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Woman Calls Kindly Laborer "Dirty," Chinese Netizens Incensed

 

[Ed: please see tealeafnation.com for more content]

Laborer

China's class divide continues to rile the masses.  Netizens have rushed to condemn a young mother who called a young laborer "dirty" after he offered her his seat on a public bus in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province. As of this post, this incident had garnered almost 1.3 million  comments on Sina Weibo and was the site's #1 trending topic under "hot events." It is reported that she disdainfully refused the seat for herself but later allowed her child to take it after the child complained, telling her child "don't be afraid of dirt or disease."

The seemingly minor event has stirred strong feelings among netizens, who have labeled the mother various unprintable epithets. One commenter called for a Chinese "human flesh search," an online method to find the identity of anonymous Chinese.

More restrained commenters have pointed out that the apartment the mother lives in was likely built by just such a laborer, with one netizen asking rhetorically, "whose family weren't farmers three generations back?"  Others identified larger social ills of inequality at work. One netizen wrote, "only when China truly solves the great question of relative fairness will it become truly socialist."

Online, the young laborer is referred to as a "农民工," literally a "farmer-laborer," shorthand for a person from the countryside who has migrated to the city to find blue collar work. But the term itself is not without controversy, in part because calling someone a "farmer" has taken a pejorative meaning in recent years. One commenter called it "an insult," while another asked, "when someone comes from a farming village and becomes a national party cadre, do we call this person a farmer-cadre? China is, after all, an agricultural country."