In the dusty streets of China’s factory towns, a generation of rural migrants found belonging in impossible hairstyles and neon dye. The shamates were never just a subculture; they were survival made visible.
In the heart of southern China’s factory belt, lies Shipai, the largest urban village in Guangzhou. Here amid grey dormitories and dust-choked streets, a subculture once flourished that looked nothing like the muted tones of its surroundings. Young domestic migrants, teenagers and twenty-somethings who had left mountain villages with little money and fewer options, turned to neon-dyed hair, sequinned vests and gravity-defying bangs as both a shield and an identity. They called themselves shamates.
Inma Escribano’s chronicle for the Spanish-language publication Revista Late tells their story with intimacy and grit, weaving portraits of the individuals who made this fleeting movement a form of survival. “An urban tribe whose name is a phonetic interpretation of ‘SMART’ in Mandarin,” to him they’re more than an aesthetic rebellion. Shamates are a declaration: we are here.
The article begins with Lan, once a proud member of the tribe, now 26 years old and returning for a last time to his former look: bubblegum-pink hair, sequins, worn jeans. (The article is interspersed with Escribano’s own photographs of the phenomenon). On Shipai’s streets, people still recognise him instantly, pointing and taking pictures. But this return is only temporary, a farewell. Lan has long since set aside his shamate persona, though it once gave him the strength to endure the isolating life of a teenage migrant worker.
His story is emblematic of millions. At 14, Lan left his Guizhou village because his family couldn’t afford school. Factories rejected him for being underage and undocumented until one glassworks finally took him in, apparently blind to the danger of putting a child near burning hot sheets of molten glass. He worked gruelling hours, fearing that a single accident could cost him a limb and any chance of building a future. At night, he shared a cramped dorm with seven others, their faces lit by cell phone screens. It was on one of those nights that he stumbled across Luofuxing, the “father of the shamates”, in the video platform Kuaishou (what the article terms “the Chinese version of TikTok”).
Luofuxing had once migrated to Shipai himself, and in response to the monotony of factory life, he invented a style: hair sculpted into impossible forms, colours borrowed from anime and punk. His defiance spread quickly across China’s industrial towns, attracting more than 200,000 followers at its peak. For migrants like Lan, shamates offered not just a fashion statement but a family.
Shipai, as Escribano describes it, is the perfect backdrop for such a movement. By day, it is a district of relentless labour: saws shrieking in open workshops, dust rising from unpaved sidewalks. By night, it transforms into a makeshift carnival. Vendors push skewers of meat, techno booms from battered speakers, smoke curls into the low, grey skyline. Amid this chaos, shamates gathered: on Sundays they could be found in parks, at skating rinks, in karaoke bars, turning drab industrial towns into temporary stages of colour.
But movements like this do not last long in a country wary of the unsanctioned. Over time, the shamates dwindled. Friends married or moved away. Authorities shuttered their meeting spots and checked IDs in their rented apartments, sending undocumented workers back to their provinces. A culture that once seemed unstoppable began to fade, until today it survives mostly in memory and scattered photographs.
Escribano introduces us to Liu, a barber whose salon profited during the shamate boom of 2014 and 2015. An internal migrant like them, Liu never joined the tribe; but his business thrived on their demand for wild styles. He recalls lines that stretched outside his shop, entire weekends of cutting, teasing, dyeing. The shamates, he admits, were never dangerous – just lonely children raised by grandparents while their parents laboured far away. Styling their hair was a way to matter, if only for a moment.
Another portrait in the article is that of a woman named Beibei, who left her Miao village at the age of 16 for the garment factories of Shipai. Her wages barely covered rent and food, but Sundays offered escape. She experimented with shamate styles, rainbow streaks, glitter, mash-ups of punk and traditional dress. For her, the look was temporary, a weekend indulgence rather than a full identity. Now married young and raising a child in a cramped apartment shared with another family, she laughs at her old photos but recognises what they meant: a way to feel alive in a life built on repetition and sacrifice.
The strength of Escribano’s piece lies in how it connects these lives to broader realities. China’s economic boom rests on the shoulders of 280 million rural migrants, the article notes, a third of its workforce. They leave behind villages where there is no future, only to arrive in cities that treat them as disposable labour. In such spaces, something like the shamates is not frivolous but essential, a way to assert individuality in environments designed to erase it.
Lan, Beibei and Liu all show us different facets of this story: rebellion, pragmatism, nostalgia. Their voices are clear, their circumstances harsh. The dream of shamates has already receded. Lan has cut his hair short, deleted his photos and now dresses like a real estate agent, chasing stability. The skating rink where he once ruled is shuttered. Beibei, now a mother, sees her days blur into routine. Liu continues his work, pragmatic as ever.
And yet, as Escribano makes plain, the shamates left an imprint. They turned hair into armour, parks into stages, Sundays into brief sanctuaries. They remind us that even in the most constrained conditions, people will find ways to resist invisibility. Escribano’s article restores dignity to stories too often dismissed as eccentric or marginal. And it asks a simple question: what becomes of those who shine so brightly, if only for a moment, against the grey?
Original article (“Shamate, la tribu de los trabajadores migrantes chinos”) by Inma Escribano was first published in Spanish in December 2024.
It is available here.
Revista LATE is a non-profit network of Spanish-speaking journalists, founded in Latin America in 2017, that investigates and reports on important stories after the initial news has broken, focusing on issues like corruption, organised crime, environmental destruction and human rights abuses.
Summary by TMH
