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.

Rachel Murphy explores Chinese children's experience of having migrant parents and the impact this has on family relationships in China.

Between the 1890s and the Second World War, twenty-five million people traveled from the densely populated North China provinces of Shandong and Hebei to seek employment in the growing economy of China's three northeastern provinces, the area known as Manchuria. This was the greatest population movement in modern Chinese history and ranks among the largest migrations in the world. Swallows and Settlers is the first comprehensive study of that migration. Drawing methods from their respective fields of economics and history, the coauthors focus on both the broad quantitative outlines of the movement and on the decisions and experiences of individual migrants and their families. In readable narrative prose, the book lays out the historical relationship between North China and the Northeast (Manchuria) and concludes with an examination of ongoing population movement between these regions since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

The largest migration in history is taking place in China today, off the radar of the world's major media. Since the 1990s at least 120 million Chinese peasants have left the countryside for the big cities to work in factories, on construction sites, in catering and prostitution - typically without the most basic rights or protections. Here van Luyn relates the remarkable tales of migrant workers who have helped fuel the explosive growth of the People's Republic of China.

Every year over 200 million peasants flock to China’s urban centers, providing a profusion of cheap labor that helps fuel the country’s staggering economic growth. Award-winning journalist Michelle Dammon Loyalka follows the trials and triumphs of eight such migrants—including a vegetable vendor, an itinerant knife sharpener, a free-spirited recycler, and a cash-strapped mother—offering an inside look at the pain, self-sacrifice, and uncertainty underlying China’s dramatic national transformation. At the heart of the book lies each person’s ability to “eat bitterness”—a term that roughly means to endure hardships, overcome difficulties, and forge ahead. These stories illustrate why China continues to advance, even as the rest of the world remains embroiled in financial turmoil. At the same time, Eating Bitterness demonstrates how dealing with the issues facing this class of people constitutes China’s most pressing domestic challenge.

A concise and compelling survey of Chinese migration in global history centered on Chinese migrants and their families.

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang examines the human exodus from China to Taiwan in 1949, focusing on trauma, memory, and identity.