New York Times
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
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HANGZHOU, China From his precarious perch high above the morning rush hour, Wang Fulin watched the restless crowd below. Arms were drawing arches in air, he recalled. They wanted a swan dive. People were chanting, "Jump, jump."
Enraged and afraid, Wang had scaled the metal frame of a billboard to call attention to his grievances. It was his first day in this bustling east coast city, his first trip outside his home province in southwest China. He had been neglected, robbed and abused. Now they wanted blood.
In the end he does not remember how he slipped. He recalls only waking up in a hospital bed with three cracked ribs, a broken hip and a shattered ego. "I told those people that I'm a good man, not a bad man, that I just needed help," he said. "But I could not believe in anybody, and nobody believed in me."
The six-story plunge was the coda of a two-day, cross-country odyssey, a personal tale of desperation emblematic of the gamble every Chinese migrant worker takes, leaving family behind to live on the fringes of urban society.
Migrant workers are China's untouchables. They are assumed to be behind every unsolved crime. They are also the dark underside of China's economic success, which has been marked by annual growth of 8 percent for several years now, and by exports to the United States growing so fast that they have surpassed Japan's. In general these people are vulnerable, pliable, cheap to employ and easy to suppress.
The migrant workers number well over 100 million, staffing the factories of Asia's export powerhouse. They work long hours in dangerous jobs for low salaries and no benefits. They are legally barred from forming unions - the Communist Party allows just one union, its own - and liable to be dismissed on a boss's whim.
Migrants would not come to the cities if the opportunities did not outweigh the dangers, of course, and the government has taken steps to stop systematic abuses.
Yet even government-controlled news organizations offer regular examples of their extreme distress. There are migrants who threaten suicide when they are not paid. Some are preyed on by job agents or forced into sex slavery. Migrants say the police often beat them for minor infractions, like forgetting to carry an identity card or selling goods on the street without a license.
It was money that persuaded Wang Fulin to leave his lush but poor mountain village in Guizhou Province and travel 2,000 kilometers, or 1,250 miles, to Hangzhou, near Shanghai. He arranged to take a job making cardboard shipping containers for $72 a month, enough to send cash back to his ailing father and his two young children.
But instead of sending money home, he has relied on relatives to raise $1,500 for his medical care, two years' salary at the box factory.
He seemed hale and steady enough before leaving home, relatives said. His sparkling brown eyes, round cheeks and soft lisp make him appear younger than his 30 years.
As an only son with a chronically ill father, he tended the family plots alone. He once recruited volunteers to build a road that eased the isolation of his mountainside hamlet.
This year, though, Wang needed cash to pay school fees for his 6-year-old son and to buy medicine for his father. The day after summer planting was done, he set out, first by foot along the road he built to Nanlong, then by bus to the provincial capital, Guiyang. On July 3, he boarded a long-haul train with a stop in Hangzhou. It was trying from the start. His had a standing room ticket for the 36-hour trip, and he could not find a spare seat.
He was leaning against the bulkhead of car No. 8, around midnight on the second day, when he heard a fellow passenger whisper, "It's about to get crazy."
A group of men had begun working its way through the darkened cabin. Wang watched the men pull down bags from the overhead rack and search them, pocketing money and valuables.
Soon the group spotted Wang, awake and afraid. They peppered him with questions - where was he from, how much money was he carrying, where was he getting off. Wang said he had answered honestly. He was a country boy with very little money.
"They accused me of hiding wads of cash, maybe inside my pants," Wang said. "They said I looked like a sly guy." He said he stripped off his pants to prove he had nothing strapped to his legs. But a man with a cellphone, the apparent ringleader, kept harassing him.
"He called someone on his phone and told them he had a big catch, some clever guy with big money," Wang recounted. "He said they should be prepared to meet me at the train station - bring drugs to knock me out."
When the conductor announced that the train was nearing Hangzhou, Wang darted from car to car to find a railroad policeman who was aboard. He found the officer in the café car, chatting with two train workers. Wang hurriedly explained that people were plotting to steal his money. He needed an escort off the train.
The policeman, Wang said, asked just one question, "How much money do you have?" Wang said he was a poor man with nothing. The policeman waved his hand to indicate he had heard enough, and walked away. But the rail workers stayed. One grabbed him from behind. The other ordered him to turn his pockets inside out. Wang said he produced a small wad of bills, his travel money, and put it on the table. A worker pocketed the cash.
The two then dragged him to the caboose, and cast him into a rail yard near the Hangzhou station. His instinct was to flee. He scampered up the rail-yard wall, losing his sandals in the climb.
Breathless and barefoot, he had arrived in downtown Hangzhou.
Wang said he had thought of going to the factory where his wife worked. But he knew only the name of the township.
A shop owner let him use a phone.An hour later, officers went to the store. He told them what happened, saying he needed help and money. The police looked at him skeptically. Maybe they did not understand his Guizhou accent. They told him someone else would come to handle his case.
He wandered the street, wondering what to do. Then he saw a billboard hanging over a major boulevard.
"My idea was to go up there and make a scene," Wang said. "Then I could explain what happened and demand that they contact my family."
He climbed a ladder to the top. To attract attention, he took off his jacket and tossed it down to passersby. His shirt followed, then his belt. His pants fell to his ankles, so he took them off, too. He stood on the billboard in his baby blue skivvies, shouting to people below.
When several rescue workers began climbing toward him at once, Wang scrambled to an edge, apparently looking for an escape. Then he tumbled. He landed on a patch of grass.
Wang is now back in Guizhou. He said he has decided that he just had bad luck. The next time he goes to the big city it will be different. And there will be a next time, given that his family, once merely strapped for cash, is now deeply in debt.
"For our kind of people," he said, "there's no other choice."
The New York Times
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