This Is Shenxiang Village, a Microcosm of Industrial Suzhou

Suzhou is usually thought of as a city of gardens, and its industrial side gets overlooked. Through three stories we record a place called Shenxiang Village — a microcosm of industrial Suzhou.

Shenxiang Village sits about 15 kilometers from downtown Suzhou, on the border between the factory-dense High-Tech Zone and Wuzhong District. None of the scenery of the old city of Gusu or the garden city shows up here. Without the industrial parks this would be an ordinary farming village. But the parks changed everything. Today Shenxiang Village has only about 2,000 local residents, against roughly 19,000 migrants.

Starting in the 1990s the area followed the "southern Jiangsu model": the government developed the surrounding farmland, fenced it into industrial parks, and drew in township enterprises and foreign-invested factories. The parks rarely left much land for worker dormitory blocks, and the factories often built no dormitories either — they just ran shuttle buses to carry workers to and from their shifts. That turned places like Shenxiang Village, dense with houses and easy to reach, into villages-in-the-city packed with young migrant workers.

One village is a whole society. The single central commercial street cuts the village in two, and the workers live in homestead housing on both sides, north and south. Most of the younger local villagers have moved away, leaving the older generation to watch the houses and rent them out. There are no stable social ties here: the workers may share broadly similar lives, but to one another they are only passersby.

We interviewed 15 people who live here. This is another Suzhou.

People began paying attention to Suzhou's industrial side on January 7, when news broke that Japan's Nitto Denko Group was "pulling out its investment." The details going around online — "equipment moved out in the dead of night," "workers demanding back pay" — were part true and part false. Qianjiang Evening News, The Paper and other outlets later confirmed that only the polarizer film division was being dissolved, that its 500-plus employees had a compensation plan the next day, and that a flexible printed circuit board division (FPC), covering another 500-plus people, had already been sold off.

This was simply one more Suzhou factory shrinking. Rising labor costs, rising housing prices, the end of tax breaks and a shift in the industry are pushing factories out of Suzhou, toward central and western China or Southeast Asia. Suzhou's actual utilized foreign investment fell from US$9.16 billion in 2012 to US$6.003 billion in 2016, and the share of loss-making enterprises rose from 16% in 2010 to 32% in 2016.

Nitto Denko was among the first foreign companies to enter Suzhou. It built a plant here in 2001, making components for mobile phones, LCD displays and computers — earlier even than it set up its China headquarters in Shanghai.

It was also the 16th Fortune 500 company to restructure its business in Suzhou since 2015.

Some of the factories that have closed in Suzhou in recent years

2015.07

Puguang Electronics, a contract manufacturer for Samsung, shuts down

2015.08

TE Connectivity's Kunshan CD division closes

2015.12

Nokia's Suzhou factory closes

2016.06

Suzhou Zixing Paper halts production and dissolves

2017.01

US hard-drive maker Seagate closes its plant

2017.09

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) closes its plant

2018.01

Nitto Denko closes its polarizer film division and transfers its flexible printed circuit board division

Suzhou's fast growth over the past 20 years is inseparable from the industrial parks and the foreign manufacturers they brought in. In 1994 Jiangsu Province partnered with the Singapore government to turn about 70 square kilometers of land in eastern Suzhou into the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park, importing foreign capital and building up manufacturing. Developed at the same time were the High-Tech Zone to the west and, to the south and north, Wuzhong and Xiangcheng districts, which gathered large numbers of downstream private suppliers. At the 2012 peak, Suzhou's actual utilized foreign investment reached US$9.16 billion, 67% of it in manufacturing; the gross industrial output of above-scale foreign-invested and Hong Kong-, Macao- and Taiwan-invested industrial enterprises reached 1.887 trillion yuan, or 66% of the city's total.

In 2014 Suzhou rose to seventh among Chinese cities by GDP, with per-capita GDP second only to Shenzhen.

What held up this industrial growth was a huge migrant population. Suzhou is the only one of Jiangsu Province's 13 cities with a resident population above 10 million — 10.6474 million at the end of 2016. But its registered (hukou) population was only 6.782 million, which means migrants made up 36% of the total.

From 2015 on, though, the fortunes of manufacturing in Suzhou began to change. In July 2015 Puguang Electronics, a contract manufacturer working solely for Samsung, announced it was shutting down; in December, Nokia's factory, 17 years in Suzhou, closed. Suzhou's fixed-asset investment, industrial fixed investment and corporate deposits all started sliding. In the first three quarters of 2017, foreign-invested fixed investment was 65.2 billion yuan, down 17% year on year; industrial investment was 150 billion yuan, down 5% from 2016.

Workers, too, began leaving in large numbers.

"Damn Darfon, Lousy Asus, Wouldn't Set Foot in Jinlike Even If You Beat Me to Death"

In Shenxiang Village the most practical subject is money. People talk about which factory pays better, which treats people more decently, or what might be a faster way to earn more. Factories with bad pay and worse conditions get worked into doggerel that travels around: "Damn Darfon, lousy Asus, wouldn't set foot in Jinlike even if you beat me to death."

The most conspicuous businesses on that street are the staffing agencies — thirty or forty of them. Outside each stands a bright blue placard, covered edge to edge with job notices in one format: "company name + age and gender requirements + pay + address." For example: "Panasonic Electric Works, male/female, ages 18-30, [Japanese-invested company], base pay 1,820 yuan + full-attendance bonus 100 yuan + monthly bonus 80 yuan + night-shift pay 15 yuan + position allowance 50-300 yuan, five days on two off, total pay around 3,400-4,800 yuan/month, Huaihai Street."

Hardly anyone stops to read the placards; the job hunters walk straight in. Most offices hold a black or brown desk, a computer and two leather sofas beside it. Once the clear plastic door slides shut, it looks like a secret meeting is under way. A few young men usually hang around outside drumming up business, much like real-estate agents.

Workers depend on these agencies, and many resent it. One worker living in Shenxiang Village told QDaily that because the agencies exist, factories no longer hire directly — you have to go through a middleman. When there are plenty of people looking for work, the agents can name their price and charge a 1,000-yuan referral fee.

Old Lu, an assembly-line worker at a Singaporean electronics plant, is a dispatched worker. He cannot understand why Suzhou has so many labor-dispatch companies: "Look at our company — 99% of the people on the shop floor are dispatched. Operators, team leaders, shift supervisors, basically none of them are direct hires." Factories that use dispatched workers owe them no social insurance and can pay them only the minimum wage. Old Lu thinks this is plain wrong, and he lays the blame on the staffing agencies.

Wang Tingting found her first job through an agency like this when she came to Suzhou from her hometown of Xuzhou at 18. The boss of the agency quietly passed her personal details to his own nephew; after two years together the two young people married. Wang Tingting later tired of the repetitive work in the factory and went to a beauty salon in nearby Mudu Town to learn massage and sell beauty products.

There used to be several large factories around the salon in Mudu Town, and the customers who came in were all "high-end." A membership card took at least 18,000 yuan to load. A year ago those factories closed or moved away one after another, and the salon shut down with them. Wang Tingting then opened her own shop in Shenxiang Village: a massage costs 50 yuan, and there is also cupping and body-shaping.

Migrant workers have no loyalty to speak of. They go wherever the deal is better.

Zhang Yumei went to Shenzhen to work after finishing junior high, and when that factory closed she came to Suzhou at the end of 2009, assembling materials in the clean room of the US company Seagate for 1,600 yuan a month, three days on, three off. She did this for eight years and her pay rose to 4,000 yuan a month.

After the plant closed, Zhang Yumei stayed in Suzhou, for her daughter's sake. In 2013 you could still get Suzhou hukou and a school place by buying an apartment, so she and her husband took out a loan and bought a 67-square-meter unit in the Xingshengke complex in Shengpu Town, in the Suzhou Industrial Park, for 270,000 yuan with a 140,000-yuan down payment. The place is an hour by car from the city center, but Zhang Yumei likes it because it sits next to the couple's first home in Suzhou — a garage in the Langhuayuan community, just over ten square meters, 250 yuan a month.

Seagate moved out in four batches. Zhang Yumei was in the third and got a severance package of N+1+1+1; in September 2017 the last batch left, her husband among them, and that time the package was N+1+1+1.5.

Her colleagues scattered. The coworkers closest to Zhang Yumei found jobs in Suzhou too, but at different factories. She moved to the US company TE Connectivity, where she watches machines. Her pay is still a bit over 4,000 yuan a month, but her hours are several times what they were at Seagate: four days on, two off, 12-hour shifts (8 regular hours plus 4 of overtime), and sometimes a night shift from 8:30 pm to 8:30 am.

"One Person or Two (Looking to Rent)?"

Set against the decline of manufacturing, Suzhou's property market has thrived. Between 2008 and 2015 commercial housing prices in Suzhou as a whole rose 56.5%, from 7,836 to 12,267 yuan per square meter, while prices in the Suzhou Industrial Park rose 95.6%, from 8,399 to 16,432 yuan. In 2016 Suzhou home prices rose 43% over the year, second in the country only to Shenzhen.

Old Liu is 70 and speaks with a thick Suzhou accent. It was only around 2008 that he put up the first concrete house of his own on his homestead land, and he has renovated it seven times since. He spent most of the first half of his life farming for work points, which came to about 300 yuan a year. In the late 1990s industrial parks were built near the village, outsiders arrived to do business or rent rooms from local residents, and the village started laying concrete roads. A contractor took a liking to Old Liu and hired him to haul building materials on a tractor. He did that for nearly ten years, and when the concrete road was finished around 2008 it became Shenxiang Village's one and only central commercial street. Barbershops, restaurants, KTV parlors, a roller rink and a Trust-Mart supermarket opened along it one after another.

From then on rent alone was more or less enough for Old Liu's family. His son became one of the village's few college graduates and, after his bachelor's degree, went into technical management at a nearby factory; when he took girls out he no longer had to go to Mudu Town but could take them to KFC in downtown Suzhou. Once married, the son and his wife moved into a new apartment in a housing complex, while Old Liu stayed in the village to collect rent. He also owns a house divided into twenty or thirty rooms, which he rents to workers for two to three hundred yuan each — by his estimate at least 8,000-some yuan a month.

He gripped his electric-scooter helmet the whole time he sat talking. The moment he heard someone coming to look at a room he sprang up and left, saying "sorry, sorry" as he went.

Star Home, a workers' center in Shenxiang Village, once counted 273 standalone houses here, every one of them partitioned into small rooms for rent, with the ground floor usually turned into shops. "Going by the houses I've lived in and the ones my friends have lived in, the fewest rooms in a house is 28, the most is 42, and the average is 32."

Turn off the central street at any junction and you are in an alley no more than half a meter wide; ahead you can see drying poles, blackened snow and white cooking smoke rising from some house or other. Overhead the sky is gray-white. Some alleys have shops on both sides too: public bathhouses, mahjong rooms, tattoo parlors, mending stalls, nail salons, corner stores. The corner stores do several jobs at once — two shared washing machines out front, an internet café inside, and in some of them clothes for sale.

The buildings keep the traditional Suzhou plan of a front house and a back house. The front door of the front house is usually left unlocked, with a wooden sign reading "rooms to let inside" hanging on it. Walk in and you are in the hall, landscape paintings and calligraphy on the wall facing the door, all of it under dust. Where an Eight Immortals table and chairs might once have stood there are now electric scooters, the workers' essential ride to the factory. Behind the hall, or up the stairs on either side of it to the second floor, are rows of small partitioned rooms. The passages are pitch dark and narrow, wide enough for one person at a time. To add rentable space, some landlords split the attic into two levels, so some of the rooms are very low. The back house, once used for farm tools, has also been cut into several rooms with very poor light.

Most of these houses have no kitchen. If tenants want to cook and the landlord allows it, they can set up a table of scrap wood in a shared space, lay a few sheets of plastic over it and put an induction cooker on top. There isn't always anywhere to dry clothes, either. To dry them you string a line in your room or in the hallway.

Landlords speak Mandarin mixed with Suzhou dialect. Pass their door and the first thing they say isn't a greeting but "One person or two (looking to rent)?" — in a tone that leaves no room for argument.

The rooms vary enormously. A good one runs 350 yuan a month: 10 square meters, a big window, sunlight, space for a bed, a small table and a small wardrobe. The tenant is a woman of about 22 who works at a nearby factory and has lived in this building for five years. Hearing that the last tenant of this room had left, she had just moved over from a windowless inner room. Her parents work here too and live across the hallway. At 8 am on a Saturday her father was lying in bed next door playing on his phone, while she had just come off a night shift, changed into pajamas, and was yawning.

The room she used to live in was only six or seven square meters, but she had made it warm. A few small mirrors on the wall were pieced together into a full-length one. The bed was a mattress laid straight on the floor, and on the wall above it hung a white metal photo rack holding postcards, with small decorative bulbs wound around it.

The worst rooms cost 240 yuan a month including water (there are two kinds of water here, tap and well; without tap water you fetch well water to do laundry). Six or seven square meters, room for a small bed and a small table, about 2 meters high. What the landlord calls a window is a small opening onto the corridor that lets in neither light nor air, and all the lighting comes from one incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling is covered in wood-grain plastic sheeting, bulging in places from the damp.

On the wall a previous tenant had put up a white poster, its color already faded, with "I quit" written in one corner in thick black marker.

Public Bathhouses

Washing at the rental houses is a chore.

In winter there is no hot water; you carry it back from the alley in a thermos, or you go to a public bathhouse. The bathhouses in Shenxiang Village still look like public baths from the 1990s: big sacks of coal and bundled firewood stacked by the door, the owner walking over to the metal furnace every so often to stoke it and heat water. The front room has leather chairs, mirrors and hair dryers; the back is split into private rooms and a communal bath, with attendants who scrub you down. One bath costs 8 to 10 yuan and lasts 50 minutes.

Afterwards people sit in the leather chairs to dry their hair, watch TV or talk to one another. For another 10 yuan, some bathhouses will let you spend the night.

Running a bathhouse takes stamina. The owner of one in an alley on the south side works from 7 am to midnight every day, with no day off.

But sometimes things slip. One day the Qingquan Bathhouse in a north-side alley opened as usual, except the owner sat in the doorway grinning foolishly at passersby. His wife, holding their child, smiled apologetically and said: "He's had too much to drink today and forgot to heat the water. Go wash somewhere else."

That Commercial Street

If the bathhouses of Shenxiang Village are a trade that mixes public service with private enterprise, that commercial street is a textbook "city in miniature."

The 400-to-500-meter central street handles the food, clothing, daily necessities and entertainment of everyone in Shenxiang Village. It only comes alive in the evening, after the shift ends, and stays that way into the early hours, when snack shops and mahjong parlors are still lit. As Chinese New Year approached, quite a few shops put up "for transfer" notices; a general store lined up colorful rolling suitcases outside its door in a row, and the "black bus" operators — unlicensed long-distance coaches — had raised a sign reading "no cheating the old or the young."

Over more than a decade the outside merchants who set up here have come and gone, but the mix of trades has barely changed. At the entrance to the village a big red tent covers a whole row of food stalls. Shopfronts run from one end of the village to the other: six or seven selling men's and women's clothes, a dozen-odd selling Vivo and Oppo phones, three or four selling shoes, three or four selling household goods, one KTV, plus small restaurants serving Huainan beef soup, Cangshu mutton and the like.

Boss Chen has run a clothing shop on the central commercial street for 10 years, which makes him one of the oldest hands. He is 51, from Anqing in Anhui, with a booming voice; with the zebra-striped flat cap on his head he looks something like an actor.

Boss Chen calls himself restless and a bit lazy. Back home as a young man he studied veterinary work, sold tea and made steamed buns, and gave all of them up as too tiring. The buns especially: "Everyone in my family made buns. Anqing baozi are as famous as Shaxian snacks, they're all over the country." But Boss Chen could not stand getting up at 3 am to knead dough. "Working till 7 at night — it'll kill you."

Hearing from relatives working in Suzhou that there was money in it, Boss Chen came with his wife in 2004 and sold clothes in the Majian housing area of Fengqiao, in the High-Tech Zone. He chose Majian because he had heard there were several blocks of temporary resettlement housing there, and factories in the nearby industrial parks trucked fresh graduates in by the busload to live in them for a while. "We couldn't do mid- or high-end clothing — we sold to students and workers who had no money." He paid a 40,000-yuan transfer fee there and ran the shop for two years, selling both men's and women's clothes. Every two days he went to Changshu, in Jiangsu, to restock, two hours on the bus each way.

In 2006, short of hands, Boss Chen moved the shop to Changbang. Like Shenxiang Village, Changbang belongs to Xikuatang Village, and he had a number of relatives working nearby who could help out. He took over a bigger storefront there and started selling shoes as well.

Changbang was later demolished, so in 2008 Boss Chen moved to Shenxiang. "By then storefronts were already hard to find — a lot of people had come to Jiangsu to do business. I rode my bicycle around every day looking." Shenxiang Village was the biggest, most fully formed urban village he had seen. "It's lively, it has everything." But a shop here was expensive too: 62,000 yuan in transfer fees, plus more than 40,000 yuan a year in rent.

Drawing on experience, Boss Chen adjusted his business twice. When he first arrived in 2008 he dropped women's clothing for men's only, and dropped shoes.

"Look at this street — there are almost no women's clothing stores. Women's fashion changes too fast; it's hard to judge how much to order and you end up stuck with stock. Shoes have better margins, but when you restock you have to take every size from 35 to 42, you can't just pick the best sellers. Too much trouble."

Boss Chen also thinks Taobao shops have eaten into his trade; since coming to Shenxiang his clothing business has never matched its Majian heyday. But he doesn't understand how Taobao shops work, can't be bothered to learn, and figures he still makes some money every year anyway. Last year, with clothes selling slowly, he opened a restaurant next to the clothing shop and signed up with Ele.me. "We only deliver within three kilometers." That business is middling too: "since going online we sell maybe a dozen-odd more boxes a month."

Li Rong, from Huainan in Anhui, is new to the central street — she came to Shenxiang Village only two years ago to open a Huainan beef soup shop. The place is done up warmly, about 50 square meters, with wooden tables and chairs. The three bottles on each table, soy sauce, chili and vinegar, are wiped spotless; when there are no customers she picks them up one by one and wipes them again. Beside every table is a bin lined with a white plastic bag, so customers can drop their napkins in while they drink their soup. Beef and vermicelli soup is 10 yuan for a large bowl, 8 for a small one, and it is the shop's best seller.

She is quick, too. Blanching sweet-potato noodles and shredded dried tofu takes her under three minutes; she shakes them out, drops them in the bowl and ladles beef soup over them, while her mother-in-law beside her chops scallions and cilantro to scatter on top. "Our soup is all simmered from beef bones. We don't use MSG."

Li Rong used to work the line at a foreign-invested electronics plant in Anhui. She met her husband there and they married in 2015. The work was hard — 12 hours a day, one day off a week, about 2,000 yuan — "and the supervisor watched us closely; you had to report even to go to the bathroom." After a few years she had had enough and wanted to earn money elsewhere. Several relatives working in Suzhou said the pay there beat Anhui, so the year she married she went with her husband and mother-in-law to open a restaurant.

"Relatives said Shenxiang Village had a lot of people, and when I rode over to look, it did." In two years in Suzhou, Li Rong has never left Shenxiang Village. She and her mother-in-law mind the shop; her husband handles the restocking.

The central street, though, is past its best days. A landlord from Anhui who rents rooms by the day remembers that around 2010 the street was "so packed you couldn't walk — people and vehicles jammed together, a long row of snack stalls in front of the shops, crowds everywhere." Now even at night it looks empty. Prices have risen a good deal. "Half a yuan used to buy you several baozi; now you can't get breakfast for under 5 yuan."

A 51-year-old local landlord on the south side of the village said: "A lot of people have gone home — and some of their hometowns are doing well now. Others left because their factory closed, or the foreign company pulled out."

Then there is demolition. Since 2013, rumors have gone around among villagers and tenants that Shenxiang Village will be torn down. Two other urban villages under Xikuatang Village, Changbang and Mazhuang, have already been leveled. What will replace them is unclear; everyone just says "housing complexes, commercial apartments." From what our reporting found, forty or fifty households have signed agreements and moved out so far. Their houses aren't pulled down right away — they are simply sealed up with cement and brick.

The village has also put forward a condition that works against migrant workers: a landlord who stops renting to outsiders can collect a 100,000-yuan subsidy every year until the house is demolished.

The 51-year-old landlord's neighbor signed the demolition agreement and moved out last year, her doors and windows sealed with layer on layer of cement and red brick. She herself is still wavering, because the old people in her family don't want to leave.

Boss Chen isn't worried about demolition for now. Some landlords further from the central street may have signed, but those near the street, whose annual rental income is far above 100,000 yuan, are still unwilling. "What we pay our landlord every year is much more than that."

Li Rong hasn't thought about moving either. Holding her 10-month-old child, she said: "Wherever I am, I love it. My child was born here too."

"Blaming the Zipper for Not Finding a Girlfriend?"

Shenxiang Village has few public spaces in any real sense. People move through so fast that social ties never settle. At a restaurant, in front of a fruit stall, on the road, people who know each other exchange a few words. Back inside, most tenants don't know one another and keep their guard up. For people who work 12 hours a day, a room is mainly for sleeping, and their most constant company is drink.

Sister Sun's tailoring stall is one of the few places where people will chat and joke with strangers.

Sister Sun is from Lianyungang. At about 20 her family arranged a match and she married into Lianshui County, Huai'an. She worked in Nanjing first, then followed relatives to Suzhou in 2007 and sewed at a garment factory on Pangshan Lake in Wujiang, south of the city. The factory closed in 2008, and that same year Sister Sun found her way to Shenxiang Village and opened a tailoring stall, fixing zippers, hemming trousers, appliquéing patches and mending clothes. Her prices are low, mostly under 10 yuan.

Calling it a tailor's shop is generous. It is an open patch of ground at the mouth of an alley, under 2 square meters, rented for 10 yuan a day. Sister Sun sets up around noon and stays until 10 pm. She puts the sewing machine in front of her, with an incandescent bulb hung above it for light and a teal balloon dog tied on for decoration. She stretches a red canopy overhead, lays spare zippers and fabric in a pocket on the right, and she is open for business.

Sister Sun wears a white work coat over a red down jacket and a bright red faux-fur hat. She laughs easily and has a loud voice, a pleasant one. A phone hangs by her tent playing songs she likes, to pull in customers and to pass the time: Teresa Teng, and 《酒干倘卖无》, "Any Old Bottles for Sale?"

"But my vocal cords are shot. I sat out here in the wind and got too cold, and had to have surgery at the hospital. Back when my voice was good I was really something — I could sing in a man's voice or a woman's." She pointed at her own throat as she said it.

Between 6 and 7 pm on February 2, Sister Sun barely had a free moment. Someone turned up at the stall roughly every five minutes. She likes to banter with the customers who bring clothes to mend, and they come in all kinds.

A woman in her forties came with a down jacket, complaining that her grandson had been mischievous and torn a hole in it. As they talked, the grandson brought over a box of cookies and asked for 10 yuan to buy it. The woman handed it over without a thought, and Sister Sun spoke up: "Pretty well off, aren't you." The woman shot back: "If I had money I'd go buy new clothes! I come to you because I don't. I just like mending things."

A young man holding a black down jacket said the zipper was broken and he wanted a red one instead. Sister Sun said, "I don't have red zippers," and pulled out three black ones in different styles for him to choose from. He turned them over and couldn't decide. "None of them look good!" Sister Sun answered: "Blaming the zipper for not finding a girlfriend?"

A couple who had just bought a pair of men's dress trousers at the clothing shop next door came to have them taken in. Sister Sun glanced at the husband and said, "Waist 36, right?" He looked a little startled. "Hey, that's right. 36." His wife spoke up beside him: "Do a proper job on it for me, don't cheat me."

Three minutes later it was altered, and the wife asked her to press the trousers as well. "Oh my, I've run into the Queen Mother of the West herself," Sister Sun said with a loud laugh, then jumped up and ran off with the trousers toward her home deeper in the alley.

For most of the year Sister Sun sits at her sewing machine at the mouth of the alley. Recently she took the subway to look at the first factory she worked at in Suzhou. What she saw annoyed her: "I didn't recognize any of it. It's all commercial housing now."

"What Makes You From Somewhere?"

Boss Chen's son was born in Shenxiang Village. Sometimes in conversation the 10-year-old will say, "I'm a city person, you're country people."

Boss Chen finds this hard to answer. He half regrets that when he was making money he didn't buy an apartment in Suzhou but went home, borrowed money and spent over a hundred thousand yuan on a two-story house. "I'm going back to Anqing. Anqing isn't worse than Suzhou — it has more and more industrial zones too. But he definitely won't go back. To get into a public school here and sit the college entrance exam, you need hukou. To get hukou you have to buy an apartment. To buy an apartment you first have to pay social insurance for a year."

A self-employed man like Boss Chen has nowhere to pay social insurance directly, so he pays someone in the industrial park to arrange it. "I pay 836 yuan a month, and in a year I'll buy him an apartment near here," Boss Chen said.

Meizi, who is 10, was born in Fujian; now she helps out at Suixin Snacks, the restaurant her parents run in Shenxiang Village.

At 11 pm on a Saturday, Suixin Snacks was still open. Only a couple and a middle-aged man were eating. Meizi looked sleepy, leaning against the table furthest in, fiddling with her fingers, then picking up a rabbit-eared sleep mask she had made herself and putting it on. Her father hadn't eaten dinner yet; he took out a small metal basin, dropped in some blanched noodles, added soy sauce, sesame oil and scallions, spooned in chili oil, tossed it together and ate it standing on no ceremony.

Meizi has a 12-year-old brother who lives with their maternal grandparents back home in Sichuan. Because their parents were running a business in Suzhou, Meizi was sent after birth to live with relatives in Fujian. "Then I got kicked out — they said I was too naughty." Meizi laughed, a little embarrassed.

Her parents came to Shenxiang Village in 2015. They have been in the restaurant trade in Suzhou for more than a decade, though they change locations often. Meizi remembers working in the shop since kindergarten: taking money, wiping tables, taking out the trash, sweeping the floor. She can't quite say where her parents ran their shop before. "Sometimes there's hardly anyone, nobody for half a day. Other times there are so many people I can't get to sleep until two or three in the morning."

Going home early to sleep carries its own risk. Suzhou winters are damp and cold, but electricity is expensive — at least 1.3 yuan per kilowatt-hour in Shenxiang Village, up to 2 yuan at the worst. So workers use electric hot-water bottles or electric blankets. Once, Meizi turned on an electric blanket and fell fast asleep alone, and the bed caught fire; luckily her parents came home early and put it out in time.

Meizi likes how "lively" Shenxiang Village is. There are plenty of children her age here, and when there's nothing to do they go to the Loving Heart Cottage at the village entrance to read books and play games.

She goes to a nearby school for migrant workers' children. Her hands look wrinkled; Meizi says they have looked that way since she was born, and classmates call her "old lady" for it.

"My parents tease me about it too. I said I want to be a doctor when I grow up, and they said with hands like that you'd shake holding a needle, don't go hurting people." She tells it as a joke. The reason she wants to be a doctor is that she wishes there were more people in the world. "It's only lively when there are lots of people. If a thief robs you in the street, or a bandit, someone will shout and come save you. Otherwise nobody pays you any attention."

Asked where she is from, Meizi asked back: "What makes you from somewhere?"

Her grandmother has an answer: "Wherever you own a house, that's where you're from." Last year Meizi's parents bought an apartment near Shenxiang Village. "In a while, once we've saved enough to fit it out, we can move in."

But Meizi still thinks she is from Sichuan. "In Sichuan there's my grandpa, my grandma and my brother, and there's a house. When people ask my parents where they're from, they say we're from Sichuan too."

(All interviewees in this article are referred to by pseudonyms.)

Cover image and photographs taken on site by the reporter; some provided by Star Home.