Scattered Sand. Hsiao-Hung Pai

      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

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