Day’s Pay

In the daytime, the cotton fields are tranquil. However, at dusk the fields bustle with noise and excitement. The cotton yard is the place where the workers hand over their cotton. Delivering the cotton is always the happiest time of the day. Before handing it to the farmers, the workers examine their cotton, removing impurities.

“It may take me more than one hour to pick out the impurities,” says 38-year-old Wang Pingya. From Linze County, Gansu Province, Wang and his wife picked more than 160 kilograms of cottons on the day I interviewed him, earning approximately 160 yuan. Happy about their income, Wang showed no weariness.

Handing over the cotton for checking, weighing, and payment, cotton pickers laugh and joke during the process. Chatting away, they calculate their daily income, comparing it with their recent take and with that of their co-workers.

Wang tells me that what attracted him to Xinjiang in the first place was a simple motivation: money. Picking cotton is piecework, and money is earned with every move. Usually, workers are paid one yuan for every kilogram of cotton they pick. A puffy cotton bud only weighs around four grams. That means each picking movement and placement of the cotton in the bag perhaps earns Wang about 0.0048 yuan. If Wang wants to pick 100 kilograms of cotton per day, he must repeat the same action about 25,000 times.

At 10:00 p.m., Wang begins to prepare dinner. After slicing some tomatoes and chili, he places all the ingredients on the cutting board. When cooking, the dim little dorm is full of smoke. “It is not so bad. At least, I will not be bitten by mosquitoes,” Wang jokes.

“How many hours of sleep do you get a night?” he is asked. “A little more than four hours, I think.”

Around 11:00 p.m., the cotton fields are in total silence. Workers are sound asleep in their dorms. After washing off the dust, they slumber soundly, accompanied by the chirping of crickets.

Mechanized Movement

Most cotton workers consider picking cotton to be like finding a job in the big city – just another way to increase income and improve their living conditions. After the harvest season, with their pockets full, most head back to their home town and village to rest for a while and maybe improve their homes with the money they earned.

However, Xinjiang is realizing a technological advancement in the form of cotton harvesting machines.

In Changji, Xinjiang, it is expected that by the year 2010, more than 60 percent of cotton in this area will be picked by machines, and this means that workers will not be in such high demand.

In two villages of Manas County, where automated picking is advocated, there are altogether 35 huge mechanized harvesters. The season having arrived, these huge mechanical beasts will lumber onto the fields to do their job. Cotton farmers explained that a machine can do the work of 600 skilled workers. Despite the fact they are not as effective at removing impurities, as compared with human labor, the harvesting machines have witnessed rapid development in recent years. “It is an inevitable trend that machines will eventually replace workers,” says cotton farmer Du Yongqiang.