Editorials

Budding dreams

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-23 07:56

Welfare schemes aimed at city residents are denied to them; they contribute silently to urban development, yet are kept away from its fruit, including homes that they can call their own.

China must pay closer attention to the problems faced by more than 100 million second-generation migrant workers in order to ensure social stability and deepen the trend of urbanization, a research group affiliated to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions urged on Monday.

This call to action is both urgent and timely.

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These young workers, although born and brought up in cities, have still been labeled as rural migrant laborers despite the fact that it was their parents who had migrated to cities in search of jobs a generation earlier.

This group faces many problems their parents never encountered. For instance, members of this group are not registered citizens of urban areas. They are more often than not poorly paid workers toiling away at construction sites in cities or private factories in the country's booming coastal areas.

Welfare schemes aimed at city residents are denied to them; they contribute silently to urban development, yet are kept away from its fruit, including homes that they can call their own.

Still, they continue to dream of living and working in cities.

Research done by the China Youth Research Center in recent years has clearly shown that more than 50 percent of these second-generation migrant workers intend to settle down in the cities where they are currently working in.

This is in sharp contrast to the aspirations of their parents, who are content to retire to their native villages in their autumn years. In fact, a survey of rural migrant workers conducted by Tsinghua University in 1999 revealed that 89 percent of first-generation migrant workers wanted to return to their home villages to spend their remaining years.

The young migrant workers of today can actually be termed a floating generation, with no roots either in home villages or in urban areas.

The government must create better living conditions to ensure that this vital group is smoothly integrated into city life. This is essential for social harmony.

(China Daily 06/23/2010 page8)