Silent makers of the Chinese Dream

It was near midnight. I was walking back home after my seasonal fill of Sichuan hotpot at a neighboring restaurant when I heard a clanging sound in the air.

I looked up and saw two men handling the metal plates of an upcoming building in a part of Beijing that already had some skyscrapers. The men were possibly on a floor higher than the 20th. I spotted them by their bright helmets against a clear summer sky. In China, real estate never sleeps, I thought to myself.

That was in 2016. Now the building is much taller.

It will be four decades in December since economic reforms in New China were launched under the stewardship of Deng Xiaoping.

The transition — from a country with a vast poor population to one with plenty of billionaires — was made possible, to a large extent, by migrant workers.

They continue to translate policy into reality, and in my opinion, form the bedrock of the Chinese economy.

Of the country’s total working population of around 770 million, between 35 and 36 percent are estimated to be migrant workers.

But their hand in the growth story is often invisible.

The majority of migrant workers have left their homes and children behind in the countryside or small towns. Toiling day and night, many live in crammed dorms and eat the cheapest meals in host cities. They build glitzy towers, highspeed rail corridors, dams, ports, airports and roadways. And, the things they make in factories sell worldwide.

They travel in dusty clothes on subway trains alongside stylish white-collar urbanites whose Chinese Dream they have helped to shape.

While many middle-class Chinese tourists take vacations abroad, the migrant workers typically get to visit their hometowns once or twice a year, during Spring Festival or the National Day holiday week. In a relatively new trend, the National Bureau of Statistics noted in 2016 a rise in the number of short-distance migrant workers as compared with those working far away.

Coastal boom towns were once the big draw.

China had some 30 million migrant workers in the late 1980s, and 130 million by 2006, according to the International Labor Organization.

Earlier, manufacturing was the top sector that employed them. In the past decade or so, construction, services, sales, transport and logistics have picked up.

More recently, a surge in food apps in China has pushed up the demand for delivery personnel in cities.

Wage levels have risen over the last decade. The average monthly salary in 2016 was 3,275 yuan ($508), according to a Chinese nonprofit organization. Higher pay came from transport and logistics while household services, sales and hotels gave less.

China introduced the household registration system, or hukuo, in 1958. Both economists and sociologists have called for major reform of the system, saying it limits access to public services such as housing, education and healthcare for the migrant workers in host cities. But it may take a while before that happens.

In the meanwhile, this is a good year to celebrate the men and women without whose contribution China’s economic feat wouldn’t have been possible.