AS WINTER TIGHTENED its grip on northern China, temperatures plummeted and Beijing became bitterly cold.
I traveled across the city to visit a place called "Picun Village" in the eastern suburbs.
In an ancient city like Beijing, even the most inconspicuous of places has its traditions, yet Picun Village has no real history of its own to boast about. It is not a village in the traditional sense: it was conceived when local villagers turned their farmland into rows of crude, temporary rental houses. Now, over 10,000 migrant workers live here, most of whom are young people. Despite being heavily reliant on the surrounding metropolis, Picun is nonetheless an isolated "migrant worker community" with its own schools, art troupes, and even a unique museum showcasing migrant worker culture.
The first policy document issued by the Central Government in 2010, also known as "No.1 Central Document" , explicitly outlined the definition of the "New Generation of Migrant Workers" for the first time—these post-80s and post-90s migrant workers already account for 60% of the total population of 150 million migrant workers. That number is now around 100 million, and is increasing by 9 to 10 million per year. In less than ten years, the population of this group is expected to reach or perhaps even exceed 200 million.
The problems faced by this new generation of migrant workers will greatly affect China's changing rural socio-economic structure and perhaps even its entire social system. The No.1 Central Document stressed that "Targeted measures should be taken to solve the problems of the new generation of migrant workers."
China's cities have already entered an era when migrant workers are as indispensable as the electricity or water supply.
It is the migrant workers who embrace the first ray of sunlight every morning—they are the newspaper boys, they are the milkmen, they are the vegetable peddlers and the construction workers…
It is the migrant workers who keep company with the stars and the moon—they are the cab drivers and security guards; they are the cleaners and assembly line workers…
A research team from a university in Beijing conducted an extensive questionnaire survey titled "The City and Migrant Workers: Their Existence and Concerns" . In this survey, participants were asked to list any time in the past twenty-four hours that they had come into contact with a migrant worker. Even after the university students carefully removed any repetitions, it was found that the average citizen of a modern metropolis was likely to be in direct or in direct contact with a migrant workers at least eighty-four times per day. It is becoming clear that it is no longer a question of whether modern Chinese society should or should not be concerned with migrant workers. The problems faced by this increasingly significant community simply cannot be overlooked. Without migrant workers, a city could not operate properly for a single second; without migrant workers, China's GDP would not rank second in the world; without migrant workers, China's CPI would not have been pushed below 5%; without migrant workers, 90% of jobs in the construction industry, 37.9% of jobs in the manufacturing industry and the overwhelming majority of jobs in the service sector would be left vacant… In short, the healthy and harmonious development of Chinese society is impossible without migrant workers, most of whom are of the "new generation."