The plight of China’s rural migrants
Al Jazeera English has filed a video report on rural migrants and why they are treated like second-class-citizens in China.
China has an estimated 150 to 200 million rural-to-urban migrants, who have moved to the cities in search of work and better lives, in what has been called "the world's largest ever peacetime migration".
The number is expected to grow even further, with some estimating there will be 300 million rural-to-urban migrants by 2015. From Amnesty International's report:
" … While they have served as the back-bone labourers fuelling China's economic take-off, the majority of internal migrants never gain permanent residency in urban areas ...
" Tens of millions of migrants are denied rights to adequate health care and housing, and are excluded from the wide array of state benefits available to permanent urban residents …They experience discrimination in the workplace, and are routinely exposed to some of the most exploitative conditions of work. Internal migrants' insecure legal status, social isolation, sense of cultural inferiority and relative lack of knowledge of their rights leaves them particularly vulnerable, enabling employers to deny their rights with impunity …"
Comments
Alexandra Rodd | Posted on 16 October 2008, 09:29PM | Report comment
Surely all Chinese people, just like people everywhere, deserve basic human rights. It is especially sad that people of peasant origin should be discriminated against in a communist country. Surely that is against communist ideology?!