SHENZHEN, China — This nation's officials are trying to tighten their control over millions of migrant workers who have been the engine behind China's spectacular economic growth but who now are emerging as the biggest threat to its stability.
The country's itinerant masses--as many as 100 million people, equivalent to the population of Mexico--are adrift in China and have sorely strained traditional government controls. Most migrants aren't registered, as required, with authorities. Many don't pay taxes. Some are now blamed for creating crime waves in China's cities.
And as the workers' numbers grow, so do tensions between those who are falling behind in China's boom and those who are reaping the benefits.
In a belated crackdown on the "floating population," the government now hopes to prevent violent outbursts like a recent riot here in China's showcase "economic zone" that left 11 workers dead.
The clash began, as one worker said later, over "just a little thing": A wealthy villager rode his motorcycle through a blockade onto a road freshly tarred by migrant workers. The angry laborers reacted by trashing his bike. The villager, in response, called police on his cellular phone. The workers summoned friends from nearby construction sites. In the battle that followed, 11 workers were killed by paramilitary troops armed with submachine guns.
"The police treat us workers no better than dogs," a man from inland Hunan province, who was injured in the melee, said bitterly from his hospital bed.
Since paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's 1979 economic reforms freed this nation's peasants to find their fortunes in the cities, migrant workers' cheap labor has driven China's phenomenal expansion. The economy has grown at an average rate of 10% a year since 1982.
Chinese farmers, in turn, have found more than freedom of movement: Not only can they nearly triple their countryside wage by moving to the cities, they can evade taxes and China's one-child policy in the process.
But as China struggles to balance its rapid economic development and the social shifts that go with it, it must also confront officials' greatest fear--that they may lose control of the once tightly regulated population.
