Pi Village is a city-side village located in the east of Beijing. It is close to the Capital Airport. Instead of the busy planes, the workers living there have witnessed the development and defunctionalization of the capital with their own hands and eyes, blood and tears, as well as their own comings and goings. Since the reform and opening up, behind the high-rise buildings in the north and south of the country are hundreds of millions of new workers who have moved to cities to work. Most of them cannot stay in the cities that were built with their own blood and sweat. The Migrant Culture and Art Museum in Picun is a testimony of their past, work, joys and sorrows, and their ups and downs. The Migrant Culture and Art Museum is the only public welfare museum in the country founded by migrant workers themselves. It was officially established and opened to the public on May 1, 2008. On May 20, 2023, it was announced that it would temporarily bid farewell due to demolition. (Please read the museum’s own voice: The Migrant Museum has gone through 15 years – Red May of 2023 ) This is a real museum, a whisper of life rather than a safe and a refrigerator. What is on display here is not cultural relics, nor art in a narrow aesthetic space, but the temporary residence permits and barbecue grills of migrant workers, the story of female workers and labor institutions, the wage guide and the last letter home sent before the factory fire. These everyday objects are unusual. They are rear-view mirrors through which workers can take a close look at their own joys, sorrows, sorrows, and joys. They are also turn signals for scholars and journalists to raise their awareness of issues. After all, there is a road that many people have walked on, but even more people are aware of. Paying little attention to the road ahead. The temporary stop of the museum also made more friends realize that this road never stops. A few days after bidding farewell to the Picun Workplace Museum, some workers took back their belongings and re-embedded them into their lives. More exhibits were packed, moved, and retold with their own stories in the chaos of Beijing. In summary, I collected several notes from friends who revisited the Migrant Work Museum, including reflections after viewing the exhibition, traveling through Pi Village and hearing about it from fellow workers, as well as touching the exhibits and bringing them back to life. More friends are also welcome to contribute. Related reading: May labor bring happiness rather than misfortune | Inventory of labor rights events in 2022
Author/Kiwi, Shi Qi Editor/Yu Kun
The gate at the entrance of Pi Village is very modern, with a string of English words on the door: “WELCOME to PICUN “. It looks like an art park. But after entering, you will find that this is an urban village where migrant workers live together. The flat buildings are very densely packed next to each other. Compared with the solemnity in Beijing, this place is full of vitality, and the narrow alleys are crowded with people. The self-selected lunch box with one meat and one vegetarian dish is very filling and filling. At seven o’clock in the evening, more than ten people got out of the van, and more than a dozen people who took over the night shift got in again.
The entrance to Pi Village, source: author.
The owner of the bakery in the village asked us what we were doing here. We said we were going to see the Migrant Work Museum. He said, “Oh, that place is going to be demolished? The children here like to run there when they have nothing to do.” Play .” After passing through the noisy commercial street, we arrived at this quiet area. A wooden plaque reading “Migrant Culture and Art Museum” hangs across the door of a bungalow. The space of the museum is not large, only more than 30 square meters, but the exhibits are as heavy as Mount Tai, because they bear the blood and tears of hundreds of millions of migrant workers.
Picun Commercial Street, source: author.
The museum opened on May 1st, 2008, when exhibits reflecting the work and life of the first generation of migrant workers were collected from across the country. Several paintings of stumps and broken fingers expose the bloody fact that there were once 30,000 work-related injuries and broken fingers in the Pearl River Delta every year. Displayed next to it are letters home from Qin Mei, a female worker at Zhili Toy Factory. In the letter, she apologized to her parents because the factory worked overtime until eleven every day and she couldn’t even spare time to write a letter. Her salary that month was 350 yuan, and she sent 400 yuan home. She asked her father to reply to her promptly after receiving the money and pay back the 100 yuan she owed her third uncle. At the end of the article, she revealed her true feelings: “Please parents, please cherish your body!” But she never expected that her young life would be swallowed up by a ruthless fire four months later.
Exhibition area of work-related injury stories at the Migrant Work Museum, source: author.
Letter from Qin Mei at the Migrant Work Museum, source: author.
In addition to enduring poor working conditions, migrant workers often face the threat of unpaid wages. “In half of the cases, asking for a salary of 1,000 yuan requires a comprehensive cost of at least 3,000 yuan.” This situation did not improve significantly until the Labor Contract Law was implemented in 2008. The first generation of migrant workers were once stigmatized as “blind migrants”. They built gorgeous cities, but they would lose their temporary residence permits because they could not find a job or were fired from the factory, and were sent to detention centers or deported back to the countryside. Until “Sun Zhigang” “The occurrence of the incident made the detention and demobilization system into history.
Work-related injury compensation exhibition area at the Migrant Work Museum, source: author.
Exhibition area of the Sun Zhigang incident in the Migrant Work Museum, source: author.
But migrant workers did not succumb to the oppression of suffering. They also showed the power of workers. In the Foxconn 18-jump incident that shocked China and the world in 2010, Tian Yu was one of the two survivors. Three months after she was discharged from the hospital, she was still trapped at home and refused to go out, fearing that others would see her disability. Later, writer Cao Zhenglu, together with other enthusiasts, patiently enlightened her, encouraged her to learn to make handmade slippers, and helped her sell them online. As she built up her confidence in life, she finally faced the camera and spoke about her experience, becoming the heroine of the documentary “Ascension.” When the mainstream media accused the suicidal workers of having “frail psychological qualities,” Tian Yu expressed the “inability to obtain the dignity of labor and the feeling of helplessness” among workers in the world’s factories.
Tian Yu, source: author.
The nearly 2,000 exhibits in the Migrant Culture and Art Museum all tell the story of workers’ experiences of oppression and resistance after the reform and opening up. For visitors, this is an indelible memory in the history of China’s economic development. For workers, having their own museum not only reflects recognition of the dignity of labor, but also provides an opportunity to inspire the labor movement to carry on the past and forge ahead into the future. Although the Part Time Work Museum will become history, it will never be forgotten!
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