They left the camp by foot, with no other plan except to run away as far as their strength would carry them. None of their workmates joined in the escape out of fear of reprisals, but they helped them out with a bit of money. “We managed to get as far as a nearby police station, but we couldn’t ask for help because we don’t speak a word of French. The policeman got an idea of what had happened from the gestures we were making and he found us a driver to take us to the nearest village,” they tell us. By that time the camp boss had realized that the two had gone missing, and so the company sent four Chinese thugs to hunt them down. The runaways began to fear for their lives and so, in the hope of getting some help and to recover their salaries, they made their way to the offices of CCCC, the company which subcontracts Aolong, to meet with a representative of the state-owned company. The company’s reaction could not have been more brutal: first they refused to see the men, and then they told them to go back to work and stop causing trouble.
Desperate, and without any help or money in a foreign country with a language they did not speak, the two men set off on a very different African adventure to the one they had imagined. Over two days of traveling 400 kilometers along Gabonese roads—hidden in plastic bags on regional buses—the two Lius fled from the gangsters sent by Lei Youbin, the head of Aolong, who was ruling the camp with an iron fist in order to subdue the rest of the workers and prevent other desertions. “It took us over two days to get to Libreville, the capital of Gabon. We got help from some Chinese people there who gave us food, but most of all a local taxi driver helped us by giving us money and shelter for five days.” Unfortunately, the Chinese Embassy in Libreville was not so helpful, choosing to wash their hands of the affair and to blindly follow the usual guidelines. “We can’t do anything. Go back to work and don’t talk to the foreign press,” one embassy representative told them, refusing to give them his name.
When we checked these facts with the embassy in Libreville, we received the same treatment as the two fugitives: a “diplomat,” who refused to give us his name despite demanding our full personal information and the names of the media companies we worked for, assured us that the embassy “had done everything possible to reconcile the two parties.” In other words, they pressured the workers into submitting to exploitation and mistreatment without even the guarantee of receiving a salary in return. The all-powerful Chinese state, capable of investing in projects across the planet and exerting its draconian control over a population of 1.3 billion people, was incapable of bringing a modest Chinese company into line after it exposed Chinese citizens to cruel and illegal abuse. Liu Senlin explains that the embassy’s rejection left them with no alternative but to turn to the local and international press. “After we were interviewed by the local television station, the Gabonese people started stopping us in the street to give us money. But the Chinese people who had helped us when we first arrived turned their backs on us, saying the Chinese community in Gabon had lost face when we uncovered the scandal,” he remembers bitterly.
The impact of the media uproar was a mixed blessing. Handled properly, a scandal of this kind could have caused the African Development Bank, the institution which is financing the construction of the road and which, in theory, has rigorous requirements for companies involved in the project, to withhold its payments and begin investigating these events. However, the defenseless Chinese workers, with no knowledge of the law or even the local language or customs, and with no money or support from their embassy in Gabon, were unable to achieve their aim of using the media to end the abuse taking place at the camp, hundreds of kilometers away from the capital. Instead, the media reports reached the ears of Lei Youbin, their Machiavellian boss, who picked up the telephone and sent several thugs on a courtesy visit to the fugitives’ families in China, threatening them with reprisals if their relatives did not stop causing trouble.26
A month later, the two Lius received an encouraging phone call. “Come to my office. They’re going to give you the money,” said the director of the state-owned company that had wanted nothing to do with them just weeks before. They were met by three men dressed in police uniforms, who handcuffed them and shut them in a room where they were left for two days. “Lei Youbin bribed them to arrest us,” the two workers insisted. Forty-eight hours later the police and their boss’s henchmen took them to the airport, where—without passing through any immigration controls—they were put on a plane to Beijing. Their boss had decided to get rid of them once and for all by packing them off back to China. The nightmare had come to an end, but the legal battle in the Chinese courts was just beginning.
THE LAWYER OF LOST CAUSES
At our office in Beijing, Liu Jianxin, Liu Senlin, Ru Liyin and Li Gao demonstrate the typical characteristics of millions of these emigrants who serve as cannon fodder to fuel the longings of collective wealth in a new China. These workers are prepared to suffer terrible hardships in return for a salary, and therefore they rarely complain about having to do a hard job, however arduous it might be. However, they will go to any lengths to air their grievances when they become the victims of injustice, such as when salaries go unpaid. Like two pieces of the same puzzle, the proliferation of this type of abuse against emigrant workers has also created a generation of lawyers who will fight tooth and nail to protect their rights, despite the restrictions imposed on them by the government. Lawyer and client, both of them on the side of China’s poorest people, are two faces of the same injustice, a phenomenon that has tainted China all too often. Now that China’s investments and infrastructure projects have spread across the world, the shockwaves of this abuse are being felt beyond China’s own borders.
Zhang Zhiqiang is one of these heroic figures. Short and stocky with stray bits of hair falling into his eyes, this lawyer and activist is one of the followers of the imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo. He is an expert in fighting against the abuses suffered by Chinese rural workers who leave their homes with all their belongings in a bundle on their backs, in search of a better future in the towns of eastern China. He has represented over 500 clients since 2007, when he too left his life as a mingong to become the Robin Hood of the Chinese courtrooms. “I began studying law in 1997, while I was working in the sewing workshop at a multi-national sportswear company. My foreign boss encouraged me to continue with my studies after my shift,” he recalls. Today, this brave and tireless man, who travels all over China wearing a T-shirt with an image of the five mascots of the Beijing Olympic Games behind bars, is the defender of a caste of people who have “no rights”: people who have been trampled on and left in the gutter of life in Communist China, a country that aspires to become the leading world power of the twenty-first century.
Since 2009, Zhang has been carrying out his work almost free of charge, in exchange for barely 5 or 10 percent of the reparation won by the aggrieved worker, which tends to be just a few thousand euros at best. “I used to do it for free. Now I need to charge something in order to support my family, because the number of these cases has multiplied. But I give free legal advice over the phone. I receive an average of three calls a day,” he explains. Thanks to our intervention, Zhang represented the two Lius in an open court case against Aolong at the People’s Court of Wuhan district in Hubei. Paradoxically, after the two Lius returned to China the company filed a case against them, demanding compensation for breach of contract. It was the first time that Zhang had taken on a case that had occurred outside China’s borders, although he predicts that it will not be the last. “The government’s policy to encourage companies to go abroad will lead to an increase in this type of case,” he argues, proudly telling us that he has lost “just five cases” in his whole career.
On December 10, 2010, the Chinese justice system only partially made amends for the suffering of the two Lius. The court ordered a payment of 19,180 yuan (around 2,000 euros) in unpaid wages to Liu Senlin, the veteran laborer who had worked in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In the first instance, the jud
ge also ordered the payment of 25,000 yuan (around 2,600 euros) to Liu Jianxin, his companion on the African adventure. The two remaining workers, Ru Liyin and Li Gao, lost their case in the first instance, having signed a document after their return to China exempting the company from the payment of any compensation or unpaid salaries. Strikingly, Aolong’s abuse went completely unpunished and the company’s illegal practices cost them nothing in legal terms and very little in labor terms. As of the end of August 2012, the company was still offering work in Africa to laborers from Hubei through tempting adverts in Chutian Dushibao and other major newspapers and websites. The company’s headquarters in the African country were still a minefield of abuse.27 Nothing had changed in the country of dizzying changes.
LABOR EXPORT AGENCIES
The two Lius and their workmates fell into the grasp of Lei Youbin after being seduced by an attractive advertisement in the local press. However, many other emigrants like them are recruited in a surprising variety of ways. As he makes his way along the country roads of China’s Chongqing Province, Liu Ning has no idea that he is on a mission with deep historical roots. His role is one that dates back a hundred years: the role of “immigrant hunter.” Every day he sets off in his small car in search of the workers who will build the next dam in Ecuador, a road in Sri Lanka or a football stadium in Guinea. In the country’s most remote villages, where the unemployment rate reaches double figures, Liu Ning uses his excellent people skills to convince laborers, machine operators, farmers and the unemployed to move to the dangerous Democratic Republic of Congo or the mysterious Karakum desert in Turkmenistan. “I’m looking for machine operators, technical directors and rural workers. We promise them a salary of between 5,000 and 9,000 yuan and a two- or three-year contract,” he explains.
Wang Yinqiong, a carpenter from Chongqing, is one of these potential workers. He is short, lean and friendly. He has a thin mustache and dresses in a military jacket and trousers, and has lived through much hardship. At the age of twelve, when China was at the height of its economic opening-up process, he set off towards Hubei to work as a painter and decorator on a building site. It was his first job. He earned a single yuan (10 euro cents) for each day he spent decorating the walls of what was to become the new China. Since then, he and his country have taken different paths in life. The country has been transformed beyond all recognition, although the bare bones of its structure have remained the same. For Wang, on the other hand, nothing much has changed. He is married now and has two children, but economic uncertainty still plagues him like a curse. He has traveled tirelessly, exploring many of China’s provinces in search of a better job that would pay just a few extra cents per hour or for an opportunity that would change his life and that of his family. He has traveled for thousands of kilometers in crowded trains or on foot, bearing the cold and exhaustion with his tools on his back. He has traveled on buses in a China that was yet to be built, driving deep into the valleys surrounding the Yangtze river basin and along the endless Chinese coastline with its millions of factories and workshops. He took a plane just once, when a wealthy client paid for his ticket.
Wang’s life can be summarized as a continuous struggle just to be able to live from hand to mouth. He is forty-four; his journey has now brought him to live in a shack with two colleagues on the building site of a skyscraper in Chongqing. In this frustrating and noisy city of over 32 million inhabitants, with endless traffic jams and horrific pollution, the three men share everything: three beds with wooden boards and no mattresses, a small electric stove, a cooking pot, a feeble light bulb hanging from the ceiling and asbestos to keep the rain out. With the walls lined with plastic to fight off the damp and leftover food scattered all over the shack, they live in a state just above abject poverty. Wang pays a high price for a monthly salary of around 200 euros, as he gets to spend time with his family just once a year. “For the last five years I’ve only seen my wife and two children at Chinese New Year,” he tells us. China’s growing presence abroad therefore seems like a fantastic opportunity to leave this life of hardship behind him. And, so, Wang has decided to try his luck in Angola.
He has been assured that he will multiply his salary several times over by playing his part in the reconstruction of this country, along with the other 300,000 of his compatriots estimated to be working there.28 He made the decision several months earlier when his brother-in-law, who had emigrated to Algeria, told him about the high salaries on offer. Word of mouth is unbeatable in China. The certainty of being able to quadruple his income was enough to convince Wang: he went straight to an agency to get the ball rolling so that he would be contracted by a Chinese company in Angola. “I want to go to Angola because they’ll pay me a good salary there. Any country is OK with me if they pay me well,” he assures us. Despite never having set foot in Africa, he already has a plan: to work his heart out in exchange for 100,000 yuan, or 13,000 euros. He is confident that this amount will pay for the education of his youngest son, who is currently ten years old, thereby laying the groundwork for his children to have a better life than he has had. “I don’t want them to be migrant workers like me. I want them to be able to live a decent life,” he concludes. If there is any money left over, he tells us, he would like to open a shoe shop in his hometown, Zhong Xiau.
Wang has already paid his 14,000 yuan to the agency run by Miss Lei Lin in Chongqing, so that it can start making the necessary arrangements to set his dreams of the “new world” in motion. The director of the Meilian agency is in her thirties and speaks basic English. She set up the company in 2002 and has been sending Chinese emigrants abroad for the last six years. The agency has sent out a thousand workers, almost all of them to Africa, and has established around a dozen offices in various districts and counties in Chongqing. The agency only accepts male workers aged between thirty and forty-five, and prefers them to be actively in work but with aspirations to earn more. The majority of candidates are low-waged, experienced manual laborers, but university students also apply to go to Japan or Singapore to work in the service, packing or hotel industries. Cooks, for example, have the opportunity to travel all over the world thanks to the current appeal of Chinese gastronomy. Family support and a strong personality are essential attributes. “Many workers get excited about the idea of going to work abroad. But they have to be capable of doing a very hard job,” Lei Lin warns us.
The 982 labor export agencies currently registered in China—as well as the many thousands more that operate on an unofficial basis29—are the natural successors of China’s nineteenth-century “recruiters.” Today these agencies use adverts in newspapers and local television channels to carry out the same work once undertaken by the people who filled the ports of Hong Kong, Shantou (Canton) and Amoy (Fujian) with emigrants prepared to take on a lifetime of debt for the chance to try their luck on the other side of the Yellow Sea or even in distant Cuba. Recruitment is carried out by word of mouth, flyers and adverts or by sending agents such as Liu Ning all over China to summon potential emigrants by loudspeaker to a meeting in the village square, with the full approval of local village and party leaders. “Our employees go from house to house trying to convince the locals,” Lei tells us. “There are two types of emigrants. Men with no work experience who want to go abroad; we offer them training. Then there are skilled workers who are not yet convinced; in those cases we try to convince them, even though it takes time.”
The reason for this reluctance is the payment system for emigrant workers. The fact that wages are paid in various stages to ensure that the employee will stay at the worksite until the end of the contract raises understandable suspicions. “Many workers don’t want to go to Africa because they are scared they won’t get paid,” Lei admits, as we remember the desolation on the faces of the four emigrants from Hubei when we met them after their return from their Gabonese adventure. We also think of the dreams of men like Wang Yinqiong the carpenter, who have worked and suffered all their lives and now hope to get on board the
last train of progress. Not getting paid is just one of a string of abusive and often illegal practices suffered by workers at the hands of employers and agencies, who achieve their respective goals of minimizing labor costs and earning commissions by offering potential workers employment contracts that protect the employer over the worker. “Model” employment contracts such as the one used by the Meilian agency to convince their workers to commit to a project are clearly an invitation to abuse and injustice.30
“A lot of the contracts don’t look OK,” Geoffrey Crothall of China Labor Bulletin31 explains in reference to the fact that these documents offer the workers anything but a decent level of legal protection. “It’s difficult to see how the overseas labor [agencies] have done anything really to help workers’ rights. All they’re interested in is their commission.” The dire economic needs of emigrants like Wang Yinqiong or the two Lius, along with the greed of the agencies and the indifference of the provincial Chinese governments, who encourage the exportation of Chinese labor simply to reduce local unemployment rates,32 all clearly stack the odds against the emigrants. Although the agencies exist purely for commercial reasons, they receive the enthusiastic support of the provincial leaders in charge of administering regions with high unemployment rates. It is no accident that agencies have started sprouting up like mushrooms in Chongqing: the region contains 1.5 million workers in the construction industry alone.33 The question is, what are the Chinese authorities doing to mitigate possible cases of abuse?
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