Editor’s note: the following piece was translated and edited from an article that appeared in China Business News. The article discusses a recent incident in Henan Province, in which it was discovered that many elderly rural Chinese are going to Southeast Asia to work as beggars in order to make ends meet. The article details the risks and motivations behind their decision to beg abroad.

Source: china5080.com

Early last October, a dozen or so locals showed up, passports in hand, at the Zhengyang County (Henan Province) Public Security Bureau's immigration hall to apply for international tourist visas. Most of them were 70-plus years old, illiterate or only semi-literate and some had physical disabilities. They were all applying for tourist visas for Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.

Faced with a large group of rural elderly folks asking for tourist visas, the PSB personnel understandably sensed that something was amiss, and contacted the local authorities. A subsequent investigation by the local police department discovered that they were part of a larger operation, wherein rural elderly were provided with fake passports to leave China to beg in other countries. The investigation discovered that this single operation had already sent more than 40 from the area abroad in the past few years alone.

Poor living conditions lead rural elderly to beg

A reporter for China Business News recently traveled to Zhengyang County's Fuzhai Township to interview the locals about the causes of this strange phenomenon. The reporter soon learned that the motivating force behind locals joining these “beg abroad” groups was indeed financial—the support provided to the rural elderly by their families and the state simply weren’t enough to live off.

Touring some of the local residencies, the reporter was taken aback by the terrible living conditions. Old husbands and wives resided in small two-room shanties, with a narrow cluttered passageway down the middle which they referred to as their "living room". Each home's courtyard was littered with mounds of crushed bricks and other rubble, piled high in front of a single small glass-less kitchen window. In most cases, the living conditions for these rural elderly couples were far inferior to those of younger residents in the area.

The reporter found that a substantial proportion of the county’s Fuzhai Township elderly had worked as beggars in the past, as had those in the adjacent Handong Village, Pidian Township and Yuanzhai. And according to the issued statement by the Zhengyang Police Department, in recent years, as many as 40 of the county’s elderly residents had in fact left China to "beg abroad", while additional cases were found in the surrounding Pingyu and Runan Counties as well.

“Begging abroad” has been around for a while

The reporter visited a small farming community outside Madian Township in Zhengyang County. When asked about the recent incident, a local resident told the report that actually, this was not really “news” to them. The “beg abroad” operation had been around for four or five years already, not just there but in neighboring areas too. Down a side street in Handong Town, a resident told the report that due to droughts and floods, locals had been leaving the area to go beg for a long time, while the whole international begging operation slowly caught on over the last decade or so.

"When things get difficult, you do what you must to survive"

A sudden foggy haze rolled in to Fuzhai Township, leaving the streets mostly deserted. Closing up for the day, a butcher at a nearby shop told the reporter that to the east in Zhanglou Village, there’d been an old woman, surnamed Li, in her seventies but still agile enough, who'd left China as part of the “beg abroad” operation last year. The reporter paid her relatives in Zhanglou a visit. While they did not specify where exactly Li had gone, they explained her background and reasoning a bit: "The old lady's husband died. She has a son, but he and her daughter-in-law moved to Shanghai for work. They don’t have much money to send her, so she went out to work for herself." Another local named Fu Zhanguo concurred, quipping that it costs money to live, so what do you do when you have no money? Moreover, elderly folks are unable to engage in any sort of physical labor, so for them begging is often the only way. "When things get difficult, you do what you must to survive."

The perils and benefits of “begging abroad”

Rural elderly beggars generally choose to “work” in China's biggest cities, such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangzhou. In recent years, facing increasing competition in these cities, others have moved to Wuhan and Shenzhen. But of course, they're able to make a lot more money begging abroad than they are in China.

One insider who asked not to be named told the reporter that after these elderly folks leave China, they live in small rooms set up by the person who brought them there. Once they’re settled in, everyone grabs a small bowl and a beggar's stick and heads out to work. "They usually work in tourist attractions or busy shopping districts. When they're begging, there is no need for them to say anything really, they just use their little stick to bring attention to themselves, and get passersby to throw coins into their bowl.”

They discuss with us ahead of time what their take is, usually 60%, claimed one such organizer who was arrested. "Working for less than a month, you can bring in 10,000 RMB; isn't that much better than harvesting crops?" However, according to locals, the organizer wasn’t telling the full truth: They’d agree on dividing profits 60-40 with the elderly beggars in China, but once they’d get to their destination, the organizer would change it to 50-50.

Local police confirmed that some of the elderly who have not yet returned home were caught begging and are currently being held at those countries' detention/repatriation centers. Also, according to Fuzhai Township Police Station Director Wang Haijun, so far this year, several of the 40 known international beggars have passed away while abroad, two of them from Fuzhai.

A vulnerable group in need of assistance

China's rural elderly are an incredibly vulnerable group. They're unable to work the fields the way they used to, they have no discernable income, many of their children have left them and their retirement pension is minimal at best. Former township cadre Zhang Qinghua says, that under such circumstances, there will always be some that choose to make a living out of begging.

Moreover, according to the locals, in the last decade or so, Zhengyang County has suffered from drought and floods. While the local government has offered some subsidies to help with these natural disasters, it's failed to address the underlying problems: recent years have seen a dramatic rise in price for chemical fertilizers, pesticides as well as oil, all of which greatly affect the household income of local farmers, thus adding to the burden felt by the older generation who tend to rely on them.

There are about 800,000 people in Zhengyang County, but only 30,000 have their minimal needs met. Last May, the country began implementing rural endowment insurance (as part of the nationwide social insurance program), which gave each elderly person less than 100 RMB per month. While barely enough to scrape by on, a family will immediately be in trouble if anyone becomes ill. With no money, they've got no choice but to go out and try to earn money some other way.

As of 2012, there were approximately 150-200 million Chinese 60 years of age or older, with more than 80% of them living in rural areas. Apart from the small number of people whose minimal needs are met by the old "five guarantees" collective support system, most of these elderly will be relying more and more on the new rural endowment insurance. But while the current implementation is a good start, there is still a long way to go toward fully providing for China’s rural elderly population.

Source: hsb.hsw.cn

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Keywords: Chinese beggars in Southeast Asia Chinese beggars