China Briefing | A New Year but a decades-old blot on China’s conscience: unpaid migrant workers
The world’s largest migration puts on show one of China’s greatest shames – a long-standing failure to guarantee the incomes of the many millions of labourers who built the country
The mad rush of travellers for the Lunar New Year, known as the largest migration of human beings in the world, is under way. Hundreds of millions of people are taking planes, trains, cars, buses, ferries and motorbikes back to their families for the Spring Festival which falls on Friday. Altogether, about 3 billion trips are expected to be made between February 1 and March 12 during the rush known as Chunyun, a similar figure to last year.
Every year – and this year is no exception – there are the all too familiar, heart-rending scenes of tens of millions of migrant labourers on the move. They may have toiled and built the country’s high-speed railways and gleaming airports, but they usually choose the less modern and cheaper ways home to save money.
Hundreds of thousands will ride motorbikes for days and nights on journeys of up to 1,400km, dressed in raincoats to brave the rain, sleet and snow, with their loved ones and goods strapped on their back seats.
Others, with huge nylon bags on their shoulders or their backs and their children in tow, will jam railway stations as they wait for the slower and cheaper overnight trains. Many of them will have to stand for 10 hours or more on the crowded, oversold train journeys.
But they are still the lucky ones, considering that at least they bring their hard-earned salaries with them. Tens of thousands of other workers across the country will be stranded in the cities where they work as they have not been paid at all, not knowing what to expect and facing a hard decision on whether they should go home empty-handed after a year of hard work and inhospitable living in crowded dorms.