By CHUN GE
Spring Festival Correspondent

Cops help a petitioner whose sign reads ‘Will pelt Apple store with eggs for one-way ticket to Gansu’

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – Zhang Lu did not have to wait long.

Standing in Tiananmen Square with a giant placard reading ‘Shandong government, give me back my land,’ it took just thirty seconds for a team of plainclothes police officers to arrive offering assistance.

Two hours later, Zhang was on a train enjoying a hearty meal, paid for by the guard escorting him home. Yet the 28-year-old migrant worker was delighted. For the first time in years, he’d secured a ticket home for Chinese New Year – and he hadn’t had to pay for it either. “I don’t even own any land,” he grinned.

Zhang’s tale is not an untypical one. In a country whose continuing obsession with the annual Spring Festival get-together has become a source of untold misery for those unable to find an affordable handrail home, more and more workers are exploiting the government’s obsession with stability to score a free handrail back.

The situation is at breaking point, experts warn. Bosses frequently withhold vital wages – or abscond with payrolls – after construction jobs finish. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Transport’s recent introduction of an online booking system, requiring real-name registration, has simply made scalpers’ jobs easier:  few of China’s nearly half-billion web users are minimum-wage laborers.

Posing as a petitioner, though, virtually guarantees an instantaneous journey to the provinces, courtesy of the central government.

Petitioning – the official airing of grievances, often by traveling to the capital to plead a case in person – is an archaic, judicial last-resort in China, designed to side-step its skewed court system and offer possible redress to the wronged. In fact, however, it often results in plaintiffs being kidnapped and sent home – and for many migrant workers, that’s the ideal result.

“It was probably worth it,” said Jie, an avuncular grandmother who works as a traditional Chinese dentist in Beijing, touching the numerous bruises on her face. Jie gave up hope after queuing at a train station for three days without success. A friend suggested she saunter through Xidan wearing a ‘Free Wukan’ T-shirt.

Workers queue hopefully outside a booth selling tickets to queue at another station selling tickets

“I got the usual sustained beating and lost a couple of teeth – but there’s no other way I could have gotten any standing room to Changsha this late in the day,” Jie mused.

With the petitioning scam now simply the latest migrant craze, Jie observed, it’s already getting harder to make an impact. “Next year I’ll probably have to light myself on fire,” she sighed.

In fact, the main drawback to the scheme, says Zhang, is having to attend the festival itself.

“Since I got back to my family, I’ve only been asked two questions: how much money have you brought for us, and when are you going to get married? I’m beginning to think it wasn’t worth having my balls whipped with a car aerial for two days, after all.”

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By ZOU MIAO
Fashion & Style correspondent

Deng’s workout group sit eating for 10 hours before a mine collapse kills three

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – “A police officer chased me half way around the city and then beat me mercilessly,” says Mia Xin. “I’m down 20 pounds!”

So run adverts popping up all over popular microblogging websites such as Weibo in recent weeks, sparking a new feeding fad: the Migrant Worker Diet.

Mia is one of millions of young Chinese particpating in the new diet-and-exercise regimen that is taking China’s urban centers by storm.

The thousands of illegal coalmines outside of Beijing are packed to the brim with tracksuits.

“They say inspectors are going to come in with baseball bats and shut this coal mine down, maybe maim a few people,” said Deng Liubao, a lumber exporter from Kaixian county, Chongqing municipality. “I’ll need to find a new gym.”

Under the extensive rules of the regime, practitioners can only spend 10 yuan a day on box meals, are forced to kneel for pay cheques and must  hitchhike to another city at weekends or whenever they see an authority figure. Practitioners are all but forbidden from enjoying any kind of sex life.

Deng intends to hitchhike to Yiwu, Zhejiang Province to crack bricks on a building site and will continue doing so until he can fit back into his high-school jeans.

The diet is the latest brainchild of mung-bean farmer and dietitian Professor Jin Xiaoxin, who is said to have come up with the revolutionary regimen after closely observing migrant workers naked.

“With my diet, anyone can have a physique rippling with pure muscle,” said Jin. “Minus the vacant, soul-crushing stare, of course.”

Migrant workers are said to comprise 1 in 4 residents of first-tier cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing. Many may consider this 200 million-strong army of labor a poorly treated, highly disposal workforce that is often sidelined for political and economic expediency – for others though, they may be the perfect way to fit into that wedding dress at the last minute.

Even foreigners are getting into the mix. Jennifer Pepper from Des Moines, Iowa and a teacher in Shanghai, says that she lost over 12 pounds in one week after she started moonlighting at a building site.

“I can’t really leave the city. So, I’ll have to turn to other, more domestic options here in Shanghai,” she said, stripped to the waist and soaked in sweat and brick dust on a Pudong construction site. She added that after the Spring Festival, dietary options often dry up in the city. “But there is a hairdresser on my way home from school that should do until I find another building project.”

Professor Jin’s diet is also an appealing change to the office grind familiar to China’s legions of urban white-collar workers. When news of his next fashionable food habit leaked onto the Internet – dubbed the “Dissident Diet” – the Jin Company’s servers crashed under the demand.

But Professor Jin is keeping the Dissident Diet close to his chest. When asked by China Daily Show, all he would reveal is that hopeful dieters should stock up on jump suits.

Tylenol  contributed to this story

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