The Human Costs of China's Industrialization

We've heard a lot about the environmental costs of China's industrialization, and of social unrest in rural areas and other problems, but less about how industrialization affects the army of migrant workers who come from the country to the cities in search of work:

In China, a Rare Return , by Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post: On almost every other day, Cai Weilan wakes up hundreds of miles away in a cramped factory dormitory, facing another long shift making sweaters... On this day, she wakes up at home. She ... lifts a pair of knitting needles and a ball of green wool to begin making a single sweater for her 2-year-old daughter... For one brief stretch -- this week's Chinese Lunar New Year festival -- mother and daughter are reunited. "Of course I miss her," says Cai, 23, who has been gone for a full year, leaving her daughter behind in the care of her mother-in-law while she endures the factory life for $80 a month. "At home, there is nothing for me to do. My family needs this money."

In this village ... as throughout most of China, migrant workers are heading home this week on packed overnight trains and buses for the most important holiday of the year. They are carrying home to their families things they did not have before -- televisions, sacks of clothing and cooking pots. They are bringing along glimpses of China's burgeoning urban wealth and tales of street hustlers and bosses who cheat them out of wages. They are bearing new expectations for their own lives and those of their children.

In this rapidly industrializing country ..., these workers send home nearly $80 billion a year... Many villages in bitterly poor interior regions have seen their incomes doubled and tripled by this flow of wages. ... "In many counties, as long as there is one migrant worker in the family, the whole family is lifted out of poverty."

But not without wrenching social costs. Migration has separated families, delivering a generation of rural children raised largely by grandparents. For many migrants, round-trip bus and train fare home can exceed $60 -- more than some monthly wages. ... The New Year is typically the only time workers go home. ... Wherever they sleep the rest of the year, migrant workers are clear that home remains home -- a concept laden with significance in Chinese culture. ...

Cai has been working in Guangdong province since she was 14, returning only to get married, give birth to her daughter and celebrate the Lunar New Year. She speaks of forced unpaid overtime and wages that have stayed flat for almost a decade in factories without air conditioning. But her eyes light up when she speaks of how her income has kept her younger sister in high school and how she and her husband are saving about $1,200 a year to build a brick home in the village. Some day. They figure they need $12,000.

Next door, Huang Meiyun, 28, and his father have returned from their jobs as carpenters in Guangzhou, where they occupy plywood bunks in a shed with seven other men. Huang's wife works at a factory in another city ... Their son, 6, stays here in the village with Huang's mother. "I will definitely return," Huang said... He will come back changed. In the city, Huang has grown accustomed to reading news and communicating with people all over China on chat boards at Internet cafes ... He wants a computer at home now... He graduated from high school. He wants his son to make it to university. "We see the other villagers going out to the city and their houses getting better, more money in their pockets," Huang said. "We need to keep up."