Qin Hui, "Looking at China from South Africa" 2

Qin Hui, “Looking at China from South Africa:”  “Economic Miracles” under Conditions of “Low Human Rights Advantage,”[1] Part Two
 
Translation by David Ownby
 
Other People, Other Places:  Comparing Systems
　　
The Past and Present of the “Migrant Labor” System:  Corvée Labor, Certified “Mobility,” Free Employment and Residence
 
China and South Africa have many intriguing points of comparison, including for example mine disasters (China and South Africa are “world leaders” in mine disasters, which also have a status component:  the main victims of these disasters are migrant workers in China and blacks in South Africa).  But the most basic comparison should be that of systems, especially the labor and land systems as discussed by Xia Jisheng, cited above.[2]

In economic terms, racial oppression in South Africa is concentrated in the migrant labor system.  I should note that in and of itself, migrant labor is not necessarily linked to oppression.  Today’s South Africa, democratic for more than a decade, still has migrant labor (mostly composed of foreign workers from neighboring countries),  But what was called migrant labor under apartheid was an exclusionary institutional arrangement; as already explained, at that time South African authorities imposed an “orderly” mobility on black labor, dictating that when they entered the cities “it was merely temporary…they were just people working for money, and not migrants permitted to reside in the cities.”  This is of a piece with China’s regulations that migrant workers have rights only to “temporary residence.”  Such systems produced large numbers of “amphibious people” whose resident permits were in the village (in China these are called “new villages,” in South Africa “black homelands”) while they were working elsewhere.  The youth leave while the elderly, the women and the children are “left behind;” migrant workers spend most of their time in the cities but come home in groves at New Years for a few days like “migrant birds” (“migrant labor” in English comes from the idea of “migratory birds”).

This system created a very famous scene:  the “migrant wave” of workers flocking home for the holidays and then back to the cities once the holidays are over.  The spectacle of this migrant wave around Chinese New Year’s is something everyone knows about.  And South Africa has something very similar.  Soweto, where most of black labor in South Africa is concentrated, has what is said to be South Africa’s largest long-distance bus terminal, and just before Christmas, South Africa’s “wave of migrant workers returning home” appears.  But South African friends have told me that most of these workers returning home now are foreign workers.  Since democratization, most South African black workers reside in the cities (although in the ghettos), and thus are no longer “migratory birds.”  But the migrant wave during the apartheid era was like China’s today, made up of native migrant workers.

Yet from a historical perspective, the ancestors of migrant workers were the even less fortunate “corvée labor.”  China and South Africa have followed similar paths on that front, from corvée labor to certified “migration” to freedom of employment and residence.  The difference is that with democratization, South Africa put an end to the second phase, when blacks received the right to freedom of employment and city residence, while China remains mired in the apartheid stage of “certified migration.”

Prior to reform and opening, China confined peasants to the villages through strict status barriers and household registration systems.  For a relatively long period, South Africa also practiced a policy of “white urbanization” that excluded blacks, implemented through a similar system of discriminatory passes and permits.  In 1921, South African blacks, who made up more than 70% of the population, constituted only 13% of the urban population.  The idea that blacks should be “rural” was deeply embedded in the minds of South African authorities. 

In the era of command economy prior to China’s reform and opening, there were very few opportunities for peasants to be “recruited” via special qualifications that could alter their status. At the time, the concept of "migrant workers" did not mean working to earn money, but referred instead to requisitioned labor that went basically unpaid. This was very similar to the corvée labor owed to the imperial court in ancient times.  Under the command economy, almost all young peasants were called upon to “furnish labor” during the agricultural slack season, and sometimes even during harvest time, a certain number of “peasant workers” were required to continue to work for the state.  I myself participated in such projects, personally experiencing the burden and witnessing the many ways the peasants sought to avoid labor service.  At the time, it was impossible for peasants to go “work for money” on their own.  And for peasant labor to become “urban citizens” was even more impossible.  Those who did leave the villages and seek to work for money were called “blind migrants 盲流” (during the Cultural Revolution, in some places they were called “criminals on the lam 流窜犯”), and it was normal to arrest them.  The Sun Zhigang 孙志刚 affair that caused such a public outburst in the reform and opening period would have been seen at the time as completely normal and ordinary.  At the time, peasants had no right to work, to say nothing of living [in the cities], so there was no “temporary residence permit.”  If peasants needed to enter the city, they needed a one-time permit related to this specific purpose, otherwise they risked being arrested as “blind migrants.”

After the abolition of slavery in South Africa in 1834, the authorities preserved the right to requisition black labor for their purposes, as in the case of the 1894 Glenrae Act, which stipulated that all adult black were required to work outside of their place of residence for three months out of each year, or otherwise pay a labor tax of ten shillings.  In this situation, where whites sought out blacks to make them work and blacks sought to avoid such work, whites had no intention of keeping blacks “apart.”  The term “racial apartheid” did not appear until 1947.  But this clearly does not mean that blacks were treated better before 1947.
Thus China’s “status socialism” prior to reform and opening was quite similar to South Africa’s “racial socialism.”  Since neither Chinese peasants nor South African blacks could easily work for money, they could not become the core of the urban manufacturing work force.  In China at the time, the work force in manufacturing was made up of city dwellers, and the peasant migrant workers whose labor was requisitioned were mainly engaged in infrastructure construction, such as transportation, reservoirs, power stations, mines, etc., and most of their construction sites were not in the city.  Aside from dangerous and heavy work in mining or on state farms during harvest season, where peasants were occasionally hired as “contract labor,” “temporary labor,” or “shift workers,” prior to reform and opening, peasants were rarely hired in other areas.  In South Africa, before 1911 corvée black labor mainly worked on Boer farms or in gold mines, and the work force in urban manufacturing was made up basically of whites.  In its early period, even the Communist Party of South Africa based itself on whites, excluding blacks in the interests of “poor whites.”

In the absence of globalization and economic reform, there could be no economic miracle in contexts of “status socialism” or “racial socialism.”  The low economic efficiency and widespread poverty of pre-reform China are well known.  Even if the aggregate growth rates for the pre-reform period are not too low, in fact this is largely due to the “peace benefit” that followed the end of 21 years of large-scale warfare prior to the success of the 1949 revolution (the hostilities between the Nationalists and the Communists beginning in 1927, the anti-Japanese War beginning in 1937, and the full-scale civil war that followed the defeat of Japan in 1945), but in terms of institutional performance, pre-reform China has nothing to brag about when compared with peace-time pre-revolutionary China, with India, or with the Soviet Union.  In South Africa, the ruling Boers were more closed-minded and conservative than the English-speaking whites, with less interest in industry and commerce.  They long relied on “the three treasures—cattle cars, rifles, and the Bible” and the “cattle-car mentality” (stubbornness, conservativism, and xenophobia) to resist world trends.  For this reason, although they became wealthy through the discovery of gold, South African manufacturing remained undeveloped through the period of the First World War, and was not an economic leader even in Africa.

This situation changed greatly with the opening to the outside world and participation in globalization.  China launched its policy of reform and opening in 1978, and 1992 marked yet another wave of opening up, leading to China’s successful entry into the WTO in 2001.  South Africa opened up even earlier. Despite the peculiar situation in which, following the Boer War, the British colonial government reached a compromise with the Afrikaners allowing the defeated Boers to retain political authority under British domination, South Africa remained a British dependency (and was part of the Commonwealth after independence), and was incorporated into the world market system of the time.  Despite Boer political leadership, the economy, and especially industry and commerce, dominated by descendants of the British, grew very quickly.  For this reason, South Africa was successfully integrated into the world market system.
Subsequently, the “low human rights advantage” of Chinese peasants and South African blacks quite dramatically become a favorable condition accelerating the primitive accumulation of capital in the global market system. Under the “stable” conditions achieved by iron-fisted control, China’s and South Africa’s “migrant labor”—cheap labor without unions, lacking bargaining power 博弈能力, hard-working yet docile and obedient, poorly paid and without the “cost” of welfare benefits—together with other cost-saving features, came to offer the “best investment environment.”  In an era where the major industrialized countries had long since passed through the period of primitive accumulation, and in which high factor-costs associated with high taxes, high benefits and strong unions led to a wave of industrial displacement to cheaper parts of the world, South Africa and China relied on their “low human rights advantage” to attract vast amounts of capital to produce vast amounts of manufactured goods.  South Africa became “Africa’s factory” and China became the “factory for the world.”

Both countries maintained high levels of economic growth for a relatively long period of time:  in the 30 years following the beginning of reform and opening, China’s development was the fastest in Asia, and South Africa’s was the fastest in Africa (again for 30 years).

In the “economic miracle” of the two countries, China’s migrant peasants and South Africa’s migrant blacks made enormous contributions.  The development of the market economy and of industry universalized the hiring system, as the requisitioning of peasant labor declined.  A mobilizing force unfazed by human will led the cities to absorb more and more Chinese peasants and South African blacks as workers:  in South Africa, the 1911 practice of corvée labor gave way to migrant labor, and the practice was no longer that of “white people trying to put blacks to work and blacks trying to escape” but instead that of blacks moving to the cities on their own initiative and whites imposing limits.  “Apartheid” in its strict sense (as opposed to ordinary racial oppression) really only became the chief means of discrimination during this period.  By the 1970s, blacks made up more than half of South Africa’s urban population, and by the 1990s more than 70%.  And the conflicts between these black migrant workers and the white city-dwellers intensified.  In China, after 30 years of reform and opening, migrant workers are no longer unwilling objects of corvée labor and have become an unstoppable flow of workers moving toward the cities, 200 million migrant workers pursuing city-dwellers with residence papers.

At the same time, another similarity between the two countries was:  due to various professional access restrictions and other conditions, the doors to many “top level” professions remained closed to these poor recent migrants; peasants in Chinese cities and blacks in South African cities mostly did low-paying, physical, dangerous jobs that their “betters” did not want to do.  In South Africa, black labor moved from the farms and the mines to cities, and by the 1970s made up most of industrial work force, accounting for 68.9% of the total labor force in the industry and mining. In China, the “laws” of the market economy increasingly drove enterprises to hire migrant labor that was harder-working, less well paid, and, because of institutional discrimination, less able to protect their rights, as their blue-collar work force.  Many city-dwellers, particularly those with “status privileges” in the capital or in other large cities, many of whom were younger urbanites and products of the one-child policy, increasingly took their distance from blue-collar professions, preferring unemployment to working with migrant labor.  This led to the phenomenon of the premature “white-collarization” of city dwellers with residence permits, even in cases where the level of economic development was not particularly high.  The question of blue-collar work in China is increasingly one of migrant workers and not one of city workers.  Talking about labor rights in China without including migrant workers makes less and less sense, and the same is true of black labor in South Africa.

A Chinese expert on South Africa once pointed out that “whites were the masters of the cities, while blacks were migrants, working for money on a temporary basis, their real homes being in the ‘black homelands.’”  When he made these remarks in 1996, South Africa had already experienced a basic change, but his observation still captures the situation in today’s China!
 
 “Temporary Residence Permits” and “Travel Passes:” The Pain of Sun Zhigang and Sharpeville
　　
In many countries, like India and the countries of Latin America, the distinguishing feature of poor people is poverty.  This is different from the cases of South African migrant blacks or China’s migrant peasants, where a more serious issue is their lack of civil rights.  They are not only poor people, but also “inferior people 贱人.”  Of course, the Indian caste system also has “untouchables,” but this discrimination comes from traditional culture and is illegal.  What China’s and South Africa’s inferior people suffer is state-imposed “legal” discrimination.

The first characteristic of inferior people is that must always carry a special permit on their person, and the police (not only the police, but any special coercive organization established by the government—in China we have the “urban management officers 城管”, or in the past there were the people’s militia 民兵, public security defense units 治安联防队, etc.) can demand at any time that they produce these permits, and can detain or fine them for any irregularity.  Systems like this originally did not target mobile or peasant labor; prior to industrialization, these systems sought to shackle “inferior people” as a means of ensuring “social stability.”  In South Africa, as early as 1760 during the slavery period, the Boer authorities stipulated that any black slave not in his authorized place required a “travel pass,” and in 1809, the English authorities in the Cape Colony had a similar regulation.  At that time, however, blacks were most often requisitioned by whites to work for them, and migrant labor entering the city of its own volition did not exist.  Since it was easy to distinguish blacks from whites by their appearance, and since any black person found in a city in the absence of organized requisition was clearly illegal, arrest and return of wayward blacks was easy and the system of “travel passes” was not particularly important.

As migrant labor increased, there were more and more unrequisitioned blacks in the cities, and the “travel pass” became more important, serving as the most important symbol of the apartheid system until after WWII.  The Afrikaans word for this kind of travel pass is DomPas, which is the same as “pass” in English; it came from the verb to “pass through,” and once it became a noun we came to call it a “travel pass.”  But “pass” also appears in passports, admissions passes and all sorts of documents.  But the passes used by blacks at the time were in fact proofs of a work permit issued by white authorities.  As already explained, since in the eyes of officialdom, the especially approved black migrant was “only temporarily” permitted to reside in the city, and since the pass contained the words “temporary sojourner,” it would be more accurate to translate it into Chinese as “temporary resident permit.”  I will continue to refer to it as a “travel pass” because that is how existing studies in China refer to it.

The most important function of a travel pass is what is called “influx control 流入控制,” which allowed the white authorities to regulate the areas and occupations that black labor could enter.  South African authorities considered that the status of “temporary resident” was suitable for black labor, and the jobs they were permitted to do were those that were deemed as indispensable to the national economy, in the absence of which the economy would collapse.  Yet blacks could not be seen as city dwellers.  “Some extreme Boer groups demanded that travel passes only be issued to young blacks, and that black women and children be returned to the black homelands.  Only black men can reside in white areas for the period that we need them.”  Even if the “travel pass law” was not as explicit as this, such was the goal it intended to achieve.

In China, residence restrictions were strictly enforced after the establishment of People’s Communes in 1958 as an important part of the mechanism of “socialist primitive accumulation.”  In the great famine which followed shortly thereafter, this system became the nemesis of those “slanderers of socialism” who were fleeing for their lives.  Ever since, this “confinement 收容 [to the village]” has served as a routine “stability” measure.  As already explained, peasant labor at the time was all corvée labor, and there was no question of free mobility.  During the Cultural Revolution, peasants wanting to enter the city needed the “revolutionary committee” of their commune to issue a document, without which hotels would not let them register.  Because peasants and city dwellers in China were not as easy to tell apart as blacks and whites in South Africa, “document checks” were very important.  But at the time peasants made only single trips to the city, and a new pass was required for each trip.  So there was no “temporary resident permit.”

As the market economy grew with reform and opening, the number of peasants entering the city to work greatly increased, and China then created the “temporary work permit” system similar to South Africa’s “travel pass.”  This document also served as an influx control.  The “blindly mobile” without this document could be detained and returned to the village on detection.  And those who were detained had to pay the associated fees and penalties.  In the craze to cash in on the market economy, many people discovered that detention was a good way to make a fast buck.  As a result, people used detention to issue bonuses or to build spacious new dormitories, and there were even “detentions on commission” involving quotas and kickbacks.  Later on, corruption worsened, and some people discovered that detention was not only served the interests of “social stability,” but even more served the interests of the stability of their official position, and people who dared to “illegally” sue officials or to “jumped the queue” to submit petitions against official behavior became frequent objects of forced “detention.” 

Things got worse and worse.  There was Su Ping 苏萍, Cheng Shuliang 程树良, Huang Qiuxiang 黄秋香, Zhang Zhenghai 张正海, Pu Yonggen 朴永根…one sad case after another, as well as unknown souls like the “woman migrant worker who fell to her death while attempting to jump off of  the 604 train,” or the “outsiders who died or were injured when falling like dumplings [into water] from the Baoan prison vehicle.”  The web of detention grew ever larger, capturing wandering beggars, prostitutes or the “three nos” (i.e., people with no livelihood, no labor power, and no one to be responsible for them), from peasants to college students, from “blind migrants” to “illegal petitioners.”  Until 2003, when Su Zhigang 孙志刚, a college graduate with all necessary permits and a job died in the disaster that is “detention,” which led to mass indignation. 
In the 1950s, a South African scholar noted that:  “The legal status of Africans today is that the police can arrest an African walking on Johannesburg Street at any time of the day or night.”  China’s non-resident workers are in a similar situation.  A Chinese scholar observed:  “The Pass Law makes black people’s freedom of movement impossible, and they are constantly monitored. They can only work in prescribed areas, which is essentially forced labor.”  But Chinese scholars they remain silent about the similar situation of the migrant workers who are their fellow countrymen and who share their skin color.  Of course, in terms of Chinese standards, calling this “forced labor” is something of an exaggeration.  Migrant workers suffer discrimination, but it’s not the same as “labor education,” “labor reform,” or the gulag, and compared to corvée peasant labor from the pre-reform period, the situation of China’s migrant workers is different as well, just as South African migrant labor is not the same as earlier corvée labor.

South African had a unified regulation that any 16 year-old black in a white area had to carry his travel pass on his person.  China allows each local administration to decide what documents a “peasant entering the city” must possess, but in the early twenty-first century, most municipal administrations demanded three documents:  temporary residence permit, work permit and family planning certificate.  The most ridiculous thing is that the Beijing temporary resident permit has long existed in three forms, A, B, and C.  Ordinary migrant workers get a year-long C pass that must be renewed every year, while the prestigious “migrant entrepreneur” can obtain an A permit, granting “temporary residence” of five years.  This is commonly known as a “green card,” and means that migrant workers entering the city are seen as foreign workers.  Even more interesting is that the residence permits in certain cities are only valid for certain areas, as noted by a migrant worker in Guangzhou in 2006:  “I got a temporary residence permit from a village in Baiyun 白云 district, but authorities from another village refuse to honor it, and I have to reapply.  Every place has its own policy, and the fees are out of control.”

Blacks in South Africa generally don’t have to pay for these discriminatory permits, but for a long time, in many cities in China, migrant workers not only had to pay, but had to pay every year.  In Beijing, for example, every person has to pay at least 450 RMB every year to obtain the three permits.  In 2001 in Guangzhou, migrant workers had to pay four fees of 30 to 40 RMB per month to obtain the three permits, which comes to 360 to 480 RMB a year.  In many cases, the fees required to obtain a temporary residence permit equal a month’s wages for a migrant worker.  In the past few years, some places have announced changes regarding the temporary residence permit or the associated fees, but in fact, it remains normal to pay fees.  For example, in the winter of 2007, Foshan in Guangdong imposed an annual fee of 112 RMB, and Dongguan 53 RMB.
In both countries, many “inferior people” are detained each year as a result of document controls.  For example, in 1984 in South Africa, 1,630,000 blacks were detained in the context of the Pass Law.  And in China, in Guangdong province alone 580,000 people were forcibly detained in 2000.  In the same year, Beijing detained 180,000 in the first half of the year.  The population of Guangdong is almost twice that of South Africa, but it detained 3.6 times as many people.  The population of Beijing city is one fourth that of South Africa, but Beijing authorities detained more than twice as many people as South Africa!  And awful things often happen in detention, such as: 

On July 26, 1999, Su Ping, a young woman from Hunan who had in her possession a marriage certificate, a migrant work permit and a temporary residence permit, was forcibly detained by security personnel at the Guangzhou train station and subsequently taken to a mental institution, where she was raped by violent inmates.  Later, her husband came to claim her, and was asked to pay a fee of 2000 RMB.  He gave someone working there a bribe of 200 RMB, and the fee was reduced to 500 RMB.

On October 27, 1999, a 27 year-old woman on the 604 train who had not bought a ticket and who did not have her identity card was tied up by train security personnel, after which the young woman jumped from the train and killed herself.  The direct cause of this terrible event is that the train security personnel had an arrangement with a detention center to the effect that people without tickets or identity cards would be brought to the center, and the train security personnel would receive 200 RMB in “work fees” for every person delivered.  Clearly, the detention center did not offer the 200 RMB for nothing, but was hoping to make a profit.  Nothing is for free, after all 羊毛还要出在羊身上.

The retention center in Pingshi, Shaoguan, Guangdong 广东韶关坪石收容站 has a budget of only 200,000 RMB per year, but it has built a very spacious dormitory. A local leader revealed that they were making money through detentions.
A member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference once said: Migrant workers have two fears:  one is not getting paid, and the other is being detained.  “Someone who has broken no law can be arrested while walking on the street and taken to a detention center where the conditions are awful.  And although the "Regulations concerning Punishments by the Public Security Administration" stipulate that no one can be detained longer than 15 days, in fact every place does as it sees fit, and the “longest period of detention” can extend to six months or can even be without limits.  Those detained must also pay the expenses of their detention (room and board) as well as transport fees.”  A migrant worker remembers:  “I graduated in 2001 and went to Guangzhou.  It was terrible.  You could be walking down the street minding your own business and someone would come over and grab you and ask for your ‘three permits.’  If you didn’t have them on you you were screwed, they would take you back to a room in the neighborhood committee 居委会关 and tell you to call home.  They already took your cell, so you had to call on theirs, and they charged your four RMB a minute, the same rates as an overseas call.  At night, people would bang on your door asking for your ‘three permits,’ and if you didn’t open right away there went your door, they were not polite about it.  What do you think expect as an outsider?  The fees for a temporary resident permit came to a month’s wages.  And if your three permits weren’t in order, forget about it.  These assholes would ruin your life.  They call it detention, but you could wind up working like a slave in a stone quarry, and might not get home for three or five years.”

When authorities in South Africa checked black people’s travel passes, this was a bad law, but it was still a “law.”  A black who produced his pass was usually not detained.  South Africa has no tradition of “striking hard 严打”[3] or of political movements.  But China does this all the time.  During the holidays, or when there are important meetings and major events, authorities will launch a cleanup of "outsiders." Even if the three certificates are in order, they will still be "detained."  For instance on National Day in 1999, Beijing police saw a group of migrant workers and detained them.  “One of them produced his three permits and said ‘I have a temporary residence permit,’ after which the policeman took it and tore it up, throwing it into a ditch.  ‘Do you still have it now?’  He asked casually.”

For a certain period, women were not subject to the pass law in South Africa; it was in 1957 that authorities decided to apply the law to women, which prompted considerable resistance, even among whites.  By contrast, China’s temporary residence permit system has emphasized “equality between men and women” from the outset.  Su Ping, Huang Qunxiang, and the “female migrant worker who jumped to her death from train 604” are all famous examples of sacrifices to this system.

Such treatment of inferior people is heartbreaking. In South Africa, the Pass Act has been the focus of black protests, as in the case of the famous Sharpeville tragedy. In March 1960, in the town of Sharpeville, 35 miles south of Johannesburg, police fired at the blacks protesting against the law, killing 69 people.

This incident awakened the world to the tragic price that that black people were paying to oppose this evil law.  The ANC was branded illegal for having launched the Pass Law protest, and was forced to go underground and take up armed struggle.  And Robert Sobukwe (1924-1978), the leader of the even more extreme Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, was arrested in the context of these protests and died in prison.

Given the strict policies on migrant workers in China, there was no way to launch a resistance movement.  But since urban and rural Chinese are harder to distinguish than blacks and whites in South Africa, detention inevitably “expanded” to include people who were not migrants, which finally provoked a public outrage.  In 2003 there occurred the sensational Sun Zhigang affair.  Sun Zhigang was not a migrant worker, but instead a proper college graduate (according to Chinese regulations he had already obtained his “non-rural” residency) and he had a proper job in Guangzhou, yet because he was dressed like an “outsider” and did not have his papers on his person, he was arrested and detained by the police and beaten to death in the detention center.  Such terrible things had happened to real migrant workers in the past, and many had been reported in the press.  But no one cared about the plight of migrant workers.  But this time city people were angry, and the detention system faced a major crisis.

In response to the resistance of blacks in South Africa and Chinese city dweller’s empathy for migrant workers, a certain amount of improvement and reform occurred in both countries.

In 1978, the pass system was “relaxed” for blacks in South Africa, and blacks were not required to produce their documents on demand as long as they were available at a distance no greater than five kilometers.  Over the next few years, the number of blacks detained in the context of the pass law declined by a half.  In many cases, fines came to replace detention for those unable to produce passes.  In 1986, South African authorities “formally ended the population influx control system,” and abolished travel passes, but continued to control blacks through housing restrictions, which meant expelling blacks whose residences were in “violation of ordinances.”  The final abolition of the pass law would occur only after South Africa’s democratization.

In China, the wave of resistance provoked by the Sun Zhigang case finally put an end to the infamous “detention law.”  But the “three permits” were not abolished.  What is different is that outside of movement-like “focused management 专项治理” activities, those without papers are now fined instead detained or made to do forced labor (which strangely resembles the “improved” methods toward the end of the South African pass system).  Today, the “three permits” system amounts to economic discrimination.  The following is the 2007 complaint of a migrant worker whom we might consider lucky (migrant workers who can buy commercial property today are exceedingly rare):

“I have been in Foshan for three years and don’t know how many document checks I’ve seen.  It’s shameless.  If you rent an apartment you are suspect, and it is a common occurrence for them to come in the middle of the night and bang on your door.  But the most hateful thing they do is to check at the entrance to the industrial zone when people are going to work, directly targeting people who are walking or riding a bike, and fining those without papers.  This is incredibly shameless.  Because I take a bus to the industrial zone I have managed to avoid this, but recently they sent a directive to my company saying that they were going to check documents at the door to the company, and that everyone who is not local would have to have a permit.  I have bought a house here, but have not yet transferred my residency permit, so I called to ask whether I needed a permit, and they said that the fact that I had a house didn’t matter, that if I didn’t have a pass then I was part of the migrant population…I was so mad! There’s no word to describe these people other than gangsters.”


Translator’s Notes

[1] 秦晖, ”从南非看中国—‘低人权优势下’的“经济奇迹,’” available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/33585.html , published on Aisixiang on May 12, 2010.

[2] The reference is to Xia Jisheng 夏吉生 ed., Analysis of Race Relations in South Africa 南非种族关系探析 (Shanghai :  Southeast Normal University, 1996).

​[3] “Striking hard,” a practice initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1983, refers to campaign-like law enforcement activities focused on particular problems.