It has just gone past 6.30am and dozens of Chinese migrant workers are lingering by the roadside on the outskirts of eastern Beijing, their hopes of finding work for the day rapidly fading as the morning sun breaches the horizon.

Xiao Zhiquan, a 59-year-old originally from central China’s Hubei Province, is ready to call it quits for the day and trudge back to his rented home in the nearby migrant village, where workers typically live in cramped quarters sharing a room with five or six others.

He has waited at the roadside pick-up point since 4am, watching as vans driven by middlemen pulled up and handpicked workers to ferry to construction sites, factories and other labour-intensive jobs across the city.

Once again, he has been overlooked, left to try his luck again tomorrow.

“I only get about 10 days of work each month. After paying for rental and food, I have nothing left,” Xiao says. “When I do get work, I do the most dirty, the most dangerous, and the most difficult tasks.”

Modern China owes a great debt to its nearly 300 million domestic migrant workers, he says. They are the backbone of the low-skilled workforce – usually farmers who have moved from rural villages to Beijing searching for manual labour jobs. They have played a key role in the country’s transformation to the world’s second-biggest economy, all while eking out an existence with no job security and no welfare safety net.

“Look at those fancy roads, railway and high-rises, busy subway stations and beautiful parks in the city. Who built them? It’s us, migrant workers,” Xiao says.

“Look at me, an almost 60-year-old man, still living an unstable life.”

A few hundred metres away, on another pick-up corner in the Tongzhou District, a carpenter in his 50s pulls off a black cropped wig he wears each morning and shoves it into a hessian bag used to carry his yellow hardhat to construction jobs.

“Some bosses are picky, they prefer young people, rather that people who have grey hair like me. That’s why I wear a wig,” he says.

It hasn’t worked today, and so he heads home without the 350 yuan ($73) he would have received for nine hours’ work. Missing a day’s work is becoming more frequent, he says, as more farmers flock to the city and construction jobs dry up.

Economic crossroad meets Golden Week

China is currently in the throes of Golden Week, the seven-day holiday period that begins on October 1, when it also celebrates National Day, for the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

This year’s National Day marked communist China’s 75th birthday, and state media eagerly stoked nationalistic sentiment, pumping out glowing reports about the rapid advancement over that time, from an agrarian backwater to an industrialised superpower. In 1949, people here could expect to live for an average of 35 years, whereas today this figure stands at 78.6 years.

China is now the key rival to the US on many metrics, posing a challenge to the American hegemony that has shaped the liberal world order for almost a century. The China of 2024 is a superpower in high-tech industries that are remaking global economies, through technologies such as artificial intelligence, electrical vehicles and solar panels.

It has an ambitious space exploration program that has robots collecting samples from the dark side of the moon, while Chinese EV companies are pioneering the creation of flying cars.

While President Xi Jinping has cultivated a fervent nationalism during his 11½ years in power, there is a genuine pride held by many Chinese people about the remarkable transformation their country has undergone in a few decades.

More than 123,000 people poured into Tiananmen Square before dawn on Tuesday to watch the annual National Day flag raising ceremony. Some of them travelling from across the country and queued overnight to secure a front vow vantage point for a spectacle that lasted less than 10 minutes.

Thousands of balloons and pigeons were released into the air, soaring above the portrait of Chairman Mao that looms over the square, triggering a chorus of delighted gasps and furious waving of the national five-star red flags from the crowd below.

Lu, 60, who travelled 12 hours by road with her husband from Jiangsu province to attend, is from a generation that has witnessed China’s rise with awe, their lives among the hundreds of millions who have been lifted from extreme poverty along the way.

“We could barely afford clothes and had to weave cloth manually. There was also not enough food. Rice was rare and in most cases we ate coarse grains. Today, we eat whatever we’d like to and buy anything we need,” says Lu, who will only give her last name.

She credits this change to the “excellent governance of the leadership”.

It is not uncommon to find this kind of unbridled praise for Chinese leaders, including Mao, among this generation, despite the destitution many endured because of policy missteps in the years before the country began opening up in the 1980s.

Also in the crowd for Tuesday’s celebrations was Ma Guoqing, 64, a member of the Hui Muslim minority group from western China’s Qinghai province, who recalled being poverty-stricken and in rags as a boy.

“I feel extremely grateful to the motherland. I love our motherland very much. I feel so proud of being born in the great People’s Republic of China. Our country is so powerful and beautiful,” he says.

Dimming economic miracle

There’s no question that the glittering miracle that has been China’s juggernaut economic growth has dimmed. This year’s National Day festivities occurred against a backdrop of increasing alarm among the leadership about the economy’s flagging health. The government’s own growth target of 5 per cent is now widely projected to be beyond reach, and a pessimism about future economic security has embedded in the minds of many everyday people, especially the younger generation, which faces an unemployment rate of 19 per cent.

There remain hundreds of millions of migrant workers like Xiao, whose fortunes have not been swept up in a rising tide of prosperity and modernisation. There is also a burgeoning middle class who have watched their wealth creation backslide as China failed to make a post-COVID resurgence.

The main culprit is the free-falling property market, which at its peak was the engine room of growth, accounting for as much as 30 per cent of GDP. No other industry, including the burgeoning high-tech and advanced manufacturing sectors,is yet large enough to replace it.

The real estate boom also drove investment and speculation, so much so that about 70-80 per cent of household wealth was tied up in property. This delivered a blow to owners when the bubble burst and house prices began a four-year collapse, declining at record pace in August. This has shattered consumer confidence, made people hoard their savings instead of splashing cash on the economy, and put China on the cusp of a deflationary spiral.

Amid this, Xi Jinping signalled a pivot last week to embrace large-scale stimulus measures to arrest the property industry collapse, after months of resisting calls by economists for a bazooka-style injection of fiscal firepower to shore up the economy.

On the eve of Golden Week, China’s top governing body, the Politburo, pledged to ensure the real estate market would “stop declining”, though offered no detail on how. News agency Reuters has since reported that Chinese officials are planning a 2 trillion yuan ($415 billion) stimulus package, with about half of that to be used for consumer subsidies and handouts.

This was preceded by the central bank announcing measures designed to drive demand for new homes, including slashing mortgage rates – which sent the local stockmarket soaring. Many economists are sceptical the measures will deliver a long-term boost to growth once the sugar hit dissipates.

Dr Alfred Wu, a Chinese politics expert at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, says the Chinese government is perennially concerned about social unrest, and the latest package of measures was timed deliberately to boost the optics of the 75th anniversary.

“The poor economic performance is leading to a lot of discontent at the local level, in grassroot settings. They [the Chinese Communist Party] are concerned about this. They have already had many small stimulus measures over the past few months, but the confidence crisis remains,” Wu says.

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Meanwhile, China watchers in the West are looking for signs the economic downturn is straining the social contract between the CCP and the people. This is the unspoken compact from which the party derives its governing legitimacy, and the people surrender their political and personal freedoms in exchange for economic prosperity and stability.

For his part, Xi used a speech at a banquet on the eve of National Day to warn “the road ahead will not be smooth” and “we may encounter major tests such as high winds and rough seas, or even stormy waves”, but that the people must place their resolute faith in the party.

Back at the roadside in Beijing’s Tongzhou District, female workers scramble over each other to claim a seat in van that has just pulled up. It is a sign of the desperation for work among the lower classes, however miserly the pay is.

Watching on, migrant worker Xiao Zhiquan reflects on Mao’s view, expressed to American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, that “whoever wins the support of the peasants will win China; whoever solves the land question will win the peasants”.

“The problems of farmers and migrant workers is the most important issue today. Whoever can solve this problem is a great person, but it has not been solved so far,” Xiao says.

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