Ma Jinhua, withdrew in protest.

“If I continue to participate, I will lose,” said Ms. Ma, the owner of a local gardening business. “By quitting at least I can send a warning to the government so that in the future things can be done in a more fair and reasonable way. It’s a reminder that says, ‘Pay attention, you can’t get away with this again.’ ”

Others in the city’s bulging middle class have taken their activism into other arenas. Zou Tao, a Shenzhen golf equipment supplier, recently won national attention when he started a home-buyers’ boycott aimed at reining in real estate prices that have been increasing at a clip of 30 percent a year.

“Prices have been stirred up by speculators stockpiling houses, and by officials and businesspeople joining hands,” Mr. Zou said. “The government hasn’t done its job well in supervising the market.”

From Shenzhen, Mr. Zou’s boycott quickly spread to other large cities, allowing him to collect more than 100,000 signatures. He has also earned the ire of the authorities, who he says have tapped his telephone and barred the press from writing about him or using the words “housing boycott.”

But Mr. Zou has refused to back down, prompting the government to bar him from television and to block Web sites that he operates. “Facing boiling public opinion, the first thing the authorities think of is not ‘maybe we should listen,’ but repression,” he said.

 


NYT

Chinese Success Story Chokes on Its Own Growth

In Shenzhen workers’ dormitories, frustration with hard labor, merciless factory bosses, low pay and miserable living conditions is palpable.


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.


Migrants, unfazed by stories of the difficulties awaiting them, are drawn to Shenzhen by the promise of work.
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.

Although the city does not publish crime data, the Southern Metropolitan News, one of the most reputable Chinese newspapers, reported that there were 18,000 robberies in 2004 in Baoan, one of six districts in Shenzhen. By comparison, in Shanghai, a city of around 18 million, there were only 2,182 reported robberies for all of 2004, according to figures compiled by the city.


Prostitution, often disguised in karaoke joints and massage parlors, but increasingly in the open, ranks as one of the city’s biggest industries.


Near the gates of Foxconn, a huge electronics assembly plant that is one of the city of Shenzhen’s largest employers, a half-dozen former factory workers lounged in the shade on a recent afternoon.

Asked if it was their day off, one of them, a 20-year-old, explained that he had been fired when he developed lesions on his arms from exposure to paints and asked to switch jobs. Now, he said, he and his friends survived by “beating people up for a living.”

In addition to shakedown crews like this one, prostitution, usually thinly disguised in karaoke joints and massage parlors, but increasingly in the open, ranks as one of the city’s biggest industries. In Shenzhen’s blue-collar neighborhoods, thick with fetid workers’ dormitories, the frustration with hard labor, merciless factory bosses, low pay and miserable living conditions is palpable.

“I’ve changed jobs many times,” said one man, a onetime factory floor manager, who was lying on a bunk bed in a stiflingly hot room jammed with other workers. “The pressure is very high in these jobs. They don’t give you weekends, or breaks — especially the Taiwanese companies.”

Migrant workers describe the city’s labor market as a predatory environment filled with unscrupulous job brokers, fraudulent training courses and a multitude of other scams aimed at cheating the most disadvantaged part of the population.

Yu Di, a 19-year-old from Hubei Province with a junior high school education, said he worked in a grimy watch-casing factory, loading and unloading heavy boxes from a truck 11 hours a day, six days a week. With a salary of about $80 a month — and no benefits — Mr. Yu has to borrow money from his parents just to cover his living expenses. He lives in a dim and filthy dorm room, crammed with 12 bunk beds and mattresses made of bare springs covered with cardboard. “The only thing I regret is not working hard in school,” he said.

In the room next door, Zhou Hailin, 20, who grew up in Guang’an, the hometown of Deng Xiaoping, seems better off. Mr. Zhou, who came to the city four years ago, earns about $120 a month as a machinist in the same watch factory.

To do so, though, he must work eight-hour shifts, plus three or four hours of mandatory overtime, six days a week. A typical workday, he said, ends at 10:30 p.m., when he often goes to visit a sister who works in another factory nearby.

Asked if he ever visited downtown Shenzhen, which bristles with skyscrapers and shopping malls, he said he had never had time. “I have to work every day,” Mr. Zhou said. “All the factory jobs here are the same. That’s what it’s like being a migrant laborer.”

Mr. Zhou calmly accepts his lot, but for many the merciless grind of factory life is too much. Their health failing, or their dreams of amassing sizable savings broken, these workers opt to return home to simpler lives in the countryside.

“Shenzhen may seem prosperous,” a worker said, sitting in his bunk in a steamy dormitory, “but it’s a desperate place.”