A bit of news from the microblogs last week: the Guangdong government’s plan to abolish use of the label ‘peasant-worker’ (“nongmingong“) to refer to migrant workers in the PRD has stirred up a wave of discussion and critical commentary online. Southern Daily has covered the story.
The nongmingong label appeared in the 1990s in China, and is used to refer to people who come from rural areas, people who make money in cities but lack any recognition of an identity, meaning that they never become citizens of the city in which they live and instead remain known just as “workers”——workers without residence registered by the city.
Most netizens applaud the abolishment of the term, as it is seen as a form of prejudice against peasant (from a rural area) workers. However, a small percentage of netizens insist that the nongmingong itself is just one kind of objective phenomena, and the term has nothing to do with discrimination. Sound familiar, laowai?
This coincides with other recent news which directly impacts nongmingong: the difficulties they’ve had in recent days in trying to purchase a train ticket home for Chinese New Year through the new system allowing tickets to be purchased online, and also through constantly occupied telephone channels. This isn’t just a problem of not being able to get through on the train ticket hotline, but rather symptomatic of the larger issue of migrant workers being unable to benefit from urban development. While they struggle to support their families on their meager wages, they also miss out on welfare, subsidies and other social benefits enjoyed by (registered, recognized) urban residents. What nongmingong lack and need is humane care and an effective protection system.
So, what can be done? Will finding a new and gentle name to replace nongmingong, or the invention of new technologies, make getting “home” any more convenient? Of course not. What they themselves demand is “care, respect and education.”
This is what the government and all PRD citizens should pay attention to, not just the shouting of slogans.
In summary, it comes down to the process of realizing human rights in China, in which there are bound to be gaps or disconnection between ideology and common experience.
