Word: songjiang
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...politics. As the retired city planner said, there is nothing more important to the central government than making sure economic growth continues, and that the benefits of that growth are spread widely. More than anything, this is what gives the communist leadership legitimacy. All across China, towns like New Songjiang are built on the backs of migrant workers - people who have moved from other provinces to earn better money as construction workers. An estimated 114 million workers in China now are migrants, and roughly 15% work on construction sites throughout the country, usually far from their home towns or villages...
...Songjiang, indeed, most of my neighbors are here-today-gone-tomorrow migrants, not middle-class Chinese. Henry Ford famously developed the assembly line to make cars so cheap that his workers could afford one. That's not what's happening here. The people building the houses of suburban Shanghai have no real chance of ever owning...
...Jintao, China's President, has said repeatedly that the gap between rich and poor is one of the government's central concerns. In New Songjiang, the reasons for his insistence become obvious. Theoretically, migrant workers are supposed to receive some health-insurance benefits from the companies that hire them. But many, particularly day laborers who hook up with small contractors, do not. I spent one evening a few months ago in the emergency room of the huge, modern hospital in New Songjiang. In the space of about three hours, five construction workers were admitted, including one who had tumbled three...
...Their reasons for moving way out here are familiar. For some, it's proximity to work. The old Songjiang, the neighboring town, is heavily industrial, with a string of modern factories - many foreign-owned - that runs for miles. One friend, a guy I play basketball with at a gorgeous new public sports facility, is an engineer for SMIC, the large semiconductor company that has a plant not far away. This friend - I'll call him Yu Xiang - has a cousin he has visited who lives outside Los Angeles, and says that New Songjiang reminds him of the area...
...married, and often his wife, Lin, was in the car on our journeys into town. Over time my wife and she became friendly. One day last summer, they had tea together and Lin told Joyce she was pregnant, and that she and her husband were moving away from New Songjiang to a neighborhood in Shanghai with a lot of new construction, where her husband would continue to try to make a living shuttling workers around. Lin came over to our house one evening just before leaving; Joyce was giving her some of Abby's old baby clothes...