In this “Wang Dan Hotmail”, I would like to recommend a good book on China, “Low End China”.
Dexter Roberts, a veteran Western journalist based in Beijing, has lived in China for 23 years since 1995, and was the China bureau chief for Bloomberg Businessweek. During his time in China, he covered the entire country, especially some remote areas. Unlike many Western journalists who are keen to follow and report on the power struggle at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, Luo Gu is more concerned with the fate of the underclass, especially migrant workers, in the wake of China’s reform and opening up. This book is the result of his long-time tracking of migrant workers in the village of Binghua in Guizhou, and his in-depth discussion of the living conditions of China’s so-called “low-end” people based on this case, showing the “other China” to the outside world.
At a time when the Chinese Communist Party boasts that it has accomplished the task of poverty eradication and claims to be a “rising power,” and when many young urban-born and -raised generations are deafened by the illusion of China’s economic prosperity, Luo Gu, through his rigorous research and keen analysis, tells the outside world the truth, which is: ” The success of the forty years of reform and opening up was built on bureaucrats and corporations working together to squeeze the peasants.” Behind Xi’s claim to have “eradicated poverty across the board” is the truth that half of China’s population is still poor and weak. He pointed out that China’s rural population earns only a third of what urban residents earn, that only 13 percent of rural men graduate from high school, and that 61 million children of workers are forced to live apart from their parents. Under the current hukou system, up to one tenth of Chinese citizens are “illegal residents” in their own country.
Luo Gu’s book “Low-End China” is most concerned with the current situation of migrant workers in China’s social development. He tells us that migrant workers, who make up nearly half of China’s population, are at the lower end of society. In order to extract the maximum benefit from them, from the government to factory owners, from urban elites to local powers, have joined hands to create a unique identity system that deprives them of the right to legal employment, schooling and medical treatment in the city. They endure extremely low wages, poor working conditions, and arbitrary detention by the police, becoming China’s “second-class citizens”. As we can see from the descriptions in this book, China is the country where discrimination is most severe. In China, discrimination is mainly manifested in the oppression of the lower end of the population. I think one of the greatest contributions of this book is that it shows us the other side of China’s economic takeoff, that is, the price paid for it. And migrant workers are one such price. Without recognizing this, one’s understanding of China is blind.
Finally, I would also like to thank Mr. Luo Gu. As a foreign journalist, his concerned gaze can be directed to the people at the bottom, which warms our hearts more than those Chinese people whose eyes only look at the top, who only care about the fate of their own class and are indifferent to the fate of the underprivileged. This is one of the important reasons why I would like to recommend this book to everyone.
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