Chinese employees vote with their feet – the WTO column

(later also in Chinabiz)

Nothing can inspire me more than a decent piece of propaganda. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua made it this week very easy when they loudly proclaimed that 90 percent of the overseas students wish to return to the motherland. There was even a rather scientific survey to support the claim.
There is no reason to have any doubt about that figure, but what made the article very fishy was that an even more important figure was lacking. How many are actually coming back? According to my unscientific estimation that figure might be well under those 90 percent.

Very little solid information is available on what is actually happening on the very diverse Chinese labor market. Most figures that are available are financially out of reach for most companies and all employees. Those figures tend to offer also a fairly general picture, very seldom of practical use when you have to hire a supervisor in Shenzhen or a marketing manager in Shanghai.
That lack of data used to be a limited problem, since with very few exceptions the labor market in China was a buyers’ market. Wages did not go up dramatically, and seemed to be rather stagnant over almost the whole line, sometimes even declining. But things are changing in certain markets and perhaps the trend in that process can give an idea about what might happen in the future as qualified labor is becoming scarcer as the economy keeps on growing.
As solid data are lacking and employees are not represented in a useful way, Chinese employees vote with their feet.
Last year I was asked by one of the better academic institutions in China for some ideas on how regional governments could predict trends in employment. I could not imagine such a tool, apart from what we would call with a broad term a civil society. I told them they do not need a tool, but a marketplace, at least on industry-level, for representatives of both employers and employees to negotiate. They were looking for a more scientific solution of this problem, but I do fear that those do not exist.

A few months ago I described how migrant workers in southern China started to vote with their feet, and increasingly decided to stay home to work in the booming agriculture. That trend expands, as examples in Shenzhen show. Better communication tools, like SMS and the internet, between groups of employees that are forbidden or otherwise unable to organize themselves, are supporting that trend.
MBA-graduates of the top-10 MBA-schools now follow the example of the migrant workers in Guangdong, when companies try to lure them back to China. According to recent research their global job chances are picking up very fast, while compensation in China is lagging, on average one third of what they would get in the US, Europe and Australia. Over the past six month an increasing number of those well-connected MBA-graduates have refused job offers, not because they did not want to come back to China, but because those offers were not competitive. They also voted with their feet.
Companies now have to decide whether they should go down the food chain, where competition among graduates of the lower ranked MBA-schools is still fierce, or offer a competitive package.
The move by the presumed-dead Chinese trade union to force Wal-Mart to set up union branches in their stores is a sign that also at top-level the need of making conciliatory noises to the work force is recognized. What a nice squeeze that could be, grass root unrest and a supportive top-down movement.

labor - Emerging call for real trade unions

Howard French of the New York Times reports about a strike in Shenzhen at the factory of a supplier of Wal-Mart, as evidence that labor relations in China do need a different approach. In the Sino-Japanese joint venture, where wireless phonese are being made, 12,000 workers walked out on Friday.
"The hordes of young women employed here say they are required to work 11-hour days, including three hours of mandatory overtime, in order to earn a basic monthly salary of 484 yuan, or about US$58. The women say they must spend nearly half their wage on the drab company dormitories where, as migrants, they must live," the article reprinted in the IHT says.
While the women are not organized in a union, contacts have improved and the article identifies SMS-messages as the main way to communicate.
"The migrant workers have learned to protest with their feet, they are more capable of negotiating, and they can choose not to work," said Liu Kaiming, who studies conditions of migrant workers in Guangdong Province in the article. "That has especially been true recently, with a lot of the migrant workers who were born in the 1980s entering the workforce. They've had a better education, they're young and emotional, and they've been emboldened by media reports about their conditions to demand their rights."
(I have waited a day so I could provide a link to the article in the IHT, in stead of the NYT that would disappear behind a firewall after a week - FT)

media - Pamela creates a new case for the censor


Former Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson will force the Chinese censor to make overtime again when she will appear naked on billboards to promote an anti-fur campaign. The necessary licences have not yet been issued, a problem that cause recently also headaches for Playboy and a late night sex show at CCTV.
An image of falling snow appears above Chinese characters reading "cold shoulders are nothing compared to the pain they feel" and "please don't wear fur," says a story written by AP. The campaign might not get the blessing of the censors, also consumers in China's big cities and those in the freezing north would not be impressed by Pamela's call to save the animals.

media - SCMP unpublishes an article by Patrick Ho

The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's leading English language daily, has taken an article by its secretary on home affairs Patrick Ho off its website, writes the Chatter Garden, a new Hong Kong based collective weblog. The article on how the "private sector can bring more creativity" was even pulled from Nexis-Lexis.
"But who? and why? My guess is Patrick received feedback (who?) and took it down.
What surprised me is that SCMP complied. Is this media common practice, take out article from web when the author wishes to unpublish?, asks the Chatter Garden.
Simon World takes another go at the paper for pushing chief secretary Donald Tsang as their favorite for the new chief executive. "Why bother worrying about press freedom when this paper censors itself? he wonders.

media - Dinousaurs pull sex show on CCTV, so....

The State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (SARFT) has decided the planned late night sex show on CCTV will not be aired, various media report. Last week SARFT also banned a harmless Nike commercial and forced the multinational actually to apologies for hurting China's dignity.
There seems only one way out: not only Nike, but also the sex show has to move to the internet. The traditional media not only see the erosion of their audiences media see worldwide, they are even helped by the authorities in chasing their audiences away.

NGO's - Intellectuals detained, released

Shortly before he was arrested Liu Xiabo, president of the independent Chinese Pen Center, said (in a transcript by ESWN): ""In Chinese society today, from the viewpoint of either the civil society or officialdom (and especially officialdom), the signals that have been released after the ascension of Hu Jintao are very complex. You cannot say that they are totally positive nor can you say that they are totally negative. On one hand, official suppression continues and ideological control has increased. On the other hand, the authorities have certainly done a number of things that they have never done before, such as the Liu Di case, the Du Daobin case, reversing the Nanfeng Metropolitan News verdict, the release of Cheng Yizong, the Sun Daiwu sentence of 3 years plus 4 years of suspended sentence, the insertion of human rights into the constitution, the abolition of the detention/expulsion system as well as the current attempt to reform the petition system. Based upon all this, you cannot make any simple rightist versus leftist judgment."
Liu was, together with Yu Jie "summoned to assist in an investigation" and detained for several hours.
We should not look too much what is happening at the top, he says in the interview. "In reality, the true impetus comes from the hidden strength of civil society. " More here at ESWN.

economy - The number game on foreign residents

Simon World wonders why according to the official figures China has only 90,000 foreign residents working in the world's most booming economy. The first and most simple answer is that all figures in China are distorted, fake or otherwise not true.
Too often the outside world believes it, for example when the Ministry of Culture says it has checked 1.8 million internet cafes and closed over a thousand. They just pretend they are working, while they mainly send out press releases.
How could it work out then for these figures, supplied by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security? First, it does not count several groups of people who are essential for China's economic growth, the Taiwanese, Hong Kong citizens and Chinese with a foreign passport. Then the large number of foreigners working with a Shenzhen visa are ignored, since they do not have a working permit. This together makes the official figures pretty useless.

economy - A too high price for China's resources

China is at a global shopping spree to guarantee enough oil and other resources to fuel its booming economy, writes Howard French in the International Herald Tribune. But because of its lack of experience in doing global business, it might lead to big trouble.
"China's economy is grossly imbalanced at this point, with an overwhelming dependence on investment versus consumption - possibly the most imbalanced country in human history," said Jason Kindopp, a China analyst at the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political-risk consulting firm in an interview with the IHT, adding that "China is paying peak prices for commodities today, and if their economy stumbles in any significant way, we are going to see really significant declines in the prices and some very serious pain as a result."

economy - Export duties on textile to stop the flood


China will put export duties on its textile to stop its producers from flooding the world after the regime of textile quota will end by the end of this year. The country had a system of textile quota, mostly imposed by Europe and the US, but this system of protecting its own industry is not allowed anymore under the World Trade Organization (WTO).
"We hope that by adopting this measure, we can encourage the export of high-value products and further optimise the structure of China's textile industry," the Chinese commerce ministry said, according to the BBC.

tourism - California through Chinese eyes

BBC-reporter Fuschia Dunlop, in a transcript by ESWN, joined three Chinese chefs on their tour through California and wonders whether the US will be a favorite destination for Chinese tourists.
'What they do want is to see how America measures up to the American Dream. They're all familiar with the stereotype of the United States as the richest and most advanced nation in the world, its lifestyle as the holy grail of development. And they want to see it in all its brilliant modernity, to understand how far China has to go to catch up, and whether the struggle will be worth it. Given their high expectations, it's not surprising they are disappointed. Even lovely San Francisco doesn't fit the bill. "If that's going to be the end result of China's development," says one, "then I'm really in despair."'
Since tourists from China have to pay a deposit of US$ 12,000 to garantee their safe return, they might anyway not be able to help the US airlines out of their crisis.

book - German edition now available in China



My book on fifteen misunderstandings on China and the Chinese is now available in China in both German and Dutch through this link. For ordering outside China, please click here for the German edition. ISBN: 3-00-015051-X.

blogging - Global voices take off



Oops, a global blogging movement has started at a recent Harvard conference reports from Rebecca MacKinnon and others tell me. Its called Global Voices and from what I read I can see that the participants have great expectations. Isaac Mao blogged about the event in Chinese. He will join us on Friday at the Shanghai Weblogger meetup, and if you are interested, you can register here.