This article is by Malcolm Moore, the Daily Telegraph‘s Shanghai Correspondent. You can follow him on twitter.
What happened to the men who built China
by Malcolm Moore
In the late 1980s and early 1990s tens of millions of Chinese farmers set out to make their fortune on the coast.
This first generation of migrant workers transformed China, building its skyscrapers, manning its factories and digging its mines.
But where are they now, and did their dreams come true?
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Cheng Guorong sits stiffly and silently on his bed, staring into space. When he lights himself a cigarette, his hands shake.
Seven months ago, the 34-year-old was living rough in the eastern port of Ningbo, eating food out of bins and scraping tobacco out of butts to roll into new cigarettes.
In March, however, he briefly became one of the most famous people in China after a candid photograph of him was posted on the internet, wandering through the city with his cheekbones framed by cigarette smoke.
His striking looks won him the nicknames “Brother Sharp” or “China’s Sexiest Tramp”. After his fame spread, local government officials tracked him down and rescued him.
He became such a sensation that several different families popped up claiming to be his relatives. His real family had to prove they knew him by revealing they were aware of a scar concealed underneath his matted hair.
Today, he is back in his hometown, living his life with mother and two sons in a village near Poyang Lake in Jiangxi province. His wife and father were killed in a car crash just two months before he became famous.
Meanwhile, the trauma of his years in Ningbo still haunts him, and he rarely speaks.
“He shows his affection for us through his actions,” his 22-year-old cousin, Cheng Si, says. “For example, he always serves us the best cuts of meat at the dining table with his chopsticks,” she adds.
She insists that he is not mentally-disturbed, and that a psychiatrist has seen him and claims that his condition is reversible. Nevertheless, Cheng now measures out his days in cigarettes, and whatever happened to him as a migrant worker on the coast seems to
have destroyed much of his spirit.
Cheng was 16 years-old when he first went out to work in 1992. Although he is only in his mid-30s, that makes him, in terms of timing, part of the first generation of workers to leave China’s countryside and seek their fortune on the coast.
The “first generation” of Chinese migrants are now aged anywhere from their mid-30s to their mid-60s, but share an ability to “chi ku” or eat bitterness that younger migrants are often said to lack. The second generation, according to the Chinese media, has grown up more fragile, with high expectations and an impatient urge to better themselves.
In terms of attitude, Cheng belongs squarely to the first generation. He seems strong and wiry, silent and self-contained. And when I interviewed him earlier this year, I suddenly realised that there must be many more like him, men who sweated and toiled to build modern China, but who had failed to find the dream they were seeking.
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