Chinese cities shut out migrants at their own cost

In the traditional values of an agricultural community, the home and land are the centre of one's being. Leaving one's homeland means forsaking one's roots; the call for a migrant to return to the homeland is described as "falling leaves return to their roots".

But in the past three decades, these values have changed drastically and irreversibly in China, as millions of peasants are forced to leave their villages to seek new ways to make a living and travel to wherever work takes them. They have become rootless.

Peasants have been transformed by China's reform and opening up into a mobile proletariat, taking up jobs in manufacturing, service industries, construction, mining, brick-making and many other industries in the cities. And wherever they go, they live a ghost-like existence.

Migrants are becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of freedom of association, and their strong sense of alienation and rootlessness often expresses itself in "mass incidents", which have increased sharply over the past decade. In late June, for instance, a riot broke out in Zhongshan following a clash between a local man and a migrant youth. Up to 300 protesters threw stones at government buildings and burned police cars; this was cited in the local media as "the latest in a stream of violent protests in Guangdong linked to migrant workers against unequal wages and discrimination". Feeling totally outside the local society, migrant protesters can feel they need to resort to more drastic measures to be listened to.

In Beijing, migrants make up a third of the capital's 19 million population, and they build the city's wealth and guard its security. Yet they have been subjected to ruthless segregation in every aspect of their life. In Daxing district, southern Beijing, where thousands of migrant workers reside, I met Xuan, a security guard in his 30s. When I asked him where he comes from, he said: "I am a Shandong native from Heilongjiang working in Beijing, who has neither a Shandong nor Beijing hukou." He said he belonged nowhere.

Making a living in the poverty-stricken Shandong village where he was born became impossible as corrupt village cadres increased their influence, randomly distributing land under the new household responsibility system.