The migrants who made China an industrial giant face a grim retirement

EVEN IN A China filled with the shiny and the new, the southern city of Guangzhou stands out. A generation ago it was a smoggy, sweltering sprawl of factories and workshops, a bit embarrassed by its history as a semi-colony of Western powers, who knew it as Canton. Now Guangzhou aspires to be a hub of global commerce. It boasts the 600-metre tall Canton Tower, an opera house designed by Zaha Hadid and high-speed trains that can reach Beijing, 2,300km to the north, in just eight hours. Yet Guangzhou’s rise had human costs. The province of Guangdong, of which it is the capital, is a hotbed of worker unrest, with 129 strikes and protests logged this year by China Labour Bulletin (CLB), a Hong Kong-based monitor of workers’ rights. A growing number involve workers reaching retirement age, who discover that—because they fall through gaps in the welfare safety-net, or because employers skimped on pension contributions—a meagre future awaits.

China’s migrant workers, who for 30 years have left inland villages and townships for coastal boomtowns, are growing old. Their average age is now over 40. Nearly a quarter are over 50. More than a tenth of all strikes, sit-ins and protests recorded by CLB in 2018 and 2019 involved rows over pensions and social insurance. The latest national survey on living conditions of the urban and rural elderly, published in 2018 on the orders of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, describes startling inequalities. About 100m retired Chinese covered by the unified basic urban pension system, to which most full-time urban workers contribute, received average monthly benefits of 2,600 yuan ($369) in 2016. But about 150m retirees had to make do with a state pension scheme open to both urban and rural residents. They received on average 117 yuan ($17) a month, a pittance even in a poor region.