SCATTERED SAND
THE STORY OF CHINA’S
RURAL MIGRANTS
HSIAO-HUNG PAI
Preface by Gregor Benton
First published by Verso 2012
© Hsiao-Hung Pai 2012
Foreword © Gregor Benton 2012
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
eISBN: 978-1-84467-920-1
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pai, Hsiao-Hung.
Scattered sand : the story of China’s rural migrants / by Hsiao-Hung Pai ; preface by Gregor Benton.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-84467-886-0 (hbk.) – ISBN 978-1-84467-920-1 (ebook)
1. Migrant labor–China. 2. Rural-urban migration–China. 3. China–Social
conditions–21st century. 4. China–Economic conditions–21st century. I. Title.
HD5856.C5P35 2012
331.5’440951–dc23
2012016668
This book is dedicated, with much love,
to my parents, Hsiu-Hsiung and Judeh
Contents
1. Exodus: Northeast Youth Head for the City
2. Earthquakes in Bohemia: Life and Death in Sichuan
3. Dust and Heat: Black Mines in the Yellow River Region
4. The Dark Kilns: Brickmaking in the North
5. ‘Bad Elements’: The Uprooted and the Permanently Impoverished in Shandong
6. The Factory of the World: Recession in Guangdong
7. In the Shadows of Olympians: Unorganized Workers in Beijing
8. Go West! The Migration Industry in Rural Fujian
Epilogue: Trouble on the New Frontier – Ethnic Tensions in Xinjiang
Foreword
The present movement of Chinese peasants – around the countryside, from the villages to the towns and cities, from China to the world, and around the world – is the biggest mass migration in history. And it is among the world’s biggest social upheavals ever, dwarfing centuries of European migration to the United States. The rural migrants who are braving abuse by employers, discrimination by urban natives, and repeated crackdowns and restrictions by the authorities have driven China’s economy to new heights and changed the face of China’s cities, while the earnings they send home have helped lift villages out of poverty. Much of the migration is seasonal, however, and during slowdowns and crises its direction is reversed, as many of those laid off move back to the villages to share their poverty and await the next rising tide. By disappearing not only when they lose their jobs but also when they grow old, fall ill, or get pregnant, peasant migrants subsidize urban employers, the state treasury, and the lifestyle of richer urbanites.
Chinese rural-to-urban migration has been the subject of dozens of books and hundreds of articles, written by experts and based on prodigious research; their work is an exemplar among international migration studies. Over the past few years, high-quality writing on this subject in Chinese, English, and other languages has exceeded in quantity the entire output of all previous such work, yet in it, the voice of the migrant is seldom heard. The merit of this book is that it lets Chinese rural migrants speak for themselves, so that we can experience their world from their point of view and in their own words. Scattered Sand displays the same empathy and sense of authenticity as Chinese Whispers, Hsiao-Hung Pai’s acclaimed 2008 study of Britain’s hidden army of ‘illegal’ Chinese labour. Both books maintain the rich tradition of socially progressive writing founded in China in the 1930s and revived in the 1980s, in which the narration is an act of collective identification and empowerment and a main aim is to give voice to the voiceless.
Hsiao-Hung Pai is a Taiwanese who was able to communicate uninhibitedly with her Chinese informants, which deepened her identification with them. As a person committed by nature to equity and justice, she is outraged by the self-interest of those in business and government who control migrant employment. Documenting abuses carried out on behalf of the rich and strong takes courage in a country where those forces monopolize power and are not used to being watched. Through her investigation, Ms Pai threatened the interests of the new composite class of officials, business people, and organized criminals who dominate the corrupt world of Chinese state capitalism. On several occasions, things could have turned nasty had her luck failed. As a British passport holder, she could count on some immunity, and she has a native ability to talk her way out of trouble. Even so, her work required greater nerve and determination than most people have.
What did her informants tell her? Having gained their confidence by showing sympathy and interest, she elicited a rich flow of ideas, views, and stories from them. Her journey starts and finishes at Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station, where she joins homeward-bound migrants on the Trans-Siberian Railway. They paint her a sobering picture of the often romanticized reality of international migration. The pillaging by predatory police and other authorities starts at the Russian border, intensifies at the destination, and is rounded off with a final shakedown on re-entry into China. Migrant traders suffer endless official rip-offs in Russia and occasional attacks by xenophobic skinheads. Migrant labourers, driven out of China by poverty and despair, are paid pittances by their Russian employers and milked dry by the Chinese agents who recruit and run them. Those who publicly resist the abuse risk fines and deportation.
This picture bears little resemblance to that of the footloose globe-trotter moving around the world in a cocoon of global Chinese