In 2014 the number of mobile phones in use exceeded the world’s population, and about half of them were produced in the Chinese coastal province of Guangdong. This ‘Made in China’ phenomenon is based on the highest level of human migration in history, the movement of hundreds of millions of poor peasants from the interior of China to the coastal regions to work in ultra-modern factories catering for a multinational market.[1]
The Chinese economic miracle was created by the sweat and sacrifice of peasants and workers, but average real wages, compared to the 1950s when the giant SOEs dominated the economy, have fallen considerably. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost in the SOEs, jobs which had been seen as secure for life and carried pensions, health care and housing allowances. A so-called “rust belt” has appeared across the traditional industrial areas, such as the North East, the heartland of China’s old state plan as many loss-making SOEs, both factories and mines, were rationalised for privatisation – an ongoing process.
The majority of Chinese workers are now predominantly low-paid, short-term migrants working in giant high-tech factories. They have little or no job security, and do not receive the welfare benefits that their predecessors in heavy industry had enjoyed. Since the mid-1990s company retirement pensions have largely disappeared, health services have been privatised and moved out of the reach of many, housing has been privatised and the rents being extracted from the workers are a major source of capital for financing factory expansion. Many of the gains of the 1949 revolution have simply evaporated.
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Chan, K. China, Internal Migration. Blackwell Publishing, 2013.