Life Is Not Fair

By WANG HAIRONG

Life Is Not Fair

By WANG HAIRONG

Full integration with the mainstream of their host cities remains out of reach for low-income college graduates

On the eve of the lunar Chinese New Year which fell on February 3 this year, alone in a rented room in Tangjialing Village on the north edge of Beijing City, Deng Kun is surrounded by a computer, a bag of frozen dumplings and a bottle of liquor. Yet he feels empty. Firecrackers are exploding outside, making his heart ache. For seven days, he has not gone outside or talked to anyone.

Deng’s friends all went back to their hometowns. He didn’t for he is too embarrassed to go. It has been two years since he graduated and he hasn’t accomplished anything.

This is a scene inAnt Tribe, an infuential book published in 2009. Deng is a character in bothAnt Tribeand its sequelAnt Tribe IIreleased at the end of last year.

Ant Tribesheds lights on low-income college graduates residing in crowded quarters on the edge of Beijing such as Tangjialing Village.

It’s publication struck a chord with many people, and put “ants” and Tangjialing under the media spotlight.

Ant Tribe IIalso studies such groups not only in Beijing, but also in other big cities such as Shanghai, Wuhan in central Hubei Province, Guangzhou in southern Guangdong Province, Chongqing, Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu Province and Xi’an in northwestern Shaanxi Province.

Lian Si, the author of these two nonfction books, is a young associate professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.

Lian labels these struggling young people“ants” as he fnds the characteristics of ants in them: clever, weak and living in groups.

Ant Tribesays most of the “ants” are aged between 22 and 29, and graduated from universities no more than fve years ago.

A majority work on unsophisticated technical jobs or in the service industry doing jobs like insurance agents, electronic products sales representatives and waiters or waitresses, and some are unemployed.

They make an average monthly income of 1,956 yuan ($300), and can save little. Their average income is lower than urban employees and college graduates who graduated six months before.

The “ants” usually live in a cramped area on the edge of cities where rent is relatively low, each taking up an average living area of less than 10 square meters and paying an average monthly rent of 377 yuan ($57).

The research team led by Lian estimates there are more than 1 million “ants” across the country.

Clever and weak

Born in an ordinary family in Yuncheng County in north China’s Shanxi Province in the mid-1980s, Deng graduated from a university in southwestern Yunnan Province in 2007, and came to Beijing in 2008. He stayed with a childhood friend who lived in Tangjialing.

Deng previously thought he would buy an apartment in Beijing within two years.

But he could not fnd a decent job, and his dream to be a home-owner became even more unattainable as Beijing’s housing prices soared.

Yet Deng did not think of himself as a loser. “It is just that I have not succeeded,” he said.

InAnt Tribe II, Deng appears as an “ant”in Yunnan Province. He left Beijing in early 2010. He said he did not like Beijing because people there have a sense of superiority, not because they themselves are brilliant, but because they were born in Beijing, and their parents (social connections) are there.

Deng did not go back to his hometown. There was not much for him to do there, he said. Without social contact, fnding a good job there was also diffcult.

In Yunnan, Deng got a job. But he found life was still difficult for his lack of social connections.

“Connections, social status, family background, residence status, power and money…these were knit into a firm web. However hard a small ant struggled, the net cannot be broken,” saysAnt Tribe II.

The new book is based on interviews with nearly 5,000 college graduates in seven large cities in 2010.

It is no longer limited to portraying the“ant tribe.” It also reflects “the confusion, anxiety, anguish, feelings of being at lost, and the dreams of an entire generation in China today,” Lian wrote in the book’s foreword.

In the 2010 survey forAnt Tribe II, Lian’s research team found, compared with the previous survey done between 2007 and 2009, a smaller percentage of respondents replied they were unemployed or employed in the public sector, and a higher percentage of respondents said they had completed graduate studies or were graduates of top universities.

The 2010 survey found 10.1 percent of the respondents were unemployed, lower than the 18.6 percent reported in the 2007-2009 survey.

Graduates from China’s top universities accounted for 28.9 percent of the total respondents in 2010, much higher than the 10.8 percent in the frst survey; while the respondents with a master’s degree increased from 1.6 percent in the first survey to 7.2 percent in 2010.

Even some master’s degree holders had become “ants,” and this percentage was still increasing, which suggested higher education was no longer tantamount to high income and privilege, Lian toldChina Youth Daily.

China’s universities have dramatically expanded enrollment in recent years. The number of new graduates increased from 2.8 million in 2004 to 6.5 million in 2009, according to Lian’s research team. The Ministry of Education said the number of new graduates would rise to 6.6 million in 2011. It is not easy for many new graduates to fnd a job.

GE YUEJIN

Lian said the parents of graduates from top universities usually pin great hopes on them, so they would rather work in large cities instead of returning to their hometowns.

Graduates from ordinary universities are more realistic and return to work in their hometowns, while graduates from colleges or vocational schools usually fnd jobs more easily because they have practical skills, according to Lian’s surveys.

Discontent but confident

Nearly 60 percent of the respondents to the 2010 survey attributed their hardship to social circumstances rather than to personal factors, Lian said. Only 18.9 percent said society was fair.

Lian’s research team found more than 70 percent of the respondents were from mediocre or poor families with annual incomes less than 50,000 yuan ($7,692).

Analysis of Lian’s research team reveals the respondents’ feeling of fairness is strongly related with economic conditions of their families and their monthly income. Those with better economic conditions and higher monthly income are more positive about the state of society.

The respondents ranked “power, family background and social stratifcation” as the three major causes of social inequality. They expressed very strong dissatisfaction with corruption and inheritance of social resources.

“Now, not only wealth can be inherited, but also power,” said Lian. The survey respondents felt it very unfair that children of some government officials could find good jobs through their parents’ connections or even had stable and highly-paid civil service jobs reserved for them.

Although 80 percent of the respondents to the 2010 survey admitted currently they were not yet in the middle class, half of them did not think they were a vulnerable group.

“Many of them have great expectations about the future, and are very self-confdent,”said Lian. “They hold on to their dreams, which has helped them get over the diffculties they have encountered in large cities.”

In a letter allegedly from the “ants” in Tangjialing to Lian Si and the media that appeared online around March 2010, they said,“We are neither weak nor poor. Our current situation is but only one stage in our lives!”

Goodbye to Tangjialing

Tangjialing looked desolated on January 30, a sunny and cold day about two years after Deng celebrated the Spring Festival alone in Beijing in 2009.

Debris about two to three meters thick covered most of the ground, like the scene of a devastating earthquake. Only a few bungalows including a pharmaceutical store were still standing.

It was bizarrely quiet, except for the sound of a hammer striking bricks, which was produced by a man standing in the middle of the debris. Except for him, only one other person on a bike and a dog can be seen.

The person on the bike, surnamed Liang, is a villager of Tangjialing. He said almost all the villagers and renters had already moved away because of an imminent renovation of the village.

Tangjialing lies only minutes from Shangdi, the northern part of China’s “silicon valley.” The village, originally with a population of 3,000, once accommodated 50,000 people because of the infux of outsiders.

After the publishing ofAnt Tribe, journalists focked to the village. Media coverage also prompted the government to take action.

In October 2009, Tangjialing Villagers’Committee submitted a report to the Beijing Municipal Government, requesting support for its reconstruction.

In March 2010, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning announced Tangjialing would be renovated. Since then,“ants” have gradually moved out of Tangjialing to neighboring villages or other places.

Lian toldChina Youth Daily, according to the government’s plan, in the future, villagers would move back to Tangjialing into buildings constructed for them and some land was also reserved for the village to develop industries, while apartments for rent at reasonable prices would be built for white-collar renters.

Many “ants”, nonetheless, left Tangjialing reluctantly. In their letter to Lian and the media, they expressed their worry about whether the white-collar apartments to be built in Tangjialing would be affordable.

China’s Central Government and the Beijing Municipal Government have stepped up the construction of low-rent apartments for low-income people.

“The existence of “ant tribe” is not only a housing issue; it involves many social issues, such as education reform, urban and rural disparity and urban governance,” said Lian.“It will take a long time to solve the problems giving rise to the ‘ant tribe.’”