to go down on my knees, to beg for your forgiveness…
Ren Jianguo began writing down his thoughts from the day he left home for the city. Peng, instead, found consolation in sharing his experiences with other migrants. He told me that for him, solitude was one of the most distressing things about living and working in a city as an outsider. The day I left Shenyang, Peng accompanied me through the dusty lanes of the city to the train station, confessing that he was trying to look after his mental health by not being alone.
Shenyang’s past glories and tragedies are no longer very visible in the city today. Still the capital of Liaoning Province in northeastern China, and historically known as Mukden, it had been the legendary Manchu general Nurachi’s first capital after Nurachi overthrew the Ming Dynasty in 1625. It remained so until 1644, when the Manchus invaded Beijing and established the last dynasty there, the Qing.
Toward the end of the Qing dynasty, when the imperialist powers were dividing the country into their spheres of influence, Shenyang was an object of competition between Russia and Japan. The former built a railway connecting the city with the South Manchurian Railway, in an attempt to tap into the region’s natural resources; the Japanese used a train-car explosion north of Shenyang in 1931 as a pretext for invading the city, seizing all of northeastern China, and establishing a puppet state called Manchukuo. The anti-imperialist sentiment among the people of this region has lasted and evolved over the years into a strong nationalism.’2
Shenyang has developed into an important industrial centre since the 1920s, and in the 1970s it became one of China’s top three industrial cities, alongside Shanghai and Tianjin. Shenyang today is the largest city in the northeast of China, with a population of 8.1 million. Its historic heavy industry (it has been known as the rust belt since the industrial decline of the 1980s) is still manifest: you cannot ignore the polluted air when you enter Shenyang. You also see the city’s new look: the inflow of foreign investment and the fast growth of the city’s service industries apparent in the ubiquitous high-rises housing foreign banks and insurance companies.
As a fast-growing city, Shenyang boasted a total GDP of 383 billion yuan in 2009, and has been recognized as one of the top twenty emerging cities in China. Its income level is known to be the highest in the region. In 2010, the average income in Shenyang was reported to be 1,708 yuan per month,3 an enviable one compared with other northeastern cities and towns. For that reason it has pulled in many rural people from the northeast as well as from the south. Currently, there are around two million migrant workers in Liaoning province, most of them seeking opportunities in the private sector, particularly in Shenyang’s manufacturing and service industries. Thousands of labourers, a massive reserve army, crowd the streets and labour markets each day, waiting for jobs.
The Lu Garden Labour Market in central Shenyang is the city’s largest. Two or three hundred jobless migrants gather there each day. Near Lu Garden is a well-known antiques market much liked by the city’s middle class. In fact, it is much better known to them than the labour market. ‘Just cross the bridge and it’s on the left-hand side,’ is what everyone tells you when you walk in that direction. The labour market itself is an unimpressive, grey-looking concrete building that can be seen from the other side of the bridge. Street sellers with three-wheeled carts crowd around Lu Garden. Job seekers can be seen waiting and talking to one another even hundreds of metres before you reach the bridge. When you push yourself into the building, you feel the heat coming from the mass of people inside. In midsummer, it was just as the migrant workers described it, ‘like being inside a steamer’. The heat of competition is just as fierce: people try to grab the first job around; they cannot afford compassion for other aspirants. The place is particularly overcrowded at the beginning of the year when migrants return to the city from their winter break, with the number of job seekers rising to more than two thousand each day. Then it’s like a movie scene of a wartime train station. It is all about survival.
Lu Garden’s labour market was originally formed spontaneously by migrant job seekers who gathered here looking for work, and it has been regulated by the local authorities since 2003 as a casual-labour exchange. Official estimates say that 2,000 to 5,000 job seekers visit Lu Garden every day – up to a million people per year. Big companies advertise their vacancies on the walls, but some construction employers and small- to medium-size catering businesses come here in their cars and look for workers themselves. Employers often go through middlemen, because it is the easiest way for them to find migrant workers. And employers prefer migrants because their labour costs much less than urban workers’. This is particularly the case in the private sector. The middlemen receive fees from both the employers and the workers. Some middlemen are labour contractors themselves, which means they will take a regular cut from the migrants’ wages.
In 2011, the number of Lu Garden’s migrant job seekers has apparently increased while in similar markets in other provinces employers have complained about a labour shortage. At Lu Garden, employers now complain instead about workers’ reluctance to accept low wages.4 One caterer was reported to have said: ‘These workers nowadays…they want their wages on the day. And those workers you want to employ are just unaffordable!’5 An employer from a cosmetics company who had visited Lu Garden five times said, ‘I’m now offering 1,500 yuan per month and still can’t find workers!’6 It seems that in Lu Garden, migrant workers’ self-confidence has grown.
Even so, Shenyang is now known not only for its fast growth but also for its mass unemployment, which affects workers in both the state sector and private sector. The mass layoffs here are largely a result of the conversion of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) since the era of reform and opening up.
Previously, all enterprises in China had been publicly owned and managed, and the state was the largest employer, providing work for more than 75 million people. But since the late 1970s, the government under Deng sought to increase the competitiveness of the economy by dismantling or privatizing them, a process that took more than two decades. In the first stage, 1978 to 1984, greater autonomy was given to the management, and enterprises were allowed to keep a portion of their profits instead of submitting them to the state. In the second stage, 1984 to 1992, this autonomy was increased, as enterprises were given freedom to hire and fire staff and to establish direct links with suppliers. Increasingly, traditional administrative relations between the state and entrepreneurs were replaced by contractual relations. In the third stage, 1992 to the present day, the central government has limited its ownership to 500 to 1000 large-scale SOEs, allowing all smaller SOEs to be leased or sold; by 1998, a quarter of China’s 87,000 industrial SOEs had been restructured. By the end of 2001, this number had grown to 86 percent, 70 percent of those having been partially or fully privatized.7
The result was mass unemployment. From 1998 to 2004, six in ten workers in SOEs were laid off, or 21 million workers from 1994 to 2005, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MOLSS). In the northeast, as the centre of heavy industries, which were all state-owned, layoffs were nearly twice the national average.8 Although workers are entitled by law to compensation when laid off from an SOE, there is no national standard for the amount of compensation: It is completely up to the individual enterprises. In certain enterprises, particularly in those SOE-concentrated provinces such as the northeast, workers often receive no compensation at all from a corrupt management. In March 2002, 10,000 workers at the state-owned Liaoyang Ferro-Alloy Factory in Shenyang embarked on a series of protests against the corruption of factory managers during the forced closures of the local state-owned enterprises.9 While company assets disappeared, the company failed to pay workers their pension contributions and full wages. Following a closure, workers were promised only the minimal compensation of 600 yuan for each year of their service. After receiving this compensation for two years, workers would not be eligible for further unemployment benefits. As the workers’ petitions had brought no solution to their misery, they took to the streets. Adding insult to their injuries, the worker activists Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang were arrested and convicted of ‘subversion of state power’. Yao was sentenced to seven years in prison, Xiao to four.
A report titled ‘No Way Out’ put it this way: ‘The government’s failure to implement clear policy guidelines for the process [of the enterprise closures], combined with a lack of transparency, flawed auditing of company assets, and widespread corruption, left millions of workers out in the