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《时代周刊》等分析中国经济特别是失业问题
When China's President Hu Jintao made his first official visit to Washington in April of 2006, he encountered a string of diplomatic snafus that culminated in enduring several minutes of screaming from a protester admitted into the media stand. Still, U.S. officials say he and President George W. Bush developed a genuine personal rapport. At one point, Bush asked his counterpart which of the numerous challenges China faced was the most serious — which one kept Hu awake at night worrying. "Unemployment," Hu reportedly answered without hesitating.
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These days, Hu must be suffering from serious insomnia. When that meeting in Washington took place, China's economy was still expanding at a double-digit rate, creating enough jobs every year that many of the 20 million new job seekers who entered the market found some sort of gainful employment. Now GDP growth has dipped to around 9% and is expected to decline further as the worldwide financial crisis transmogrifies into a global recession. Already, scores of Chinese factories producing consumer goods like toys and plastics goods have shuttered in the southern industrial powerhouse of Guangdong, and thousands of unemployed workers have made their displeasure known with rowdy demonstrations last month.
It's a situation that is only going to get much worse in the next few months, as the number of unemployed balloons. According to estimates by the Dongguan City Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, 9,000 of the 45,000 factories in the cities of Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen — the heart of China's industrial south — are expected to close before the Chinese New Year in late January. That could mean up to 2.7 million workers facing unemployment, the association said. And they called that number "conservative."
Finding jobs for millions of unemployed is "the biggest challenge [China's] leadership faces" says David Dollar, head of the World Bank's China office in Beijing. The current crisis has greatly accelerated a process that was already underway as China's economy has been shedding low-level factory jobs to transition to manufacturing higher value-added products and jobs in the service industry. "In a way, the crisis could work out well for China. It has the potential to help in rebalancing the economy away from production" to the creation of more jobs in the service sector, says Dollar. If GDP growth slows further to 8%, the government still can hit its job creation targets, but the speed with which the adjustment happens will be critical, he says. "We're going to learn just how well the capital and labor markets work in China. The concern is if the adjustment is very quick, it could be difficult."
There have already been indications of what exactly "difficult" might mean. On October 18, some three thousand laid-off migrant workers demonstrated outside the gates of a shuttered toy factory owned by Hong Kong company Smart Union Group (Holdings). The workers were demanding the payment of over $3 million in back wages. With the factory managers apparently having fled to Hong Kong, the Dongguan city government was eventually forced to announce that it would guarantee their payment.
That day, the protest passed peacefully. But the government's overriding concern is that such protests could become violent and even spread. China, by its own admission, suffers tens of thousands of what the government describes as "mass incidents," or protests involving large numbers of demonstrators, and the majority take place in the countryside. Should they begin to occur in the cities, "we would be witnessing the most severe challenge the Communist leadership has faced in many, many years," says Beijing based scholar Russell Leigh Moses. "Stability has been taken for granted by outsiders, but cadres are well aware of how dependent their power is on economic growth. This is a going to be a very real test of the government's capacity."
A Blue Christmas at China's North Pole
At about six o'clock Thursday evening, around what used to be quitting time for the day shift at the He Jun toy factory in Dongguan, China, 40-year-old Wei Dong Li made his way to the factory's front entrance, his three-year-old son Qian Jie tugging at his sleeve. The factory is now closed; a few security guards stand inside the locked gate. Posted each evening at the front entrance is a sheaf of documents: the latest rulings from a local court on compensation claims filed by many of He Jun's 4,000 workers, Wei included. "They process a few of them a day, so I come back every other day to check and see if my case is on the list," Wei says. He has no luck again. "I'll just wait some more," he says. "I have nothing else to do at this point."
Dongguan, along with a handful of similar, nearby towns, is the real Santa's factory at the North Pole. A sprawling, charmless city of 7.5 million that sits 80 km southeast of Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong in southern China, Dongguan produces a vast amount of the toys that will end up under Christmas trees around the world. Toys were one of the critical, low-wage, low-tech industries on which China built its economic ascent over the past 30 years. But as workers such as Wei know better than anyone, 2008 is the year that that part of China's miracle has come to an end.
It's been six weeks since He Jun, a Hong Kong-listed company, shuttered two of its biggest factories in China — suddenly and without any warning, former workers say. They were among the latest and largest factory closures in China's battered low-end industries: toy manufacturers, textile companies and shoe makers most prominent among them. China's steadily appreciating renminbi currency — which makes Chinese goods more expensive in key exports markets like the U.S. — as well as higher costs embedded in a new labor law enacted last year were already wreaking havoc with companies that survived even in the best of times on the thinnest of profit margins. Now, with a global recession gathering pace, the best of times are gone, and the pain in what had been booming areas in southern China is spreading quickly. Fully half of China's toy exporters, which sent nearly $8 billion worth of Barbies and Thomas the Tank Engines to export markets in 2007, were driven out of business in the first seven months of this year, Beijing's General Administration of Customs said in a recent report. In the city of Shenzhen, the other major manufacturing center in Guangdong province, 50,000 people have already lost their jobs this year. And in Beijing last week, Zhang Ping, chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the nation's key economic policy-making body, bluntly warned that "excessive production cuts and business closures will cause massive unemployment and that will lead to instability."
In Dongguan, it already has. Earlier last week, on the evening of November 25, another large toy manufacturer here, Kai Da Manufacturing, laid off more than 600 of its workers because of slowing production. According to participants and eyewitnesses to what followed, a large group of the workers gathered in the front courtyard of the factory demanding to know what compensation they would receive. At first, a company manager told them that anyone with a good work record and less than five years service would receive less than 10,000 RMB—less than $1,500 at today's exchange rates. Anyone with over seven years on the line and a good record would get 12,300 RMB or about $1,800.
Those gathered were furious at what one worker, who gave his name as Mr. Shao (he declined to provide his full name), described as "the pittance they are offering us." They refused to leave the plant, and according to eyewitnesses, security guards started to get aggressive, pushing and shoving them to leave. At that point, Shao says, "things got out of control." Workers fought back against the security guards, who quickly called the local police for assistance. Then more workers joined in. Some moved into the factory's office and began breaking windows and computers. When the police showed up, they were immediately on the defensive. Two squad cars were overturned and trashed, as were five police motorcycles. The police called in reinforcements, and five workers ended up getting beaten badly, an eyewitness said. (Dongguan police declined comment on the riot.) The violence lasted over an hour before police restored order.
And order, above all, is what the Chinese government is concerned about. Episodes like the one at Kai Da in Dongguan have become jarringly frequent in southern China in recent months, and the NRDC's Zheng, in his press conference yesterday in Beijing, made the government's nervousness plain. The central government is pressuring provincial authorities to make sure employers pay severance according to the law, and in cases where they don't, to step in and pay workers themselves. (Several provincial governments, according to Chinese press reports, have in turn complained that they don't have the needed funds to make extensive severance payments as the number of unemployed workers mounts.)
That's the reason Wei Dong Li of He Jun shows up at the closed factory gate each evening, awaiting the court's ruling on how much he and others should be paid. "The [local] government has told us that this issue will be resolved by the end of this month, so I should find something out soon from the court [about the severance]." But he acknowledges he doesn't have much faith that the authorities will come through with any assistance, and in the meantime, his money is running out. "I've posted my resume online for a month now, but it's very hard to find a job around here these days. I've had no responses."
Soon, he acknowledged, he may have to join the exodus out of Guangdong province of migrant workers, now jobless, headed back to their hometowns in less prosperous parts of the country. This exodus — the reversal of more than two decades of migration from poor rural areas to faster-growing, coastal cities — is most visible at the Guangzhou train station, where hundreds of migrants, all bearing suitcases and shopping bags crammed with all their worldly belongings, now sit outside for hours waiting to board their trains home. On the evening of Nov. 26, Zhang De Jun, 35, was one of them. For 10 years, he said, he worked in a sweater factory not far from Dongguan. His wife, seated next to him, worked in a toy factory, but had lost her job, too. Like millions of other migrants, Zhang said each month he'd send part of his salary of 2,000 RMB home to his extended family, who live outside Chongqing in Sichuan province. Asked what he will do when he gets back, Zhang took a drag on his cigarette and muttered: "I'll do what I used to do. I'll work in the fields."
Since its reforms started 30 years ago, China hasn't been able to keep peasants down on the farm anymore — and that was a resounding sign of success. Now, as Christmas approaches, China's North Pole is shutting down, and millions may have to stream back to the farms. For the leaders in Beijing and in the provinces, that's not success. That's trouble.
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