Archive of Hsiao-Hung Pai
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Verso's books are shortlisted for the Bread and Roses award
Two books by Verso have been shortlisted for the Bread and Roses award for Radical Publishing.
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Portraits of a constricting underground economy: Scattered Sand excerpted in Design Observer
An abandoned factory in Shenzen [photo by dcmaster]
In the aftermath of the Foxconn workers' riot earlier this month, the world's eyes are again cast to the worsening conditions for China's factory laborers. As recently as this week new data suggests international demand for Chinese goods is faltering, further constricting what have already been extremely limited options for workers in the country. As goods lie on production floors unused and factory owners continue to cut low-paying, high-risk jobs, it's likely the massive population of migrant laborers in China will be forced to work under even more perilous circumstancesToday in Design Observer is an excerpt from journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai's Scattered Sand, named after the Chinese term for the 200 million migrating across the country in search of just this kind of factory work. As the situation among these workers worsens, Pai's book provides a grim eyewitness account of the lives and regions impacted by the largest yearly migration in human history.
Pai explores the architecture of Guangdong, a region claiming China's "largest provincial economy" and over 60,000 factories. Though the government once claimed the region as the first to reach a per capita income of $10,000, writes Pai, "it was later discovered that this figure had not factored in the estimated 3.7 million migrant workers living and working in the city at that time." Moving from the train station where migrants first arrive to the dormitories in which they, if lucky, may spend their limited breaks, Pai finds the troubling results of the stagnating economy:
There are three to four million migrant workers living in Guangzhou, which has a total population of about ten million. Many of those I saw sleeping at the station, as well as those who might have left for their villages after a few homeless nights, were first-generation migrants who'd come to Guangzhou in the hope of higher wages and abundant opportunities. Guangzhou was meant to be a life-changing experience. As many of them told me, most had been working there for more than a decade; they had devoted their prime to this city.
Visit Design Observer: Places to read the excerpt in full and view photographs from Guangdong.
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Scattered Sand in Literary Review and on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves
Scattered Sand, Hsiao-Hung Pai's exposé on the phenomenon of Chinese migration, has received further praise from Literary Review. In his review, Jonathan Mirsky writes with a new understanding of modern China, the China detailed in Pai’s book. The reality goes far beyond the myth of the economic miracles reportedly taking place. "Will she ever get another Chinese visa?" writes Mirsky comically, astonished by the depth of Pai's research and the accounts that can only come from first hand experience. Mirsky details Pai’s discovery of the many instances of AIDS-related deaths in China, as the blood donation trade acts as a deadly means of securing any sort of stable income for the poorest Chinese workers. Qi Cheng is one example: He sold up to 800 centilitres of blood per day and earned enough money to build three homes, but left four children behind after he and his wife died of AIDS. His story is just one of many. The aims of the book appear to have been met, with Mirsky noting that:
Pai's book is suitable for anyone with even slightly interested in China and worried about this becoming the Chinese century, and it may jolt academic specialists clinging to the conviction that the Chinese 'economic miracle' is widespread. -
"Injustices and indignities scream out of every page" Scattered Sand reviewed in The Observer
Immigration is not an unfamiliar topic in contemporary European media. Regular reports detail the increasing figures of immigration from countries hit by economic recession. Countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal document and account for outward migration of those who are worst effected by weak economies. But elsewhere, in a country that is undergoing enormous waves of prosperity, China has a yearly migration, within provinces and internationally, of over 200 million people. Scattered Sand is a first-hand account by Hsiao-Hung Pai of her two-year journey through China and its mines, construction sites and alleyways.
Writing in the Observer, Sukhdev Sandhu believes that the extent of the movement in China makes "the demographic debates about modern-day Europe seem parochial and hysterical." The difference being, of course, that while European figures are turned into statistics, the 200 million Chinese are invisible: the "scattered sand" of the title is a derisive term used to describe the millions who are lost along the way during China's economic transformation.
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The working-class in the saddle: A reading list for May Day
The 1st of May marks International Workers' Day, a festival of working-class self-organisation stretching back over 130 years. It was originally inaugurated to commemorate the "Haymarket Massacre" of 1886 in Chicago, where a bomb thrown during a worker's strike kicked off a police crackdown followed by a period of anti-labor hysteria.
In 1890, the first internationally co-ordinated demonstration for an 8-hour day was held, in commemoration of those killed in the massacre, and those eight anarchists executed on trumped-up charges after the event.
Here, Verso staff present "A Reading List for May Day", looking at the radical history of the festival in the European and North American labor movements, and how that spirit lives on in grassroots workplace struggles.