Israel Gives Chinese Migrant Workers the Pay—and Dignity—They Don’t Get at Home

Commentary

As Israeli missiles streak overhead and sirens wail across construction sites in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, thousands of Chinese migrant workers are making a remarkable choice: they are staying put.

In March and April, when Beijing ordered the evacuation of its citizens amid escalating conflict, roughly 50,000 to 60,000 Chinese construction workers responded with blunt refusal.

“I’d rather be bombed to death than starve to death,” one worker told reporters.

Another added: “We want freedom. We want to live with dignity.”

The workers explain that the practical risk is manageable. A missile alert simply means stepping into one of Israel’s ubiquitous safe rooms—mandatory in virtually every building—for about 10 minutes until the all-clear sounds.

“I’m working here, everything is normal,” one said in a widely circulated video. “If there’s an air raid siren, you take cover.”

Another said, “The chance of being killed by a bombing is lower than being hit by a car back home.”

And another said: “The reality is that Israel is hundreds of times safer than China under the CCP.”

These workers represent roughly 10 percent of China’s entire global stock of officially dispatched contract laborers—50,000 to 60,000 out of 582,000 at the end of 2024, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce.

Israel has quietly become the single largest national destination for Beijing’s tightly controlled overseas labor program—more Chinese contract workers are in Israel than in the top five African countries combined. The entire continent of Africa hosts 90,793 Chinese contract workers.

For the Chinese laborers themselves, Israel has been a godsend. Chinese construction workers in Israel reported earning 30,000 to 80,000 yuan (roughly $4,100 to $11,000) per month, often for 12-hour shifts—up to 10 times what comparable migrant construction workers earn in China. Israeli employers pay on time. Housing and meals are frequently provided. Conditions, while demanding, are widely described by the workers themselves as superior to anything available at home.

The contrast with life in China is stark. Wage arrears are common, unemployment is rife, and workplace safety is often treated as secondary. In China, where 18,000 to 20,000 workers die annually in industrial accidents, life can feel dispensable.

Before Oct. 7, 2023, Israel relied on roughly 165,000 Palestinian workers from Gaza and the West Bank—many of them in construction—who had made a handsome living commuting daily to Israeli job sites. After the Hamas attacks and the ensuing security crackdown, those permits were sharply curtailed.

To keep Israel’s booming construction industry humming—Israelis joke that the national bird has become the crane—Israel turned to Asian recruitment pipelines. China’s state-regulated system—the same one that supplies workers to Belt and Road projects from Angola to Cambodia—stepped in with remarkable efficiency.

Israel’s labor laws help explain why the workers feel respected rather than exploited. Foreign workers are entitled to the same minimum wage, overtime premiums (125 percent for the first two hours, 150 percent thereafter), rest days, health care, and basic protections as Israeli citizens. Employers must provide suitable housing and health coverage. The system is far from perfect, but the legal framework is the same for locals and migrants alike.

By contrast, Chinese workers in other destinations often face harsher realities. In Saudi Arabia, for example, many migrant workers on major infrastructure projects have reported exorbitant recruitment fees, punishing hours in extreme heat, wages as low as $2 per hour, and conditions amounting to forced labor.

Yet the very success of the Israeli arrangement is becoming an embarrassment for Beijing, which touts itself for lifting its people out of poverty. In social-media clips that have circulated inside China, ordinary laborers are praising Israeli pay, conditions, and dignity while openly disparaging life back home. Their refusal to evacuate is a rare, visible act of defiance against the economic reality the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims to have mastered.

The optics are worse still on the world stage. China routinely condemns Israel at the United Nations and positions itself as a champion of Palestinian rights. Yet its labor-export machinery has quietly become an essential replacement workforce for the very Palestinian day laborers Israel has sidelined.

The combination of Beijing’s anti-Israel stance and the growing embarrassment over the glaring contrast between work conditions in the two countries could soon lead to a deliberate phase-out of Chinese workers. For the CCP, the spectacle of its citizens choosing Israel over home may be the most inconvenient truth of all.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.