The Other Side of China’s Economic Miracle
China has witnessed the greatest stretch of growth and poverty alleviation in human history, made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions of workers. A new book recounts one of their lives, offering a glimpse into the dark side of China’s success.
A memoir by the Chinese worker-poet Xiao Hai offers a bracing look into the lives of the millions of workers facing brutal exploitation during the country’s gilded age. (Cheng Xin / Getty Images)
China’s remarkable economic development is the most important event of the last half-century. The People’s Republic has gone from a peasant economy sustaining itself on subsistence agriculture to a global powerhouse that dominates high-tech manufacturing and builds shining megacities.
But behind the broader narrative of marvelous macroeconomic success lie the stories of hundreds of millions of exploited Chinese workers thrust into a new capitalist paradigm. Inseparable from China’s growth was the largest urbanization project in world history. As China developed its manufacturing ecosystem, hundreds of millions of rural peasants flooded into coastal cities, chasing the economic opportunities brought by new factory jobs. In the cities, they searched for an escape from rural poverty but encountered the horrors of industrial capitalism.
The Other Side of Progress
Adrift in the South is the memoir of one of these workers, Xiao Hai, a poet who has spent much of his adolescence and twenties toiling in the harshest jobs available to Chinese workers.
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