00.03This is an illegal labour market in north-eastern China. The government says it doesn’t exist.The signs on their shirts say ‘carpenter for hire’, ‘labourer’, ‘plumber’.Every day thousands of desperate people flood in, hoping for some of the few jobs that do exist.
“China’s twenty-year flirtation with capitalism has provided the rich world with cheap toys and clothes. But it’s left millions of ordinary Chinese people utterly destitute.”
00.35As the world’s most populous country joins the World Trade Organisation, I’ve come to find out what life is like for 350-million Chinese who live on the edge.
TITLES: UNREPORTED WORLD CHINA
UPSOT “Hell and paradise.”01.01I’m 50 metres under the Huangpu River in the heart of Shanghai - City of the Future. UPSOT JM “So what is it? Hell or paradise?”01.13This is the glitzy new 21st century China the government wants the world to see.JM: “Well, thank you. That was a rather unusual view of Shanghai, I’ve got to say.”
01.26I emerge into a future of another sort. Until 20 years ago there were rice fields where these skyscrapers stand. My government minder says Shanghai is sprouting 500 new glass and steel towers every year.
PTC So this is just one of the little local neighbourhood trading posts and in places like this people just wander in and stir fry their stocks and shares as it’s said.01.52Capitalism has taken Communist China by storm. UPSOT JM “So the market’s right on the floor at the moment, yeah?”02.01Now China’s crossing the final frontier – membership of the World Trade Organisation.
02.09But away from Shanghai, there’s another China paying the price for this race to join the mainstream global economy. I flew to Beijing to catch the train north and see this “other China” for myself.
PTC “OK so we’re in the central station in Beijing. We’re about to jump on a train to the northeastern city of Shenyang, the capital of a big province up there called Liaoning. Got to keep moving sorry.”
02.39Timewise we’re cutting it fine. UPSOT PORTER02.45Our porter’s a migrant from a faraway rural province. Millions like him have swarmed into big cities, only to scrape by in the twilight economy. The problem is getting to talk to them.
PTC “Does nobody talk on Chinese trains or something? It’s very quiet, why’s nobody talking”“Everybody’s watching. Weird foreigners coming with loads of luggage.”
PTC “Our minder has been challenged about whether or not we’re allowed to film at all and she has to bring out all her papers from the Foreign Ministry and Chinese Central Television for whom she works and try to persuade them to allow us to film. Put the camera down a sec.”
03.44The guard eventually backs down – but on condition we film no-one but me.
PTC “This city Shenyang which we’re travelling to is up in the far Northeast of China. There’s Beijing the capital there’s Shenyang and that’s this 9 hour train journey Shenyang used to be the industrial heartland of China but those industries have been going bankrupt at such a rate that it’s now better known as the rustbelt.”
04.14In Shenyang there’s a giant statue of Mao Zedong, beckoning workers towards the city’s industrial smokestacks. But now the competitive pressures of the market economy have driven many inefficient factories out of business. Workers have been laid-off in droves.This is the story I wanted to get to.
04.34Meet Mrs Yuan. News Director of the Foreign Ministry in Shenyang. Her job: to decide what we’ll actually have in our film. She’s drawn up a formidable schedule.
JM: “I’d just like her to understand that there are certain things that we have to film – which her schedule makes difficult.”
04.59Mrs Yuan’s most important engagement of the day: lunch with a local Mayor. Plenty of alcohol. Fantastic food. And a fish carved out of melon.UPSOT MAYOR “Special melon fish – you pronounce it fiss?”UPSOT JM “Yes, could I have some water please?”
05.18The Chinese government spends eight billion pounds a year on official banquets. Now I know how.
05.33I’d hoped the after-effects of the wine might give us a chance to film a bankrupt state-owned chemical plant we happened to pass.
JM: “Well why don’t we just ask and see if they’ll allow us to film inside.”
05.48State-owned factories like this one used to look after their workers from cradle to grave. UPSOT JM “Nihao.” 05.53No longer.“Can I go in to take a look?” “Is this one dead? Finished?”“The boss is upstairs? Let’s go and get Sophie and Mrs Yuan. Ah, here they come.”06.13This is the story they’re anxious to hide. You can understand why. UPSOT JM “We have to get permission. The trouble is Mrs Yuan, we have respected your schedule totally and sometimes when you see something at the side of the road that would be nice to film, it’s just nice to be able to do that. It can take such a long time to get permission.” 06.33Bankrupt factories can’t pay redundancy money to workers. Those who’ve retired lose their pensions. Everything goes – schools, housing, even free haircuts.
06.50Later, we hired our own van and got a little closer to reality.
“OK we’re just about to meet the lady who’s just thrown the bag in the dustbin. She’s called Mrs Wang and she lives in this very poor neighbourhood and she’s going to give us a tour of some of the rundown factories in this area.”
07.11She’s taking a big risk meeting us – let alone being filmed. But, she says, things can’t get any worse. UPSOT Mrs Wang Like most of her family, Mrs Wang’s been laid-off.
“Mrs Wang has just been giving us a tour around the area in which she lives. It’s a very poor rundown post-industrial suburb of Shenyang called Tiexi and in this area people are desperately poor she said. There’s hardly anybody in work anymore. And in fact she says there’s a sort of village within a village up here where just yesterday a family of 3 committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building.”
07.59Locals call this the Avenue of Losses. The chimneys don’t belch out their poisonous smoke any more. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the province has shed more than five-million workers in a decade
PTC “So that’s Mrs Wang’s old factory in there she’s just been showing us. A really classic case of what happens when a state-owned enterprise gets its assets stripped. Her former boss sold off the land and there’s some flats just up here. Those were all built on land that was sold off by the boss… and he made about a million yuan out of it which is more than £100,000.”
08.42What makes Mrs Wang most angry is that this was state land. The boss, she says, had taken a fee for the deal he’d brokered with corrupt local officials. UPSOT Mrs Wang
08.57Later that night we went to see Mrs Wang at her home.
09.02She supports her family by packing chopsticks for restaurants. All she has to show for years of hard work: a few meaningless pieces of paper.
“This is about ten thousand pounds’ worth of not only Mrs Wang’s life savings but her husband’s entire life savings, her sister’s life savings, her mother and fathers’ life savings and she put it into this finance company which offered high interest rates. It was backed by corrupt officials in the municipal government. It went bust leaving hundreds and hundreds of people like her with absolutely nothing. She just lost everything over night.”
09.49Then Mrs Wang told me her story.
“I just get the sense, you know, that this lady was so hopeful. She had so much to live for and it’s just gone horribly, horribly, horribly wrong. She worked 21 years for her factory and now she’s just left destitute while she’s watched other people in China get richer but there must be millions, maybe tens of millions of people like her.”
10.32In China’s cradle-to-grave system, state companies not only guaranteed workers an income for life – but free health care too. Now, when they’re sacked or their companies go bust, there’s no one to pick up the bill.
I’d asked to see a cancer hospital because cancer rates here are three times the national average. Doctors say it’s caused by industrial pollution.
10.56This is a cancer ward. The treatment here is world-class. JM: “Could you ask him how he manages to pay for the treatment he’s getting?”11.12My factory pays, he told me. If they didn’t I wouldn’t be here. So what happens, I wondered, if you lose your job, then get sick?
11.22I wanted to find out. We hired our own car again and headed for the rougher side of town.
JM: “Can I just ask Mr Tian Fung what it is, the illness that he has?”Translator: “Lung cancer.”
PTC: “He should be in hospital, Mr Tian Fung. He’s got lung cancer. He could get treatment. In days gone by the factory for whom he worked would have given him that treatment but these days he can’t afford it. He’s been out of work now for four or five years and his wife too has been laid-off. There isn’t any hope for him at all really. It’s hard to know what to say.”
12.26The operation to remove the cancerous growth on his lung costs £3,000. Four years’ wages – even if he had a job.
12.42Back on the official tour, I’m at a showcase government re-training centre for the unemployed. UpsotMy guide: Provincial Vice-Governor Liu Kegu. JM “Ah, we’re going to get a demonstration. What are these called?”UPSOTSJM “Can I ask, I know it’s difficult in the circumstances, but I want to get a sense of whether they do feel hopeful that the retraining will allow them to work again in the future.”13.18She says she’s hopeful. Maybe I can sell noodles or something..
13.29I get a whirlwind tour -- everything from cuddly-toy making to computers and massage.But, the numbers going though here are a drop in the ocean. Across China, thirty-million more state workers are forecast to lose their jobs in the next five years.
13.53But Vice-Governor Liu believes they have found a solution – a pioneering new project to replace the failed factory welfare schemes with a social safety net properly funded by the state.
PTC “Mr Liu, as Vice-Governor, has got responsibility for turning round in this province what is basically a post-industrial nightmare and he’s been refreshingly open and honest about some of the problems that he’s facing. He’s obviously hoping that with this new social security system and all these new insurance polices that he’s hoping to bring in that he can keep the lid on social discontent here before it boils over.”
14.37We slipped off for a lunch break on our own and witnessed something we weren’t meant to see.
“One of our contacts has told us here outside the city government offices, you get regular demonstrations of sometimes thousands of demonstrators people who’ve lost everything… They’re here. Just give us the camera…”“This is a country where you’re not allowed to demonstrate…”15.07They’re desperate to keep the plight of these people unreported.We drive round the block and look for a spot to park for a minute.
“I would say there’s about 150, 200 demonstrators at the building there. You can see five or six police men including one in uniform who’s got a Beta camera filming the protestors.”15.39With nearly 300 protests a day across China, the government’ scared mounting social unrest may become an unstoppable force.
15.52That afternoon I was passed a remarkable piece of film.UPSYNC ZHOU WEIThis is what the government does to people who organise protests. The prisoner is 70-year-old man from Shenyang who dared to stand up for workers, pensioners and victims of official corruption. He was sent to a labour camp for two years where this film was secretly taken. His name is Zhou Wei. I learned he’d just been released and I wanted to meet him.
16.23But that night we got some disturbing news. [But that night we found out we hadn’t been careful enough in our filming.]
JM: “I’ve just sent a message to our production base in the UK, letting them know that we’ve been followed and warned not to do any further filming on our own. Which is a real problem as we’ve still got lots to do.”
16.47Zhou Wei has agreed to meet us. Despite the warning, we've decided to take the risk.Very early the next morning we slip out while our minders sleep. Our plan: to quickly switch vehicles – in case we’re being followed again. We're waiting in the lobby of a nearby hotel for the signal. UPSOT: Phone bleepJM: “That’s it. We’re off.”
PTC in van: “Perfect. Perfect. We’re in our van with tinted windows. All this cloak and dagger stuff may not be necessary. We just don’t know. But we’ve been told that paranoia pays. It certainly does for someone like Zhou Wei.”
17.52On the way to our rendezvous, we take a slight detour.
PTC: “We’re on Dragon Mountain which is where the labour camp is where Zhou Wei spent two years.”“There it is now. There’s the front gate on the left.”“It’s got three hundred inmates in there…”18.18Most are sent here without trial, as Zhou Wei was.
18.26In a village outside Shenyang, Zhou Wei was waiting for us at what he called a ‘safe house.’
18.37He showed me treasured documents which had survived police raids on his home. He’s a revolutionary veteran of Mao’s Red Army. UPSYNC “This is his certificate to say that he was a model worker”
JM “We’re concerned for very much your safety. Are you happy to appear on this programme?”19.00Zhou Wei said yes, but warned that he’s still under close surveillance. But, he said, I’m not afraid to speak because I’m telling the truth. He told me how market reforms had made some factory bosses and local Party officials greedy and corrupt. He said that because of him, several prominent officials are on trial. Despite this, his wife's been repeatedly threatened, his daughter summarily fired and he remains unforgiven. The authorities, he said, won’t tolerate independent whistle-blowers.
PTC: “Well, Zhou Wei is the strangest of dissidents. He’s been telling me over the past hour of his love for the Communist Party, even though he’s lost his membership of that Party. But on one thing, Zhou Wei is absolutely clear. He will keep fighting corruption in this city, which is ruining the lives of ordinary people.”
20.07Most ‘ordinary people’ in China live and work in the countryside. I wanted to get out and see it for myself. Joining the World Trade Organisation may spell disaster for peasant farmers who will find it impossible to compete with cheap imports – like rice from America. But if the authorities were sensitive about what we saw in the city, out here they seemed even more worried. And with Mrs Yuan in command, and a cortege of Agriculture Ministry saloons as an escort, I wasn’t hopeful of getting to the real story.
UPSYNC ARRIVAL JM: “Well, Mrs Yuan, here we are. I feel rather ill after that journey. We’ve travelled for three hours to reach this spot. God knows why.”
20.58As I followed my hosts, it dawned on me why – this was a model village.I was to be herded from one dwelling to another for specially arranged interviews with model peasants.JM: “I think we’re being followed by the convoy.”
21.11I struck out on my own to try to conduct an impromptu interview.JM: “Ni hao.”21.14Suddenly there weren’t any people. But this woman looked like she might have something to say.She told me again and again that the Communist Party was fantastic. Fair enough though – they’ve given her this new house. But I wasn’t quite sure whether she was addressing me or to the local Party Secretary lurking beside us.
21.50Over the past three years, protests by peasants throughout rural China have been widespread and occasionally violent. The government knows the extent of the problem. But I was herded out of this village without any sense of what people out here really thought.
22.08That night, back in Shenyang, I began to understand more. My taxi driver drove me down dark streets lined with prostitutes -- many from the countryside. He said around 150 had been murdered over the past five or six years – often killed by unemployed men with no money to pay.
22.32Mao’s China eradicated prostitution but the free market’s changed all that. It’s now among the few job opportunities available to millions of migrant women. Shenyang is the regional sleaze capital.
JM: “This is Li. Li comes from Liaoning Province. She has a daughter in another city not very far away who she rings every week. She has done a variety of different jobs. Including very heavy labour and construction.”
23.13Li’s problems started when the paper mill she worked for went under. Then her husband, a fisherman, died. Now she lives off one meal a day and shares a room with five other prostitutes – also from the countryside. She says she despises what she does. It’s only so her twelve-year-old daughter can have the chance of a better life she says. If it weren’t for that Li says she’d have killed herself long ago.
23.46Li’s smiling eyes were a mask. I wondered just how long she could endure. And when you think of the millions out there just like her, you get a sense of a volcano ready to blow. Maybe, one day, they will reap the benefits of China’s entry into the mainstream global economy. Until then the government faces the prospect of ever larger numbers of people questioning the price of admission.
“China’s twenty-year flirtation with capitalism has provided the rich world with cheap toys and clothes. But it’s left millions of ordinary Chinese people utterly destitute.”
00.35As the world’s most populous country joins the World Trade Organisation, I’ve come to find out what life is like for 350-million Chinese who live on the edge.
TITLES: UNREPORTED WORLD CHINA
UPSOT “Hell and paradise.”01.01I’m 50 metres under the Huangpu River in the heart of Shanghai - City of the Future. UPSOT JM “So what is it? Hell or paradise?”01.13This is the glitzy new 21st century China the government wants the world to see.JM: “Well, thank you. That was a rather unusual view of Shanghai, I’ve got to say.”
01.26I emerge into a future of another sort. Until 20 years ago there were rice fields where these skyscrapers stand. My government minder says Shanghai is sprouting 500 new glass and steel towers every year.
PTC So this is just one of the little local neighbourhood trading posts and in places like this people just wander in and stir fry their stocks and shares as it’s said.01.52Capitalism has taken Communist China by storm. UPSOT JM “So the market’s right on the floor at the moment, yeah?”02.01Now China’s crossing the final frontier – membership of the World Trade Organisation.
02.09But away from Shanghai, there’s another China paying the price for this race to join the mainstream global economy. I flew to Beijing to catch the train north and see this “other China” for myself.
PTC “OK so we’re in the central station in Beijing. We’re about to jump on a train to the northeastern city of Shenyang, the capital of a big province up there called Liaoning. Got to keep moving sorry.”
02.39Timewise we’re cutting it fine. UPSOT PORTER02.45Our porter’s a migrant from a faraway rural province. Millions like him have swarmed into big cities, only to scrape by in the twilight economy. The problem is getting to talk to them.
PTC “Does nobody talk on Chinese trains or something? It’s very quiet, why’s nobody talking”“Everybody’s watching. Weird foreigners coming with loads of luggage.”
PTC “Our minder has been challenged about whether or not we’re allowed to film at all and she has to bring out all her papers from the Foreign Ministry and Chinese Central Television for whom she works and try to persuade them to allow us to film. Put the camera down a sec.”
03.44The guard eventually backs down – but on condition we film no-one but me.
PTC “This city Shenyang which we’re travelling to is up in the far Northeast of China. There’s Beijing the capital there’s Shenyang and that’s this 9 hour train journey Shenyang used to be the industrial heartland of China but those industries have been going bankrupt at such a rate that it’s now better known as the rustbelt.”
04.14In Shenyang there’s a giant statue of Mao Zedong, beckoning workers towards the city’s industrial smokestacks. But now the competitive pressures of the market economy have driven many inefficient factories out of business. Workers have been laid-off in droves.This is the story I wanted to get to.
04.34Meet Mrs Yuan. News Director of the Foreign Ministry in Shenyang. Her job: to decide what we’ll actually have in our film. She’s drawn up a formidable schedule.
JM: “I’d just like her to understand that there are certain things that we have to film – which her schedule makes difficult.”
04.59Mrs Yuan’s most important engagement of the day: lunch with a local Mayor. Plenty of alcohol. Fantastic food. And a fish carved out of melon.UPSOT MAYOR “Special melon fish – you pronounce it fiss?”UPSOT JM “Yes, could I have some water please?”
05.18The Chinese government spends eight billion pounds a year on official banquets. Now I know how.
05.33I’d hoped the after-effects of the wine might give us a chance to film a bankrupt state-owned chemical plant we happened to pass.
JM: “Well why don’t we just ask and see if they’ll allow us to film inside.”
05.48State-owned factories like this one used to look after their workers from cradle to grave. UPSOT JM “Nihao.” 05.53No longer.“Can I go in to take a look?” “Is this one dead? Finished?”“The boss is upstairs? Let’s go and get Sophie and Mrs Yuan. Ah, here they come.”06.13This is the story they’re anxious to hide. You can understand why. UPSOT JM “We have to get permission. The trouble is Mrs Yuan, we have respected your schedule totally and sometimes when you see something at the side of the road that would be nice to film, it’s just nice to be able to do that. It can take such a long time to get permission.” 06.33Bankrupt factories can’t pay redundancy money to workers. Those who’ve retired lose their pensions. Everything goes – schools, housing, even free haircuts.
06.50Later, we hired our own van and got a little closer to reality.
“OK we’re just about to meet the lady who’s just thrown the bag in the dustbin. She’s called Mrs Wang and she lives in this very poor neighbourhood and she’s going to give us a tour of some of the rundown factories in this area.”
07.11She’s taking a big risk meeting us – let alone being filmed. But, she says, things can’t get any worse. UPSOT Mrs Wang Like most of her family, Mrs Wang’s been laid-off.
“Mrs Wang has just been giving us a tour around the area in which she lives. It’s a very poor rundown post-industrial suburb of Shenyang called Tiexi and in this area people are desperately poor she said. There’s hardly anybody in work anymore. And in fact she says there’s a sort of village within a village up here where just yesterday a family of 3 committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building.”
07.59Locals call this the Avenue of Losses. The chimneys don’t belch out their poisonous smoke any more. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the province has shed more than five-million workers in a decade
PTC “So that’s Mrs Wang’s old factory in there she’s just been showing us. A really classic case of what happens when a state-owned enterprise gets its assets stripped. Her former boss sold off the land and there’s some flats just up here. Those were all built on land that was sold off by the boss… and he made about a million yuan out of it which is more than £100,000.”
08.42What makes Mrs Wang most angry is that this was state land. The boss, she says, had taken a fee for the deal he’d brokered with corrupt local officials. UPSOT Mrs Wang
08.57Later that night we went to see Mrs Wang at her home.
09.02She supports her family by packing chopsticks for restaurants. All she has to show for years of hard work: a few meaningless pieces of paper.
“This is about ten thousand pounds’ worth of not only Mrs Wang’s life savings but her husband’s entire life savings, her sister’s life savings, her mother and fathers’ life savings and she put it into this finance company which offered high interest rates. It was backed by corrupt officials in the municipal government. It went bust leaving hundreds and hundreds of people like her with absolutely nothing. She just lost everything over night.”
09.49Then Mrs Wang told me her story.
“I just get the sense, you know, that this lady was so hopeful. She had so much to live for and it’s just gone horribly, horribly, horribly wrong. She worked 21 years for her factory and now she’s just left destitute while she’s watched other people in China get richer but there must be millions, maybe tens of millions of people like her.”
10.32In China’s cradle-to-grave system, state companies not only guaranteed workers an income for life – but free health care too. Now, when they’re sacked or their companies go bust, there’s no one to pick up the bill.
I’d asked to see a cancer hospital because cancer rates here are three times the national average. Doctors say it’s caused by industrial pollution.
10.56This is a cancer ward. The treatment here is world-class. JM: “Could you ask him how he manages to pay for the treatment he’s getting?”11.12My factory pays, he told me. If they didn’t I wouldn’t be here. So what happens, I wondered, if you lose your job, then get sick?
11.22I wanted to find out. We hired our own car again and headed for the rougher side of town.
JM: “Can I just ask Mr Tian Fung what it is, the illness that he has?”Translator: “Lung cancer.”
PTC: “He should be in hospital, Mr Tian Fung. He’s got lung cancer. He could get treatment. In days gone by the factory for whom he worked would have given him that treatment but these days he can’t afford it. He’s been out of work now for four or five years and his wife too has been laid-off. There isn’t any hope for him at all really. It’s hard to know what to say.”
12.26The operation to remove the cancerous growth on his lung costs £3,000. Four years’ wages – even if he had a job.
12.42Back on the official tour, I’m at a showcase government re-training centre for the unemployed. UpsotMy guide: Provincial Vice-Governor Liu Kegu. JM “Ah, we’re going to get a demonstration. What are these called?”UPSOTSJM “Can I ask, I know it’s difficult in the circumstances, but I want to get a sense of whether they do feel hopeful that the retraining will allow them to work again in the future.”13.18She says she’s hopeful. Maybe I can sell noodles or something..
13.29I get a whirlwind tour -- everything from cuddly-toy making to computers and massage.But, the numbers going though here are a drop in the ocean. Across China, thirty-million more state workers are forecast to lose their jobs in the next five years.
13.53But Vice-Governor Liu believes they have found a solution – a pioneering new project to replace the failed factory welfare schemes with a social safety net properly funded by the state.
PTC “Mr Liu, as Vice-Governor, has got responsibility for turning round in this province what is basically a post-industrial nightmare and he’s been refreshingly open and honest about some of the problems that he’s facing. He’s obviously hoping that with this new social security system and all these new insurance polices that he’s hoping to bring in that he can keep the lid on social discontent here before it boils over.”
14.37We slipped off for a lunch break on our own and witnessed something we weren’t meant to see.
“One of our contacts has told us here outside the city government offices, you get regular demonstrations of sometimes thousands of demonstrators people who’ve lost everything… They’re here. Just give us the camera…”“This is a country where you’re not allowed to demonstrate…”15.07They’re desperate to keep the plight of these people unreported.We drive round the block and look for a spot to park for a minute.
“I would say there’s about 150, 200 demonstrators at the building there. You can see five or six police men including one in uniform who’s got a Beta camera filming the protestors.”15.39With nearly 300 protests a day across China, the government’ scared mounting social unrest may become an unstoppable force.
15.52That afternoon I was passed a remarkable piece of film.UPSYNC ZHOU WEIThis is what the government does to people who organise protests. The prisoner is 70-year-old man from Shenyang who dared to stand up for workers, pensioners and victims of official corruption. He was sent to a labour camp for two years where this film was secretly taken. His name is Zhou Wei. I learned he’d just been released and I wanted to meet him.
16.23But that night we got some disturbing news. [But that night we found out we hadn’t been careful enough in our filming.]
JM: “I’ve just sent a message to our production base in the UK, letting them know that we’ve been followed and warned not to do any further filming on our own. Which is a real problem as we’ve still got lots to do.”
16.47Zhou Wei has agreed to meet us. Despite the warning, we've decided to take the risk.Very early the next morning we slip out while our minders sleep. Our plan: to quickly switch vehicles – in case we’re being followed again. We're waiting in the lobby of a nearby hotel for the signal. UPSOT: Phone bleepJM: “That’s it. We’re off.”
PTC in van: “Perfect. Perfect. We’re in our van with tinted windows. All this cloak and dagger stuff may not be necessary. We just don’t know. But we’ve been told that paranoia pays. It certainly does for someone like Zhou Wei.”
17.52On the way to our rendezvous, we take a slight detour.
PTC: “We’re on Dragon Mountain which is where the labour camp is where Zhou Wei spent two years.”“There it is now. There’s the front gate on the left.”“It’s got three hundred inmates in there…”18.18Most are sent here without trial, as Zhou Wei was.
18.26In a village outside Shenyang, Zhou Wei was waiting for us at what he called a ‘safe house.’
18.37He showed me treasured documents which had survived police raids on his home. He’s a revolutionary veteran of Mao’s Red Army. UPSYNC “This is his certificate to say that he was a model worker”
JM “We’re concerned for very much your safety. Are you happy to appear on this programme?”19.00Zhou Wei said yes, but warned that he’s still under close surveillance. But, he said, I’m not afraid to speak because I’m telling the truth. He told me how market reforms had made some factory bosses and local Party officials greedy and corrupt. He said that because of him, several prominent officials are on trial. Despite this, his wife's been repeatedly threatened, his daughter summarily fired and he remains unforgiven. The authorities, he said, won’t tolerate independent whistle-blowers.
PTC: “Well, Zhou Wei is the strangest of dissidents. He’s been telling me over the past hour of his love for the Communist Party, even though he’s lost his membership of that Party. But on one thing, Zhou Wei is absolutely clear. He will keep fighting corruption in this city, which is ruining the lives of ordinary people.”
20.07Most ‘ordinary people’ in China live and work in the countryside. I wanted to get out and see it for myself. Joining the World Trade Organisation may spell disaster for peasant farmers who will find it impossible to compete with cheap imports – like rice from America. But if the authorities were sensitive about what we saw in the city, out here they seemed even more worried. And with Mrs Yuan in command, and a cortege of Agriculture Ministry saloons as an escort, I wasn’t hopeful of getting to the real story.
UPSYNC ARRIVAL JM: “Well, Mrs Yuan, here we are. I feel rather ill after that journey. We’ve travelled for three hours to reach this spot. God knows why.”
20.58As I followed my hosts, it dawned on me why – this was a model village.I was to be herded from one dwelling to another for specially arranged interviews with model peasants.JM: “I think we’re being followed by the convoy.”
21.11I struck out on my own to try to conduct an impromptu interview.JM: “Ni hao.”21.14Suddenly there weren’t any people. But this woman looked like she might have something to say.She told me again and again that the Communist Party was fantastic. Fair enough though – they’ve given her this new house. But I wasn’t quite sure whether she was addressing me or to the local Party Secretary lurking beside us.
21.50Over the past three years, protests by peasants throughout rural China have been widespread and occasionally violent. The government knows the extent of the problem. But I was herded out of this village without any sense of what people out here really thought.
22.08That night, back in Shenyang, I began to understand more. My taxi driver drove me down dark streets lined with prostitutes -- many from the countryside. He said around 150 had been murdered over the past five or six years – often killed by unemployed men with no money to pay.
22.32Mao’s China eradicated prostitution but the free market’s changed all that. It’s now among the few job opportunities available to millions of migrant women. Shenyang is the regional sleaze capital.
JM: “This is Li. Li comes from Liaoning Province. She has a daughter in another city not very far away who she rings every week. She has done a variety of different jobs. Including very heavy labour and construction.”
23.13Li’s problems started when the paper mill she worked for went under. Then her husband, a fisherman, died. Now she lives off one meal a day and shares a room with five other prostitutes – also from the countryside. She says she despises what she does. It’s only so her twelve-year-old daughter can have the chance of a better life she says. If it weren’t for that Li says she’d have killed herself long ago.
23.46Li’s smiling eyes were a mask. I wondered just how long she could endure. And when you think of the millions out there just like her, you get a sense of a volcano ready to blow. Maybe, one day, they will reap the benefits of China’s entry into the mainstream global economy. Until then the government faces the prospect of ever larger numbers of people questioning the price of admission.