Beijing. Peng was thrilled with the opportunity. He had worked as a security guard before. And wouldn’t it be great to leave Shenyang and work in the capital? He took the offer immediately, without negotiating.
The security company was called Tianhe Antai ‘Heavenly Peace’. It was one of the largest security companies in Beijing – and infamous for its covert operations, which included running drug deals, regularly bribing the public security department, and deceiving and transporting rural migrants into unpaid jobs. But Peng was a stranger to Beijing. How could he know? All he knew was that he was to board a bus from Shenyang to Beijing, along with fifteen others – all older than Peng – to start a new life.
The whole busload would soon be joining the army of migrant workers who performed the dirty work for China’s grand capital: building apartments for its new rich, cleaning its streets, planting trees along its avenues, guarding its properties. Each of them was as hardworking as the next, but the younger migrants, like Peng, were more equipped with information about life and employment in the cities and less willing to tolerate poor conditions and more prepared to stand up for their rights. Would his father ever understand?
The trip to the capital was a long one – ten hours. Peng had taken so many bus trips before, and each time he’d told himself that he would make a success of himself and send the much-needed money home. He would be proud of what he could do for his family. He nibbled at the steamed buns that he had brought with him for the trip. He had only two.
It was well past midnight when the bus finally arrived. As it turned in to the depot, Peng wondered where they were: the place didn’t look remotely urban. A few other buses were parked, but no one was around. Under the dim streetlight, Peng could see two men selling steamed buns on the side of the empty street. Wasn’t this Beijing? ‘Gongzhufen,’ said the conductor – a quiet part of the city.
Peng and the other fifteen villagers got off the bus and looked around in the semi-darkness. Another bus would take them from this east Beijing depot to Daxing district, in the south of Beijing, where the company was based. Though the depot was not well lit, their many pairs of eyes found the right bus stop soon enough. Daxing, it said. This second ride lasted another hour.
Daxing district, situated on the periphery of Beijing, is clogged with factories of all kinds – ugly even at night. The district comprises nine towns and eighteen townships, and has a total population of 650,000, more than 75 percent of them migrant families who have created their own communities. They come from Hubei, Henan, Shandong and Hebei provinces, as well as from the northeast.
Tianhe Antai has many security contracts with companies in Daxing, to whom they supply migrant workers recruited from Shenyang and elsewhere. The company is housed in a first-floor office in an ordinary-looking street. You can easily miss it. On arrival, Peng and the others were asked by the recruiter to hand in their IDs. ‘It is just our normal procedure,’ he said. ‘It’s for our records.’ But after a few days, the workers realized that they weren’t going to get their IDs back. Peng’s repeated requests for his were refused. But none of them protested, for fear of offending the company.
They were then sent to guard a business nearby which they were told was an insurance firm. During the first two weeks, they were also told by the security company not to leave the premises under any circumstances. They were to station themselves right at the gate, but they were not to step outside the compound. They were to eat in the company canteen. Peng became very concerned, because this was the first job where his movements had been restricted – but without his ID, he couldn’t simply get up and leave. As time passed, he began to feel trapped. He and the other workers talked about what to do. Should they approach the management collectively? Should they be more confrontational? The shared feeling, however, was that there was little recourse, so the subject was dropped. Meanwhile, the men were desperate to be paid.
Passive cooperation did not bring them peace. In fact, things got worse. When they asked for their weekly pay, they were told that there was no pay yet and they’d have to wait. At the end of the second week, their request was again rejected, without any reason given. The workers realized then that they would not be paid at all. Not one yuan. They didn’t voice their concern because they didn’t really understand what was going on. Peng, however, did: He and the others were simply being treated as rural peasants who were so desperate for work that they’d accept whatever deal was on offer.
Peng wanted to flee. But to do so, he’d have to fight a large security company. How many bodyguards and thugs did the company have at its disposal? Peng had no idea, though he had heard that workers had been beaten for demanding owed wages and that one of them had been stabbed. There was enough talk like this to keep him frightened.
By the third week, Peng felt like a prisoner. He wanted to get out – there was no way he could go on like this without pay. One day, he noticed that his team leader, a simple-minded man, was easily placated by the offer of a bottle of spirits. Peng came up with an escape plan. He shared it with only two coworkers, because the others seemed too frightened to do anything.
The next week, as their shift ended for the day, Peng invited the team leader for a drink in their dining area. The man had no suspicion about Peng’s motives, as so many workers had offered him alcohol to sweeten him up in the past. As cup after cup of liquor was poured, the leader became less and less aware of what was happening. ‘Have more, my elder brother! It is my fortune to have met you!’ Peng cheered and toasted him.
Finally the team leader downed the last drop in his cup and, voice slurred, said he had to go to bed. Less than a minute later, he was asleep. Then Peng and his two companions snuck out of the building, into the dark night of Yellow village, in central Daxing. They ran as far as they could, although no one was chasing them, slowing down only to catch a bus headed away from Daxing. They had nothing to show for their three weeks’ work, but they knew they had done the right thing.
The bus took them to the east side of Beijing, where they stayed with another job seeker from Liaoning, who let them sleep on his floor and fed them for two days. Peng and his two coworkers then tried to recover their IDs, calling the recruiter and threatening to call the police. Of course, this was an empty threat, since reprisals from the security company for carrying it out might be anything from an ordinary beating to a disabling one by company thugs – but it worked: the recruiter sent the IDs via another migrant from the northeast. The company still refused to pay them; Peng had to give that up. He didn’t know what became of the workers who had remained on the job.
Eventually, he and his two friends learned the security company’s real reputation – much too late. Tianhe Antai is well known for its criminality. Their labour recruitment is used to make illegal profits. Many of the rural job seekers they hire are underage and made to work for nothing. The migrants even have a saying: ‘You can get work from Tianhe Antai, but you can’t get money!’
It is as if the Labour Contract Law never existed. The law was passed on 1 January 2008, thanks to momentum generated by a child labour scandal in May 2007 that caused a great deal of public anger: Thousands of children, some as young as eight years old, had been kidnapped and sold for 500 yuan a head to 7,500 illegal brick kilns in Shanxi and Henan. Of these, 576 children were rescued. The kidnapped children were found to have been beaten, burnt, and disabled, and some were killed. Those who survived were forced to work in the kilns under the most subhuman conditions. It was found that these illegal brick kilns employed 53,036 migrant workers.14 At the time, many feared that this scandal was only the tip of the iceberg. Its aftermath was also shocking: A few foremen and middlemen (one of them a Labour Bureau official) were prosecuted, and one of the kiln owners, the son of a Party official, was sentenced to nine years in prison for what amounted to a crime against humanity. Other than that, little was done. But the public outcry had worried the government. It was in this context that a call for the enactment of new labour legislation was heard. A law to protect workers’ basic rights was recognized as necessary. Eventually, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, that is, China’s top legislature, decided to adopt the Labour Contract Law, which had been under consideration since 2005 but never became reality until after the brick kiln scandal.
The law contained ninety-eight articles setting out rules requiring employers to provide