Jin Xiaoqin epitomizes all that is going right in China.
Through 15 years of hard work and keen attention to the fickle global market for trinkets, she and her husband have climbed from street peddling to owning a plastics factory with 50 workers, all migrants from poorer regions.
This year, their hottest products are painted figurines of Jesus and Mary, sold to buyers from the US and South Korea.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"The glow-in-the dark statues sell pretty well, but not as well as the painted ones," Jin noted, perusing her display in Yiwu city's vast wholesale market for small goods of every kind.
Her trajectory is multiplied by the thousands in Yiwu, perhaps the most sizzling city in the zooming province of Zhejiang, in China's southeast.
Three hundred twenty-two kilometers to the interior is Caijiacun -- a broken farm village that functions mainly as a source of workers for Yiwu and other boomtowns. Caijiacun epitomizes the rural stagnation that could be China's most intractable problem.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"We pretty much lead a hand-to-mouth existence," said Cai Songquan, whose 24-year-old son, like most everyone else in the Jiangxi province countryside who is young and able, left home while in his teens.
Linking these disparate worlds are the migrant workers, more than 100 million nationwide, men and women from China's interior.
They travel for work because they have no alternatives and because they dream of better days. In factories large and small, foreign-owned and domestic, they assemble computer parts or shoes or, as Cai's son did until he was laid off a few weeks ago from a factory in Yiwu, toys.
The migrants face numbingly low wages as they scramble to save for marriage and a home and, in their wildest dreams, a little shop back home.
A clever and lucky few gain skills that help start them up the modern economy, on a long ladder.
The fates of migrants like Cai's son, along with that of relatives in the villages who increasingly depend on money sent home, is one of China's biggest unknowns.
Will large numbers of migrants, like those elsewhere, climb to lives of reliable earnings and respect, perhaps even seeing a child or grandchild make it to college? Or will many remain on a virtual treadmill, as the son, Cai Gaoxiang, feels he has done over the past year, watching as the meager pay for his labor has actually declined?
On such issues may hinge whether China hardens into extremes of wealth and poverty, as some fear today, or emerges as the middle-class country that everyone hopes for.
A tour from booming Zhejiang to the interconnected villages of Jiangxi provides evidence for both futures.
The boom
"Build the World's Biggest Supermarket, Construct an International Shopping Heaven!" reads the giant electronic sign at the entrance of what once was called the Yiwu Small Commodities Wholesale Market. Now, relocated in a cavernous new four-story air-conditioned quarters, the market has renamed itself, with no apparent hubris, the Yiwu World Trade Center.
Inside are thousands of stalls staffed by local factory owners and traders, offering an astonishing selection of hair bows and Christmas ornaments, key rings, plastic jewelry, lava lamps and every other made-in-China trinket that fill stores the world over.
Jin Xiaoqin, a lively woman in her mid-40s, waits for walk-in buyers and watches the fax machine in her booth. On the shelves are a dozen variants of Christian statuary.
"Ours is a typical Yiwu story," she said, "from small to big, from middleman to producer of goods." Her family moved from a mud house in the country to a four-story house in town, and from carrying goods on their shoulders to their first motorcycle eight years ago and, last year, a van. She and her husband were barely educated; their daughter studies marketing at university.
This inland city, with no obvious geographical advantage, has within two decades grown into a metropolis with skyscrapers, an airport, a new glass and steel convention center and acres of industrial parks and housing estates now under construction. Enough Arab dealers live in Yiwu year-round to support several Middle Eastern restaurants, including one with belly dancers, and a mosque.
The development here, as in much of Zhejiang province, is all the more remarkable because it is entirely home-grown -- not, as in some regions, a product of a General Motors, Panasonic, Compaq or other big multinational corporation that has transplanted factories along China's coast. This is one place where China's surging exports actually translate, at home, into middle-class status for ordinary Chinese.
Illustrating how tightly Yiwu's development is bound with the supply of outside workers, while the official resident population is 640,000, a further 500,000 migrants reside in and around Yiwu.
Buying and selling inexpensive goods was a tradition in the area, only partly suppressed in the Mao era, and Jin had trading in her blood. As a youth with her family in the late 1970s, as petty commerce was openly allowed, she crafted crude sunglasses. "You had to sell on the sly," she recalled. "Back then, selling sunglasses was considered decadent."
Her future husband roamed the country with an uncle, each carrying useful little products, such as sewing needles and thread, peddled from a single blanket. "They'd sell everything, come back to Yiwu and buy more, and go out selling again," she said.
Married in the 1980s, she and her husband moved from one local market to another, lugging goods on shoulder poles. They set up a permanent stall in Yiwu selling socks, then moved into handicrafts because "there seemed to be more market potential."
Four years ago they set up their own small plastics factory, concentrating on religious figurines after one foreign buyer brought in a mold and big order. Soon they developed their own molds, she said, and business "really took off last year."
They offer workers around US$60 a month with room and board to an apparently endless supply of applicants. The real problem, she said, is finding people skilled enough to paint the eyes of Mary and Jesus.
"You really have to paint the eyes just right," she said. "Foreigners care a lot about the expressions on the faces."
The strugglers
Yiwu has built an imposing multistory job exchange where employers recruit help, but out front is the raw face of the market economy. Hundreds of migrants, young men and women, couples with babies in tow, from Jiangxi and Hunan, and Henan, Anhui and Sichuan, mill about -- some with signs advertising a skill.
A few prospective employers carry signs offering work but have no takers because the wages and conditions seem too onerous even for this hungry crowd. Waiting with some friends from his home province of Jiangxi on a recent day was Cai Guoxiang, who has been doing factory jobs in Zhejiang province for 10 years. Because of slow orders he recently lost his last job, assembling swivel-headed dog ornaments that motorists put on their dashboards.
He wasn't feeling so good about that job anyway, he allowed."The assembly work is really tough," he said. "And they've been pushing down the rates. We used to get 3.5 fen per toy but now they are just paying 2.5 fen." (One fen is a Chinese penny, worth less than one-tenth of a US penny.)
When the orders are high, he said, assemblers work 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and might clear US$120 in a month. More typical is US$90 a month and in a slow month, US$50. "Often it's just not enough to get by on," he said.
Cai has worked in all the boomtowns of Zhejiang -- Hangzhou, Wenzhou and now Yiwu -- but never gained a long-term job or special skills. Still, he doesn't regret leaving home at 14. "There's nothing to do at home and everybody leaves to work," he said. "Each family has a tiny patch of land and you spend your days mostly doing nothing."
Cai has managed to save US$2,000 but this is not enough to marry his fiance, from a neighboring Jiangxi village, who works in Yiwu in a socks factory and whom he sees once a month or so.
"My dream is someday to save enough money to return home and build a house and maybe start a small shop of some kind," he said. "Because in the end, if you are a migrant worker you suffer a lot of discrimination and you have a lot of unfair bosses. Even if you're sick, they make you work and the food is often not very good and not enough."
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