The urbanisation of rural migrants and the making of urban villages in contemporary China

Lao Dong: ‘It feels like I have been “growing houses” all my life’

Lao Dong is a landlord for over 100 tenants, all of whom are rural migrants. When we first met in February 2014, Lao Dong was monitoring the demolition team in front of piles of used bricks that were left over from his old tile-roofed house that had just been torn down. His plan was to replace his old house with an ‘apartment building’ containing 40 individual rooms.

‘We no longer grow crops. We grow houses (zhong fangzi) instead. And it feels like I have been growing houses all my life’, said Lao Dong with a smile on his face. ⁷

However, Lao Dong’s ‘lifelong’ business of ‘growing houses’ only started 12 years ago when the number of rural migrants began to grow in bicun. Before that, he participated in the labour markets by taking all sorts of jobs. In the early 1990s, Lao Dong quit agricultural chores to work as a middle-level member of staff at a township enterprise in his rural county. When the company went out of business in the mid-1990s, Lao Dong started to seek jobs in the urban centres of Beijing. Thanks to his status as a Beijing resident, he was able to work as a taxi driver for several years until he realised his status as a peasant in Beijing and his entitlement to housing land could potentially give him more advantages in the market.

Since the early 2000s, Lao Dong has rented out his spare rooms to migrants. Then, his two extra rooms made him 100 yuan per month. He soon realised that his whole family could depend on this rental business if he owned more rooms. In 2006, he borrowed money from his friends and relatives and started to build a two-storey apartment in his yard. There were roughly 20 separate rooms at first, and that number doubled with continuous investment and construction. These rooms are designed for rental purposes. Each room is about 10 m² to 12 m² and the rent is from 180 yuan to 200 yuan (about $30 to $40 USD) depending on the quality and size. In urban villages, these rooms are typically called ‘single rooms’ (danjian).

When I met Lao Dong in 2014, he was demolishing the tile-roofed house where his family had lived since the 1980s. What he was about to build was a three-storey building with 40 more rooms. These standard rooms are called gongyu, meaning apartment. Every gongyu is equipped with individual electricity meters, running water, separate kitchen, internet service and indoor bathrooms. The rent usually is three times more than danjian or from 600 yuan to 750 yuan ($100 to $120 USD).

For Lao Dong and his family, this new three-storey apartment building is the biggest investment they have ever made. It may produce a big leap upward in their income. With a one-time investment of about 300,000 yuan ($50,000 USD), they now have added 40 more rooms. Their old two-storey building will continue bringing them the income of 48,000 yuan annually ($8,000 USD). This new one will allow them an annual income of 280,000 yuan (about $56,000 USD).

As a typical local villager in urban villages, Lao Dong’s journey in ‘growing houses’ represents many other local villagers’ life stories trying to cash in their entitlement to land. They actively seek chances to maximise their investment and strategically manage risks.

Bai Jie: ‘It almost feels like a town here’

Bai Jie was born in a village in Henan Province 661 miles from Beijing. Before heading to Beijing with her husband in the mid-1990s, she worked in a toy factory in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province for three years. Becoming pregnant with her first child in 1995 forced her to leave her work and come to Beijing with her husband.

During their 20 years as rural migrants, Bai Jie and her husband tried many ways to make a living. During the first two years, she sold small toys in the streets outside a park in Beijing. After accumulating some money, she and her husband were talked into shoe cleaning. However, in little more than three months, the business failed and their 30,000 yuan ($5000 USD) investment was gone. This setback did not crush their will, however; they kept trying to set up their own business. A better chance came for Bai Jie when one of her friends introduced her family to door manufacturing in 2002. At first, they were workers and apprentices. In 2007, they finally started their own business.

During these ups and downs, Bai Jie and her family have always lived in urban villages, even though life in the urban village was not always stable. Over the past 12 years, four times they were forced to move because the developmental programmes by the state and real estate companies led to the demolition of the villages in which they lived. When I met them in 2014, Bai Jie’s family had been in bicun for about two years. They rented a ‘big yard’ (dayuan) of about 2400 square feet from a local peasant family. The eastern three rooms were used as their living space. The rest of the space, both the rooms and the yard itself, was used as a factory site.

In this rented yard, Bai Jie’s family and two hired apprentices produced wooden doors for consumers in Beijing. Owing to the booming real estate market in Beijing that began in 2003, there is always a need for Bai Jie’s wooden doors. Bai Jie is satisfied with her living arrangement in urban villages. She said:

You cannot compare this place with the urban centres. But we have everything we need here. Ten years ago, urban villages had no light at night. But look how this place looks like now. Just check out how crowded the main road can be on a weekend night. People call this place a village, but it is not. It almost feels like a town here. What else could people like us ask for? ⁸

Unlike local villager Lao Dong, Bai Jie and her families left behind their land and had to rely mainly on their small investment and labour to make a living in Beijing. Bai Jie’s desire for modernisation and urban lifestyle is shared by many of her fellow rural migrants who have survived or even succeeded in the service markets in urban villages in Beijing. People such as Bai Jie have developed various tactics to deal with risks and uncertainties during their endeavour in urban villages, which I will expand in the later discussions.

Xiao Li: ‘The day I quit my job, I will open my own store …’

Twenty-year-old Xiao Li was born in a village in Xingtai, Hebei. When I met her in beiwucun, she worked as a cashier in a food market. Her aunt, who referred her to the job in the first place, told her that this stable job would allow her to save some money and plan her future. In Xiao Li’s mind, however, her future has little to do with selling groceries. When she went out to work at the age of 18, Xiao Li applied for a job in a big electronic manufacturing company in Henan. Her friend who got a job in the company told her that the job is respected and the pay is good. To Xiao Li’s surprise, she did not get in.

When she went to beiwucun in 2014, Xiao Li had little knowledge or aspiration about what she would become. The only person she knew in Beijing was her aunt, who cooks for a small factory of 15 people. She wanted a job with higher pay. However, without any capital and experience, Xiao Li’s options were quite limited. She first waited tables in a small restaurant for five months and then quit the job because she decided the work there was tedious and tiring. Working in the food market in beiwucun was her second job. The pay is 1200 yuan.

‘I think working every day and get paid every month is good because you don’t have to worry too much about if your inventory will sell. But I hate to work for other people. The day I quit my job, I will open my own store. I think then I will have my freedom.’ Xiao Li said this to me when I asked her about her future plan.

However, when asked what kind of store she would like to invest in her hometown, Xiao Li paused. ‘Maybe a toy store for kids. We don’t have a lot of those stores in my hometown. Maybe my aunt and I will open a restaurant. When I have enough money, I will figure it out’. Her voice contained both certainty and uncertainty.

In urban villages, many rural migrants are like Xiao Li. They come to the urban village with nothing more than their labour. They become able workers of many kinds. In the hope of getting better pay, they change jobs from time to time. Those who are not satisfied might start their own business and transform themselves from worker to ‘boss’ (laoban) whenever they have a chance.

Household-based developers

In comparative studies on urban villages in China and England, Chung (2010) pointed out that Chinese urban villages are developed without any planning scheme. The construction boom in beiwucun in 2014 confirms such observation. Walking on one of the main roads for only 600 m, I encountered 16 construction sites. The larger construction units covered about 400 m², and the smaller ones were about four times smaller. Each construction site was developed on its own schedule. There were no signs of collaboration or coordination, even for the neighbouring sites.

The lack of planning in the urban villages has to do with the basic unit of informal housing development being the rural household instead of village committee or other agencies. As rural land is divided into farming plots and housing lots (zhaijidi) by function, a member of the village will be allocated a lot of the communally held land with unrestricted tenure for the construction of a home whenever he or she is in need of housing. Thus only one local household is responsible for each construction site. Local households often come up with different designs and plans for their land use because they have different resources, abilities and strategies. This household-based development scheme has resulted in a seemingly disordered spatial layout.

Depending on their gender, occupation, age and economic power, each member of a household strategically participates in rental property development in different ways. For instance, the younger generation of local villagers often seeks opportunities to work in city centres. They may invest in construction and renovation. But they rarely manage rental properties at home. It is often the elderly who manage a rental business and plan construction and renovation for the whole family. Senior women often respond to tenants’ requests as they are always around; while senior men are often in charge of the renovation.

Bringing in outsiders

Even though local households are in charge of the housing markets in urban villages, once the rental business has expanded, they often need more laborers to manage their business. Many outsiders take the chance and enter this highly profitable business.

In bicun, two blocks from Lao Dong’s new compound was Aunt Ma’s four-storey building. As a divorced woman in her 50s, Aunt Ma did not have the ability to take care of her properties alone. She sub-leased her building to ‘Brothers Che’, two rural migrants who came from Shanxi province. As sub-leasing contractors, Brothers Che rent the building for 200,000 RMB (about $35,000 USD) a year. They were responsible for regular maintenance, cleaning and other managerial duties. The building was divided into 40 rooms, each of which bringing in 700 yuan (about $110 USD) per month if rented out. Brothers Che earned 146,000 yuan each year after deducting the rent to the original landlord, Aunt Ma, who nevertheless enjoyed a bigger portion of the income.

Fang was also a rural migrant who works full time as janitor in an apartment building. Compared with Brothers Che, Fang comes to beiwucun with bigger capital and better connections. He rented farmland previously directly from the village committee and built an apartment compound with his own investment.

Suffice to say, even though local households who have entitlement to land largely control the housing market in urban villages, as the market grows, outsiders such as Brothers Che and Fang have also become active agents in running the housing business. Their investment and labour have become the indispensible component for the operation and development of such an informal market.

Upgrading the living space

Local villagers are often facing a dilemma in their rental housing business. They are eager to upgrade their properties so they can maximise their profit with more rooms and higher rent. However, they are hesitant to make large, one-time investments in their property, as they fear that an unexpected demolition of the village by the state might destroy business. To better deal with such dilemma, many local village households choose to start with a smaller investment and then gradually put more money into the housing business over time. Such investment pattern is reflected in the spatial layout in urban villages. In bicun and beiwucun, in the past decades, three types of housing were developed to host rural migrants.

The first generation of housing is the ‘individual room in the yard’ (dayuan danjian). Many of these used to be spare rooms in local villagers’ houses. By simply putting furniture inside these rooms, local households transformed themselves into landlords and started collecting rent. Since the tenants usually share living space and facilities with their landlords, the labour input for such a rental business is relatively low. In most cases, the investment into such housing is less than 10,000 yuan. However, since each household has limited rooms to house their tenants, the reward from this type of housing is also low.

The second generation of housing is the ‘single room’ (danjian). These rooms are often in separate buildings attached or detached to the landlords’ own houses. Designed for rural migrants, the majority of these single rooms have no independent bathroom, no separate kitchen, and no running water. Tenants usually have to share one bathroom in the building or use public bathrooms in the village. In beiwucun, the construction of danjian began around 2006. Taking Aunt Ma’s apartment building as an example, she invested about 100,000 RMB in 2006 to build 20 single rooms. With each room renting for about 200 RMB, the annual income was 48,000 RMB. Even though single-room buildings are more profitable, they also require much more work in terms of management.

‘Apartment’ (gongyu) is the third generation of housing. In 2014, many people were upgrading their old ‘single rooms’ into ‘apartments’, with a bathroom, kitchen and running water. The initial investment ranges from 200,000 to 1,000,000 RMB. The rent for such apartments ranges from 500 to 700 yuan ($90 to $1,100 USD) per furnished room. Internet is also available in most of these properties.

The periodic investment pattern in informal housing development allows local households to avoid risks. It also makes the living space in urban villages highly differentiated. In beiwucun, for example, the rent for a single family ranges from 300 to 1500 yuan.

Budget control and the art of recycling

Budget control is key for any economic activity. In Beijing urban villages, one effective way of budget control is to use recycled or substandard materials to lower the cost to build, rebuild and renovate their rental properties.

Reused bricks are the most common and widely used construction materials in urban villages. Initially, when a house is torn down, bricks are recycled for the upcoming construction. After years of primitive development, picking usable bricks out of construction waste has become a separate trade. For example, workers come to a wasteland right outside beiwucun to collect used but usable bricks everyday. The used bricks only cost one-third of the price of new bricks, which allows the local peasants to minimise their cost.

Besides used bricks, other substandard materials are widely used in the construction of rental buildings. For example, as early as the 1990s, the Chinese government banned the use of hollow-core slabs, or precast concrete that was used in the construction of floors in multi-storey apartment buildings for safety reasons. Even though this policy has never been strictly reinforced, cement slates have been abandoned in construction in the major cities of China. However, in contemporary urban villages, hollow-core slabs are still widely used in apartment buildings. Many of these cement slates are even recycled from demolished buildings.

The use of substandard materials often results in shoddy buildings that may last less than one year. However, this does not bother the landlords, as new waves of renovation may arrive just as the walls begin to crack. Moreover, the government-sanctioned demolition for gentrification may come any day, so it makes sense to put in as little money as possible in each wave of renovations.

Subaltern entrepreneurship and informality

On 7 July 2014, a labour activist gave a talk in bicun on the structural inequality and structural violence affecting migrant workers’ lives in Beijing. After that talk, Bai Jie told me, ‘If what she said were true, what hope do we still have? I am not completely happy with my life here in Beijing. But I still believe one has to fight for his own future, no matter what condition one is born into. Chances for success won’t come unless we try really hard. There is no use blaming the society’. ⁹ Bai Jie’s voice was certain, even though she looked a bit puzzled.

For many rural migrants such as Bai Jie, even though they often feel trapped, frustrated, and confused in their journey of ‘chuang’, their aspiration to achieve ‘success’ has stayed strong. In other words, the belief in self-fulfillment through market competition and their appreciation of hard work provide them with both an explanation/justification for the inequality, suffering and difficulties they too often experience in the urban villages.

I have encountered numerous young people such as Bai Jie who desire personal success. Each may have a different understanding of the meaning of success. For instance, a 20-year-old boy who works in a hair salon told me that his dream was to open his own hair salon. A 30-year-old worker in a door factory said his goal was to open a small grocery shop in his hometown. Despite the different meanings of ‘success’, these rural migrants share a common understanding of how they can achieve their own ‘success’ – starting a business of their own. In rural migrant language, to ‘dagong’, or ‘to work for the boss’ is a less desirable status that cannot be called success. Many believe that only after they begin to work for themselves will they have a real chance to make it in the marketplace. As a result, in contemporary urban villages in Beijing, rural migrants are a dominant force in both the labour and the service markets.

Nevertheless, such entrepreneurship is a subaltern one because a lot of the businesses in urban villages operate on the margins of the state power. Today, on the previous farmland of bicun, there are more than 200 small factories with murky legal status. Most of these factories have not registered with the Bureau of Commerce and thus do not pay tax to the government. In order to avoid attention from the authority, each factory is hidden in its own factory yard. There are no signs or nametags (changpai) in front of these factories indicating names and specialties. At the front gate of each factory yard, a big threatening dog is the standardised set-up. Whenever a stranger approaches the factory, insiders instantly know. These 200 or so factories range from a family-run factory of four people to factories with over 40 workers. They produce a variety of products, including doors, windows, furniture, feminine hygiene products, clothes and more.

Besides manufacturing, rural migrants also run an array of small service businesses in urban villages, such as restaurants, day care centres, clinics, stores and hair salons. Like the manufacturing sector, the service business is also substandard and of poor quality. During my stay in the urban villages, people kept telling me that the food was not safe, especially meat of all kinds. It is commonly believed that swill-cooked dirty oil (digouyou) is widely used in restaurants, food stands and breakfast bars in these urban villages.

Place-based tactics for production and consumption

Another important tactic adopted by rural migrants is moving in between places and keeping such spatial mobility if needed. First of all, moving between factory towns, urban villages and hometowns allow rural migrants to pursue their ‘self-development’ and ‘success’ in the domain of production. For example, many of the first-generation rural migrants, those who left their home villages in the late 1980s and early 1990s, worked in factories in southern cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou when China opened up its special economic zone in the South. However, very few would work in factories for long as they often consider factory life lacking freedom. Many of them, especially the female migrants, left their factory jobs after marriage and started their own small businesses with their spouses in metropolitan areas such as Beijing. If their small business went well, they were able to accumulate some start-up money for a bigger business. Many planned to return to the cities near their home to invest in a bigger business, as they still had a social network and land there. Scholars have noted that through entrepreneurial activities by return migrants, rural migrants have begun to play a vital role in economic development and income growth in rural China (Zai and Ma, 2004).

Equally important, rural migrants also maintain spatial mobility in their consumption practices. No matter how successfully they have ventured in Beijing, without household registration, rural migrants are still excluded from urban social welfare regime (Fan, 2011). Considering the fact that Beijing has tightened its population and tried to force the ‘low quality population’ out in recent years, ¹⁰ rural migrants are often aware that their stay in Beijing is only temporary. The way to deal with such temporality is to live under a tight budget in the urban villages and to plan for their education, retirement and other consumption-related practice elsewhere. During my stay in urban villages from 2013 to 2014, I encountered many migrant families who had already purchased real estate properties in their home towns. Urban villages, as cheap living quarters, have allowed migrant families to save enough money for the downpayment of new apartments in their home township (Zhan, 2015). For those first generation migrants who still have entitlement to farmland and housing land back in their home town, they continue to invest in their old homes and manage their farmland. The rural land functions as a safety net they can always fall back on in case their adventures in Beijing do not work out.

Social networking

Further, as studies have shown, the migration patterns in China usually come with strong social ties to native places (Ma and Xiang, 1998). When rural migrants first enter the city, the social ties with people who share their same place of origin often determine where they go and what kind of work they will take. Even though such spatial bonds weaken after years of gentrification campaigns in Beijing, the pattern of spatial bonding with native villages is still visible. Taking another Beijing urban village dongdakou for example, over half of the migrants are from Henan province, and most of them are from rural villages in a small city called Xinyang. The majority of rural migrants from Henan work as scavengers. The spatial ties provide them with support for their work and investment. More often than not, the experienced fellow villagers (laoxiang) will teach the newcomers where they can go to claim territories and what kind of techniques they should use to interact with police and the urbanites. Living in urban villages with people of a similar background gives them a necessary sense of social belonging. This characteristic makes the urban village a lot more comfortable and also emotionally close.

Nevertheless, previous studies fail to highlight rural migrants’ social and emotional connections with local villagers. In many cases, rural migrants find it easier to interact with local villagers because of shared status and equal knowledge as ‘peasants’. In addition, since many urban village landlords have previously worked as migrant laborers in urban centres, they may show sympathy or even admiration for rural migrants who venture in to big cities. Likewise, a good portion of rural migrants also have land benefits back in their home villages and can take advantage of their relationship with the land just like their landlords in Beijing. As a result, local villagers and rural migrants often develop a mutual understanding quickly.

Privatising public power

Thanks to the collective ownership of rural land, Chinese village committees have relative freedom over the use of their land. In many cases, urban villages even appear to be more ‘autonomous’ than the rural villages. This relative autonomy has to do with the fact that these places have been incorporated into the urban processes, thus creating a vibrancy and dynamics that are neither seen in rural villages nor urban centres. Because of corruption and a lack of checks and balances, village committees usually are not accountable to the peasant collective. Many have transformed into agents of local clans or powerful families.

Bicun was one village that never implemented the ‘household contract responsibility system’. ¹² Land has always been ‘collectively owned’ in the village. In the mid-1990s, when local township enterprises went bankrupt, the village committee started to rent the farmland to outsiders to bring in cash. Since the late 1990s, each household received 300 kg of flour as compensation. Ten years later, even though the value of land had increased over ten times in the area, compensation remained the same. Local villagers suspect that the village committee simply took a commission behind their backs.

‘It is an open secret and we all know it. But nobody would say anything about it. Look how many trips the members of village committee have taken to foreign countries. Where does the money come from? We can do the math. It is without a doubt that they have pocketed our money’, ¹³ Aunt Li told me in private with an angry voice.

My first conversation with Aunt Li happened on the main street of bicun where most local people hang out. Two weeks later, when she trusted me more, she invited me to her house to tell me more of the ‘insiders’ stories’ of bicun. ‘I feel like that I am robbed. The powerful people just rented our land as if the land belongs to his family. I am in my 70s and I have nothing to fear. Other people would have no guts to tell you this because there might be revenge. If you do write, please reveal all these dirty scams to the central government and save us from the injustice.’ ¹⁴

Besides Aunt Li and several other elder villagers, most local peasants stayed silent about such an abuse of power, as the local politics are also reinforced by violence. In bicun, the head of the village had 20 ‘adopted sons’ (gan’erzi) who were in their late 20s or early 30s. Actually, they were gangsters who helped the Village Committee reinforce its governance.

Ironically, to some extent the abuse of public power stimulated the development of informal economies in urban villages. First, as the ordinary local peasants have little access to benefits from their collective land, they devote all their money and energy to the informal rental business on their own housing plots. Second, the village committee only rent the collective farmland to migrants and outsiders because they want to keep rental details from other village members. This has allowed some savvy rural migrants to rent the farmland as factory sites at a price far below the market value.

‘From inside out’: Gentrification campaigns and places on the move

At the municipal level, the policies forged for urban villages are somehow self-contradictory. On the one hand, there is the increasing need for land for urban redevelopment. As substandard parts of the growing urban landscape, urban villages are said to ‘harm the city’s outlook’ (pohuai shirong) and have been the target of gentrification and land grabs. At the end of 2010, the city government proudly announced it had eliminated all urban villages within the third-ring highway, a demarcation line that enclosed the most central functions of urban Beijing. A more recent report indicates that there were 332 urban villages in Beijing in 2005. That number dropped to a little over 100 by 2014. The government’s ambition for urban redevelopment goes beyond just ‘reducing’ the number of urban villages. In a 2010 environmental development report, the Development and Innovation Committee of Beijing (fagaiwei) clearly stated that the goal was ‘more or less wiping out’ (jiben xiaomie) Beijing’s urban villages by the end of 2015.

On the other hand, the ‘informal economy’ has grown dramatically worldwide in developing countries since the 1970s (Agarwala, 2013; Huang, 2011, 2009). In China today, the informal economy accounts for 168 million of the 283 million urban employed (Huang, 2009: 406). In Beijing urban villages, even though the investment is often small, the informal markets are often quite vibrant, providing millions of job opportunities to rural migrants. As an indispensable part of the economy, the informal sector continues to attract rural migrants before big capital investments taking over space in the urban villages. According to the 2015 China Statistical Yearbook, the number of rural migrants has reached roughly 4 million in Beijing. As a result, there remains an abundant need for low-cost living spaces.

This combined policy outcome is the creation of the ‘place on the move’: urban villages are demolished when the land is developed and gentrified. However, as long as migrant workers remain in the city, they will continue to find new places to live and thus produce new urban villages. As older urban villages were demolished, newer and larger ones have emerged further suburban Beijing. In other words, urban villages are not wiped out. Instead, they are pushed further to the city fringe. In this manner, the municipal government is able to keep urban villages as an important urban space to host rural migrants. Meanwhile, it maintains its transient nature and makes it the place for the informal economy.