Uprooted farmers resort to sex work
By Jane Chen |
April 29, 2010, Thursday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
MANY farmers who relocated to south China's Guangdong Province from southwest China's Chongqing Municipality to make way for the Three Gorge Dam project have to rely on sex business and unlicensed Net cafes to struggle for life in their new hometowns.
At Gangnan Village, a community for such migrants in Foshan City's Gaoming District, sex workers have outnumbered half of the village's entire population of 83, a villager told the South Rural newspaper.
Loss of land and lack of professional training, as well as difficulties in blending into the alien lifestyle of Guangdong people and communicating in the local dialects, have forced the migrants to profit from humans' original sins, the villager pointed out.
Wu Zhicai, dean for Gaoming's office for the migrants, said 980 migrants from Chongqing were settled at 12 villages in Gaoming in August 2002. The population has increased to 1,018.
But villagers soon found themselves like fish out of water. With new government-distributed land some 3 kilometers away from their residence, they had to hire local people to farm the land and collect a yearly rent of 420 yuan (US$61).
With poor professional training, younger villagers had to take low-ranking jobs at local factories while seniors picked up their original jobs such as fishing, according to villagers.
But even fishing was not that easy as the local rivers were severely polluted and no fish could be caught, according to an official, Lu Xinggui.
Lu, 56, a fisherman at his hometown in Wushan, said he could fish about 1,000 yuan of fish and crabs a day from the Yangtze River when he was at home. But here he only caught 20 yuan valued of fish in the past five days.
Villagers also found it difficult to communicate with local people who only spoke Cantonese dialect.
But soon they discovered a way out.
Sex-availing hair salons started to pop up at the Gangnan village three years after the villagers arrived and have increased to 10.
The salon owners make about 80,000 yuan a year and all own private cars, said village official Huang Yimin.
At Gangnan Village, a community for such migrants in Foshan City's Gaoming District, sex workers have outnumbered half of the village's entire population of 83, a villager told the South Rural newspaper.
Loss of land and lack of professional training, as well as difficulties in blending into the alien lifestyle of Guangdong people and communicating in the local dialects, have forced the migrants to profit from humans' original sins, the villager pointed out.
Wu Zhicai, dean for Gaoming's office for the migrants, said 980 migrants from Chongqing were settled at 12 villages in Gaoming in August 2002. The population has increased to 1,018.
But villagers soon found themselves like fish out of water. With new government-distributed land some 3 kilometers away from their residence, they had to hire local people to farm the land and collect a yearly rent of 420 yuan (US$61).
With poor professional training, younger villagers had to take low-ranking jobs at local factories while seniors picked up their original jobs such as fishing, according to villagers.
But even fishing was not that easy as the local rivers were severely polluted and no fish could be caught, according to an official, Lu Xinggui.
Lu, 56, a fisherman at his hometown in Wushan, said he could fish about 1,000 yuan of fish and crabs a day from the Yangtze River when he was at home. But here he only caught 20 yuan valued of fish in the past five days.
Villagers also found it difficult to communicate with local people who only spoke Cantonese dialect.
But soon they discovered a way out.
Sex-availing hair salons started to pop up at the Gangnan village three years after the villagers arrived and have increased to 10.
The salon owners make about 80,000 yuan a year and all own private cars, said village official Huang Yimin.
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