The police search cars at roadblocks just outside in Dadun, an urban village in the city of Zengcheng, where sweatshops make so many millions of blue jeans that the city promotes itself as the "jeans capital of the world".
"Are you a plainclothes policeman?", one spiky haired migrant sitting on a moped outside the pool hall jokingly asks a visitor.
Weeks after workers rioted in anger over the manhandling of a 20-year-old pregnant migrant hawking wares on the street, resentment simmers and authorities are taking few chances. For three days, the migrants trashed and torched government offices, police vehicles and cars -- local symbols of authority -- before security forces overwhelmed them.
For a nation that will absorb hundreds of millions of rural migrants into cities over the coming decades, the riots that Wang inspired left an acrid taste of what could go wrong if the government mismanages this huge shift.
The ruling Communist Party, which celebrates its 90th anniversary on Friday, fought to power on the back of restive peasants. Now young migrants from the villages are making greater demands to be heard and respected in the cities.
"They look down on the outsiders, so we let them know we won't be bullied anymore," said a lanky 19-year-old migrant worker in Dadun, one of the many factory towns and villages that as made the Pearl River Delta, "the workshop of the world" in Guangdong province next to Hong Kong.
"People have been waiting a long time for a chance to get them back, they (security guards) discriminate against us," he said as he watched his friends hammer away on a street fighter video game called Killer in a games parlor.
Interviews with dozens of migrants in Dadun and other nearby factory neighborhoods revealed raw resentment of harassment and shakedowns from public security teams and local security guards.
Such treatment has gone on for years, they say, even as their material conditions have improved, especially in the past two years as a tightening labor market lifted wages.
But like a ripple of strikes across Guangdong last year, the Dadun riot revealed a younger new generation of migrants still impatient with their lot in cities that can treat them as burdens or threats, not the residents they want to become.
"The police treat you differently if you're a migrant," said Fang Wuping, a migrant worker in Dongguan, the vast manufacturing zone next to Zengcheng.
"I can understand why they have to keep an eye out here" he added, describing a recent bout of detention by wary police.
But when you're singled out as a criminal like that, you get angry and think, 'What gives you the right?'"
This generation does not share the self-sacrificing ethos of their farmer parents. They are jacked into the World Wide Web, they text like their cohorts elsewhere in the world, and their walks through the streets of Chinese cities are a direct education in the gaps in income and privilege that irk them.
Nowadays when migrant workers finish work at factories across southern China's manufacturing belt, they slip into bleached jeans, bright T-shirts, and sequin-covered blouses that are a gaudy renunciation of rural dullness.
They disdain the plain blue jackets and canvas shoes their farmer-migrant parents usually wore and sport tattoos and dyed hair, proclaiming that this generation yearns for a future far from the villages where they were born.
"Our mentality is different from our parents'. We don't save money like they did," said Li Bin, a 20-year-old worker in Dongguan, who sported a mullet haircut and an earring.
"We spend it as we make it, spend it on ourselves -- restaurants, the Internet, karaoke. But in their time, people were simpler. They were saving money so they could come home."
"I'd never go back to farming," cut in Li's friend, Fang Wuping. "If you threatened to kill me, I wouldn't. If you're a farmer, people despise you, look down on you," he said.
China has 153 million rural migrants working outside their hometowns. By 2009, 58.4 percent of rural migrants were born in 1980 or after, and ninety percent of this "new generation" have barely ever farmed, a National Bureau of Statistics survey found.
Read more at REUTERS
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