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The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and Beijing’s Rural-Urban

Migrant Laborers: Effects, Responses, and Groupings

Introduction In the years, months, and days leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics,

China's Olympic Committee deliberated over a host of issues: Beijing’s pollution,

terrorism threats, the need to present to the world a city that would appear modern,

the policies regarding protests and press freedom. The list goes on. Foreign

journalists, human rights watchdogs, and academic researches feared that with

everything the national and city government had to worry about, the city’s 5.3

million temporary migrant residents would be forgotten (China Daily, 2008).

Addressing these concerns, Zhou Jidong, official with the Beijing 2008

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Environmental Construction Headquarters, told Xinhua that there were “no plans

for making any laws or decisions to force migrant workers out of Beijing during

the Olympic Games” (Xinhua, 2006). Despite this and other similar assurances by

government officials, some experts believed that, after doing the heavy labor that

made the Olympics possible, Beijing’s migrants would be forcibly returned to

their places of origin (The Wall Street Journal, 2008). Other commentators

thought that migrants would be allowed to remain in the city.

Despite their differing positions on the issue, what officials and outside

experts alike failed to predict—or, possibly, just failed to acknowledge—was the

sheer variety of ways that the Olympics and associated policies actually affected

migrants. This mistake was due to a conceptual gap; these experts had no method

of breaking Beijing’s migrant population into subgroups based on distinct

vulnerabilities, likely coping mechanisms, legal status, and numerous other

obviously useful criteria. If experts and officials had done this, they could have

acknowledged the absolute meaninglessness of speaking about Beijing’s migrants

so generally and could have instead focused on devising strategies to ensure

migrant livelihoods.

Some estimates indicate that China has a “floating population” of

approximately 144 million people (Naughton, 2007). This number can be

subdivided into various categories of migrants based on the issue in question, yet

experts routinely treat migrants as one indivisible group. This view ignores the

differences between the sweet potato salesman from the neighboring county and

the coastal factory worker from the neighboring province, the 20-year-old barber

in Shanghai and the 46-year-old construction worker in one of the western boom

cities. My fieldwork, which I conducted in Beijing from May 2008 until

December 2008, showed me that the Olympics had very different effects on

different migrants. The various effects, responses, and opinions among migrants

paired with failure of experts to predict such variation underscores the need