Would-Be Migrants in Post-Socialist Northeast China

As a figure of the everyday life, the would-be migrant is always context-specific. This article portrays would-be migrants in northeast China of the late 2000s. I chose northeast China, particularly Liaoning province, as the main research site because of the sudden surge of outmigration in the region since the early 1990s. In 2011, Liaoning sent out 20,798 migrants through 138 intermediaries that were licensed by the Ministry of Commerce, making it the fifth largest among all provinces in terms of outmigrants (CHICA 2012: 13) and the second largest in terms of number of intermediaries, far ahead traditional emigration provinces in southeast China (15 intermediaries in Guangdong, 30 in Zhejiang and 37 in Fujian; CHICA 2011: 9–10, Table 1.3). My informants estimated that one third of all Chinese who went to Japan in the 2000s were from the northeast. A college student in Japan originally from Shanghai was teased by friends when he visited home for acquiring the north-eastern accent. Shanghainese are known for their cultural sensitivity and local chauvinism, but what could the student do: “I [even] didn't realise I had a north-eastern accent as I was mingling with north-easterners in the college, at work, and everywhere!”

Prior to the 1990s, the northeast had no tradition of outmigration or even internal migration. As the national base of heavy and military industries, referred to as ‘the eldest son of the People's Republic’, the region lived through archetypical state socialism that was characterised by extremely low level of mobility. In 1995, nearly 90 per cent of all employees in Liaoning were working in formal work units, including 62 per cent in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and 27 in collective enterprises (Yu Qiuhua and Yu Yi 2004: 44). The situation changed dramatically in the early 1990s when some SOEs were privatised, and in 1998 the government introduced large-scale layoff programs. Liaoning planned to lay off 1.2 million workers between 1998 and 2000, equivalent to nearly 1,700 every single day (Communist Party of China Liaoning Provincial Committee and Liaoning Provincial People's Government 1998), and the actual number of SOE employees decreased from nearly 7 million in 1995 (Liaoning Bureau of Statistics 1996: 410, Table 2–5) to just over 3 million in 2011 (Liaoning Bureau of Statistics 2012: 418, Table 2–3).

Privatisation encouraged outmigration in two ways. First, working overseas was seen by both government and individuals as an alternative employment opportunity for the laid-off. Second, and more importantly, privatisation widened social inequality to an unprecedented level in a matter of years. State assets were turned into the private hands of those who had connections, making them millionaires overnight; at the same time ordinary workers who had spent all their lives in the same factory suddenly became jobless. Everyone felt that they had to capture the moment to ‘make a cut’ in this environment of post-socialist primitive accumulation. Migration was an opportunity for the ordinary people who had no connections.

Some were pushed out because of the sense of social anomie created by privatisation. A junior official working in Shenyang told me that his daughter had to go overseas because China is too “chaotic”:

It is important to stress that such primitive accumulation as witnessed in China in the late twentieth century was different from that in eighteenth century England or that in post-communist eastern Europe in the 1990s. The process of privatisation in China started from a relatively egalitarian base. Most people had access to a means of livelihood, and urban residents often had some savings as a result of years of stable wages, high levels of welfare provisions and artificially low living costs (Lee Reference Lee2007). My field data suggests that about 80 per cent of would-be migrants were able to use their own or immediate family's savings to finance migration, less than 10 per cent needed to borrow all the money, and the rest combined the two. As the saving rate among the general population was high (a net saving of 36,500 Chinese renminbi [RMB], or 6,000 US dollars [USD] per capita at the end of 2011 in Liaoning; Liaoning Bureau of Statistics 2012: 414, Table 1–1), borrowing was relatively easy. People in the cities normally borrowed from relatives and friends without any interest rates, and those in the countryside paid an annual interest rate between 1 and 2 per cent. Life-time security was gone for ever, but the laid-off did not become completely dispossessed proletarians (c.f. Harvey Reference Harvey2005; Solinger Reference Solinger2002; Reference Solinger2003).

Other reforms were also fuelling change. Urban housing reform which started in 1998, encouraged citizens to purchase state-owned housing which up until then they had been renting at subsidised prices. As a result most Chinese citizens for the first time possessed property certificates, which were widely used as security in dealing with recruitment agents, loan creditors, and foreign embassies. In the countryside, house property certificates and certificates for contracts over land or forests were introduced in the 2000s. Regarding regulation of international migration, ordinary Chinese could for the first time apply for passports for private purposes in 1986.Footnote ³ During the 1990s the application procedure was gradually simplified. Nearly twenty administrative procedures were cut out, and by 2005 most urban residents were able to apply for a passport by presenting their ID cards. The Passport Law effective from January 2007 enshrined every citizen's legal entitlement to possess a passport.

Thus, the state-led, top-down, market-oriented economic reform was both drastic and carefully orchestrated; both dispossessing and enabling. Due to the double nature of privatisation, the competition for opportunities was particularly fierce in intensity, and massive in scale. Everyone had some resources, had some hope, and had a strong sense of entitlement to participate in the competition. The would-be migrants in the northeast, unlike their southeast counterparts, had a large urban population, instead of being mainly concentrated in a small number of villages. They were both more anxious and more hopeful than other groups of would-be migrants.

What concerned the would-be migrants in the northeast the most were two things: money and risk. In the late 2000s, the average cost for going to Japan, Singapore and South Korea to work on a 2–3 year contract was USD $8,000, including intermediaries fees and airfare. Why were the would-bes willing to pay so much for the low-wage jobs while the living standards in China were increasing fast? After paying the money, what the would-be migrants feared most was that the intermediaries would vanish with the money. When this happened, the victim often became the butt of jokes and felt ashamed. Why was this so? While the discussion about money is about the would-bes' actions and calculations, the analysis on shame is about how the would-be was perceived by the larger community. A figure becomes a figure only when he/she is seen by others. A figure is simultaneously an actor and a sign.

In exploring and discussing aspects and perspectives of ‘risk’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘shame’ that are bound up with what it means to be a would-be migrant, this article is based on field research in Liaoning carried out between July 2004 and November 2007, and documentary studies that continue to date. More specifically, the fieldwork was conducted in five places: Beijing, Shenyang (capital of Liaoning province), a prefecture, a county under the prefecture, and finally a few townships and villages in the county. Most of the would-be migrants were met through recruitment intermediaries: private companies, individual and sometimes public institutions (for instance township government or vocational training schools) who recruited workers for overseas jobs for fees. In addition, I visited Singapore, South Korea and Japan to interview migrants as well as recruiters, employers, government officials, and NGO activists. Some of the would-be migrants' experiences were reconstructed based on interviews with actual migrants and returnees. In total, more than 200 informants were interviewed in the four countries. Each in-depth, unstructured interview lasted from thirty minutes to three hours.

The Would-Be in a Rush: “The Last Bus for the First Barrel of Gold”

Sun Dianjun, a 27 year old man from rural Liaoning, sold his house inherited from his parents for USD $5,000 and his wife's food stall in the city for USD $3,300, to pay for the fees to come to Singapore. It was only after arrival did he discover that the salary was USD $550 a month, which meant that he would never be able to earn the money back. In the end he decided to return to China long before the contract date. Sun did ask the intermediary in China how much he could make in Singapore before he paid the fee. The answer: “You may well fish up the first barrel of gold in your life”. This hit Sun. “First barrel of gold” – evoking the image of the nineteenth century California gold rush – was a popular metaphor in China in the early 2000s. It stood for the much desired first breakthrough in primitive accumulation. The exorbitant fee was thus seen as an investment. Only those who had the guts to make such risky investments, it was believed, deserved big rewards.

While the would-be migrants were highly entrepreneurial in pursuing migration, they were rather conservative in envisioning their lives after return. The most common aspiration for lives after return was to become a proprietor, or petty rentier capitalist, who would live on fixed assets such as a shop place or a car rented out as a taxi. These assets would hopefully buy them security: “You work hard to earn the money [overseas], and now you should ask the money to earn for you”, as one would-be put it. Most would-be migrants planned to return to China partly because strict government regulation in the destination countries made overstay nearly impossible, but primarily because one would not need to work hard any more by returning. Once having ‘the first barrel of gold’ in hand, it was believed, gold would yield gold in a frenzy of growth. The would-be migrants took risks now to avoid future risks; they were ready to work hard overseas in order not to work in the future. The would-bes thus looked rather different from the “beacons of modernity” (Nyiri Reference Nyiri2010: 105), or the “pioneers of development” (Nyiri Reference Nyiri2010: 106) as the Chinese state and western literature commonly portray migrants.

The would-bes held such contradictory attitudes because their migration projects were first and foremost driven by the fear about the present, rather than by visions about the future or by imaginations about foreign lands. They feared being left out in the fierce competition for resource. During the 1990s the Chinese reforms turned from being a project of ‘wealth creation’ that benefited the majority, to being a period in which wealth became concentrated among a few (Sun Liping Reference Liping2003; Reference Liping2004); a shift entrenched by the large-scale SOE privatisation. Li Qiang (Reference Qiang2005) aptly depicted the structure of the Chinese society as an inverted ‘T’ that consisted of a massive low-income population and a tiny minority who possess disproportionately large amounts of wealth on the top. Channels of upward mobility for ordinary people became ever narrower. Small household businesses, the pioneering forces of the urban economic reform in the 1980s, were marginalised and had to struggle hard in order to survive. The number of household enterprises in Liaoning remained stagnant (1.5 million) between 2000 and 2010, while private enterprises that hired eight or more employees increased by four fold during the same period, and their share of GDP increased from 24 to 75.5 per cent (Liaoning Bureau of Statistics 2011: 117). Capital-intensive, large-scale private enterprises – many were privatised SOEs – were the dominant sector of growth. Many would-be migrants of the 2000s could have been household entrepreneurs of the 1980s.

Would-be migrants decided to invest in migration for very diverse reasons, but they shared the perception that they would not be able to “make it” – to change their lives as they wished – by staying in China. One would-be wanted to go simply because he had savings of RMB 50,000 (USD $8,300):

The social stratification of the 1990s and 2000s not only took place in terms of wages, but also along the level of socioeconomic security. Most of the would-be migrants had jobs, and some had decent salaries, close to USD $165 a month, but their jobs were precarious. Of the new jobs created in Liaoning in the 2000s, only 10 per cent were of formal employment, 20 per cent were self-employed and, alarmingly, 70 per cent were so-called “flexible employment,” namely odd jobs without social benefits.Footnote ⁴ As a typical example of flexible employment, a freelance salesperson, was paid USD $26 a month plus a bonus determined by his/her sales performance. In contrast, the average annual wages at a SOE increased by nearly eight times from 1995 to 2011 (from USD $886 to USD $6,665, according to 2014 exchange rates) (Liaoning Bureau of Statistics 2012: 419, Table 2–6; 1996: 422, Table 2–9). Secure jobs were valued so much that they were for sale at high prices. I met a college graduate who paid at least USD $5,000 (as a bribe) for a formal job in a company in 2006. The going rate for a job as a high school teacher was USD $8,300, and a probationary college lectureship, USD $12,000. Indeed, intermediaries often cited the ‘prices’ of the formal jobs to justify the fees for going overseas. What was lacking was not job opportunity per se, but long-term security.

Overseas jobs were appealing because they were supposed to be more predictable than those in China. Mr. Mai, originally a factory worker, set up a small furniture repairing team that hired four workers in 1992, then ran a laundry shop, followed by an adventure with a restaurant business, finally he decided to spend all his savings to go overseas. He explained: “The difference between working overseas and working in China is that, [while you are] overseas, as long as you work hard, you can always earn money.” Migration was desirable not because it would create new entrepreneurial opportunities, but because it might render future entrepreneurism unnecessary.

The fear about being left behind and socioeconomic insecurity was experienced as fear about time; an acute ‘last bus’ mentality as the Chinese put it. It was feared that if one missed the bus now, one would miss out on everything. The selling off of state assets created a strong perception that if one does not grab the ‘first barrel of gold’ at this critical moment, there would be no chance to catch up later. The gate to wealth accumulation and economic security was getting narrower day by day. Every passing bus was the last bus. One had to migrate now if one wanted to migrate at all, otherwise the cost would increase, the savings from overseas would be worth less because wages in China were increasing and the Chinese renminbi (RMB) was to appreciate. One had to rush through the gate before it was shut. Many would-bes told me that they did not mind paying even more for a quicker placement. The USD $8,000 was not only for an overseas job, but was for snapping the opportunity quickly. The would-be were eager to work overseas not because China lagged behind the world, but because China was developing too fast.

The fear of missing the last bus was compounded by the fear about one's age. The biological clock was ticking loud. A woman in her late twenties quit a job in Shenyang and paid more than USD $6,500 to go to Singapore as a factory worker in 2006. She provided a telling analysis: “In China we are ‘eating spring rice’Footnote ⁵ . You can find jobs when you are in your twenties. The thirties may be okay. After thirty five, no one will give you good jobs unless you have skills.” She felt compelled to take the risk to go overseas before her spring rice turned cold.

Migration was thus a temporal rather than spatial project. Migration was expected to change one's life not by bringing them to a new land but by escalating their wealth accumulation thus enabling them to join the rapid development in China. It was no longer about American or Japanese dreams. It was about Chinese dreams. The transnational migration projects were always China-rooted and China-oriented, and they enabled one to skip over the present.

“Just think of the three years as if I were in jail,” Liu Lan, a woman in her late forties in Liaoning said as she described to me how she felt about her plan of going to Italy to work as a domestic maid. It would be an agony to leave her only teenager daughter behind, but she had to go because the daughter was going to college soon and she needed the money to pay the tuition fee. Otherwise, as a laid-off worker from a state-owned factory and now a part-time cleaner in a small hotel, Liu saw little hope of improving her life and especially that of her daughter. For Liu, the meaning of life was entirely defined by the future. Migration did not have intrinsic value in itself; it was useful only as a fast way to rush through the present. The present was a burden, and migration displaced the present for the future.

The Would-Be Stuck: Victims Who Became a Laughing Stock

The would-be migrants' worst nightmare was that unscrupulous intermediaries would take their money and disappear. They were not only worried about money; failed would-bes felt ashamed, or as my informants put it, “cannot raise the head” in front of neighbours. A Mr. Wang paid nearly USD $8,300 to go to Singapore in 2007 but returned home two weeks later empty handed. The job that he was promised didn't exist. The family was in a debt USD $3,300. When Wang was talking to me in the bedroom, his wife, who was washing her hair over the stove in the kitchen, shouted at him across the thin, splitting, wooden divide: “You even have the face (lian) to tell others about this!” Wang walked me out; a neighbour stared at us with a mischievous grin. The neighbour might have thought that I was a migrant agent, and he was probably eager to see what would happen next. With these eyes on the street, I, too, felt I could not raise my head.

As Wang's wife made clear, failed would-bes lost lian rather than mianzi. Lian and mianzi both means ‘face’, but have very different connotations. Mianzi, the rough equivalent of the English notion of ‘face’ as elaborated by Goffman (Reference Goffman1955), indicates appearance, impression, or status. In contrast lian stands for one's moral character. The loss of lian “makes it impossible for [one] to function properly within the community” (Hu Reference Hu1944: 45).Footnote ⁶ One can ‘earn’ mianzi back after losing it, but one can hardly do so with lian. As such, lian is associated with shame as opposed to embarrassment. The shame of the failed would-be migrants was obviously a shame without guilt. But this made the shame even more damaging. Guilt is caused by a particular action; shame indicates something wrong about the person.Footnote ⁷ Because of the acute sense of shame, fellow villagers sometimes tried to hide failed would-bes from outsiders. When I talked to a distant relative of Wang's about Wang, the relative's wife scolded him: “Why do you always have to stir you tongue [gossiping or talking nonsenses] like this! People don't like you talking of these kind of things!”

Why were the victims looked down on? Isn't it all too clear that the failure was caused by somebody else? The villagers' explanation was straightforward: “Why have others gone overseas successfully but you can't?” Something must be wrong about you. Failed would-be migrants were commonly associated with the lack of capability, having ‘high heart’ (xinqi gao, excessively ambitious), or ‘following the wind’ (genfeng, susceptible to others' influence). The failure simply proved the victim's problematic personality that people already knew. This was particularly true in the case of women: even successful female migrants were sometimes profiled negatively, which almost never happened to men. Although women made up less than 20 per cent of all Chinese migrant workers (Centre for International Exchange 2005) and 30 per cent among those from Liaoning (Liaoning Province Bureau of Labour and Social Security 2005), female migrants were so frequently mentioned that I had once thought that they could outnumber men. Women attracted so much attention partly because a large part of them – up to 90 per cent as asserted by one informant – were divorcees. A typical line of reasoning went like this: these women divorced because they had ‘high hearts’, for instance complaining that their husbands were earning too little, they then followed the wind, and some had to pay the price.

However, not all losers were treated in this way. One would win genuine sympathy if one fell ill or had a failed harvest. In explaining the difference, a taxi driver from the neighbouring village of Wang's described how people saw international and internal migrations differently:

A former primary school teacher, who worked in Japan for three years, was rather philosophical in summarising people's ambiguous attitude toward migration: “If you want extra [things], more than other people, and you fail, this means that you should have known that you are the same as most people, you should have been content. [If everyone is content] the ordinary people feel happier.” Thus would-be migrants were problematic because they challenged the status quo. This explanation is similar to classical anthropological studies that have interpreted shame as a cultural code that prevents transgression of norms.Footnote ⁸ However, the trouble with this explanation is that successful outmigration – a disruption of the status quo – was celebrated in the community. Those who succeeded gave lavish banquets in pride, and fellow villagers may congratulate them with gifts and even money in red envelopes. In a time of primitive accumulation, discontent over the status quo and others' desire to move ahead was acceptable.

Both would-be migrants and others cited ‘red eyes’ (envy) as a main reason for laughing at the victims. One villager articulated it in this way: “If you really manage to go overseas and make money, my eyes turn red in my heart but I have to praise and admire you on my lips. If you fail now, ha! Good! This is the chance for me to laugh at you.” A retired village accountant echoed this interpretation: “If your luck struck this time, you would earn money and turn around to look down at us. This time your luck didn't strike.” He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Red eye’ is different from the ‘evil eye’, which is the sorcerous expression of envious malice that must be deflected. The Chinese red eye is largely harmless, and is often associated with the notion of bu fu. Literally ‘refusal to obey’, bu fu means resenting others' success or authority without being able to question it. Behind the sentiments of ‘red eyes’ was a deep sense of ambiguity about migration in the late 2000s. On the one hand, migration was supposed to be valuable in itself because it brings about economic success. Economic success was by definition good. If one questions others' success, a third party simply shot back, “Why don't you do it if you had the capacity?” Actions are evaluated almost solely by their monetary outcomes. Effortless success was conspicuously celebrated; if would-be migrants somehow obtained visas unexpectedly smoothly, they would give out especially lavish banquets. In contrast, failure after serious attempts was particularly shameful. Not only had the efforts no value in themselves, but they also showed the losers' incapability. Present efforts were nothing but instruments to be discarded once one reaches the future. Only the less than capable were stuck to the present.

On the other hand, however, migration as a means to pursue windfall fortune that was determined by luck challenged the causal relations between virtue and rewards. Outmigration attracted more red eyes in the 1990s. This was the period when the connection between intentions, actions, and consequences was further undermined as more commercial intermediaries were involved and the procedure became more opaque. Migration as a somehow magical opportunity to rush through the present was both tantalising and disturbing. Xiao Li, a woman in her early thirties, was adamant in ruling out the possibility of migration. She was afraid of unexpected consequences of success. A migrant was killed in a car accident soon after he returned from Japan, Xiao Li told me. That could not be a simple accident, she insisted: “He was so young, he was always good in sports. He died so young because he earned a life's money in three years. Thus his life had to be shortened. God knows this.”

Thus, what the red eye was really about was the incapability of critiquing reality. Success based on luck was ethically questionable, but people could not question it. They lacked the vocabulary and also faced the social pressure against it. Shaming victims could be interpreted as ‘revenge’ for such subjugation. I can easily imagine villagers telling me that “as we have to admire you if you succeed, we shame you when you can't.”Footnote ⁹ As the line between success and failure was profoundly blurred – today's loser could be tomorrow's winners – such ‘revenge’ makes more sense. Shaming the victims was not only about the displacement of the present – the devaluation of current efforts – but, more importantly, it reflected people's awareness about such displacement. People felt compelled to skip over the present, but were at the same time anxious about their inability to critique the present.

Becoming and Being

The would-be migrant is by definition a figure of becoming. Becoming is of course not a predetermined trajectory – many would-be migrants did not become migrants. However, becoming is not a necessarily fluid, amorphous, and contingent process (c.f. Biehl and Locke Reference Biehl and Locke2010). The would-be migrants believed in the future; at the same time they knew all too well that their potential was constrained and that their ability circumscribed. “If we had stable jobs in big companies, who would want to go overseas?” would-be migrants often asked. The would-be migrant embodied tensions between the heavy present and elusive future, between the desire to skip over the present and the moral anxiety about such leaps forward. While Walter Benjamin's (Reference Benjamin and Arendt1999) angel of history struggled against the storm of progress in order to rescue the past and the present, the would-be migrant strove to lift themselves into the future while being stuck to the present. The shaming of victims was a twisted expression of the awareness about such contradiction.

“A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history” (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Arendt1999: 254). Without holding the present still, we may either fall into the trap of historicism that “gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past” as Benjamin warned us (254), or of being pushed by a blind futurism that removes the ground for ethical critiques and political actions. To hold the present still is not only methodologically necessary for writing history, but is also a political condition for making history. Only by breaking into the present could the would-be migrants liberate themselves from their fears and desires for undefined futures.