Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: A Generation Of Chinese Workers Struggle To Retire

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

As China's economy slows and optimism fades, aging workers who've spent decades of their lives building up Chinese cities find themselves in a difficult position. They're facing mandated retirement, but have little to show for years of backbreaking work.In this episode of The Sunday Story, NPR correspondent Emily Feng tells the story of migrant workers in China, and brings us the voices of two construction workers who labored in hopes of achieving the Chinese dream, but found it out of reach. Now they wonder: how will they survive in old age?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. My colleague Emily Fang is an international correspondent at NPR. You might have heard some of her reporting. I have been covering China since 2015. I freelanced a little bit first, then I joined a newspaper called the Financial Times, and then I joined NPR. I didn't know what I'd thrown myself into, but I figured it out within about a year. It was a lot of, it was just being on all the time, you know, like your body was like a live wire because there was

just news coming in all the time. Much of that news was about keeping up with all of the geopolitical moves China was making as President Xi Jinping was reshaping China's domestic and foreign policy. And a few years ago, China's economic power was on full display. So a lot of business stories, because at that time, Chinese companies were still going out and buying up assets all over the place. So they were coming to the U.S. and buying like the AMC movie conglomerate. They were buying buildings in New York City. But you could start to see cracks emerging, debts that had not been paid, basically the cost of all that growth, adding up signs that

this openness and this interest in engaging with the rest of the world was starting to change under President Xi Jinping. After years of charting incredible growth, China's economy has finally slowed. This week, all across NPR, we've been telling stories about China and its shifting position in relation to the world. Now, as optimism fades in the country and workers age, many are worried about their futures. Today on the Sunday Story, Emily Fang brings us a closer look behind the headlines of China's stalling economy. We meet two migrant workers who've quietly spent their lives building up Chinese cities. You've got to make money. You've got to work. I've walked my whole life. Stay with us. Now Our Change will honour 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad.

From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're back with the Sunday story. So Emily, for so long, it was just like constant optimism. China is on the rise and the growth felt unstoppable. So how did it get to this point? The answer is property. China built a lot of it and it drove economic growth for decades, but it also created

a huge amount of debt. And now that there is this global economic downturn, China is trying to cut down on domestic debt and the property sector has been hard hit. And relatedly, the construction sector is suffering as well. And you cannot talk about construction in China without talking about the people who are actually doing the building. And almost all of these people are migrant workers. Okay, so it sounds like migrant workers are the force behind urban development. Tell me more about what they do. Yeah, there are an estimated 300 million plus migrant workers across China. They generally do come from rural areas and they work in urban cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou.

Most of them are doing temporary low-wage labor. And back in the 1980s, when China's economy really started liberalizing and taking off on this incredible trajectory, migrant workers were the ones who started off filling in at factories and on assembly lines. Today, they're also working as street sweepers doing repair work. They're waiters and they're running stores and restaurants. They're more and more in the service industries. And of course, as I mentioned before, they're also in construction. In the U.S., when you think of migrant workers, you're thinking of workers coming from other countries to the U.S. for work. But in China, migrant workers are just coming from other parts of the country, rural parts of the country, right?

Yes. Migrant here refers to internal migration within China. And the term applies very widely because technically anyone who is living and working and maybe raising a family outside of the place where they had their household registration is considered a migrant worker in China. And this whole category of migrant workers begins with something called the hukou system. It's been around since the beginning of the People's Republic of China. It's inherited from a Soviet system of central planning, and it basically just means that a person's identity is geographically located. So you're tied to the particular town,

village, or city that you're registered in, which largely depends on where your parents were registered. You mostly inherit their hukou. Back when China's society was much more centrally controlled, your hukou would determine where you got your ration coupons from, where you could spend them to get food, even where you were allowed to live and work. But China's economy is liberalized. Now the hukou system is also more relaxed. And where you are allowed to live and work. But China's economy is liberalized. Now the hukou system is also more relaxed. And the most desirable places to live are big cities like Beijing or Shanghai. People are moving there even though their hukou is not tied to those cities. They can now find housing and work in cities, even if they don't have hukou there. But a big problem remains that cities like Beijing or Shanghai have not completely opened up their social welfare services

or even public education to migrant workers, meaning their kids, for the most part, still cannot go to school there unless they pay out of pocket and go to a private school. This remains a huge problem. But in general, China likes to call all of the people that I've just mentioned migrant workers or the floating population in Chinese because they float in and out of cities depending on where there's work. Like a floating population, like that's a concept that I hadn't thought of before now. I mean, Emily, like, I know you decided to focus on migrant workers

in the construction industry specifically. Why focus on them? I focused on them because over the last more than three decades, China has had this massive building boom. People were moving to the cities from all over the country, and this urban migration meant people needed places to live. They needed more train stations, hospitals, and this created demand for infrastructure, demand that was filled in by these migrant workers. Construction

became a ready source of employment for them. It was hard work, but it was reliable employment. And even when I first moved to Beijing in 2015, construction was still impossible to avoid in the city. Buildings went up, came down all the time. And that meant that there were construction workers everywhere, too. But there were two things that happened while I was reporting in Beijing that showed me just how little of a safety net migrant workers have, including construction workers. Even though they're a big part of the city's development, they don't have a secure hold in the city itself. And that first moment was in the winter of 2017. What happened? This was my third year in China. And there were these big fires in a residential building in the

winter of 2017. And Xi Jinping had just appointed a new mayor of Beijing who decided he was going to improve the safety of the city by ripping out what he called shantytowns on the fringes of Beijing and remove what the city called the low-end population, the di duan ren kou, which really meant the migrant worker population. And the city changed so much over the next six months. I mean, literally sometimes walls would be built in front of doors or windows would be sealed in overnight, bricked up as we called it, because they were not part of the building code, the aesthetic that the mayor wanted. And so basically overnight, I woke up and all of the people

who used to run little stores and restaurants outside of my apartment had vanished because they were all migrant workers. I'm going to guess that the second big moment that you witnessed that shook migrant workers in Beijing was the pandemic. I mean, that shook everybody, but I would imagine it would hit those on the margins the most. Yeah. And the pandemic was especially hard on migrant workers. As new variants began spreading across the country, cities were locking down. Sometimes the lockdowns were building by building. You didn't even know if you could go out and get food. But what really held it all together were migrant workers because they were delivering food and supplies to people who couldn't leave their homes. Some of this was

organized by the government. Most of the time, it was just people trying to figure out how to get food on their own, placing orders, and migrant workers on delivery bikes sending that to apartments. So they faced huge personal health risks, and they were sleeping in awful conditions because they were in contact with so many people they ever seen as a health risk, even though they were doing this public service. Some of them were sleeping on sidewalks because they couldn't find a place to live. They weren't allowed entry back into their apartment complexes. And yeah, it was rough. So, I mean, it seems like they're contributing so much to society. Was the government doing anything to support them? Like, did they have any kind of protections or a safety net? Well, what the pandemic revealed was that there is no social

safety net for migrant workers in China. Much like in the U.S., there is no free public health care system, and so people have to take out private policies. But many migrant workers have almost no savings, or very little, because they were doing low-wage labor. They often could not afford private health care, and in many cases, they cannot afford to stop working. Their employers have, in most cases, not been contributing to a retirement fund, so there are no pension benefits waiting for them either. So that got me thinking again about this nonstop construction industry and the construction workers who were such a crucial

workforce during the boom years. These workers are getting into their late 50s and 60s. They are literally aging on construction sites, still working until they physically cannot. And so my question in this reporting was, what are they going to do? How are they going to afford to retire? After the break, Emily Fang and her producer, Awen Chow, bring us the stories of two migrant workers who are grappling with just this question. How are they going to be able to manage in their old age?

So, old age. We're back with the Sunday story with NPR correspondent Emily Fang. My producer in Beijing, Alwin Tull, and I had been trying to figure out a way to tell this story that went beyond the headlines. And so we looked around and thought, hey, we have all these construction sites in Beijing. And we wondered where these workers go after their job is done and when they're about to retire. And eventually we met two men who wanted to talk with us. This was actually harder than expected because even though migrant workers are everywhere, they're largely silent. They're disenfranchised. They're rarely asked for their opinions on things. They get suspicious when they are asked.

And so it was actually really hard to convince people to talk to us about their day-to-day lives and convince them that we wanted to hear their stories. The first man I spoke to was Liu Zhongxian. He's 58 years old, and we caught him right before a break on a construction site he's working on in Beijing. There is not much I want to say about construction sites. I'm tired. I miss home. Liu told us he came to Beijing in 1990, and he spent most of his life working on dusty construction sites like this one, among scaffolding and cranes.

Back when Liu first started working, construction seemed like the best option for him. Really, it was the only option, other than to stay in his village and work the fields and grow crops. You need to make money, right? So men from his village left one after the other for the cities, and they found work at construction sites. And when they got there, they brought more of their fellow villagers over.

People like us, we all work on the construction sites. It's pretty decent money. How much? Every month, the company pays me about 5,000 to 6,000. I'll send 3,000 to 4,000 home. I keep some money for daily expenses. The rest, I send home to raise the family.

Liu is talking about the Chinese yuan. So with the current conversion rate, that's about 800 US dollars a month. He's done this work for long enough that he manages other workers now, about 80 to 90 people at a time. And it's been a lonely life, living in unfamiliar places on unfinished construction sites. Three decades in, he still works 10 hours a day, five hours in the morning, then five hours in the afternoon, and he gets a break in the middle of the day. After work, I do nothing. You see, it's so hot in the middle of the day.

You eat and try to sleep right away. At night, after dinner, maybe you've got a bit of time to shower, then you lie down with your phone for a while, then you're asleep. We are just migrant workers. We don't have high standards for ourselves. Most of the time, we just want to lie in the bed and look at what's on TikTok or watch the news. Really, that's it. That's all we have energy for. Liu is frugal. He lives in worker dormitories.

He eats most of his meals in the workers' cafeteria. But still, there's never enough money to go around, and he worries about the future. Especially because the state of the construction industry just is not looking good. China's economy is plateauing, and the property sector in particular is under tough new rules that are bankrupting developers. It's bad. It used to be better. Now it's not good. There's few sites, less work.

It's harder to make a living. Since last year, it started getting bad. This year, it's even worse. Let's see. Let's see if I can save money these next few years. Let's see. Liu has good reason to worry. He feels time is running out for him.

Recently, cities have new rules banning men above the age of 60 years old from working on construction sites. So he's facing a mandated retirement pretty soon. But after a lifetime of work, he's not eligible for any pension or unemployment benefits, and he's got no health insurance. And the thing that stuck with me when we asked Mr. Liu what he would do if he got sick is, in the over 30 years he's been building cities, he hasn't visited the hospital or seen a doctor in Beijing even once. He always goes home to the village instead. And that's, of course, because he does not have medical benefits in this city where he's worked for more than half his life. I was thinking about that, how Liu never went to a hospital in the more than 30 years he lived in the capital. We met another migrant worker named Song Aimin, whose first job in construction was actually building a hospital,

more than 40 years ago. The Anzhen Hospital cafeteria had everything you'd ever want to eat. They have noodles, bread, rice, cooked dishes. They had everything. It didn't cost much. You didn't have to spend much to fill your stomach. Not like now. Life was decent back then.

Back then, people from the villages, all of us wanted to live to go find work in the cities. Laboring in the cities, at least, you always ate well, better than you ate back home. Song was pretty nostalgic. He said the Beijing of the 1980s was a completely different city. It was far less built up, and it was much less cosmopolitan then. He and his generation of workers never had a home in the city he helped construct. They slept in company-provided dormitories, and they sometimes even just laid down a cot somewhere on the construction site to sleep.

When he was reminiscing about his early days, I asked him a simple question. How did we shower? Well, you would have to spend money to go to the bathhouse to wash. In the summer, you could just splash yourself with some cold water. In the winter, you might boil some water, get a big basin, and use that for a quick bath. That's it. He spent decades moving from city to city wherever construction work took him, out to places like Shandong province in the northeast,

all the way up to Ningxia province in the west of China. And the thing that motivated Song through all these years of work was this fuzzy idea of a better future for his family. The hope I had for change was that maybe one day I might rise up the ladder and eventually go to work at an official job in the main office of a construction company, and they'd really invest in me, in my retirement or something. Then when I got old, I might have something to live on. But the way I worked, I have nothing now, to tell you the truth. If I work, they give me money. When I stop work, they give me nothing. When I retire, I get nothing at all.

And aging workers across China are in this bind right now. More and more people actually will be because China's workforce is aging faster than demographers expected. Chinese government statistics show nearly 30% of migrant workers are 50 years old and above. That's almost 90 million workers. And keep in mind, the official retirement age for men in China is 60 and as young as 50 years old for a woman. Liu and Song both told me they chose this life more than anything else for their families. Over the years, they sent most of their money home, and they only rarely got to spend time with their wives and their kids.

Song said he would go home only when he was needed to help with the harvest or during holidays. When I went home, usually I arrived late at night, and the kids wouldn't even know that I was coming home. Missing my kids is useless. If you don't make money, how can you live? Try not to think about it.

For both Song and Liu, they see education, not work, as a way out and up for their children. Of course, I want my children to live a good life. But it's not up to me. It's all on them,

their abilities. You can't tell the future. Just have to see if they do well in school. It's what's in their hearts. If they want to keep studying, then that's good. Of course, we in countryside all want that.

I don't want them to be farmers. Who wants their children to be farmers, right? But also, they had limited ability to influence their children, because after all, they were separated from their children for most of the year. They were living in different cities, different realities, working. I've talked to them many times before. I said, study, change your destiny. If you don't study, you won't be able to make it in the world. But they couldn't hear me, and there's nothing I could do. This phenomenon of going out to work far away from your family is so common in China,

there's a term for their children. They're called left-behind children, or 留守儿童. And Mr. Song seems to feel some regret about leaving his children behind because even though he graduated from high school, his children only got a middle school education. His son now raises sheep and his daughter is working in a local factory in the village making toys. And without a safety net, it will probably be these children who will bear the costs of supporting him. Now Song is 64 years old, so he's returned home to his village in Hebei province, which is just north of Beijing. And that's where we reached him by phone. And I could tell after a while of chatting that he'd never been asked before to reflect on his life and what all these

years of work meant to him. What kind of story can you tell about hard work? It's just labor, there's no story here. I've worked my whole life. Without migrant workers from the countryside, China wouldn't have developed so quickly, right? He did not think he'd still be working at this point in his life. At first I thought, when the kids grow up, when I'm 55 or so, I'll just stay home and farm. But then I saw how my money wasn't worth anything. You call this money? The money isn't enough to spend. So I had to go out again. He's picked up a job as a part-time security guard in his village, pulling late-night shifts,

which gives him a lot of time to think about the past and the future. And the future, it's constantly on Liu's mind as well. When I'm old, unless I have my own savings, I got to rely on my son or daughter. Or maybe he will need to keep earning his own keep. I can't say now. I mean, if there's nothing in construction, I will have to come up with a way to make money at home. Maybe it's not much, but you've got to make money. You've got work. You cannot make money.

A few years back, he started to plan ahead, and Liu started saving some money through an opt-in program called Xinonghe. This is a state-run pension program specifically for farmers and migrant workers who might not have formal employment and therefore no formal employment benefits. But the program does not pay out much. So to put numbers to it, Liu will get about 100 Chinese yuan or just about 15 US dollars each month from that when he retires. Which means for now, Liu keeps shouldering on. And on the construction sites where he supervises workers, what he sees are lots of people just like him.

Look around. There are no young people in this construction industry. Nobody in their 30s. We are all in our 50s or up. Young people don't want to do this work. You know, now these young people, none of them want to come out here and put in such hard labor. They say, I will make less money, but I will suffer less.

That was a different time when our generation could suffer. Young generation, they can't suffer like we did. That's life. It's not easy. You throw yourself into making money your whole life. Some people are successful, but for people like us, it's mostly hard labor. Lying down at night, looking at my phone, that's the happiest time. There's no happy times at construction sites.

Meanwhile, Song, at home in his village, had this to say about where he ended up. My grandkids, if they can get out of here, I hope they do. Let's see if they can make it. It's on them. I hope. Then they go anywhere but stay here in the countryside. What good could come out of staying in the village? Look at me.

My whole life I've labored in the cities, and it's still the same. I'm still in this spot. I'm still just a peasant. That's all I am. Just a farmer walking the soil. As in his dream of moving up in the world and becoming part of the middle class. After a lifetime of work, that dream is now over. Thank you so much, Emily, for bringing us these stories. It's really rare to hear directly from these workers who are often in the background of these stories about China.

So thanks for bringing them to the forefront so we could hear about their choices and their sacrifices in their own words. It was really humbling to get to meet them because their story is the story of China. You know, they live through these extraordinary social and economic changes. And really, it's because of them that China changed. This episode was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. The engineer for this episode was Gilly Moon.

The voiceover actors were Songhee Liu and Liu Wei. Thanks to NPR's Asia editor Vincent Nee and producer Alwyn Chow. Our team includes Liana Simstrom and Andrew Mambo. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. We always love hearing from you so feel free to reach out to us at thesundaystoryatnpr.org. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow in your feed with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.