The Sunday Story: A Generation Of Chinese Workers Struggle To Retire
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Am I shara KO? And this is a sunday story my colleague, Emily fang, is an international corresponded at in pr. You might have heard some of her reporting.

I have been covering china since twenty fifteen. I freeLance a little bit first, then I joined the newspaper financial times and I joined. I didn't know what i'd throwed myself into, but I figured that out within a Better year. Th IT was a lot of IT was just being on all the time, you know, like your body was A A live wire because there was just a news coming. And all the time.

much of the news was about keeping up with all of the geopolitical move china was making as president. Shagging was reshaping china's domestic and foreign policy. And a few years ago, china's economic power was on full display.

So a lot of business stories, because at that time, chinese companies were still going out and buying up assets allow for the place. So they were coming to the us. And buying like the AMC movie conglomerate, they were buying buildings in new york city. But you could start to see cracks, emerging deaths that had not been paid, basically the cost of all that growth, adding up signs that this openness and this interest in engaging with the rest of the world was starting to change under a president changing pain.

After years of charting incredible growth, china's economy has finally slowed. This week, all across in P, R, we've been telling stories about china and its position in relation to the world. Now, as optimism phase in the country and workers' age, many are worried about their futures. Today, on the sunday story, Emily thing brings us a closer loop behind the headlines of chinese stalling economy. We meet two migrant workers who have quietly spent their lives building up chinese cities.

现在 没钱 不行。

money .

you got .

to work.

walk whole life.

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We're back with a sunday story. So imm, for so long I was just like castle optimism. China is on the rise and and the grow felt unstoppable. So how did you get to this point?

The answer is property. China build a lot of IT, and that drove economic growth for decades, but IT also created a huge amount of debt. And now there's this global economic downturn.

China is trying to cut down on domestic debt, and the property sector has been hard hit and relatives the construction sector is suffering as well. And you cannot talk about construction in china without talking about the people who are actually doing the building. And almost all of these people are migrant workers.

Okay, so IT IT sounds like migrant workers are the force behind urban development. So tell me more about what they do.

There are an estimated three hundred million plus migrant workers across china. They generally do come from rural areas, and they work in urban cities like beijing, shanghai, guangzhou. Most of them are doing temporary low wage labor.

And back of the one thousand and eighty, when china's economy really start liberalizing and taking off on this incredible trajectory, Michael workers were the ones who started off filling in at factories and on assembly lines today. They're also working as street sweets, doing repair work, their waiters and their running stores and restaurants there, more and more in the service industries. And of course, as I mentioned before.

they're also in construction. In the us, when you think of migrant workers, you're of workers coming from other countries to the us. For work. But in china, migrant workers are just coming from other parts of of the country, rule parts of the country, right?

Yes, migrant here refers to internal migration within china. And the term applies very widely because technically, anyone who is living and working in, maybe raising a family outside of the place where they had their household registration, is considered a migrant worker in china. And this this whole category of marketing workers begins with something called the hook o system.

It's been around since the beginning of the people's republic of china. It's inherit from a soviet system of central planning. And that basically just means that a person's identity is geographically located.

So you're tied the particular town, village or city that you're registered in, which largely depends on where your parents were registered. You mostly inherit their hook. O backin. Chinese society was much more sentimental.

Rolled your hooo would determine where you got your russian coupons from, where you could spend them to get food, even where you are allowed to live in work. But china's economy is liberalized now. The hook o system is also more relaxed, and the most desirable places to live are big cities like beijing or shanghai.

People are moving there even though their hook is not tied to those cities. Uh, they can now find housing and work in cities even if they don't have hook o there. But a big problem remains that cities like beijing and shanghai have not completely opened up their social welfare services or even public education to markt workers, meaning their kids, for the most part, still cannot go to school there unless they pay out of pocket and go to or a private school. This remains a huge problem. But in general, china likes to call all of the people that I ve just mentioned, migrant workers or the floating population in chinese, because they float in an auto cities depending on where there is work.

like a floating population. Like that's a that's a concept that I I had that before. Now I mean, Emily, like I know you decided to focus on migrant workers in the construction industry specifically. Why focus on them?

I focused on them because over the last more than three decades, china has had this massive building boom. People were moving to the cities from all over the country. And this urban migration meant people needed places to live, they in more train stations, hospitals.

And this created demand for infrastructure, demand that was filled in by these marketing workers. Construction became a ready source of employment for them. IT was hard work, but IT was reliable employment.

And even when I first moved to beijing in two thousand and fifteen, construction was still impossible to avoid in the city. Buildings went up, came down all the time, and that meant that there were construction workers everywhere, too. But there are two things that happened while I was reporting in beijing that showed me just how little of a safety network workers have, including construction workers. Even though there are a big part of the city's development, they don't have a secure hold in the city itself. And that first moment was in the winter of two thousand seventeen.

What happened?

This was my third year in china, and there were these big fires in a residential building in the winter of two dozen seventeen and teaching. Pink had just appointed a new mayor of beijing who decided he was going to improve the safety of the by ripping out what he called shanty towns on the fringes of beijing and remove what the city called the low end population 的 低端 人口。 What really meant the migrant worker population and the city changed so much over the next six months mean, literally sometimes walls would be built in front of doors, or windows would be sealed in overnight, bricked up, as we call IT, because they were not part of the building code, the aesthetic that the mayor wanted. And so basically, overnight I woke up, and all of the people who used to run little stores and restaurants outside of of my apartment had vanished because they were all migrant workers.

I'm gonna guess at the second big moment that you witness that should my rent workers in beijing was the pandemic, I mean that that should everybody, but I would imagine he would hit those on the margins the most.

And the pandemic was especially hard on migrant workers as new variants began springing across the country. Cities were locking down. Sometimes the local downs were building by building.

You didn't even know if you could go out and get food, but were really healed IT altogether were Michael workers, because they were delivering food and supplies to people who couldn't leave their homes. Some of this was organized by the government most of the time. I was just people trying to figure out how to get food on their own, placing water and migrant workers on delivery by extending that to apartment.

So they faced huge personal health risks, and they were sleeping in awful conditions because they were in contact with so many people there. Everything as a health, even they are doing as public service. Some of them were sleeping on sidewalks because they couldn't find a place to live. They weren't allowed entry back into their apartment complexes. And um yeah I was I was rough.

So I mean, that seems like they are contributing so much to society. Was the government doing anything to support them? Like did they have any kind of protections or a safety met?

But what the pandemic revealed was that there is no social safety night for migrant workers in china, much like in the U. S. There is no free public health care system, and so people have to take out private policies.

But many market workers have almost no savings, are very little because they were doing low wage labor, they often could not afford health care, and in many cases, they cannot afford to stop working. Their employers have, in most cases, not been contributing to a retirement funds. So there are no pension benefits waiting for them either.

So that got me thinking again about this nonstop construction industry and the construction workers who was such a crucial workforce during the bonus. These workers are getting into their late fifties and sixties. They are literally aging on construction sites, still working until they physically cannot. And so my question in the reporting was, what are they going to do? How are they going to afford to retire?

After the break in, my fang and her producer, owen chow, bring us the stories of two migrant workers were grappling with justice question, how are they going to be able to manage in their old age?

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We're back with the sunday story with in P, R, correspond, mali fang.

my producer in beijing. All and I had been trying to figure out a way to tell the story that went beyond the headlines. And we looked around and thought, hey, we have all these construction sites in beijing.

And we wondered where these workers go after their job is done and when they're about to retire. And eventually, we met two men who wanted to talk with us. This was actually harder than expected, because even though migrant workers are everywhere, they're largely silent.

There are different franchise to their rarely asked for their opinions on things. They get suspicious when they are asked. And so I was actually really hard to convince people to talk to us about their day to day lives and convince them that we wanted to hear their stories. The first man I spoke to was the Johnson in his fifty eight years old, and we caught him right before a break. 什么 i want to .

say about .

that tire told us he him to beijing .

in nineteen ninety。 And he spent most of his life working on dusty construction sites, like this one among scape ding and cranes. Back when you first started working, construction seemed like the best option for him. really. IT was the only option other than to stand his village and work the fields and grow crops.

我 觉得 得 挣钱。

对 不？ To make money. So mean.

from his village left one after the other for the cities, and they found work at construction sites. And when they got there, they brought more .

of their fellow villagers over 村人。

people like us. We all work on the .

construction sites.

It's pretty .

decent money.

How much every month the company pays me about five to six thousand. I've sent three to four thousand home. I keep some money for daily expenses. The rest I sent home to raise.

The family view is talking .

about the chinese yn. So with the current conversion rate, that's about eight hundred us dollars a month. He's done this work for long enough that he manages other workers now about eighty to ninety people at a time. And it's been a lonely life living in unfamiliar places on on finish construction sites three decades. And then he still works ten hours a day, five hours in the morning, then five hours in the afternoon, and he gets .

a break in the 加以 后 那那 都， 师妹 子 不做 了， 你 今天 中午 前 不？

I do nothing. You see, it's so hot in the middle of the day, you eat and try to sleep .

right away at night.

After dinner, maybe you ve got a bit of time to shower, then you light on with your phone, follow while, then you're sleep. We are just migrant workers. We don't have high standards for ourselves most of the time.

We just want to lie in the bed and look at what's on tiktok or what's the news, really. That's IT. That's all we have. anything?

现在 吃完饭 洗澡 就 睡觉 了。

Lew is frugal. He lives in worker geometries. He eats most of his meals in the worker's cafeteria, but still there's never enough money to go around, and he worries about the future, especially because the state of the construction 睡 gist is not looking good。 China's economy is platoon, and the property sector in particular is under tough new rules that are bankrupting developers.

不好。

it's bad. 以前 还好 点。

现在 不好， be Better.

Now it's not good. 工地 少了。

价格低， few sides. Let's work hard to .

make a living.

Since last year, we started getting bad. This year.

it's even work. See, let's see if I .

can save money next .

few years 时候 再 考 呗。

View has good reason to worry. He feels time is running out for him. Recently, cities have new rules banning men above the age of sixty years old from working on construction sites.

So he's facing a Mandated retirement pretty soon, but after a lifetime of work, he's not eligible for any pension or unemployment benefits, and he's got no health insurance. And the thing that stuck with me when we asked mister view what he would do if he got sick is, and over thirty years he's been building cities. He hasn't visited the hospital or seen a doctor in beijing even once.

He always goes home to the village instead. And that, of course, because he does not have medical benefits in the city where he's worked for more than half his life. I was thinking about that, how you never went to a hospital. In the more than three years he lived in the capital, we met another migrant word name song, I mean, whose first job in construction was actually building a hospital. More than forty years ago.

the angle hospital cafeteria had everything you'd ever want to eat. They have noodles, bread, rice, cooked dishes. They had everything.

You didn't cost much. You didn't have to spend much to fill your stomach, not like now life was decent. Magazine zine. People from the villages, all of us wanted to leave, to go find work in the cities, labor in the cities. At least you always eat well, Better than you ate back home.

比 自己 坚持 的 好啊。

was pretty 的。

我 二十几岁 就 到了 北京。

The nineteen eighties was a completely different city. IT was far less built up, and IT was much less the Cosmopolitan. Then he and his generation of workers never had a home in the city he helped construct. They slept in company provided dormitories, and they sometimes even just laid down a cut somewhere on the construction site to sleep. When he was reminisces about us early days, I asked him a simple question.

how did IT with shower? Well, you would have to spend money to go to the bad house to wash in the summer. You could just splash yourself with some cold water in the winner. You might boil some water, get a big basin and use that for quick bit.

He spent decades moving from city to city. Whatever construction work took him out to places like random province in the northeast, all the way up to share province in the west of china. And the thing that motivated zone through all these years of work was this for the idea of a Better future for his family.

你 改变 什么？ 你 打 作业 打。

The hope I had for change 到 was that maybe one day I might rise up the ladder and eventually go to work。 And an official job in the main office of a construction company. And they really invest in me, in my retirement or something.

Then when I got old, I might have something to live on. But the way I worked, I have nothing. Now, to tell you the truth, if I walk, they give me money.

We still work. They gave me nothing. When I retire, I get nothing at all 退休。

什么都没有。

And aging workers across china are in this bind right now. More, more people actually will be because china's workforce is aging faster than demography is expected, chinese government statistics show near the thirty percent of market workers are fifty years old, and above that, almost ninety million workers. And keep in mind, the official retirement age for men in china is sixty.

And as as fifty years old for a woman, lewin sung both told me they chose this life more than anything else for their families over the years. They sent most of their money home, and they only rarely got to spend time with their wives and their kids. Song said he would go home only when he was needed to hope the harvest or during holidays.

回家的 时候 都是 一般 的 情况。

都是 晚上。 When I went home, usually arrived late night, 我 and the kids wasn't even know that I was coming home 上 到家。 Missing my kids is useless。 If you don't make money, how can you live? Try not to think .

about IT for both .

song and you, basic education, not work as a way out and up for their children.

都行， 好不好 是 他的 事， 是 吧？ 都想 好啊， 都想。 Of course.

I want my children to live a good life, but it's not after me.

It's all on them, their .

abilities, you can tell the future. 你 现在 就说 不准， just have to see if they do well in school.

想 上 不想 上。

It's what in their heart. If they want to keep studying, then that's good. Of course we in countryside I want that.

有的 农村人， 他 都是 这个 想法。

谁 愿意 让 他 工地， 对不对？

I don't want them to be farmers. Who wants their children to be farmers.

right? But also, they had limited ability to influence their children, because, after all, they were separated from their children for most of the year. They were living in different cities. Different reality is working.

I've talked to them many times before. I said, study or disney, if you don't study, you won't be able to .

make IT in the world.

But they couldn't hear me, and there's nothing I could do.

This phenomenon of going out to work far away from your family is so common in china. There's a term for their children, the cold left behind children or 留守儿童。 And mister song seems to feel some regret about leaving his children behind, because even though he graduated from high school, his children only got a middle school education.

His fun now raises sheep, and his daughters working in a local factory in the village making toys. And without his safety net, IT will probably be these children who will bear the costs of supporting him. Now, song is sixty four years old, so he's returned home to his village in hubby province, which is just north D.

J. And that's very reached ten by phone. And I could tell after a while of chatting that he never been asked before to reflect on his life and what all these years of work mention.

What kind of story can you tell about the hard work? It's a slaver. There's no story here. I've worked my whole life without migrant workers from the countryside. China wouldn't have developed so quickly, right?

He did not think he'd still be working at .

this point in his life.

First I thought when the kids grow up, i'm fifty five or so, i'll just stay home. And .

far 小孩 结了婚 以后。

but then I saw how my money wasn't was anything because this money, the money isn't enough to spend. So I had to go out again.

He's picked up a .

job as a part time security guard in his village, polling late night shifts, which gives a lot of time to think about the past and the future and the future. It's constantly on news, mind as well.

老了 以后， unless I have .

my own savings, I got to rely on .

my son or later or maybe .

he'll need to keep earning his own keep.

I can't .

say no. I mean, if there's nothing .

in construction.

I will have to come up with way to make money at home.

你 在 家里 挣钱， it's not much 没 想法。

You've got to make money.

You've got work 多一点。

You cannot make money.

现在 没钱 不行， 你 都 这么 做， 这么 少 的 在家 也得 干。

A few years back， he started to plan ahead, and lew started saving some money through an option program called single hu. This is a state run pension program, specifically of her farmers and migrant workers who might not a formal employment and therefore no formal employment benefits, but the program does not pay out much. So to put numbers to IT, you will get about one hundred chinese un, or just about fifteen us. Dollars each month from that when he retires, which means for now, lew keeps shouldering on and on the construction sites where he supervises workers. What he sees are lots of people just like him.

看来 现在 你看 现在 搞 建筑行业 的 没有 几个 年轻 的， 三十多岁 的 那种 都是。

There are no Young people in the construction industry. Nobody in their thirties were all in our fifties of up 了。 Young people don't .

wanna do this work, you know.

Now these Young people, none of them wanna come out here and put in such hard labor. They say, I will make less money, but I was sofer less.

这个 补 要 补充 那个。

That was a different time when our generation could suffer. Young generation, they can suffer .

like 我们 这 现在 这 你 能 受苦。

that's life is not easy.

you throw yourself .

into make money your whole life. Some people are success, but four people like us, it's mostly .

lying down at .

night looking my phone. That's the happiest time.

这是 最好的 工地， 是 最好的 时间。

There's no happy times at construction sites。

工地 没有 快乐的 时候， 都是 干活， 哪 有 快乐的 时候。

Meanwhile， song at home in his village had this to saying about where he ended up.

都 让 他们 考 出去。

My grandkids, if they can get out of here, I hope they do. Let's see if they can make IT this on that may, I hope, then they go anywhere but stay here in the countryside. What goods could come out of staying in the village?

被告 现在 有什么 出血？

Look at me, a whole life have labored in the city, and they still the same, 还是 这个。 I'm still in this spot. I'm still just a present. I just a farmer walking to soil and his dream of .

moving up in the world and becoming part of the middle class after a lifetime of work that that dreams is now over.

Thank you so much, Emily, for bringing a sea stories. It's really rare to hear directly from these workers who are often in the background of these stories about china. So things were bringing them to the forefront so we could hear about their choices and their sacrifices in their own words.

IT was really humbling to get to meet them because their story is the story of china. You know, they live through these extraordinary social and economic changes. And really, it's because of them that china changed.

This episode I was produced by Justin yan and edited by jie h. mdt. The engineer for this episode was gilly moon.

The voice over actors were song I leu and leu way. Thanks to imp s. Asia editor than sydney and producer owen child. Our team includes ly on a simply orm and Andrew mambo, I read a gucci is our executive producer we always love hearing from you. So feel free to reach out to us at the sunday story at epr dot org M I E shark o up forces back tomorrow in your feed with all the news, you need to start a week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.