Do you know the mingong in China ? Who exactly are they ?

Answer 1

Min gong, or nong min gong, means a farmer worker. A farmer who lost his opportunities in the country side and goes to big cities to survive and explore the opportunities is a min gong.

since the chinese agricultures are rapidly modernizing, the use of masses of farmer is slowly disappearing. More and more work are done by machineries, which leaves millions of farmers going to big cities, and becoming the floating population: min gong.

Min gongs are the ones that do most of the construction works. They have no skill, and are quite cheap to hire, often paid significently under the legal amount ( think of illegal Mexican labourers in the US and you get the idea.)

Min gongs are mostly from the rural areas, and country sides, with poor education systems. So most of them do not speak very good standard Mandarin. Therefore commonly discriminated.

Answer 2

IMHO they are the people who are behind china's economic boom. Everyone else in the country i getting rich on their backs. They build the skyscrapers that are mushrooming in all the big cities in china and they also make all those toys and clothes that are exported all over the world. I think a more realistic estimate of their numbers is in the hundred million.

Answer 3

These people, called mingong ("popular workers", to mark the difference from proper city-dwelling "workers", gongren) or liudong renkou (floating population, meaning they are no longer residents in the countryside but not city residents either), the national government estimates China's mingong population to be about 36 million to 40 million, and that 8 million have already left cities for their home villages.Mingong provide necessary cheap and flexible labor that is ready to return to the countryside if there is no longer anything to do.

Answer 4

Actually, "min gong" is short for "nong min gong".
"nong min" means peasants who come from rural places; "gong" means labor.

They are the people who were originally peasants, (especially from undeveloped west part of China), and now work in big cities as construction workers.

I disagree with lollypop.

The reason that those people go to do very hard work in big cities is not they don't have to much work to do in their farms, that's because they can not earn a lot a money by doing farm work. They left their family, go to big cities, because they can make more money there.

Answer 5

These are the "countryside" people who go into the big cities to make a few yuan. The closest analogy would be "day labor". These people are largely unskilled, put to doing very hard tasks.

Answer 6

mingong is a brief name for nongmingong, which means peasant worker.

They are a group of peasants who have not much farm work to do in an industrialized society. Then they rush into cities to hunt for a job(bricklayers, cleaners, waiters, etc)

I recommend u a website answering all ur questions about China.
http://ask.jongo.com/

Answer 7

MIN GONG means people come from country side and work in the city.

Answer 8

Refers to farmers that work in cities and should not be taken as
farm workers.

Answer 9

imagine the Mexican labor in the States

Answer 10

Pretty good arguments.