Omicron Weighs Down on HK

More testing unveiled another 98 local positive cases

The Omicron wave is wearing down on Hong Kong with another 109 new cases confirmed today, 98 of them local. There is another 100 preliminary positive cases for tomorrow.

Most of the infections have come from Yat Kwai and Ying Kwai houses, the housing estate in Kwai Chung, and now there is the possibility of another cluster forming in Wong Tai Sin, that may be linked to an infected hamster.

Meanwhile a friend who lives in Pui O told me tonight that her daughter's classmate who lives near them had tested positive, and several of the pupils and their families have been sent to Penny's Bay to quarantine. 

CHP warns of possible cluster in Wong Tai Sin

My friend and her husband are already thinking if they need to quarantine, what kinds of items they would bring. Her daughter suggested clothes, while my friend thought a power strip would be more useful...

She said Omicron has suddenly become more real for them. No kidding.

Hope she and her family don't get roped into Penny's Bay. It would be a drag having to spend Chinese New Year there...

Speaking of quarantine, there's a quirky story from China hailing a pilot for being the modern Lei Feng, the Mao-era soldier who symbolised selfless giving, modesty, and dedication, that resulted in the Communist Party using him for propaganda purposes.

Today there's China Southern Airlines A380 pilot Ma Jian, and his employer last week proclaimed him the "King of Quarantine". He earned the honour after spending a whopping 189 days in quarantine in 2021 -- 52 percent of the calendar year, so he could deliver "thousands of passengers and supplies around the world."

Pilot Ma Jian spent 189 days in quarantine

So Ma is considered a hero for spending more than half the year sitting around in hotel rooms to pass the time?

Doesn't seem half as productive as a Chinese man surnamed Yue who was trying to look for his 19-year-old son who went missing in 2020. 

The 43-year-old Yue quit his job as a fishing boat sailor and searched for his son in northern China. While he was doing that he picked up all kinds of part time work to support his wife and younger son, as well as pay for his elderly parents' medical bills.

It turns out Yue worked day and night. In Beijing he worked at construction sites, restaurants, office buildings, residential compounds, a trash collection point, and a shopping mall. Over the span of two weeks, he did 31 gigs, including many overnight ones, and only ate out once.

How do we know all this? Because he contracted Covid-19 and his detailed itinerary was revealed publicly in a bid to do contact tracing.

The posting of his itinerary reminded many middle-class people how difficult life is for migrant workers and how poorly they are treated in terms of work conditions and pay.

The 43-year-old toiled day and night. This month, in Beijing, he worked at construction sites, restaurants, office buildings, residential compounds, a trash collection point, and a shopping mall. Over the course of two weeks, he did 31 gigs, including many overnight ones, and only ate out once

Chinese and Polish Docs Looking for Hope

Photo of Tereska, a Polish Jew in an orphanage taken in 1948

The inaugural Hong Kong International Documentary Festival is on and I caught my colleague's short film called Gone With the Policy.

In 2017 the Beijing government wanted to keep the capital city's population under control and shave a  million or two people off the census. The easiest people to remove? Migrant workers and their children.

A migrant school in Beijing is slated for demolition ("chai")

It was heartbreaking to watch the scene of a migrant school in Chang Ping district, in the outskirts of Beijing being knocked down and the pile of rubble was still left there months later.

The principal of the school was keen to find another space and set up another school, having taught for 10 years. But by the time he secured the space and moved the desks and other furniture there, many families had left -- some even overnight -- which resulted in only four students signing up.

Unfortunately the principal had to admit defeat, while his subordinate, the vice principal wistfully remembers how the original school they had grew and how can the government deny these students an education? He hints at economic prejudices against them.

Students enjoying school, before it is torn down

Meanwhile a migrant worker in Beijing brings his two children, who were born in the city, back to his hometown. The older daughter seems shell shocked at the reality of having to make a new life in the countryside, where her grandmother doesn't understand what laundry detergent is, and wondering how she will continue her education, let alone get into university.

The vice principal points out many of the students' parents built the Bird's Nest for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but they also built much of Beijing as well. And what do they get for their contribution? Being shoved out of the city.

While the documentary is a bit rough around the edges, it is an important piece of evidence that documents the plight of migrant workers, who otherwise don't have much  of a voice in Chinese society let alone history.

Two people try to track down Tereska in old photos

The other film presented was called Searching for Tereska, a Polish documentary that has some fictional scenes in it.

In 1948, a Magnum photographer David Seymour took a haunting picture of a young girl with a bow in her hair. She is standing by the blackboard with a mass of circles she has drawn and a disturbed look on her face.

Fast forward to today, and a young man wants to find out who this girl is and if she is still alive. He enlists the help of a woman who seems very resourceful and determined, very much like a reporter.

They are warned at first by a group of Jews that they may not find the person, but on their journey they will meet many people. The latter was for sure. Their first clue was that she wrote her name, Tereska at the top of the black board. That was it.

Through some sleuthing they identify the building and from there go to a Jewish Centre that deals with survivors, a woman there believes the girl in the picture is her friend and so the couple meet her, but she is the wrong Tereska.

The poster for Searching for Tereska

And then they tracked down what they think is the building but the nun won't let them inside. They also try to find who they think is Tereska but it leads to a tombstone. They leave a note there, hoping someone will contact them, and the grandson does.

However, when he brings out a picture of his grandmother in her younger years, she doesn't look like the girl in the picture.

Then they hit upon a school and find very old registration records and even get copies of the contact sheets of the photographs David Seymour took. They get in touch with various experts to identify the school Tereska was in or where the building was located.

Finally the woman who showed them the school registration records realizes that perhaps because of her disturbed mental state, Tereska did not graduate with her grade, but after, which leads to a massive clue to help track her down...

At first I didn't know what was going on in the story, but as it kept going on, you as a viewer become more invested in the story and wonder if they will ever find an ending to their search (which they do). It makes you realize how important records are and that when buildings are torn down, memories and information are lost forever. And not just buildings, but people too, when they pass away.

But Tereska isn't the only one who was lost. There are thousands of other people who may not have been accounted for. Will anyone find them?



 

"Ice Boy" Reveals Plight of "Left-Behind" Children

"Ice Boy" Wang Fuman (centre) visits Beijing for the first time

Over a week ago there was an uproar in Chinese cyberspace with the story of "Ice Boy".

Wang Fuman, an eight-year-old boy from Ludian county, in a poor area of Yunnan province became famous overnight when he was photographed with his hair, eyelashes and eyebrows covered in frost and he wasn't wearing enough clothes to keep warm. It took him over an hour to walk 4.5km to get to school everyday.

The picture went viral with many in China feeling sorry for the boy, who is a "left-behind child", because his parents have to leave home to work elsewhere, while Wang and his older sister are raised by their grandparents.

This picture of "Ice Boy" went viral

An outpouring of sympathy led to donations of over 300,000 yuan (US$46,900), but apparently not all the money went to the child -- apparently the local government only gave the family 8,000 yuan, saying it was not good for the boy to become "rich" overnight, which led to questions of where the rest of the money went.

State broadcaster CCTV reported 100,000 yuan went to Wang's school, Zhuangshanbao. So where did the over 202,000 yuan go?

Maybe it went towards his "free" trip to Beijing this past weekend for three days with his father and older sister. But the propaganda website China Peace, run by the Party's Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission claims to have shelled out for the trip.

It was the first time Wang had ever been on a plane, left his hometown and gone elsewhere. He also marveled that people in the Chinese capital had indoor heating, which probably led to him wondering why he didn't have that at home.

"It's very cold at home, but very warm in Beijing. At home, we have to burn charcoal at night for warmth. In Beijing, the rooms are so warm -- I only need to wear one layer of clothing. This is the first time I've come across heating, it really is a miracle," he said. "I want to see how children in Beijing go to school, and whether they need to walk a long way everyday."

He and his sister in their bare home

He might also be shocked to find kids in the big city get driven by car or take the bus, not many actually walk to school -- let alone 4.5km -- to get to class.

And apparently to make life better for Wang, his father has been given a job in his hometown so he doesn't have to be away from his children. Is he really going to earn enough money to support the family? And what about the other parents of "left-behind" children? Is the government going to offer them jobs too?

These stop-gap measures hardly solve the problem of "left-behind" children. It wouldn't be a surprise to find after six months to a year that Wang's father needs to leave again to support his family.

The government really doesn't seem to care or understand the plight of these people and that the economy is dependent on migrants like Wang's father to work in big cities. However, the sacrifices they make are a big impact on the family's emotional well-being.

"When I saw the photo, there was pain in my heart," says Wang's 28-year-old father. "I couldn't stay home and look after my children -- I had no choice. If I didn't leave and find work somewhere else, my two kids would've have had nothing to eat."

How is Xi Jinping going to solve this problem? With "left-behind" children, their education level is lower which leads to less opportunities later in life, stuck doing menial work and unable to further improve their situation.

If China values these 60 million children, then it will do something, but so far not much has been done for them. If Xi wants to eradicate poverty by 2020, these children need to be on the priority list.

The Effects of Pushing out "Low-End Population"

Migrant workers gathering their things and getting ready to leave Beijing

Last night I met up with a friend from Beijing who's visiting Hong Kong and we caught up since we last met up.

I asked him about the evictions of the migrant workers and he shook his head, sad at the turn of events.

Following a fire in Beijing's Daxing district that killed 19 people, the local government has used the tragedy as an excuse to get rid of the "low-end population", though this campaign has been happening for the past year.

Parts of Sanlitun have been completely demolished

When I was in Beijing in April, the back streets of Sanlitun, where many expats hung out and used to buy cheap DVDs, or have manicures and pedicures, massages and buy cheap clothing and food, were being torn down.

"Beijingers are happy the streets are cleaned up and feel that the city is now becoming more international like London and New York," my friend said, adding he didn't like Beijing anymore because these colourful aspects of the city were now fast disappearing.

In other words, Beijing is gentrifying.

He told me about a small restaurant across the street from where he lived. It wasn't really a restaurant -- a kind of shack -- where they sold all kinds of food, from jianbing or a savoury pancake, to fried chicken wings, noodles and char-grilled lamb skewers called chuar.

It was run by a bunch of young guys from Henan. While my friend described them as a bit on the tough side, perhaps dealing in things other than food, they were nice people, who he got to know as acquaintances. He'd stop by after work for a beer, or pick up a snack for his wife to bring back home, and have a quick friendly chat. They were also open until 5am.

But now they were gone and he didn't know where they went. More importantly he didn't know where to get his snacks and drinks now.

Some people are hardly given much notice to leave

The small cigarette and liquor shops that supposedly sold items that were collected by senior government officials as "gifts" and sold for cheap are also gone. The last time I was there, the closet-sized sex shops had also disappeared.

Not all expats have the same view as my friend who is from the UK and has lived in Beijing for many years. These foreigners like seeing migrant workers gone and the streets are now cleaner, or getting rid of businesses that didn't fit in the neighbourhood, like the aforementioned shack selling food and perhaps were noisy late into the night.

Nevertheless these were businesses that were convenient, cheap and useful for many residents, and what are left behind are empty stalls, or areas that have been completely demolished, leaving no trace of their previous existence.

However my friend has the last laugh -- expats are complaining it's hard to find an ayi (a maid) these days. Gee, I wonder why?

He says his ayi may leave next year if she too is pressured, but doesn't know where to go. She doesn't want to go back to Anhui province, and do what? She has lived in Beijing for over a decade and makes good money cleaning people's flats.

The Beijing government may think it's doing a good thing getting rid of the "low-end population", but really it's shooting itself in the foot. These migrant workers keep the city going. They were the ones who built all the new buildings and infrastructure, but you deny their children education because they don't have hukou or a residence permit, and now you force them to leave because you consider them an eyesore?

How is that equality in the so-called socialist People's Republic of China?

China's Evolving Definition of Human Rights

Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia suffered human rights violations

With the year ending in just over two weeks, China has already hailed 2017 as one of "remarkable" progress in human rights, including its achievements in anti-corruption and legal reform, which don't have much, if anything to do with human rights.

The latest State Council white paper listed international cooperation on counterterrorism and climate change, as well as the "Sky Net" program to hunt down and repatriate fugitives accused of corruption as human rights achievements.

So forcibly bringing back people to stand for corruption charges is a good thing for human rights?

In the past China has included the right to peace, and the right to economic development.

Migrant workers are being forced out of Beijing

How random and irrelevant to consider these under the meaning of human rights (everywhere else).

Many international critics focused on the detention and death in custody of Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo and how he was only briefly reunited with his wife Liu Xia before he died of cancer in July. Afterwards his body was hastily cremated and the ashes dumped at sea to avoid some kind of memorial for democracy activists.

His widow is still closely watched by the authorities and her whereabouts are still unknown. Doesn't she have human rights?

There are also human rights violations in pushing migrant workers out of Beijing on the pretense of a fire in Daxing District on November 18 that killed 19 people. Following the fire, the authorities immediately launched a 40-day campaign to get rid of the "low-end population", a word that has since been banned from China's cyberspace.

Migrant workers who provide essential services or do jobs that no one else wants to do are being pushed out of the Chinese capital with very little notice and the experience has been so harsh and violent that they don't feel welcome anymore and have no choice but to go back to their hometowns.

Uyghurs' DNA are now being collected by the police

Did the authorities realize what effect this vicious campaign will have on how the city will function from now on?

But another shocking human rights violation is a recent report from The Guardian that says DNA, fingerprints and other biometric data are being collected from Uyghurs in a "health check", called "Physicals for All". It is unclear if patients are aware this data is being collected and shared with the police.

"The mandatory databanking of a whole population's biodata, including DNA, is a gross violation of international human rights norms," said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. It is even more disturbing if it is done surreptitiously, under the guise of a free healthcare program.

"Xinjiang authorities should rename their physical exams project 'Privacy Violations for All', as informed consent and real choice does not seem to be part of these programs," she added.

However, China is ignoring its critics and continuing this terrifying project -- even if someone hasn't committed a crime.

So when China says it's had a "remarkable" year in human rights, it really is living in a parallel universe where its definition is so far removed from everyone else's.

Property Tycoon Questions Migrant Worker Crackdown

Property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang questions why China uses hukou system

Property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang has been known for speaking his mind, and last year he got into trouble when he criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping's call for the media to show loyalty to the Communist Party.

He was back voicing his opinion on Wednesday, comparing China to North Korea over its rigid household registration system called hukou.

A migrant worker takes last look at where he lived in Beijing

At an annual conference of financial magazine Caijing in Beijing, Ren, 66, said the registration system was "adopted only by a limited number of countries, including China and North Korea", and that Beijing's ongoing eviction of migrant workers was a deluded way to solve the city's problems.

The government is currently getting rid of thousands of migrant workers in mostly the outskirts of the capital, either knocking on doors late at night and giving people 15 minutes to clear out all their stuff before demolishing their homes, or cutting off water and electricity as a sign to move on, just as the cold winter sets in.

The evictions are part of a campaign to address safety threats in the aftermath of a residential fire that killed 19 people last month.

Thousands of migrant workers evicted from Beijing

While the government may think this is an effective way to quickly get rid of people it doesn't want in the city, these migrant workers are crucial cheap labour doing menial jobs that need to be done. Most recently hundreds were evicted from an area near Beijing Capital International Airport where they work.

"The Beijing government once boasted that there was no family with housing problems in the city -- but it was only talking about locals," said Ren, the former chairman of Huayuan Property, a company owned by the Beijing government.

"The biggest problem with China's [housing] market adjustment and control policies is that they are illegitimate," he said.

Ren said there was no law giving the authorities the right to interfere in property prices, but in reality all local governments could cap these prices at a level they deemed appropriate.

A fire in Daxing prompted evictions of migrant workers

However, he added, land sales -- a key source of revenue for local governments -- were left alone, even though they were the main reason property prices had skyrocketed.

"If China doesn't solve the land problem and change the household registration system, all of its so-called long-term [market] mechanisms will be built on sand," he warned.

For years Ren has openly criticized the government's policies to control the property market and other political and social issues. He had 37 million followers on Weibo before his account was deleted in February last year when he questioned why the media should be loyal to the party when news outlets were funded by taxpayer money and so they should serve the public, not the party.

"When did the people's government turn into the party's government? [Are the media] funded by party membership dues?" he wrote at the time.

Following his comments, Ren came under attack by state media, and a news site linked to the Beijing municipal party committee declared he was spreading "anti-Communist Party" thought, and he represented capitalists who sought to topple the party's rule. He was then placed under a year's probation by the party in May and has kept a low profile -- until now.

Will he get in trouble for his criticism of the country's hukou system? Looks like so far so good...

Fact of the Day: Instant Noodle Numbers

China is a big consumer of instant noodles, but not as much as before

When I lived in Beijing 10 years ago, my colleagues would eat fangbian mian (方便麵) or "instant noodles". It was what people loaded up on in supermarkets, buying a dozen at a time -- the same flavour too.

I wondered if they knew these noodles didn't have much nutritional value being deep-fried, but they just thought it was convenient to cook in minutes.

However it seems the Chinese are eating less instant noodles than even three years ago, even though China is still the biggest consumer of the popular food product, according to a 2016 estimate by the World Instant Noodles Association.

Less people eat instant noodles due to healthier food choices

lobally a total of 97.5 billion servings of instant noodles were eaten, with China accounting for nearly 40 percent, while Indonesia was a distant second at 13 billion servings.

However in the past few years, China's consumption of instant noodles has actually dropped by 20 percent. In 2013 the country ate 46.2 billion servings, and 2016 marked the fourth consecutive year of decline, with 38.5 billion servings.

When it comes to per capita consumption, South Korea is number one with 76.1 servings per year for 2016, and China was only 27.7 servings.

There are many reasons for the drop in demand for instant noodles. According to the Straits Times, the rise of the Chinese instant noodle market paralleled "an economic boom that was fueled by the migration of low-cost workers from the countryside."

Others still find instant noodles too convenient not to pass up

But now that the economy has been slowing down these few years, the population of migrant workers has dropped off significantly, many returning to their hometowns. Another reason is the rise of the middle class and they are more health-conscious and can afford better quality food.

The third and probably biggest reason is the rise of online food delivery services that make it so much easier (and cheaper) to order food on their phone than to buy groceries and cook at home.

China's Cheap Labour No More

There are still armies of factory workers -- but they want better pay to stay

On my first day at work in Beijing at a state media company in 2007, my new boss took me out to lunch and I remember him saying the supply of migrant workers was "limitless".

He believed (or wanted me to believe) there was an endless supply of cheap labour for factories.

I was very skeptical -- eventually the country would run out of migrant workers because everyone had one-child families save for ethnic minorities.

Ten years later I wish I could go back to him and say, "Remember you told me the supply of factory workers was 'limitless'? You were completely wrong!"

Workers come from the countryside and are hardly "limitless"

Factory owners are having a tough time not only finding but retaining workers these days.

Rising labour costs have led to a high turnover rate among factory workers. Wuhan University did a survey of factories in Guangdong and Hubei and found 26 percent of workers in the Pearl River Delta had changed jobs.

"With high turnover, they have to pay workers more to retain them," said Albert Park, one of the designers of the survey and is a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The average monthly wages in China rose to 4,126 yuan (US$603.78) per month in 2015, almost comparable to Brazil and much higher than developing economies like India and Vietnam.

In addition, in order to gain subsidies and tax benefits from the government, more than one-third of mainland factory owners try to gain favoritism from the state or the Communist Party. More than half surveyed received government subsidies, which account for 2.6 percent of their sales revenues.

Some factory owners resort to using robots to cut costs

About 23 percent of factory owners do this by serving in local parliaments and political consultative committees, while 39 percent are party members.

Because of rising labour costs, 40 percent of manufacturers in Guangdong and Hubei use robots in production. To Park, this means factory owners aren't sure demand will improve and so they are cautious about making large investments.

How much has changed in a decade! While we're pleased to know migrant workers are earning more money, the cost of living for them has increased too.

What they really need is access to education to further improve their employment opportunities. However, this is the next hurdle that really needs to be tackled so that children of migrant workers will at least see more hope for the next generation in terms of social and economic mobility.

A Migrant Worker's Story

Migrant worker Fan Yusu chronicled her life in a 7,000 character essay

Fan Yusu has had a hard life as a migrant worker and single mother in Beijing.

She left her village in Hubei province and did odd jobs in the Chinese capital as a domestic helper, and went home in a rented 80 square foot flat without running water and raising two daughters.

The 44-year-old penned her experiences in an autobiographical essay entitled, I am Fan Yusu and posted it on a social media literary site on Monday last week.

Within 24 hours, the essay was shared more than 100,000 times and had more than 20,000 comments.

The 7,000 character essay chronicles her experiences over the last 30 years, detailing how a rural woman's life was shaped by massive social and economic change. Her story also raises the issues of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the urban-rural divide, and the violent seizure of farmland to make way for development.

Fan is originally from Xiangyang, a village in Hubei, and began working as a teacher in the village school when she was 12.

When she grew older, she tired of village life and decided to move to Beijing. There she married and had two daughters, but her husband was often drunk and beat her. She couldn't take it anymore and went back to her village, but her brothers would not accept her, because "a married daughter is no longer a member of her parents' family".

So she returned to Beijing, and leaving her daughters in the care of a nursery, she worked as a nanny in a wealthy home.

The tycoon owner had bought the property for his mistress and had borne him two illegitimate children, and Fan looked after a three-month-old girl.

"The mistress lived like a concubine in an imperial court," Fan wrote. "She must please her master without dignity; and lower herself to beg for food."

Fan also wrote about her pain of leaving her own children: "I often had to wake up at midnight to look after the baby girl... and at those moments I couldn't help but miss my own daughters. I often cried. Luckily it was usually midnight and nobody noticed."

She also wrote of her 81-year-old mother, who went to the local government to protest against the seizure of land without sufficient compensation. Her arm was dislocated in the scuffle with officials, but she felt fortunate because younger protesters suffered worse injuries.

In an interview with Beijing Youth Daily, Fan said she was not a writer, and made a living by "working as a coolie". But she said she had a story to tell.

"If by living one means eating, simple people like me can survive by eating sweet potatoes," she wrote. "But what is the meaning of living without thinking of one's soul? You've got to have a dream. Like the traveller who sees light far ahead, you feel happy."

Fan was brave to even upload her story online and now everyone has a good idea of what she has gone through in her first-person account. We need to hear about more of these stories to have a better understanding of not only what migrant workers are going through, but every other person in China -- to have a more comprehensive picture of the people who live in the country, and learn about their struggles and dreams.

Finally Counting Those Left Behind

Many left-behind children are raised by their grandparents

After more than 30 years of "opening up", when paramount leader Deng Xiaoping named Shenzhen a special economic zone where migrant workers left their families to work in factories, the Chinese government has finally decided to look into how many children they left behind since then.

The issue has resulted in children, some now adults, who don't have a proper education and have estranged relationships with their parents, as they only saw them once a year.

Researchers estimate there are more than 60 million of these left-behind children, but the government will try to find out the exact number so that each of the kids can get some kind of assistance, according to China Youth Daily.

The government ministries will also include migrant juveniles, those who followed their parents from the countryside to the city, which could be as many as 36 million.

Some children have to fend for themselves in rural areas

Ni Chunxia, deputy head of the Ministry of Civil Affairs' social affairs department, said there was no authoritative data on the issue, even though it has long been a major social problem.

A number of these children have led lives of juvenile delinquency, or have committed suicide. Last year a boy and three girls, aged between five and 13, who lived in poverty near Bijie, Guizhou, killed themselves by drinking pesticide.

In the same place in 2012, five left-behind boys living on the streets were found dead in a large garbage bin after having inhaled carbon monoxide while burning charcoal to keep warm.

Last month a directive from the State Council ordered local governments to build a database of these children. The authorities must have one file per child, and each updated on a regular basis.

Lawyer Li Ying, director of the Beijing Yuangzhong Gender Development Centre and an activist in helping left-behind children, said having the database was essential in providing better care and support.

Left-behind children don't get much of an education

"After many years of services, I really think that we can't replace parents after all," she said. "We saw many tragedies and learned that the absence of parents not only means  a lack of caring for their daily life, but also a lack of fundamental education, about telling them what's right and what's wrong.

"The authorities should focus more on luring the parents back home, such as creating jobs and improving their social insurance," Li said. "That way their children can enjoy normal family love."

It's shocking three decades later the government is finally taking some interest in this major group of people, and when it comes to security, one would have thought the government would want to pay more attention to them.

These migrant workers are the ones who sacrificed so much to help build the country economically to the world's second-largest economy, and yet the government only now thinks to focus more attention on their left-behind children.

If there are over 60 million of them, imagine how many aren't properly educated, don't have the necessary social skills let alone life skills to become fully-functioning members of society?

Some NGOs have tried to help this group of people, but were previously thwarted by the government through accusing them of not having proper licenses to run schools for children of migrant workers or making it hard for people to donate to charities that want to help them.

Perhaps now the government see the disparity is too great to ignore?

Migrant Labour Crossroads

Young people in rural areas are lured into factories hoping for good pay

When I lived in Beijing from 2007-2010, there was a lot of work for people with little education -- restaurants, factories, security guards, retail. But there didn't seem to be enough work for educated people.

Millions of graduates out of universities were keen to start their careers and wean themselves off of their parents, only to find their wages hardly matched their expectations. They were soon ground down psychologically and for some physically by the monotony of their work. Many were depressed to find they were a tiny cog in a massive machine that kept churning mindlessly in one direction.

When I first arrived in the Chinese capital, my boss enthusiastically said China's economy would continue to boom for sometime because there was a limitless supply of migrant workers from the countryside who would be lured to the city to work.

Many migrant workers find it hard to move up in society

They really are the ones doing the mundane work. There is a steep learning curve in the beginning, not only in how to do their job, but adjusting to city life and hoping not to be taken advantage of. But once they understand the lay of the land and where they fit in society (near the bottom), it's a near impossible climb up.

My boss' prediction was completely false as I predicted, and these days fewer migrants are taking the gamble of moving to the cities. The good thing for them is that factory wages have increased significantly in the last few years, but can migrant workers keep up with factory work becoming less labour intensive and more mechanized?

Do they have enough education to keep up with labour demands?

Development economist Scott Rozelle at Stanford is concerned about this issue.

He and other co-authors have written a paper and found that China does not have a very well educated workforce. From analyzing census data, Rozelle found far fewer migrant workers completed secondary education, contrary to Ministry of Education official figures.

One of the reasons they may be dropping out of school is because the lure of getting a relatively high-paying job, and also many kids of migrant parents living in cities are unable to get a decent education because of hukou or residency permit issues.

Development economist Scott Rozelle

As a result the next generation of migrant workers are going to miss out on job opportunities because there will be a demand for more educated workers.

The paper says:

Wages are rising and low-wage manufacturing is moving out. China is already making plans to become an economy that will be based on higher value-added, high-wage industries. This will mean, of course, that there will be a high demand for skilled labour. International experience demonstrates that individuals will need to have to have acquired skills taught at the level of high school or above if they hope to be competitive in these higher value-added industries. If China fails to endow its labour force with such skills, not only will many individuals have a difficult time finding employment, the newly emerging industries may also falter from a short supply of skilled labour. The whole economy may experience slower development.

This may not be a prediction China's leaders want to come true, but they have not done anything to help migrant workers and their families get a leg-up on society through education and other social benefits.

The authorities seem to purposely keep this segment of the population at the bottom rung of the ladder, thinking China always needs to have cheap labour. They close down schools for migrant children and because of hukou issues, they cannot go to the same schools as Beijing residents, thus creating an even greater social and economic divide.

But if Beijing wants the economy to develop, then its people need to have the right tools to progress along with it. And if migrant workers are left behind in the next step of China's economic development, there will be lots of unhappy people who could spark civil unrest -- the last thing senior officials want to hear.

So why not give migrant workers a chance? It's a win-win situation.