O HAI THAR, SHANGHAI!

Before I leave for Shanghai tonight, I thought I’d fill you in on a 58-12 Design Lab project my friend Tammy and I will be working on during my stay.

Some background:

Massive migration from rural to urban areas has been called “the phenomenon of the century” (Zhang 1998) for China, and constitutes the largest flow of labor out of agriculture in world history (Taylor 2001, p.5).

Beginning in 1978, economic reform in the countryside and the emergence of rural markets gave households in those areas more freedom over the means of production and the allocation of labor. The demand for labor in both rural enterprises and the service sector in urban areas attracted rural workers interested in diversifying their household income to urban areas. The government began to loosen its control on population movement, but still restricted social benefits to cover only the official urban population under the household registration system (the hukou system).

In 1980, the Communist regime started an industrialization process in which urban areas were privileged and its proletarian class enhanced. Urban populations received free access to public health care, education, grain and oil rations, as well as subsidized housing and lifetime employment (Garcia 2004). Meanwhile, the rural population was left to rely on its own resources for its daily necessities and received little aid from the national government. The act of migration does not entitle a peasant to change her formal household registration and has no legal basis. Only temporary residence permits and labor contracts are available for migrants, who are not counted as part of the official population of cities. Interestingly enough, migrant laborers constitute the biggest proportion of the floating population, frequently estimated as being as large as 100 million people (Garcia 2004).

With the 2010 World Expo as a backdrop, we would like to conduct an ethnographic study on the economic and social problems faced by migrant workers in Shanghai. The World Expo in Shanghai highlights socio-economic inequalities within the city. Although China’s wealth and the city’s ability to host the World Expo is a result of migrant workers’ willingness to work long hours for little pay, due to social stigma (and because most cannot afford tickets) surrounding peasant workers, migrant workers won’t be welcomed at the event. Many workers were involved in the construction of Expo pavilions and were evicted from their Shanghai homes for the duration of the World Expo.  

We want to see the ways in which the Expo has addressed issues of poverty, how it has lived up to its motto “Better City, Better Life”, and the ways migrant workers have been affected by it (providing new jobs, evicted from homes, etc.). We realize that we are approaching these topics with a slight bias, and know that despite the seemingly neglectful attitude of the government towards its low-income and often marginalized population, benefits have resulted, as well.

I’ll be updating more on our research as it takes shape. For now, I will enjoy my last day in Los Angeles.

Works Cited:

Garcia, Beatriz C. “Rural-Urban Migration in China: Temporary Migrants in Search of Permanent Settlement.” Portal 1.2 (2004): 1-26.

Taylor, J. Edward 2001, ‘Microeconomics of Globalization: Evidence from Mexico, China, El Salvador, and the Galapagos Islands’ Report to the Latin America and Caribbean Regional Office of The World Bank.

Zhang, Xianchu 1998, ‘Some Legal and Social Issues Concerning the Rural Labour Migration in China’ Unpublished paper.

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