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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 capitalism and culture, a representation that can be found in some writings of the currently influential school of transnational studies. Hsiao-Hung Pai’s important contribution to the debate on transnationalism and ‘Chineseness’ is her unrelenting focus on the different fates that await rich and poor. Where other authors celebrate the migrants’ mobility in a frictionless, deterritorialized age of ‘transilience’ and ‘flexible citizenship’ and play down the poverty, racism, and sexism of their world, she focuses on the ‘permanent journey of the mobile proletariat’ and the role of the hostile state – at home and overseas – in controlling and exploiting the petty trader and the migrant worker.

The bulk of the book records Hsiao-Hung Pai’s encounters with rural migrants in Chinese towns and cities. They can suffer poor health, accidents, and even death through their work, and they are too poor to buy insurance. They accumulate debts they can’t pay off. Local residents are more likely to show them contempt than fellow feeling. Their relations with agents and employers are rarely governed by rules, regulations, or contracts. The state-run labour unions make no effort to recruit or represent them, and they can’t afford legal arbitration. When their bosses fail to pay them for months on end, or bully and deceive them, or subject them to other arbitrary abuses, they have no remedy. They are ‘ghosts’, people with no officially sanctioned existence, subject to routine harassment and random cruelty and violence. They live in ghettoes, aliens in their own country. Because conditions for them in China are so dire, many will do practically anything to get themselves or even their unaccompanied children to the rich West, where again they face oppression and discrimination.

An even worse life is that of the ethnic migrants, the non-Han segments in the Han cities, who form minorities within the minority and live in ghettoes within the ghetto. They are even more likely than the general migrant population to suffer random police searches on the streets and maltreatment by authorities and members of the Han majority. This is especially true in the current political climate, where the establishment is playing the dangerous game of stoking Han chauvinism disguised as Chinese patriotism. Hsiao-Hung Pai describes two of these internal colonies, Yi and Uighur.

There is little in this book to relieve the general sense of repression without redress. The author occasionally reports some small instance of verbal defiance, usually from older workers with a memory of the rebel days. Another act of self-assertion she describes is the Museum of Migrant Culture and Art, a samizdat project set up by volunteers in a poor neighbourhood in Picun in Beijing that proudly displays the history of migration with exhibits donated by migrant workers. The museum staff has raised a banner, ‘To work is glorious,’ an ironic play on Deng Xiaoping’s ‘To get rich is glorious.’ Pai also cites the rise in labour militancy in 2010 to confirm that many migrant workers do not accept their fate, but although conditions for the emergence of an independent labour movement are better today than at any time since the 1920s, most observers agree that one is not yet imminent.

Pai’s title, Scattered Sand, comes from Sun Yat-sen, father of Chinese nationalism and leader of its democratic revolution (which was not very democratic and not very revolutionary), who called the Chinese people a sand rope, without fibre, but had high hopes of the Chinese overseas, who he thought could be ‘mothers of the Revolution’ because migration would change them. Yet it is hard to see how he was right, for migration abroad has dissipated the energy of the enterprising, and migration at home has greatly widened the chasm between winners and losers, which bodes ill for progressive change there. China, once one of the world’s most egalitarian societies, is now almost as inegalitarian as South Africa and Brazil.

Yet Hsiao-Hung Pai concludes her report on a note of optimism, describing the migrants’ role in the recent unofficial strikes, which she hopes are a first step to greater equity. But although a movement of criticism and dissent does exist in China, it is less focused and more disjointed than in the past, and even if its members do manage to cohere, they will achieve little unless they can quickly identify a way to heal the division between insiders and incomers in the cities.

Gregor Benton

Cardiff University, May 2012