China is finally taking measures to improve the lot of its migrant workers. In a directive issued this month, the State Council asserted that migrants have a legal right to work in urban areas, where they have long been subject to discrimination.
According to the measure, residency status can no longer be used to discriminate against job applicants, and any migrant engaged in gainful employment should be given relevant urban residency permits.
Rural migrants have long done the dirty work that their city-slicker cousins disdain, from cleaning streets and homes to waiting at table and driving taxis. Modern China could not function without them. They also labour in factories that produce the country's trade surpluses and contribute to its huge foreign exchange reserves.
Yet despite their immense contributions they have too often been treated as second-class citizens, barred from the plum jobs urban residents still want and denied access to state-subsidised education and health care in the towns and cities where they work and live.
As a result, a generation of rural children has been raised by their grandparents or other elderly relatives. They see their far-flung parents as little as once a year, usually during the Lunar New Year holiday. This enforced separation of parent and child is one of the great tragedies of China's reform and opening.
Similarly, the millions of predominantly young women working in China's coastal factory belt hold their jobs for a monotonous few years, saving as much money as possible to make a better life later in their rural communities.
