ONE STORY AT A TIME

from Shenzhen's migrant workers

Listen from the other half of modern China

our mission

Empowering People, Re-imagining Places, Creating Possibilities

At Humans of Shenzhen, we strive to amplify the voices of Shenzhen's migrant working class, shedding light on their stories and struggles. We aim to uncover social issues, advocate for change, and foster community engagement.

Learn More

our series

At garment factories

On the cabs

In disability centers

Of urban villages

The stories in each of our 4 series center on a specific group of Shenzhen's migrant workers, delving the unique intersection of identities, experiences, and challenges that shape their daily life. From urban village residents grappling with gentrification-induced displacement to garment workers facing job losses due to factory relocation, read about the lives on assembly lines, behind the wheel, in urban villages, and at Disability Centers. These interviews are conducted "in the field": in textile factories, urban villages, taxi seats, or Disability Centers.

Fabricating Life

Read the stories of 17 garment workers in Shenzhen. A labor-intensive industry, textile production offered millions of jobs for migrant workers seeking economic opportunities in China's booming cities in the 1990s through 2000s. As of 2021, 8 million workers were employed in China's garment industry. Often silenced by factory walls, media invisibility, and misrepresentation, they produce what we wear every day, yet their stories are rarely heard...

Urban villagers

Read the 6 stories from China's urban villagers. Literally termed "villages surrounded by cities" in Chinese, the villages consist of old, shoddily-constructed small apartments often rented to migrant workers at an affordable cost. Shenzhen's urban villages house over half of the city's population, yet widespread stigma, high crime rates, growing rental price, unsanitary environment, lack of infrastructure, and gentrification & urban renewal initiatives continually pose challenges to the residents of urban villages.

Metered Memories

Read the 10 stories from Shenzhen's taxi drivers. Connecting one end of the city to another, they bring together diverse individuals commuting from and between shopping centers, hospitals, construction sites, urban villages, factories, and other Shenzhen places. Shenzhen had documented over 340,000 licensed drivers by 2025, most of whom are not directly employed by gig platforms but contracted to third-parties, making them especially vulnerable to exploitation. With heightening competition amid inadequate labor protection, drivers face steep socioeconomic challenges...

Resilience Remix

Read the 7 stories from Shenzhen's Service Center for the Disabled, where I worked as a volunteer for 4 years. In 2021, the Center offered extensive rehabilitation services, providing 1,041 disabled individuals with assistive devices while subsidizing vocational training for 1,584 disabled children. Social workers are central to this system, delivering personalized rehabilitation, psychological services, and community-based family support. Over the years, I befriended and learned the stories of social workers and disabled individuals...

our stories

Over the past three years, we've interviewed nearly 100 migrant workers and wrote biographies for 40 of them. Their stories take us inside “handshake buildings” so tight that neighbors can clasp hands in the morning through opposite windows; onto stretches of land where landless farmers survive by “growing buildings” for rental instead of growing crops; down urban-village alleys where migrant children pretend to “ski” on ground that is perpetually slippery because sunlight rarely penetrates...and so much more. Through the eyes of migrant workers, we see a different Shenzhen and envision a different modernity.

"It was her 20th birthday. Xiao Mei left work early with friends, and they celebrated her birthday at KFC. 'KFC is more common today in China. But back then, we took it as a sign of affluence. Being able to afford KFC meant being able to afford the Western way of life. That was the most luxurious birthday we could imagine.' After this exotic meal, they went to a cybercafe upstairs. Xiao Mei logged onto her QQ account, and found a new subscriber named 'Li Bai.' Li Bai worked at a hardware factory in Shenzhen. He was also from the Yangchun area, from a notoriously poor place named Shiwang. The two chatted nonstop for the next six months, and by the end of those six sweet, special months, Xiao Mei realized that she was in love with Li. 'He was kind-hearted and sincere, gentle, always caring for me and my needs. It’s hard to say what’s so special about him. But he was special to me, and I decided back then that I’ll marry no one but him.'"

Ms. Mei (Xiao Mei), "Declaring War for Love," Part 1

“I was in team 4, he was in team 1 – production teams, I mean. There’s no teams nowadays. But when I was a child, all the land was collectively owned, and everyone in a production team worked together. After we harvested the grain, every team turned over a portion to the government as grain taxes, and whatever amount of grain remained was divided up among the team members by the local cadres. Grain was in theory divided up per head, but the amounts each got were always uneven. There was never enough food for every team member, some families barely got enough to eat, and no one had much motivation to work hard – when we worked in a team and divided the team’s harvest, how hard we worked had little impact on how much we got. Later on, when the land was divided among individual households, life got a bit letter – we could at least eat our fill most of the time – but there was still no money for school or healthcare or that sort of stuff. That’s when villagers started thinking about heading to the cities to find work. In the 90s, those who left their rural hometown for work earned very little, a few hundred yuan in the 2000s, wages started getting a little better.”

Ms. Liu (Auntie Liu), "City Hero, the Factory Cleaner," Part 1

"You gotta tell ‘em—what’s the difference between qi deficiency and yang deficiency, or on the flip side, yin deficiency? Yin-yang, which began as Taoist concepts, are quite important in how Traditional Chinese Medicine understands diseases. You want to establish a balance between yin and yang, or in the modern sense, people call it homeostasis. When do you use dried roots? When do you use ginseng extract? What’s for post-illness recovery, what’s for boosting vitality day to day? It’s way beyond what folk knowledge covers—it’s pharmacology. We have specialized, professional trainers. Our trainer had slides. The chain stores have regular meetings where the managers gather up to hear announcements from the headquarters, and usually toward the end of those meetings, one of our trainers goes up, introduces themselves, and starts lecturing about ginseng. So you can imagine one Monday morning, thirty store managers in one room, all yawning, and here they go saying something along the lines of: ‘This root takes six years in the soil, cultivated on a piece of land without forest cover, fully compliant with the 2015 national medicinal regulations. It’s got heat, it’s got kick, and it’ll knock the cold right outta your bones.’"

Mr. Hu (Brother Hu), "From Ginseng to Gears," Chapters 2-4

“One year, right after the Spring Festival, my wife and I said goodbye to our parents and daughter, and we were just boarding the bus back to the city. The bus station was fairly far away from our home, and our parents and daughter walked that long distance with us. We parted when the bus came. The bus didn’t stay for long. A few minutes, maybe? But after the bus started moving again, after it’s moved over a fair distance, I think, we saw our daughter from the window, chasing after the bus and crying out with all her strength, and her grandmother chasing after her. She ran for a very long distance, very very long.” She ran for what seemed like an eternity, hoping her parents would either stay at home or take her with them to the city. Her small figure grew ever smaller in the distance, her body frail against the backdrop of the departing bus. “I turned my head away. I couldn’t bring myself to look back. The sound of my daughter’s cries were desperate. ‘Mama, Papa, Mama, Papa…’ It tore our hearts to pieces. This was the kind of pain that can only be fully understood by parents, perhaps.”

Mr. Fu (Fu Xiong), "A Father Who Refused to Let His Daughter Become a Left-Behind Child," Part 2

"I’ve been part of three strikes in Zhejiang around 2004 – one at Xingfu Shoe Factory, another at Rising Sun Shoe Factory, the other at Xuyang Shoe Factory. Back then at Xingfu, I was a molding technician, and we were paid by the piece. The rates were so low, we could barely make a living out of it. It started with one or two workers refusing to work, and soon everyone followed suit and walked out. Everyone just went home. After two or three days, the factory owner called us back, and they raised the rates, so we went back to work. He couldn’t find any workers to replace us! Back then, it wasn’t easy to find new people like it is now; there weren’t as many migrant workers. And even if he did find someone, the original workers knew the job, and new ones couldn’t pick it up as quickly. They wouldn’t know what they were doing, messing up the production. No deliveries, missed deadlines, more losses for the factory. Most of the strikers were skilled workers, and the owner knew it. So after a couple of days where no one was working, the boss had no choice but to pay up. Otherwise, who would do the job?"

Mr. Chen (Chen Shen), "The Factory Philosopher Who Chose to 'Lie Flat,'" Part 2

He was in his teenage years when he first heard of a place called Shenzhen. Returnees from the South carried cash and stories. They boasted of the beach and ocean, of city lights and asphalt roads, thick bills dangling from their sweaty palms. “They bragged and boasted on and on about the sea: how big and beautiful and blue it is. And about the work they secured, which paid them more in a month than one could possibly earn in a year in the nearby town. And there’s so much more. Roads full of cars. Skyscrapers, still in construction, reaching toward the clouds. The scenes were unbelievable back then.” For Uncle Liu, the exotic prospect of modernity was unimagined and unimaginable. And it soon proved intoxicating.

Mr. He (Uncle He), "Building Dreams, Bearing Scars," Chapters 0-2

“It was a tall man dragging a woman behind him. He and the woman, his wife, stormed over and up to me without giving a single word. He yanked and ripped all the flyers, a whole stack, from my hand. A whole stack. He took a very short glance at the flyers, then he…uh…he shouted something like, ‘You’re the one who ruined my wife’s face! Do you yourself even use the cosmetics you’re selling?’ And then…and then he kept going on: ‘Look at you. Someone as short and ugly as you, standing out here and ruining the lives of others with your garbage!’ His wife, even his wife, chimed in, ‘yeah I know right – her face isn’t suited for selling makeup. It’s a waste for her, with that face of hers, to use it, let alone sell it. She probably doesn’t even bother." Sister Mann was stunned. It was the first time she had faced such aggression, and she “didn’t know how to respond. My mind was…just a white sheet of paper…entirely blank. I stuttered. I didn’t know what to say. Then staff from the supermarket heard the sound, and came and stepped in.” The supermarket staff tried to help her calm the couple down. With her help, Sister Mann stammered an apology. “After she came, I started apologizing repeatedly, again and again. I started reciting the product ingredients that I memorized and reviewed everyday after work. And I even promised to talk to the cosmetics company, to see if they can offer to test the wife’s skin reactions or allergy or some other conditions – if the company can cover the fees, basically.” The crowd dispersed, and the confrontation ended, once the couple left. “But no one, um…no one other than the supermarket staff, no one said a single word in defense of the products, let alone standing up for me. But they all knew…they all saw how unreasonable, how hurtful those two aggressors have been.” The looks people gave her as the crowd dispersed – sympathetic, disdainful, or hateful, even – all blurred together. From that day forward, Sister Mann never worked as a saleswoman again."

Ms. Mann (Sister Mann), "No Way Out," Chapter 1

“I made a silent vow: I would bring his daughter to Shenzhen, to be with us. I started researching Shenzhen’s education policies, looking into elementary school admission procedures. I asked about tuition fees and other eligibility requirements at every school I could find.” Fu Xiong scoured the city for a suitable school, visiting almost every elementary school in Shenzhen. At the factory, he took on more responsibilities and, together with his wife, saved as much as they could, cutting back on all unnecessary expenses to save for their daughter’s tuition. He also applied to the factory for a larger dormitory. Finally, in the summer of 2015, they brought their daughter, who had started first grade, to their “home” in Shenzhen. They enrolled her in a private school in Longhua. That same year, Xiao Ling became pregnant with their second child.With their daughter now in Shenzhen, and with a new baby in her belly, Xiao Ling had to adjust her work schedule, which meant a significant reduction in their household income. Their daughter’s tuition was over 30,000 yuan a year, and combined with the cost of living for the family of three, the financial pressure on Fu Xiong was immense. “Yet being able to see my daughter every day, to watch her grow and develop, made all the hardship and exhaustion worthwhile.”

Mr. Fu (Fu Xiong), "A Father Who Refused Leave His Daughter Behind," Part 3

our news and articles

Check out our posts! From workers' poems to TED talks, we feature original creative, rhetorical, and journalistic works aimed at amplifying the voices of Shenzhen's migrant working class. We also update on small triumphs and momentous victories we've claimed for our community: a book compiling 11 biographies of migrant workers, a new municipal allowance for injured laborers, a legislative amendment protecting labor rights nationwide, and so much more.

New Book Release: The Other Half of Modern China

Shenzhen, Guangdong, August 18th, 2025 — Coming in September 2025, Albert Z. Wang's book The Other Half of Modern China: Eleven Stories...

Founder of HoSZ Is Featured in The New York Times

New York, NY, March 28th, 2025 — Albert Z. Wang, founder of Humans of Shenzhen, was featured in New York Times for his photo essay on...

Founder of HoSZ Became the First Chinese Winner of National History Day Contest

COLLEGE PARK, MD, June 13th, 2025 — Albert Z. Wang, founder of Humans of Shenzhen, recently competed in the National History Day ®...

Workers' Poem (3): Workday Liturgy in B Minor, a Villanelle

January 2024: When the foreman’s bell shatters the air to ash, Quivering elbows enter the conveyor’s pulsed refrain. (A hammer howls, and...

READ ALL

What people are saying

New York Times, March 2025

"[We] saw promise in your work, whether it was your photographs, your writing or the way you wove those pieces together to tell a compelling story about your...community."

Share your story!

You are unique, and we can't wait to listen to you. Your life, in your words!

albertzqwang@outlook.com

ONE STORY AT A TIME from Shenzhen's migrant workers