That's a dramatic photograph above, no doubt. Yet its impetus is so common in China today that total strangers from totally diverse cultures can joke about it and not feel like they're whistling past a graveyard.
A brief digression, please: Thursday, during the first really snowy day we've had in Beijing this winter, professor and author Russell Leigh Moses and I were having one of our best teach-Bosco strolls through Beijing's central hutongs when Russ, who is beyond just fluent in Mandarin--and other dialects--struck up a conversation with a bricklayer who along with a crew of four or five colleagues was meticulously putting up an outside addition wall on a fairly well preserved courtyard home.
Aside from the complex pleasantries that almost always occur in such encounters--a 6'5" New Englander who walks the talk and talks the walk is more than just an oddity to many Chinese--we learned that the bricklayer and his crew were trying to earn money quickly before returning to their hometowns to celebrate Spring Festival with the family and friends they'd left behind months before with a wish and a promise. Not surprisingly, we learned through jocular banter that he and his colleagues were not at all sure their part-time employer would actually pay them when the work was finished.
After a brief but lively discussion concerning why his photograph was taken, his reluctance to be photographed at all, and the politely deflected suggestion that some amount of RMB would mitigate that reluctance, Russ and I walked on discussing the phenomenon of migrant workers being suckered by opportunists who know how desperate many are for cash in the weeks before Spring Festival. Russ explained how great the loss of face would be if the workers returned home without money. Later that evening, Dr. Moses e-mailed the photograph above and the caption below, which he had translated from a Chinese publication.
Driven to despair:
Rescuers haul a man to safety after he attempted to jump from a Chongqing rooftop in a suicide bid after claiming his employer refused to pay him. About 140 million migrant workers are owed back pay, which reached 33 billion yuan in 2003. Agence France-Presse photoAs explained, the article the photograph accompanied was in Chinese; the Reutersarticle excerpted and linked to below was not.
No new year cheer for Chinese migrant workers
By Ben Blanchard
BEIJING (Reuters) - Wei Zebo normally can't wait to go home for Chinese New Year at the end of January. Only this year he doesn't dare.
Like 60 of his construction worker colleagues, he is locked in a dispute with his former employer over back pay worth some 100,000 yuan ($12,390).
"I haven't plucked up the courage to tell my family. I can't go back without the money," said Wei, 35, sitting huddled in a tiny freezing room lit by a single, dim, bare bulb in a gritty, working class area of Beijing.
"Look -- I'm all packed," said the native of the northern province of Hebei, gesturing to a small pile of cheap-looking hold-alls sitting atop a bed covered with a filthy quilt. "I just need to be paid."
Wei's case is typical of a larger problem in China, where millions of migrant workers from poor rural areas have flocked to cities to find work, hoping to enjoy some of the fruits of an economy clocking near double-digit growth.
