Crossing The Bar

By Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
and one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Driven to despair: Rescuers haul a man to safety after he attempted to jump from a Chongqing rooftop in a suicide bid after claiming his employer refused to pay him. About 140 million migrant workers are owed back pay, which reached 33 billion yuan in 2003. Agence France-Presse photo

No new year cheer for Chinese migrant workers

By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) - Wei Zebo normally can't wait to go home for Chinese New Year at the end of January. Only this year he doesn't dare.

Like 60 of his construction worker colleagues, he is locked in a dispute with his former employer over back pay worth some 100,000 yuan ($12,390).

"I haven't plucked up the courage to tell my family. I can't go back without the money," said Wei, 35, sitting huddled in a tiny freezing room lit by a single, dim, bare bulb in a gritty, working class area of Beijing.

"Look -- I'm all packed," said the native of the northern province of Hebei, gesturing to a small pile of cheap-looking hold-alls sitting atop a bed covered with a filthy quilt. "I just need to be paid."

Wei's case is typical of a larger problem in China, where millions of migrant workers from poor rural areas have flocked to cities to find work, hoping to enjoy some of the fruits of an economy clocking near double-digit growth.

An American 'Fellow-Traveler' of Chinese Dictatorship

Lev Navrozov

From time to time, I read on-line the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's Pravda and from its Pravda-like propaganda. I often learn more than from studies published by Western scholars with strings of degrees.

Thus, the other day I saw in it an announcement: "Featured Articles," and one of these was entitled, "The Greatness of China," which I clicked.

It was authored not by a top member of the Chinese Communist Party, but by Joseph Bosco, introduced by the People's Daily as a "widely published American nonfiction book writer, novelist, poet, and veteran journalist."

As far as his income in China is concerned, the dictators of China pay Bosco as a professor of a Chinese university and probably for his articles in their People's Daily.