Scattered Sand

Starred review from June 25, 2012
The Chinese “miracle” gets a reality check in this engrossing exposé of the country’s 200 million migrant laborers set adrift since the country’s opening to international markets in the 1980s—a rural population of historically unprecedented size in constant search for work within China and abroad. U.K.-based, Taiwanese-born journalist Pai (Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour) travels widely to capture the settings, circumstances, and stories of this “new mobile proletariat,” balancing relevant statistics and modern history with voices of the mostly young, desperately insecure workers on the losing end of a widening income gap and increasing rural unemployment. Eliciting the perspectives of individual migrants—working in dangerous occupations as miners, security guards, prostitutes, black market merchants, brick makers, and cellphone assembly-line workers—gives the narrative a palpable human dimension. Pai carefully contextualizes their plight—many face further exploitation and discrimination as one of China’s 55 ethnic minorities—with reference to a strong nationalist strain in Chinese socialism, operative from 1949 on, that punishes dissent while demanding total sacrifice for the sake of the motherland. A moving contribution to the growing literature on the new China, the book will prove relevant for anyone interested in ongoing debates around migrant labor in a globalized economy.

June 15, 2012
A Taiwanese-born investigative journalist reports on the conditions facing migrant workers in China's rural interior. Hsiao-Hung Pai (Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour, 2008) brings her knowledge of China's history to this detailed examination of the plight of the millions of peasants searching for work in China's booming cities and, failing that, in other countries. She recounts her interviews with individual peasants, during which she urged them to describe their experiences in their own words. The author traveled from Russia, where the closing of a large outdoor market in Moscow sent thousands of Chinese migrant workers back home, to China's industrial northeast, to the province of Sichuan, the site of a devastating earthquake, and to its southern manufacturing centers. She also spent time in Guangdong province, where a special economic zone with thousands of new factories has brought great prosperity to the upper-middle class but for migrant workers has meant exploitation, homelessness and suicide. At one point, the author accompanied her mother on a trip to her home province of Shandong, a trip that provides her with the opportunity to fill in readers on family history as it entwined with Chinese history. In Fujian province, where tens of thousands of peasants have sought jobs overseas, many going to Japan, the United States and Europe, she introduces readers to Xiao Lin, whose misadventures in trying to escape to the West are material for a book of its own. Her final stop was the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China's northwest, where the Uighur ethnic minority are considered security risks and endure harsh discrimination and grinding poverty. Unlike Michelle Dammon Loyalka's Eating Bitterness (2012), which concentrates on a few rural migrants in one city, Hsiao-Hung Pai's examination ranges across the whole country and provides background information on factory conditions, political corruption and worker unrest. A grim but keen view of the dark underside of China's prosperity.

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