In 2009 Time magazine named the young migrant workers of China as a kind of collective runner-up ‘Person of the Year’ (behind Ben Bernanke, Chair of the US Federal Reserve) for helping achieve an eight per cent Chinese growth rate and ‘an economic stimulus for everyone else’. The credit belonged to ‘the tens of millions of workers who have left their homes, and often their families, to find work in the factories of China’s booming coastal cities’.
China, despite its embrace of corporate capitalism and private investors at the top, remains for many at the bottom highly autocratic and arbitrary. Nothing is more indicative of this than the Maoist-era hukouzhidu laws on family registration that (despite various reforms) still dictate who has the right to live where. This has left millions of China’s new proletariat in a situation of chronic insecurity, preyed upon by their bosses and often corrupt municipal authorities and police.
