Commentary

China Watch

Forum Digests

Columnists

Letters

By Li Hongmei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-12-19 15:45

China has been transformed beyond recognition since it ushered in Reform and Opening-up Policy 30 years ago. The following will be an episode showing what the market economy with socialism characteristics, though yet to grow up to its full size, has meant to the everyday life of a young man.

Zhang Zhijie is sitting across from me, immaculately dressed and chic. He frequently tossed his fashionably cut hair out of his eyes while talking in a low and soft voice. It is hard to imagine him as a peasant farmer. After laboring for only 10 months in his father’s fields in the inland Anhui Province he packed his bags in 1999 and like 140 million other migrant workers, set off in search of a better life.     

Zhang, nevertheless, had no intention of following his fellow villagers who had headed to construction sites and sweatshops along China’s booming east coast. Setting his sights higher, he went to Beijing, the capital, attending a hairdressing school, which he saw as a passport up through a series of less classy joints. ‘I knew that if I learnt to become a really good stylist I could go anywhere in China with my scissors,’ he says, again tossing his hair.

It worked. Today, after a few months in the hairdressing school and anther few years of apprenticing himself to a friend, 26-year-old Zhang is now working as an expert hair stylist at one of the most upscale hair salon in East Beijing’s CBD, or Central Business District, a zone boasting grand edifices and serious-looking white collar workers. Despite this, Zhang said his daily income could embarrass most of his white collar customers. ‘Three or four times more than those office workers,’ he can hardly conceal his pride at the mention of this, and his soft voice sounds a bit triumphant.

The new Beijing is stepping up efforts to become a real cosmopolitan through its more quickening tempo of urbanization and modernization. Like other big- and medium-sized cities in China, Beijing thrives on migrant workers, who make up nearly 30 percent of its total population. The latest statistics, released by Beijing Municipal Commission of Population and Family Planning, show that there are approximately 12 million official residents in the household register, or residents with Beijing Hukou, and 5.4 million in the floating population.

Since peasants were first permitted to leave their villages in 1978, they have flooded into Beijing and to cities like it from the still-impoverished countryside in search of two things: work and money. But now it is not merely poverty that drives them from their native villages. Many young peasants like Zhang leave the countryside with some ambition to try a new life.

‘I couldn’t do nothing,’ he says, ‘My parents just lived to survive. My generation can think bigger thoughts, and I am lucky to be born at this special time.’ And in another departure from normal migrant worker habits, Zhang has not been sending his earnings home to his parents: instead, he sought to multiply his money by investing in property, the recent market slump has soured that investment, though.

On top of that, he said he had bought a two-bedroom apartment and had to pay off a loan. ‘My biggest dream?’ he grins, ‘well, open a salon of my own in downtown Beijing.’

‘Yes, I miss my home a great deal,’ he says softly, ‘but like all the other migrant workers, I will probably end up spending most of my life here, because Beijing is where we can achieve our dreams.’