Nation &
World: Sunday, May 19, 2002
Mao's rural poor now are servants to rich
Chinese
By Michael Dorgan
Knight Ridder Newspapers
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BEIJING — Han Xiaoli's baby
face and cheery pink work jacket hide a life of hardship.
Now 20, she grew up in rural
Shanxi Province in a farm household of five that survived on less than $500 per
year. More than half of that came from her salary as a primary-school teacher,
a job that paid the young woman with a junior high-school education $24 per
month.
Those were the bad old
days, she hopes. In March, Han joined what has become a mass migration from rural
to urban China, and landed a job that pays $60 per month. The countryside
teacher has become a big-city maid.
Poor farmers made it possible for Mao
Tse-tung to bring communism to power in China, and they were supposed to be a
leading force in communist society. These days, in a twist that Mao surely
never foresaw, the best many rural residents can hope for is to become,
like Han, a servant to richer Chinese.
In Chinese cities, a
comfortable middle class is growing, and many of these people are trying to
find qualified domestic help. Two economists are working to fill that need and
help alleviate rural poverty by starting a school in Beijing to train
maids.
Surveys suggest that more
than 100,000 households in Beijing alone have maids, and the number is rising
rapidly, according to Tang Min, the chief economist of the Asian Development
Bank in Beijing and one of the school's founders.
More than 800 million of
China's 1.27 billion citizens live in rural areas. In 1999, the last
year for which there are official figures, per capita income in the countryside
was $269 per year, less than half of the $714 in urban areas.
Tang and co-founder Mao
Yushi started a poverty-relief program nine years ago in northern China's
Shanxi province that provided small loans to farmers. Mao said these loans
helped individuals, but that the broader problem of rural poverty could
never be solved if 800 million Chinese remain in the countryside.
"The fundamental
problem is that there are too many peasants," he said. "If you help
them increase their output, the market is limited, so it merely pushes prices
down. The only solution is to urbanize."
The school, which has
trained about 60 young women in two classes since opening in March, recruits
students in impoverished areas by allowing them to defer paying tuition until
after they have found jobs.
Starting salaries range
from $50 to $100 per month. That's good pay for a maid in Beijing, where many
domestic workers earn only $30 to $40 per month. Room and board usually are
provided.
Guo Jinfeng, manager of the
employment service that finds jobs for the new graduates, said their training
qualified them for placement in the villas and luxury apartments of government
officials and business executives.
The training is a challenge
for the young women. Most arrive at the school without any knowledge of
electric rice cookers, steam irons, microwave ovens and the other appliances
they need to operate.
School director Chen Zupie
said some students had never seen a porcelain toilet before they were taught
how to clean one.
The young women also must
master urban-survival skills, such as shopping in a supermarket and riding a
subway. One young woman was so terrified by the long escalator leading down to
the trains that she broke down and wept, Chen said.