Recollections of the Past | Why haven’t you “given up” at 70, migrant worker?

Everyone has been keen on talking about “lying flat” these days, and it’s not appropriate for me not to participate in this topic.

I think this matter cannot be generalized and needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis. For someone like me, who is in the prime of life, I have to be responsible for society. The revolution is not yet complete, and comrades still need to work hard. I cannot lie flat.

For elderly people in their seventies and eighties, they should lie flat. It’s also inappropriate for them to dye their hair black, obtain fake certificates, and want to continue working. Ultimately, they are punished administratively by law, losing out instead of gaining, not only embarrassing themselves but also shaming the country. Moreover, this kind of situation, where people are unwilling to lie flat even at an advanced age, is not an isolated case; I have many in my collection.

Half a month ago, Dahe Daily made a series of video reports: A month earlier, Zhang Quanshou, a representative of the National People’s Congress, suggested that migrant workers over 60 years old should be allowed to continue working: Going back to 2022, various regions introduced policies to prohibit over-aged migrant workers from entering construction sites.

The policy’s starting point is good: As people get older, their physical fitness declines, and they are indeed not suitable for heavy physical labor on construction sites, which fully meets the requirements of modern civilization. But migrant workers stop eating when they stop working. What will they eat? It’s like the saying, “Why not eat meat porridge?” So many people suggest making an exception (like Zhang Quanshou), but wouldn’t that be a regression of civilization? On one hand, there’s modern civilization, and on the other hand, there’s the right to survival. Pressing down the gourd and the dipper floats up, and this matter becomes awkward.

In fact, both viewpoints are reasonable and originally had no conflict, but when it comes to China’s reality, it becomes a “clash of civilizations”—they say “clash of civilizations” refers to the conflict of religious cultures, but here it becomes a conflict of policies and systems. Is this matter difficult to solve? Not difficult, common sense is enough. The top-liked comment in the Dahe Daily video said: “If they have a pension, who would want to go to work at this age.” Therefore, the solution is not to let them return to the construction site, but to increase their pensions.

They don’t inherently like working, as some unscrupulous experts on agriculture, rural areas, and farmers say; they have no choice. There is data to prove it. Sun Xiaoyan of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Economics, in the paper “Income of Elderly People in Urban and Rural China: The Role of Individuals, Families, and Government,” calculated based on CHARLS data that the income gap between elderly people in urban and rural areas in China is 3-5 times. Among them, social security income accounts for 74%-79% of urban elderly people and 13%-22% of rural elderly people. Based on this calculation, the social security income gap between urban and rural elderly people is about 20 times, which is what I have previously calculated: the pension income ratio of those in the system, enterprise employees, and farmers is: 30:15:1.

If this problem is not solved one day, it will appear before you in various ways, making you uncomfortable, embarrassed, and ashamed. Therefore, regarding the matter of “lying flat,” I think we should view it dialectically with Marxism, analyzing specific situations specifically: A young person with low material desires, doing daily jobs, being a hanging-wall god, as long as they are not supported by the welfare system and not spending taxpayers’ money, that’s their freedom; An elderly person who has worked hard all their life, is old and frail, and still has to obtain fake certificates to work on construction sites is also inappropriate. Not only should they be allowed to lie flat, but conditions should also be created for them to be able to lie flat.

But if it’s the so-called “full-time children” (parents retired within the system, and their retirement income is enough to support their children at home without working), this is inappropriate because it’s spending taxpayers’ money. Their retirement income should be halved to force their children to go out and work. So, we need to figure out what kind of “lying flat” is unacceptable? What is called “using the welfare system to support lazy people”? Where are the underlying causes of the various social problems we see? I saw old farmers talking about pensions online; they couldn’t find the reason, so they said it must be the Japanese devils’ doing, and they wanted to “catch traitors”—I used to think they were confused, but now I don’t necessarily think so.