“LAST TRAIN HOME”

A CASE STUDY
OF THE CHINESE RURAL MIGRANT WORKER

Introduction
China's massive population has always been a major difficulty for the government as it has struggled to provide for it. The major economic changes of China in the last decade have brought on new and different economic and social challenges. Some of these issues are depicted in the documentary film “Last Train to China.” The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of these points that the film brings to light and see how they affect China today.
Media reports on social and economic conditions in China present a contradictory picture. The cliché that hundreds of millions of people have been 'lifted out of poverty' is repeated again and again, alongside lurid accounts of worsening social problems which threaten to engulf the country in conflict. Both of these claims have a basis in fact. Most people, not only the rising class of millionaires, have gained materially as a result of China's huge increase in GDP.
However, because of the increased role of the influence of the market and the breakdown of socialist institutions, this added wealth has been accompanied by many damaging effects such as mass unemployment, inhumane and dangerous working conditions, and inadequate health care. Some of these effects and the consequent breakdown of the traditional Chinese social structures, especially in the rural areas are seen in real life in the “Last Train”, and will be analyzed in this paper.
The movie depicts the life of rural villagers who are migrant workers in China’s cities. This paper will also discuss some of the economic and social implications of the population that the Zhangs represent.

Mass Production in China
China is competitive in the manufacturing industry with its quick and cheap labor. However, their low price of production comes at a high price of workers’ quality of life. Thus, China’s dominance has mainly been a disadvantage to workers, yet the hardships within China’s apparel manufacturing industry have surprisingly resulted in advantages. In order to understand the advantages of China’s apparel manufacturing, one must consider the history of China, the workers’ characteristics, and the positive effects of global trade.
Beside its lower wages, mainland China has advantages in industrial production which most developing countries do not possess. For the big US, Japanese and European-owned trans-nationals, one of China’s particularly attractive features as an investment destination is the huge size of its potential home market, an aspect which has given the Chinese government considerable power both in attracting and controlling foreign investment, using it as a means of acquiring and assimilating technology
Historically, China was not expected to dominate the apparel manufacturing industry. Instead, Chinese families worked slowly, yet efficiently to produce and create clothing. However, Britain surpassed the Chinese with the Industrial Revolution. Inventions like the spinning jenny spurred apparel manufacturing. New England slyly acquired Britain’s patented technology and spearheaded apparel manufacturing. Later, the South dominated manufacturing because of slavery and sharecroppers. However, Southern farmers exported to Japan, who had cheaper labor. Soon, China, Taiwan, and Korea surpassed Japan. “Today, China is not only the largest buyer of American cotton, it is also projected to soon produce more than forty percent of the world’s cotton textiles”
The reason China attracts sourcing is because American and other western countries have a high demand for cheap clothing. In turn, China depends on America’s supply of cotton to meet these demands. Evidently, sourcing is a “race to the bottom” (89). The “enormous surplus of labor in China imperils workers worldwide, as international competition puts incessant downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Leading the apparel and textile industries to favor the cheapest and most Draconian producers who remain hidden behind the Chinese wall” (89). Unfortunately, China meets the demands of global trade by disregarding the workers’ quality of life. For decades, workers endured such ill treatment because they had no other choice due to the government. (1)

Migrant rural workers in China
China's booming economy depends on the single largest migrant work force in the world: 240 million people who have left their homes and villages to seek work in urban factories. The scale of this internal migration, and the social turmoil it brings, is never more visible than in the workers' annual return to their families and villages for Chinese New Year. So many millions on the move is a testament to the determination of Chinese workers to reconnect with family and tradition. It also exposes a nation under stress from rapid economic development and massive social change. (2)
In China, with thirty years of reform and open relations, a huge number of domestic immigrants have migrated into the big urban areas. In parallel, The Chinese government’s attempt to control the population in cities has caused many rural citizens to become victims of poverty, desperation, and sweatshops. The government’s enforcement of household registration, or hukou, ensures a stable and cheap labor force for the urban industry while at the same time ensuring that rural citizens bring their labor but not themselves to the major cities. In other words, hukou and impossible regulations from “Custody and Repatriation” laws bred migrant workers for sweatshop labor, since they became “desperate and docile”. Cheap labor , as we see Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin’s living conditions, usually consists of workers who endure long hours of work, in horrendous conditions, with little compensation.
Although they are a source of great social upheaval in the villages and cities migrant workers keep villages going that might otherwise die by providing relatives back home with money and they keep cities going by providing the cheap labor that fuels economic growth. Some have described the migration of workers in China as the largest peacetime movement of humanity ever, dwarfing the Irish and Italian migrations to America (the entire Irish migration to America between 1820 and 1930 was around 4.5 million people) and the fleeing of refugees from places like Afghanistan and Kosovo.(4) A point which is the recently, albeit slowly, changing this reality is the western activist human rights groups. They have brought western consumer awareness of the laborers’ conditions and a willingness to pay more in order to ensure products that have been made without taking advantage of the weak. They have also begun to hold multinational businesses accountable regarding human rights and fair working conditions in all their sites irrespective of the country in which it is situated. This has put pressure on the Chinese government and contractors to improve working conditions in the last few years.
Thus international and internal social and economic pressure has caused the government to address this issue more and more as we can see from this newspaper article published recently in the China Daily online news site
“China to help migrant workers in urbanization
BEIJING - Chinese authorities on Thursday underlined the need to help rural migrant workers become urban residents, calling it an important task for the country's urbanization, according to its first policy document for 2013.
To promote urbanization, especially concerning migrant workers, China will put forward reforms of its household registration system, loosening requirements for obtaining residency permits in small and medium-sized cities and small townships, the document said.
The country also vowed more efforts in providing professional training for migrant workers, ensuring their social security and protecting their rights and interests, according to the document.
Migrant workers should enjoy equal rights and benefits in payments, education of their children, public health, housing and cultural services, the document said. It added that authorities will work to extend basic public services to all permanent residents in cities.
The central government also urged more serious attention be given to the left-behind population, namely children, women and old people in rural areas after their family members go to work in cities.
Local authorities at all levels as well as the public should guarantee the rights and safety of the left-behind population with support, help and care, said the document.
The first policy document, issued by the central committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council every year, is dubbed the No 1 central document. This is the 10th consecutive year in which the document has focused on rural issues.
Chinese official data showed that the country's migrant worker population amounted to 253 million by the end of 2011, among which 159 million were working away from their homes”
One cannot ignore the fact that the migrant workers lives are improving and they are earning more as time progresses thus, through sheer numbers they are becoming a significant consumer power and the macroeconomic implications are huge. The trend and rise in the number of migrant workers seems to be a clear indication that money now has precedence over family in traditionally, family-oriented China and we have yet to see the long term implications of this social and economic upheaval. (4)

Rural China
In pre-reform era, China was very poor and approximately 90%of the population was rural. (5) At that time, the Gini coefficient measure income distribution was 0.280 (6), which shows that Chinese people had almost equal income across the whole republic. Although one may think as a result of this that China was “one of the most equal countries in the world”(6), the truth is that everyone was equally and extremely poor at the same time. In order to bring about a decline in poverty and connect the new republic to the world, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping instituted market reforms and said “let some people get rich first”.
Since then, China has maintained one of the most rapid economic growth rates in the world and has seen a large decline in poverty. However, together with this growth, income inequality has increased significantly between urban and rural populations.
The economic opportunities available in the cities has given rise to the phenomenon that many rural families live as the Zhangs do – the mother and father spend their time in the sweatshops of the cities, earning money to advance economically, while the elderly and children are left behind in the villages to “fend for themselves”. Thus, these families, who were starving 2-3 decades ago, are on the one hand enjoying a new prosperity they never had, yet on the other hand the traditional social fabric of these rural families is unraveling as we can see it shown so eloquently in “The Last Train.”

The Rural Consumer:
“Despite slowing economic growth, Chinese consumer confidence is at its highest level since 2005. According to Nielsen’s Global Survey of Consumer Confidence and Spending Intentions, China ranked the fourth most optimistic among the survey’s 56 country participants in the first quarter of 2012. Overall, consumers in the countries surveyed were more confident than they were last quarter.
The survey also showed that rural consumers made up China’s most confident consumer segment. Rural consumer confidence has been increasing for four straight quarters. In addition, consumer goods spending in China’s rural areas have increased more than the national average this quarter.
Xuan said central government policies, such as providing subsidies for farmers’ health insurance and plans to increase investment in agriculture and rural areas, also help explain the segment’s confidence.
Rural consumers and second-tier cities accounted for the largest uptick in spending this quarter; consumer confidence in tier-one, -three, and -four cities remained the same. While Chinese consumers are optimistic about the job market and higher income expectations overall, their willingness to spend remained flat. In fact, the Nielsen survey showed that 49 percent of those consumers would rather put spare cash directly into savings or education for their children, up from 41 percent in the previous quarter.” (7)
The Chinese are traditionally a nation that saves a large portion of what it earns. In my opinion it will be very interesting to see if this trend changes in the next decade as a new generation, like the daughter Qin, comes of age and becomes the bulk of Chinese consumers. This new generation has not experienced Mao’s China, the cultural revolution and the subsequent deprivation. They have grown up in a society exposed to the outer world and the west, and government and political atmosphere committed to bettering itself economically.

Education
Changhua Zhang and Suqin Chen are devastated when their daughter decides to leave school. They see education as the way that their children can have a better life than they did. Statistics prove they are right.
The different ratios among investments in education can directly reflect countries’ different levels of importance on education. Although many countries that have a low ratio of investment in education belong to developing countries or undeveloped countries, some countries with relatively better economic strength also have a low ratio, such as China (2.9%) and Singapore (3.7%). Especially for China, as a country with rapid economic growth in recent ten years, its ratio of investment is even lower than Laos and Nepal, whose gross national product per capita only accounts for one third of China. This example can directly reflect countries’ different levels of importance on education.
Due to the rapid pace of urbanization in China, the annual disposable income per capita for urban households is climbing from 1, 701 RMB in 1991 to 17,175 RMB in 2009. This increase is tenfold. As for rural households, similar trend can also be spotted - a 5.1 raise in annual disposable income per capita to 5,153 RMB in 2009. Subsequently, it can also be observed the growing income and purchasing power of the population in both rural and urban households indicating the improvement in people’s quality of lives over time. Also it is important to note that the largest proportion of disposable income is derived from income from wages and salaries.
China has seen a rise in educational enrollment. According to the People’s Daily (Online), in 2010 China has seen an increase of 35 % of students in higher education institutions of various forms since 2005. This is about 8 million more than in 2005 and about 1 million more than the planned scale. The enrolment of undergraduate students and students at the junior college level reached about 22 million, an increase of 43 percent compared to 2005. The education level of teachers teaching at colleges and full time universities has also risen. This rise in education levels means that more Chinese are more educated. Having a more educated class will definitely contribute to the growing GDP and a larger middle class. Also the educated middle class will demand a higher salary, which will indirectly increase their income levels.
Education is a big factor to future economic growth, but it may also widen the gap between educated people and uneducated people. The educated people have higher capacity and they can take higher income positions. The gap in education in different area is quite obvious. The Zhang’s daughter expresses her dissatisfaction with the village education. This mat be the grumblings of a rebellious teenage daughter but can also be seen as an expression of the inequality of the levels of education in rural and urban areas.
The urban areas have better education facilities and well trained teaching crew; in contrast, the rural areas cannot afford the same level of education resources and suffer from a shortage of capital. If the income inequality still increases, it will become a vicious circle. The high income people can afford a high level education and health care to their children, and then their children will benefit from that and get better jobs. Thereby, the rural regions’ per capita level of education is far lower than the urban regions, which results that rural people will continue to be poor.
The Chinese, including the rural population, must save large percentages of their income in order to pay for social services that are paid for by the government in other countries. However, In the last years the government has raised its expenditure considerably in rural areas providing tuition free schooling, subsidies for grain producers and a cooperative medical system (8)

Conclusion:
Despite its boom economy and all the economic optimism that glows like a halo above China’s head, this movie is a wakeup call. China is still full of very poor, exploited people.
In this documentary film the teenage daughter Qin, harbors huge resentment towards her parents. She outspokenly declares that her parents abandoned her for most of her young life and she can't forgive them for this. She feels the country is a "sad place." This leads to the deepest irony of the film because she quits school to go away and work first in a garment factory, later in a cocktail bar. This is despite the fact that the purpose of her parents going away to work was so she and her brother could rise above peasant or laborer status through better education. It doesn't look like Qin is going to do that.

Yang is in middle school. Those words of his justifying fifth place in class, however, show that he, like Qin, is probably abandoning the traditional values of hard work and sacrifice -- values that fueled China's economic boom, but now are being undermined by it. Because of the boom, even the poorest of the poor are seduced by glitzy fantasies of easy wealth and giddy fun. This is evident everywhere and the enormous displacements caused by the boom in themselves make the Chinese family structure grow weaker.
Despite the sadness of this film and the extremely difficult conditions of poor village families like the Zhang Family, one should remember where these families came from. As the grandmother depicts, families like the Zhangs were dying of hunger only 30 years ago. Even in this film, which shows a hard life for the lower class Chinese migrant, one can actually feel the economic dynamics and the tense atmosphere of the rat race to growing prosperity in China.
China is a country of many facets and layers. With the largest population in the world, this country and the changes it is going through have significant implications within the country and without. We have yet to see what the current economic revolution of China will bring to the Chinese and the rest of the world.

References: 1. Rivoli, R. (2009) (2nd Edition). The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Powers, and Politics of World Trade. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons 2. http://www.documentary.org/magazine/made-china-last-train-home-documents-life-migrant-worker – The international Documentary Association – review on ”Last Train Home” 3. China Daily Feb 1 2013 “China to help migrant workers in urbanization” 4. Facts and Details http://factsanddetails.com/, “MIGRANT WORKERS IN CHINA” 5. John Knighta, Linda Yuehb, 2004 “Job mobility of residents and migrants in urban China”, Journal of Comparative Economics; Vol 32, Issue 4: 637–660 6. Naughton, Barry (2007) The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth. Cambridge: MIT press. 7. Jennifer Sun, July 1, 2012, “Consumer Confidence Rises in Rural China” China Business Review - online 8. Nicholas R. Lardy, 2012 “Sustaining China's Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis”. Pearson Institute for International economics. 9. Yuval Atsmon, et.al., “2012 Annual Chinese Consumer Report From Mass to Mainstream: Keeping Pace With China’s Rapidly Changing Consumers”. McKinsey & Company.