Monday 25 January 2010
Ant tribe: Fresh grads swarming into cities and living in poverty
Together the highly educated groups come to be called the “ant tribe,” a term coined by Chinese sociologists to describe the struggling young migrants, who, armed with their diplomas, scramble to big cities in hope of a better life only to find low-paying jobs and poor living conditions.
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Ant tribe: Fresh grads swarming into cities and living in poverty
Chen Siwu and Li Yahong
19 January 2010
Every day Yang Hongwei takes the bus home from work, staring silently at the European-style villas, luxury sedans and twinkling lights from plazas as he passes by.
The 25-year-old from northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province says he dreams of living such an apparently food life and that hope has kept him in Beijing in the past three years since he graduated from university.
Yang eventually squeezes his way off the bus to the reality of his life: a collection of ramshackle buildings clustered in garbage-littered lanes of Tangjialing village in northern Beijing.
He scoots home - a 10-square-meter room that costs 550 yuan (US$81) or about one fifth of his salary in rent every month. He pulls tight his coat. “It’s very frigid inside as the house has no central heating system, but I am getting used to it.”
Finding love is another problem in a money-centered society like Beijing. “How could dare I date a girl?” He has been alone since 2006 when he came to the capital after graduating from Heilongjiang’s Daqing Petroleum Institute. Yang’s frustration over his life is shared by many other low-income graduates who have moved into China’s big cities like Beijing.
Together the highly educated groups come to be called the “ant tribe,” a term coined by Chinese sociologists to describe the struggling young migrants, who, armed with their diplomas, scramble to big cities in hope of a better life only to find low-paying jobs and poor living conditions.
They live in Tangjialing for the cheap rents. The slum-like village originally had a population of 3,000, but it has exploded to 50,000 with the influx of new “ant tribe villagers.”
“They are like ants: clever, weak and living in groups,” says Lian Si, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Chinese and Global Affairs of Peking University, who studies the phenomenon. Over the past two years, Lian led a team of more than 100 graduates students to follow the groups in university towns like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Xi’an.
In his book “Ant Tribe”, published in September 2009, Lian estimates the population of the “ant community” at one million across China, with about 100,000 in Beijing alone. Most of the “ant tribe” are from poor rural families and take temporary and low-paid jobs such as insurance agents, electronic products sales representatives and waiters, and some are unemployed or underemployed.
Lian, also an associate professor of the Beijing-based University of International Business and Economics, predicts an increasingly challenging job market and increasing ant tribes. The number of graduates, aged 22 to 29, has been growing since China greatly expanded its university enrollment over the past decade. According to the Ministry of Education’s statistics, the number of college graduates has jumped from 1.07 million in 2000 to 6.11 million in 2009.
Another 6.3 million graduates will join migrant workers and other job hunters in what promises to be a fierce labor competition this year.
On top of poor living conditions, the “ant tribe” also contends with a lack of social security in Beijing, where the official average monthly salary was about 4,000 yuan in 2008. The average “ant tribe” member earns only half that.
As in the case of Yang, marriage, for now at least, does not seem to be an option for the “ant tribe”, about 93 percent of whom remain single, Lian estimates.
Soaring housing prices and rents drive them to cheap rooms as small as 10 square meters each in villages like Tangjialing. The monthly rent for a single room downtown could be 2,000 yuan, a month’s earnings for the ant tribe.
Cheap accommodation means a long and crowded journey to and from work, however. As only six bus routes link Tangjialing to downtown Beijing, a workday begins by wedging oneself into a congested vehicle.
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