Scattered Sand: The Story of China's Rural Migrants - Softcover

Pai, Hsiao-Hung

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781680906 ISBN 13: 9781781680902

Publisher: Verso Books, 2013

Synopsis

Each year, 200 million workers from China’s vast rural interior travel between cities and provinces in search of employment: the largest human migration in history. This indispensable army of labour accounts for half of China’s GDP, but is an unorganized workforce—’scattered sand’, in Chinese parlance—and the most marginalized and impoverished group of workers in the country. For two years, the award-winning journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai traveled across China visiting labourers on Olympic construction sites, in the coal mines and brick kilns of the Yellow River region, and at the factories of the Pearl River Delta. She witnessed the outcome of the 2009 riots in the Muslim province of Xinjiang; saw towns in rubble more than a year after the colossal earthquake in Sichuan; and was reunited with long-lost relatives, estranged since her mother’s family fled for Taiwan during the Civil War. Scattered Sand is the result of her travels: a finely wrought portrait of those left behind by China’s dramatic social and economic advances.

About this title

About the Author

HSIAO-HUNG PAI is a freelance journalist whose report on the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster for the Guardian was made into the film Ghosts. Her book on undocumented Chinese immigrants in Britain, Chinese Whispers, was shortlisted for the Orwell Book Prize in 2009. She lives in London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1781680906
• ISBN 13: 9781781680902
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 320