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LIKE NEARLY EVERY RECENT CHINESE IMMIGRANT, "JON" EMBARKED FROM FUJIAN province. With its homeless, or liudong renkou, of nearly a quarter million people, Fuzhou City sends more of its residents overseas than any other city in Fujian. 1 Most were attracted by the promise of work.
Under Deng's 1980 reforms, SEZs (Special Economic Zones) began to spring up along China's southern coast. Though Fuzhou City was not one of them, nearly the entire southern coast of China became eligible for some form of foreign investment and decreased restriction on exports and the mobility of workers. The Fuzhou area grew into a boomtown adjacent to its poor provincial neighbors to the north. At least that's how Jon and his peers, who by the early 1990s were arriving in droves, viewed it. In the spring of 1995, Jon, then in his midtwenties, used almost all his money to pay for transportation to Fuzhou City.
Despite several years of national growth exceeding 12 percent, cities like Fuzhou and its neighboring areas of Changle, Lianjiang, and Fuqin could not absorb the new workers. Jon realized he would be unable to find work within a week of his arrival. He turned to the triads of China's southern coast, which have drawn on centuries of connections and have profited in substituting humans for traditional contraband. They have been phenomenally successful, if their members' six-story mansions throughout Fuzhou are any indication. 2
They have also been successful in spreading their wealth to the right people. This is how in 1993 the Golden Venture, a ship packed with nearly three hundred people who were neither passengers nor crew, was able to leave its port unimpeded by officials.
Jon was told that for $35,000 he would be taken to the United States and given a job. He needed only a 10 percent down payment for passage. Jon was able to convince the right people in his village that sending him to the United States would, through his remittances, double his village's living standard. Within three or four days, he had his $3,500.00 down payment. He waited until arrangements could be made to get him onto a ship.
Jon lived on the streets of Fuzhou City for weeks. He feared that the man to...