China’s first migrant worker museum launches crowd-funding campaign to stave off possible shutter

China’s first migrant worker museum is calling for public support in a crowd-funding campaign, as the museum is on the verge of shutdown amid a financial crisis.

Located in Beijing, the Culture and Arts Museum of Migrant Labors was founded in May 2008 as a private-public welfare museum to record the history of Chinese migrant workers through public displays of their life, from penalty tickets at work to their monthly bills. The museum is free to visit and has received more than 50,000 visitors since its opening.

The museum is also a rendezvous for migrant workers, as it has a cinema and a theater that sometimes holds performances – sometimes staged by migrant workers.

However, it now faces an operating budget shortage starting from the end of July, as the previous supporters changed their plans and cut the budget. On crowd-funding site Gongyi.qq.com, the museum is asking the public to donate 244,000 yuan to cover all expenses for a year, including 120,000 yuan for the rent.

The crow-funding campaign, which began on July 5, will last till October 5. As of press time, some 66 percent of the target amount has been raised with 2,170 donors.

Sun Heng, one of the founders of the museum, said in an earlier interview with People’s Daily Online that they set up the museum to record the history of migrant workers. It did not stand to expose the difficulties faced by migrant workers – from their low salaries to their temporary resident status.

“Rather, we want to face history and seek change. Society changes because individuals change. We may be unimportant, but we have tried our best,” Sun said.

Migrant workers in China refer to a group of people who leave their hometown - usually in rural areas - and move to work in cities. Mostly undereducated, many migrant workers are employeed in labor-intensive industries and many more on construction site. By the end of 2016, the number of migrant workers in China has topped 282 million, Some 169 million of them worked away from home, according to data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.