Opinion

Honor cultural needs of migrant workers

By Sun Wanning (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-31 15:59

Since the start of the economic reform and opening up three decades ago, about 200 million farmers have left their rural homes and travelled across the country in search of work. Rural workers have become essential to the functioning of China's economy and society, yet their social and cultural needs are not necessarily understood.

There tends to be an assumption among urban residents that as long as migrant workers are paid wages on time, they will be happy. Worse still, many urban people tend to believe that since migrant workers come to cities to make money, they are not interested in pursuing cultural and recreational activities. Research suggests that these assumptions are not true.

Rural migrants have cultural, social, as well as economic needs, and because of the differences in their age, occupation, education, marital status and location, these needs vary vastly. For the sake of equity, equality and social stability, meeting the cultural needs of migrant workers is an urgent matter.

For instance, most migrant workers do not have a computer but a vast majority does have mobile phones, with QQ (a Chinese instant messaging program) being the most popular social media tool used by them. Since migrant workers are mobile, they do not have any other device to store data. Hence, the telecommunications industry would do well to provide low-end, affordable new media products.

Apart from affordability, accessibility is another major concern. Because most of the migrant workers do not have computers or laptops, connectivity for them comes mainly through 24-hour Internet cafs, which can be found in most places where they are concentrated. The amount of time young migrant workers, especially men, spend playing games on computers in Internet cafs in the industrial cities of the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions is remarkable. Many do so to relieve themselves of the stress of long working hours.

But despite the fact that there are more women than men in South China's factories, there are far fewer women than men in Internet cafs. Woman migrant workers are more cautious about going to public places, including meeting strangers in virtual space online. In other words, there is greater need to provide affordable - if not free - and safe public space that migrant women need for recreation.

For many migrant workers, watching TV can be a luxury. Sensing this need to relax after a day's hard work, shops near construction workers' dormitories have installed TV sets to give their business a boost. It is common to see construction workers gather around TV sets. In other places such as the living quarters of factories, workers can go to a community room to watch TV, or spend extra money to have an old hand-me-down TV set installed in their room.

Migrant workers like to read when they have the time and energy. Fantasy genres are their favorite, but most are just happy to read whatever they can get their hands on. It is a common practice among migrant workers to share reading materials on construction sites, and in their dormitories. It is common, too, for workers to rent books for a couple of yuan from street vendors or stalls in a market. Some young workers pay a few yuan to get some popular fiction downloaded on their mobile phones. And if their friends' mobile phones have enough storage space, they share the reading materials using blue tooth.

Public libraries or venues catering to migrant workers' reading needs do exist in some places, but only a few workers can access them. Dormitories are seldom the ideal place to read. Construction workers in Beijing's Haidian district have complained about dim lights in their dormitories. One of them has been quoted as having said: "We would like to read but the light is very dim. The voltage here is not strong enough to allow us to even charge our mobile phone batteries (either)."

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On a few construction sites outside Haidian, workers are always happy to receive free reading materials delivered sporadically by university student volunteers. Such volunteers working in conjunction with some NGOs for migrant workers, try hard to distribute reading materials among workers at some sites.

In other cities such as Shenzhen in the Pearl River Delta region, which have a high concentration of factory workers, the municipal government has come up with some innovative initiatives to meet migrant workers' needs. For instance, community libraries and companies, which employ workers, combine resources to start libraries exclusively for workers. In the Tongfuyu Migrant Workers' Library in Shenzhen, migrant workers can expect to see a movie on Friday night and borrow books for free, and use computers in the library. The library's opening hours are set to suit the routine of factory workers so that they can use it in the evening and over the weekend.

Shenzhen has many similar libraries. Zhu Haimin, librarian of Tongfuyu Migrant Workers' Library, says the model of establishing cultural facilities for workers through the joint initiative of the local government and enterprises is specific to Shenzhen, but it can be easily replicated elsewhere.

"By dedicating space for migrant workers, young people have created a place where workers can go after work. We organize lectures and public talks on topics which are close to their everyday life, such as health, computing and professional development. Workers use this space to get to know each other. They can then start developing a sense of belonging to the city," he says.

These may be small steps, but they are in the right direction.

The author is researcher on the cultural needs of China's rural migrant workers at the University of Technology, Sydney.