Laws: July, 2003 - Number #15

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak re-focused attention on China's 100 million plus migrant workers, many of whom left cities such as Beijing and Shanghai in March-April 2003 so that they would not be quarantined there. Health officials tried to prevent migrants from returning to their villages, promising free health care for SARS patients who can not afford it. The authorities fear that, if the migrants with SARS return to villages, weak rural health care systems would be unable to cope.

By June 2003, migrants were reportedly returning to Beijing, but the number of jobs available to them had reportedly decreased.

Under a 1999 Beijing law, employers pay for their workers' health-care costs, but unemployed workers pay their own health-care costs. Some of the largest construction firms in Beijing assured migrants that, if they got sick, they would be cared for rather than simply laid off, and some also obeyed a government directive not to put more than 15 migrants in each room for sleeping. However, many smaller employers said that, if migrants got sick, they were on their own, prompting the migrant exodus.

The government ordered some entertainment venues to close, which also eliminated migrant jobs.

The SARS virus likely began in live animal markets in China's Guangdong Province, where some civets, badgers and raccoon dogs sold for meat had the virus. SARS is a coronavirus, which make animals sick but usually causes only colds in people. Viruses must enter cells to survive, and the mystery of SARS is how it jumped from animal cells to human cells.

The Chinese government suspended adoptions for foreigners in May due to the SARS outbreak. China has the world's largest adoption program; Americans adopted an estimated 5,000 Chinese children, mostly girls, in 2002.

China has an estimated 87 million employees of state-owned factories, and 92 million migrants living away from the rural villages in which they are registered, and often filling jobs that laid-off state workers shun. Many of the employees of state-owned factories have been laid off, and receive small stipends that keep them from being considered unemployed. Migrants are generally not entitled to government benefits in urban areas, although recent reforms have given them more freedom from local police harassment.

In March 2003, China's officially reported jobless rate was four percent, with 7.8 million people out of work. The unemployment rate now covers only the registered unemployed in urban areas, and excludes millions of workers laid off from state firms who receive small benefit payments, migrant workers and the rural population.

When state-owned firms are privatized, local officials often receive financial windfalls, but laid-off workers may not get the unpaid wages and benefits they are due. In March 2002, workers protested in the northeastern city of Liaoyang, and in May 2003 protest leaders received four- and seven-year prison terms for attempting to "subvert state power." To quell labor unrest, Chinese officials tend to incarcerate labor activists, give concessions to demonstrators and limit media coverage.

After a migrant detained by police for vagrancy died in police custody in Guangzhou in March 2003, the central government moved to repeal a 1982 custody and repatriation law that gave broad powers to local police to detain and jail anyone without an identification card, temporary residence card or work permit. In the investigation that followed, it was revealed that some officials in Hunan had been detaining traveling farmers and economic migrants since 1999, paying local police bounties for each person detained and then extracting large fines from the migrants.

Sichuan officials reported that 10 million residents of the province had migrated elsewhere and remitted $4.8 billion a year to Sichuan, which has nine million residents. As migrants flock to fill assembly-line jobs in coastal China, earning $50 to $60 a month, foreign investors often substitute people for capital. The director of a Honda factory in Guangzhou said about operations in the Pearl River delta: "Here we don't need to automate as much; we use manpower."

Inequality is a growing problem in China. In 2001, China's GDP was $855 a person, but varied from $3,285 in Shanghai and $2,165 in Beijing to $465 in Gansu and $340 in Guzhou. The Shanghai metro area, with 15 million residents, is China's commercial center; most foreign investment flows to the Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong areas.

Hong Kong. Beginning on January 1, 2004, people moving to Hong Kong will not be eligible for welfare until they have lived in Hong Kong for seven years, up from the current one year. The new rule will not apply to those under 18.

Hong Kong is still seeking $149 million from UNHCR for the costs of caring for Vietnamese boat people between the 1970s and 1990s.

Klaudia Lee, "Migrants to Hong Kong will wait seven years for welfare," South China Morning Post, June 4, 2003. "China suspends adoption programs over SARS fears," Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 16, 2003. Anthony Kuhn, "China May Reap a Bitter SARS Harvest," Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2003.