Scattered Sand.

• Author: Levine, Paul
• Position: Book review

We Are Like Scattered Sand: 200 Million Migrant Workers in China by Haiao-Hung Pai, Verso: New York and London, 2013, ISBN-13: 978-1781680902, 320 pp., $20.64 (Hardcover), $15.69 (Paperback), $9.99 (Kindle).

Anyone who has attended a briefing by a Chinese official knows what to expect: a recitation of statistics in a charmless monotone. In a nation of 1.3 billion people numbers rule. While Scandinavians may believe that "Small is Beautiful", the Chinese believe that "Bigger is Better." Perhaps they learned to valorize quantity over quality from the Russians. I can still feel a wave of nostalgia when I recall ecstatic Soviet reports of bumper harvests of wheat and tanks.

Perhaps it's impossible to talk about China's spectacular economic expansion, fueled by an army of 200 million migrant workers, without resorting to numbers. As Gregor Benton notes in his Foreword to Hsiao-Hung Pai's illuminating report on the hard fate of China's rural migrants, Scattered Sand:

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 movement 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. The virtue of Hsiao-Hung Pai's Scattered Sand is that while it provides quantitative analysis of migration it is the qualitative description that stays in the mind. Pai, a Taiwanese journalist who spent years in Mainland China, has written a memorable account of the trials and tribulations of those millions of unsung workers who made the Chinese economic miracle possible. Pai informs us about China's explosive economic growth. But she takes pains to count the social costs of rapid economic expansion. She writes, "Migrant labor is what makes the export-led manufacturing empire possible."

First, some background on China's amazing economic growth. After Mao Zedong's death and the end of the disastrous Cultural Revolution in 1976, Deng Xiaopeng emerged as the new leader of the chaotic People's Republic. A pragmatist who had been humiliated during the Cultural Revolution...