Situated in China’s geographical heartland (officially the south-west) and capital of Sichuan province, home to several million people, Chengdu looks nothing like a major industrial centre. Visitors to this modern city, that has not yet been caught up in the frenzied activity of the big coastal towns, feel far from the centre of Chinese development. And yet Chengdu has seen great changes. The social divide is clear: there are new districts for the rich and the northern working-class districts around the station - an area dotted with small and already dirty-grey blocks of tiny flats dating from the 1960s and 1970s.

Not far away, at the city limits, cross the unprotected railway and you are straightaway in the urban countryside with its hard-packed dust surfaces and railway line used by walkers. There is an agreeable, if evil-smelling stream, a quiet little market, tea houses in basic wooden buildings or the open air, frequented throughout the day by amiable mahjong or card players, some younger than others, none apparently in a hurry. This relaxed and benevolent-looking China exudes the kind of rural calm it is hard to imagine in the busy and often aggressive coastal cities.

The picture is different in southern Chengdu. Here are the districts that are being developed for the nouveaux riches, the business bosses and managers who have got rich - somehow or other. In a long and fairly empty street dominated by a huge building site, modern flats of doubtful taste, but with all “mod cons” (fitted kitchen, several bathrooms, and even, in some cases, a jacuzzi), are being built around ornamental pools and fountains. There is nothing special about the surroundings: a not very elegant-looking hospital and recently built, but already crumbling high-rise apartment blocks obstruct the view. Never mind, here the new elite can rub shoulders, away from the masses.

The street already has its own western-style café - a rarity this - selling coffee, a supermarket and an electrical goods store. There are a few western cars, some chauffeur-driven. The show flat, in a low building, extends over 200 square metres on two floors. It includes a small corner in Japanese style with sliding panels to provide complete privacy from prying eyes. This is imitation chic, modern and western looking, a blend, as in many modern buildings, of very different styles. What matters is that it should look flashy - neo-something or other.

The cost of a 70 year lease - urban property like land in the countryside is still state-owned - is 900,000 yuan (1). Some flats covering more than 300 square metres cost around 1.5m yuan, to be paid in cash. In the late 1970s, in contrast, the average surface area per city-dweller was four square metres. Now it has more or less doubled. The cost of luxury goods bought through an official agency (though far more luxurious goods are to be had) is the equivalent of several hundred years’ income for the average rural worker or a manual worker’s unemployment benefit (assuming he actually gets it).

A few kilometres away, the city centre is a perfect illustration of the transition from past to future. The many big stores sell everything, including cosmetic products from Paris - far too expensive for most people. Right in the centre, a huge statue of Mao is pointing towards neon signs. Last year lights advertising foreign goods - Philips, Samsung and the other major international brands - mocked the dead leader once darkness fell. The irony was not lost on people strolling through what was once the focus of maoist rallies. This year, as a mark of respect for the harbinger of national independence, some of the signs around him are advertising Chinese goods: local capitalism is gaining ground and making its mark.

Far from the centre, next to a bridge near Sichuan university, in what was until recently the rural fringe of the city, is the kind of open-air job market that is held throughout the province. Dating from the 1980s, for a long time it was unofficial but tolerated. Now it is regulated by the local authorities (and the police). The city authorities have set up a job information service with notices advertising jobs with small local businesses available to people who have at least a temporary residence permit for the city (or will be able to get one through their employer). Rates of pay vary between 200 and 300 yuan a month for unskilled workers; 500 to 800 yuan for skilled workers (mechanics or cooks); and 600 to 1,200 yuan for well-qualified carpenters.

But the main business takes place next door, in the open-air market that attracts several thousand people a day (peaking at the time of the spring festival, China’s main holiday). Many migrants come to Chengdu. Most are peasants without a residence permit, often from the surrounding countryside. Sometime are workers from the city who have lost their jobs and not been found new ones by the company or local authority. A row of men and women, two-deep, try to sell their skills set out in red characters on a large sheet of paper. Those unable to write themselves use the services of the public copyists at the market (a few brush strokes will set you back a couple of yuan).

The women are looking for work as cleaners, sales assistants or waitresses (the rate of pay is 200-300 yuan a month). The men are often looking for work as cooks. One, still a young man, displays photos of the dishes he has cooked; he is confident that he will get 2,000 yuan a month for his high-quality cooking (a chef with a good reputation can earn a lot more than that). Some spend days at a time around the market, living in cheap but basic hotels and sometimes on the streets, but still they fail to get the work they are looking for, even though they are asking low wages. In their eyes, every city-dweller is privileged. After all, the low level of unemployment benefit state workers get in the cities is about 200 yuan a month - not much less than many peasants earn from what is often hard toil (2).

 Unproductive land

According to Professor Yuan Yayu, of Sichuan university’s department of sociology, this is a young population group, more enterprising and better educated that the rest of the rural population. Ninety per cent of emigrants arriving in Chengdu have not come via an established network and most have to make do with very unstable jobs. The same is true of China as a whole.

For a long time Sichuan was one of China’s grain baskets and remained an agricultural province with little industry. It was severely affected by the famine provoked by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and impoverished by the end of his regime. Deng Xiaoping (who came from Sichuan) then put it at the forefront of his experiments in agriculture. These led to the dismantling of the collective farms and the return of the land to small family units. With the help of substantial government funding designed to improve infrastructure, Sichuan is currently endeavouring to play a more active role in the economic development of the country and industrialisation of the region (3).

Here, as elsewhere, conditions are bad for peasants. Many country-dwellers are forced to look for a living outside their village, often far from home. They stop farming land that is relatively unproductive - and in any event far from providing them with a standard of living and spending power comparable to their city cousins (4). In recent years the gap between town and countryside - already significant in Mao’s days - has widened further.

Rural workers began to move to the towns in the early 1980s, when Deng first launched his reforms. That movement increased sharply in the late 1980s when the number of migrant rural workers was put at 50m or 60m (5). Even then the majority came from Sichuan (accounting for 10% of China’s population). During the 1990s the trend continued but it was uneven. The authorities tried to stem it between 1989 and 1991, and to channel and control it from 1992, but with little success. Carried forward and given added impetus by the logic of liberalisation, the process of migration is helped by the fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, relatively, lost its ability to exercise social control and keep a tight rein on the population (6).

Now on an unprecedented scale (80m to 100m people are on the move), this development is taking new forms, including the first signs of a mass exodus, a real abandoning of the countryside.

Mao’s China was atypical of the third world. Because the peasants were forced to stay in their villages, the rapid industrialisation of the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China did not result in a stampede to the towns. In 1980 the so-called “non-agricultural population” accounted for only 16% of the total population. The People’s Republic was hardly less rural than the China of old - that was the regime’s choice and it imposed it country-wide with an iron hand. Later, when the maoist economic model was being dismantled, the peasants began to move of their own accord. The authorities tried to hold them back by developing small towns within the countryside. This was the start of a flourishing process of rural industrialisation, a kind of proto-industrialisation designed to avert the dangers of an expanding urban sector.

Fear of social instability played a large part in that policy, and the authorities are still backing it. But they could not buck the trend. Tens of millions of peasants are constantly on the move, a floating population that comes and goes, depending on opportunity and need. More people leave the countryside than return to it, and a section of the “floating population” has settled once and for all, not just in the rural towns designed for them but in the big cities, where they form a new worker sector (7).

That is a measure of the current problems facing the economy. The land brings in less income than it used to, or at least an income insufficient to meet modern expectations. In addition, the small-scale rural industry that provided work for tens of millions of peasants and kept them in their villages is suffering badly from competing products from the towns or other countries. That competition will increase with China’s forthcoming accession to the World Trade Organisation (see Marc Mangin’s article).

This has led the peasants to look for improved levels of income in the coastal provinces where they hope to get a better education for their children and have access to the kind of goods it is often impossible to find outside the towns. The strong ties with village and land that brought the peasants back home have been loosened: now they are leaving for good. But the land is not abandoned (and nor are village and house deserted). It is leased to or cultivated by a relative (possibly the farmer’s own wife).

The statistics confirm, and probably underestimate, that trend. In 1980 84% of the rural population were very largely working the land. Currently, even though more than 70% of the population remains in the countryside, fewer than one in two Chinese are still working directly on the land.

At national level, it is estimated that more than 50% of the rural workforce is now surplus to requirements. The more developed coastal regions are taking them in (8), as is the capital, Beijing, a source of fascination and attraction to peasants looking for work. A locally-based, provincial or (in the south) clan network usually takes charge of them. It will find them work and very basic accommodation. The network guarantees that workers will be “reliable” and do what they are told, and may take care of them should they fall ill - there is little in the way of social security. Sometimes peasants use a network for whose services they have to pay.

 Desperately seeking work

Towns have one or more informal job markets - some are even specialist markets. In the heart of Beijing, near the central station and big hotels, there is, for example, a “women’s market”. Women from the countryside - most of them young - look for work there as cleaners (a key element in the new middle class homes) or servants, or as sales assistants or waitresses in the many restaurants. Some are looking for less reputable work.

Though public and there for all to see, the market maintains a low profile. Banished by the police from the main thoroughfares in 1999 because of the celebrations to mark the 50^th anniversary of the People’s Republic, it has taken refuge in the side streets. The atmosphere is friendly. The same cannot be said of the “men’s market” located in a less frequented district outside the centre, close to the city’s Western station and third ring road. The skills offered by the young men who have also come from the distant countryside are less specific; the boundary between job-seeking and delinquency less clear. The tension is palpable and the police are not far off. These are desperate migrants who have no real network to look after them in the vastness of Beijing.

Often a boss or building site manager will use his contacts to arrange for peasants to be hired. The men are to be found on building sites everywhere and the young women in restaurants. All are doing unskilled and low-paid jobs. But even this lowly status may be beyond their grasp. In response to increasing social pressure during this period of high urban unemployment, Shanghai is one of the cities to have reserved some unskilled but undemanding jobs - lift attendant or concierge, for instance - for people with an urban residence permit (the infamous huku).

That is one sign of the growing tension between workers well established in the towns and the new workforce of rural origin that is trying to gain a foothold. For the moment, contact between them is limited, but there is some competition, particularly in private sector factories. They are less subject to state constraints or less scrupulous in obeying the rules. Despite the statutory restrictions, they are more willing to recruit rural workers, who cost less and receive little or no social security benefits. If they have no proper education, their income is often very low, according to city regulations. Many waiters and waitresses are paid about 300 yuan a month, and building site workers about double that. Given more or less adequate board and lodging at their workplace - though the conditions are often basic, a restaurant table may double as a bed for the night - or in dormitories, they save up and send the bulk of their earnings back to their families. That way, in a few years of very hard work (12 hours a day, 6 or sometimes 7 days a week), they save what they need for the dowry a future husband has to give his bride, or that a sister gives her brother, so that he in turn can marry.

Sometimes the money is used to fund a relative’s studies. Then it is up to the young man or woman who manages to get on in life to help the family, particularly parents in their old age - peasants do not get pensions. Getting a proper education is increasingly a motive for moving to the big city. In rural areas, secondary education is poor or non-existent and primary education, no longer free, is often restricted to private schools. That is a heavy financial burden - secondary education is often expensive. Renowned for its many good schools at all levels, Beijing attracts people from the countryside who know the Chinese proverb “books contain gold”. They may use the money they earn to open a small shop in the village, help set up a small business or pay for a new house.

There is no knowing exactly how many of China’s population are trying to move permanently to the cities, but the trend marks a complete break with the past. The numbers of small restaurants or cheap cafés in Beijing offering Sichuan’s famous cuisine at low prices at least shows their determination to stay.

Notes

(1) There are approximately 8 yuan to the dollar.

(2) The national average of 240 yuan in unemployment benefit at the end of 1999 masks substantial regional variations: 140 yuan in Sichuan but 400 yuan in Shanghai or Beijing. See Jean Louis Rocca “L’evolution de la crise du travail dans la Chine urbaine”, Les Etudes du CERI, Paris, May 2000, p 26.

(3) The western region has been given priority in the current programme of major works. Shanghai Daily, 17 May 2000; China Daily, Beijing, 19 May 2000.

(4) D Davis (ed), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.

(5) Hein Mallee, “Migration, huku and resistance in reform China”, in E Perry and M Selden (eds), Chinese Society: Change, conflict and Resistance, Routledge, London, 2000.

(6) H Mallee, op cit, pp 84 et seq.

(7) Jean Philippe Beja, “Les travailleurs itinérants, des immigrés de l’intérieur”, Perspectives Chinoises, Hong Kong, no 21, January-February 1994.

(8) Philip S Golub, “Shanghai express”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2000.