March 6th 2007
Last week I spoke to two little girls begging in the evening outside a cafe which is frequented by foreigners. Six and seven years old, dressed in thick grubby clothes, they told me they were sisters. They had come to Beijing from rural Henan Province with their grandfather, they said, clinging to the top of a train for 12 hours overnight because they couldn't afford tickets. ‘It was very cold,’ one of them said with stoic understatement. When they arrived in Beijing at the end of their awful journey, they said, they were discovered by the police and threatened with jail as stowaways, but the younger one had cried, and they had been let go.
The six year old was the more talkative of the two – indeed, her story poured out of her in a torrent. She said it was her own birth that had precipitated the family’s descent into poverty when local officials came to demand cash in fines for the birth of a second child (although the birth of a second child is, in many cases, legal in the countryside). When the family couldn’t pay the three thousand yuan demanded by local officials in fines, the mother was thrown into jail. After her release, their mother had been injured, and was now earning 5 yuan (about 40p or less than US$1) a day working as a cook for another family. The two girls clung sleepily to each other as they told their story. They would spend the night, they said, in a hut their grandfather had found for them. Their grandfather, they said, was about half a mile away, begging outside a hotel.
Their story raised all sorts of questions – how had their grandfather known how to find the lucrative expatriate watering hole as soon as he arrived in the capital city? Why were the police not intervening? Would the money the children received really go towards the tuition fees they said they had come to Beijing to raise, or would 90% of it go into a middleman’s pocket? There are gang leaders who collect children from their families and bring them to the city, either to beg, or to wash cars, or sell flowers. The children have to hand over whatever cash they receive, and their parents are promised a small per diem payment from the gang leader. Sometimes that materializes, often it does not.