“The parents have devoted their lives to the manufacturing industry, but they barely get anything. Restrictions on housing, education and healthcare, make it hard for migrant workers to bring along their kids and they are often raised by grandparents, relatives or neighbors. Zhan says he is particularly concerned about the plight of children left behind by parents.
He says the more photos he takes, the more deeply he understands the issues migrants face. If photography meant self-fulfillment for Zhan in the early days, it is now more of a mission. “Yet at other times when you want to stay on and settle down, you get fired or the factory gets taken over.” “Sometimes, you want to jump ship for better pay at another factory shortly after starting your current job,” Zhan says. The scenes Zhan has captured range from the bizarre to the intimate.Ĭhina's Lunar New Year show is bigger than the Super Bowl “So I know exactly what their situations are.”įor the past 10 years, he has photographed workers in eight factories in Dongguan, a factory town near Guangzhou, documenting their life on and off the assembly lines.
#Factory town delete worker professional#
Now a professional photographer, he trains his camera lens on those he left behind. Originally from the rural, inland province of Hubei, he worked as a security guard in the factories that surround the southern boom town of Guangzhou, over a thousand kilometers away. The lengths workers go to to see their families during the country’s biggest holiday, which this year began February 19, is one facet of migrant worker life captured by factory hand turned photographer, Zhan Youbing.įor more than a decade, Zhan was himself one of China’s 250-million strong “floating population” of migrant workers. Known as “chunyun,” the annual travel crush is the world’s largest migration of humans.
The Lunar New Year is the only time of year China’s army of migrant workers gets to go home.
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