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Migrant workers unable to find a job in Shenzhen within three months could be placed on a blacklist of potential criminals, the city's police chief says.
And that means they could be prevented from renting a shared room - all they can afford - in one of the city's slums and even be expelled from the border boomtown.
Shenzhen police chief Li Ming told dozens of Hong Kong and Macau members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at a meeting in April the city was considering driving out millions of jobless migrant workers to improve public security. 
He said Shenzhen's population was increasing by one million people a year. The city's total population is about 14 million, less than three million of whom are permanent residents. Its jobless rate is 7 per cent, which puts extra pressure on law enforcement. 
'Official numbers show that 88 per cent of suspects taken into custody in Shenzhen are first-time offenders and many committed crimes because they couldn't make a living here,' state media quoted Li as saying. 
Li complained Shenzhen's police force was understaffed, with only 20,000 officers to monitor a floating population of so many millions, and said the most effective way to cope was to drive unemployed migrant workers out of the city. 
The size of a mainland city's police force is based on its permanent resident population. But in manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen, millions of migrant workers skew the picture and leave police struggling with massive workloads. 
To deal adequately with law and order issues, some estimates say, Shenzhen would need at least 140,000 police - seven times as many as it has at present.
Shenzhen isn't the only city that has tried to place curbs on migrant workers. In Beijing and the capital of Yunnan  province, Kunming , similar iron-fisted measures have been adopted to closely monitor their whereabouts. 
There are 230 million migrant workers across the mainland - 33 million of them working in the Pearl River Delta. 
Mainland migrant workers have tolerated harsh working and living conditions for decades and take industrial action far less frequently than workers overseas. 
Maybe the Shenzhen authorities should examine why the administration has turned so many obedient migrant workers into criminals, instead of stepping up monitoring of them by police and closed-circuit television. 
Has the city government provided enough assistance to jobless workers after reaping rich revenues from income taxes? 
Have officials listened to workers' complaints about the mainland's growing wealth gap and labour laws that fail to protect workers' interests despite recent amendments?  
Not all migrant workers who hit a dead end become criminals, and some even choose to hurt themselves in silent protest. 
In Shenzhen, 13 employees of Taiwanese-owned electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn have tried to commit suicide this year. Ten have died as a result. 
But Shenzhen labour authorities did not monitor daily workloads or urge Foxconn to respect its workers and change its management style until the spate of suicides triggered a public outcry across the country. 
The company set up its two plants in Shenzhen 12 years ago. Its workers can toil for up to 12 hours without talking to anyone, and they have to follow strict rules on how long to spend on meals and toilet breaks, are subject to constant surveillance and have to work rapidly on repetitive tasks, making them feel like machines. 
Tsinghua University professor Guo Yuhua and eight other sociologists have criticised manufacturers for using their employees' status as migrant workers as an excuse to pay them less than the average for underdeveloped countries, forcing them to leave hometowns and families behind and struggle to get by without family care and dignity. 
About 1,900 workers employed by Japanese carmaker Honda in Foshan  ended a two-week strike a week ago after winning a pay rise. Some 600 interns working at the plant had been paid 900 to 1,300 yuan a month, just enough to be warmly clad and eat their fill. 
The fact that foreign companies that treat workers in their own countries with respect and pay them decent salaries can run what appear to be sweatshops on the mainland demonstrates the authorities' failure to protect workers' rights. 
It's not difficult to understand why some migrant workers, unable to air their grievances, might want to strike back at society or simply rob a stranger to supplement their meagre incomes. 
Rather than closely monitoring their compatriots as potential criminals, the Shenzhen authorities should be thinking about providing sufficient help to migrant workers to prevent them from turning to crime.



Jobless migrants should not be seen as likely criminals