Op-Ed Contributors

Honor cultural needs of migrants

By Sun Wanning (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-31 07:51

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.