Crowds of Chinese piled on to trains yesterday in the biggest migration of humanity on the planet as hundreds of millions travel back to their home provinces for the Lunar New Year.
But some can't afford a family holiday. Many of the poor migrant workers who have flooded into China's cities have been cheated of their wages by their bosses, despite growing government efforts to stop the fraud.
The shadow of sickness has also threatened to dampen spirits this year.
Most Chinese were set to spend yesterday night, the eve of Spring Festival, at home with their families.
But migrant workers slumped over in the shadows of the Beijing railway station yesterday were not going home to their families.
"How can we go home? The boss ran off and didn't give us a cent," snapped Yang Jianguo, a 48-year-old from Hebei province sprawled on the floor.
Breathing fumes of sorghum-based moonshine, he launched into a classic account -- dubious builders, fly-by-night contractors, callous officials -- repeated yearly like a broken record by down-in-the-mouth migrants who fail to collect wages.
This Lunar New Year, China's new Communist leaders are trying as hard as ever to change that, observers say.
End-of-year gross domestic product figures announced on Tuesday saw year-on-year growth of 9.1 percent.
But many of the rural migrants who build China's highways and villas and contribute to that impressive growth are mired in poverty and debt, often because they received no wages.
Hu and Wen have both issued orders to find ways to dig workers and peasants out of debt, official media said.
State television has saturated the airwaves with melodramas about people finally collecting their unpaid wages.
Some must run bureaucratic obstacle courses before breaking through red tape, others simply wait, like one Shanxi province man who has just been paid for work he did on a road in 1993 to 1994.
Populist pressure in the government and state media are making a difference, official figures indicate. In Beijing alone, more than 99 percent of wages-in-arrears on record from last year had been reimbursed.
Try telling that to Yang and his friends.
"Lies," he said. "There is no law to protect us."
TRADE WAR: Tariffs should also apply to any goods that pass through the new Beijing-funded port in Chancay, Peru, an adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump said A veteran adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump is proposing that the 60 percent tariffs that Trump vowed to impose on Chinese goods also apply to goods from any country that pass through a new port that Beijing has built in Peru. The duties should apply to goods from China or countries in South America that pass through the new deep-water port Chancay, a town 60km north of Lima, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, an adviser to the Trump transition team who served as senior director for the western hemisphere on the White House National Security Council in his first administration. “Any product going
High above the sparkling surface of the Athens coastline, the cranes for building the 50-floor luxury tower centerpiece of Greece’s future “smart city” look out over the Saronic Gulf. At their feet, construction machinery stirs up dust. Its backers say the 8 billion euro (US$8.43 billion) project financed by private funds is a symbol of Greece’s renaissance after the years of financial stagnation that saw investors flee the country. However, critics see it more as a future “ghetto for the rich.” It is hard to imagine that 10km from the Acropolis, a new city “three times the size of Monaco”
STRUGGLING BUSINESS: South Korea’s biggest company and semiconductor manufacturer’s buyback fuels concerns that it could be missing out on the AI boom Samsung Electronics Co plans to buy back about 10 trillion won (US$7.2 billion) of its own stock over the next year, putting in motion one of the larger shareholder return programs in its history. South Korea’s biggest company would repurchase the stock in stages over the coming 12 months, it said in a regulatory filing on Friday. As a first step, it would buy back about 3 trillion won of paper starting today up until February next year, all of which it would cancel. The board would deliberate on how best to effect the remaining 7 trillion won of buybacks. The move
In a red box factory that stands out among the drab hills of the West Bank, Chat Cola’s employees race to quench Palestinians’ thirst for local products since the Gaza war erupted last year. With packaging reminiscent of Coca-Cola’s iconic red and white aluminum cans, Chat Cola has tapped into Palestinians’ desire to shun brands perceived as too supportive of Israel. “The demand for [Chat Cola] increased since the war began because of the boycott,” owner Fahed Arar said at the factory in the occupied West Bank town of Salfit. Julien, a restaurateur in the city of Ramallah further south,
RSS