China’s rise over the past several decades has lifted more than half of its population out of poverty and reshaped the global economy. What has caused this dramatic transformation?
In China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation, author Bradley Gardner looks at one of the most important but least discussed forces pushing China’s economic development: the migration of more than 260 million people from their birthplaces to China’s most economically vibrant cities. By combining an analysis of China’s political economy with current scholarship on the role of migration in economic development, China’s Great Migration shows how the largest economic migration in the history of the world has led to a bottom-up transformation of China.
Gardner draws from his experience as a researcher and journalist working in China to investigate why people chose to migrate and the social and political consequences of their decisions. In the aftermath of China's Cultural Revolution, the collapse of totalitarian government control allowed millions of people to skirt migration restrictions and move to China’s growing cities, where they offered a massive pool of labor that propelled industrial development, foreign investment, and urbanization. Struggling to respond to the demands of these migrants, the Chinese government loosened its grip on the economy, strengthening property rights and allowing migrants to employ themselves and each other, spurring the Chinese economic miracle.
More than simply a narrative of economic progress, China’s Great Migration tells the human story of China’s transformation, featuring interviews with the men and women whose way of life has been remade. In its pages, readers will learn about the rebirth of a country and millions of lives changed, hear what migration can tell us about the future of China, and discover what China’s development can teach the rest of the world about the role of market liberalization and economic migration in fighting poverty and creating prosperity.
“China’s Great Migration is an excellent book on how liberty is the key for Chinese economic development. The Chinese migration movement, 260 million strong, is the largest freedom movement in the world and the key for Chinese development. The book is also great in terms of comparative value. It will further be a good book for college students to use, and I will use it in the future.”
“Economic growth requires large migrations of workers from unproductive agriculture to more productive industrial and service jobs, and China is no exception. The size of that country and its very fast economic growth since the 1980s has necessitated and been supported by a vast internal migration of workers and their families. Bradley Gardner’s book China’s Great Migration documents this ‘great migration’ with plenty of examples of real-life experiences, explains its origins and how it . . . draws lessons both for China and the rest of the developing world. China’s Great Migration is timely and makes good reading at a time when political forces in the developed world are turning against freedom and its benefits.”
“By skillfully employing primary data and secondary sources in his book China’s Great Migration, Bradley Gardner sheds a bright light on China’s great liberal leap forward. It is a free-market story of how China removed the chains from human capital and how that facilitated an explosion of entrepreneurship and the greatest migration in world history—a migration from unproductive work and misery to productive private work and prosperity.”
“China’s Great Migration is a fascinating book. What the author Bradley Gardner calls ‘the great migration of China’ is an important engine and an integral part of the extraordinary Chinese market transformation. The whole story brings home the wisdom of the ancient Chinese dictum, ‘migration breeds vitality’ (???, ??? or Ren Nuo Huo, Shu Nuo Si). Moreover, as Gardner suggests, what has worked in China can work even better globally, if we change our entrenched views about international migration. An open, global, labor market can make the 21st century more prosperous and peaceful.”
