China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation.

AuthorGriswold, Daniel
PositionBook review

China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation

Bradley M. Gardner

Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, 2017, 219 pp.

China's rise in a generation from poverty and isolation to become a global economic power would have been impossible without the mass migration of people from the countryside to the city. In China's Great Migration, Bradley Gardner describes the role that this unprecedented movement of people has played in "the greatest development story in human history."

Market reforms in agriculture, trade, and industry all played major roles in China's emergence from the legacy of Chairman Mao, but the most underappreciated reform was the growing freedom of the Chinese people to move to cities to better their condition. Gardner tells this important story with sound analysis but also with firsthand accounts from his time on the ground in China.

The movement begins with the agricultural reforms of the late 1970s, which freed millions of Chinese workers from the shackles of collective farming. The rural laborers then migrated to the cities to work in the factories that had begun to produce labor-intensive goods for global markets. As a result, Gardner writes, "Between 1978 and 2012, the population of China's cities grew by half a billion people, swollen by more than 260 million economic migrants moving to urban centers to look for new opportunities."

From 1980 to 2010, the population of Beijing rose from 9 million to 21 million, Shanghai from 11 million to 20 million, and most incredibly Shenzhen, the area surrounding Hong Kong, from 300,000 to 10 million. New York and London had also seen their populations swell during the industrial revolution, but not by nearly so much nor during such a short span of time.

The most direct impact of this great migration of people was on the migrants themselves. By moving to the city, their output and incomes rose immediately by 500 percent. The factory work was hard and the conditions far below western standards, but "for China's poor, the difference is life changing," Gardner observes. "An extra 8 to 9 dollars a day is the difference between struggling to buy clothes and struggling to buy a phone; between an empty field and a flush toilet; between illiteracy and a technical education."

For China as a nation, the great migration has been responsible for an estimated 20 percent to 33 percent of its economic growth since reforms began. That amounts to an additional $1.1 trillion in...

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