Although I grew up in the city, my whole life I have some connection with the Chinese countryside and Chinese farmers. My father is from a village in Jiaodong, Shandong, China.Although he went to work in a grocery store in the county without graduating from elementary school, although he quit his job at the age of 19 and joined the army, although he was a soldier all his life, he was still a farmer at heart.As long as I can remember, I have known that my father’s only hobby is farming. After work, he opened up a piece of land in his backyard to grow melons and vegetables, which was a lot of fun.After retiring, he simply became a "professional farmer": he farmed the land around the clock until he couldn't work a few years ago.

The relationship between the father and the land is more than that.He often went back to his hometown in the countryside to visit relatives, and took us brothers back: in the popular saying at the time, it was "recalling bitterness and thinking about sweetness", and in the popular saying at the time, it was "seeking the root".Our hometown is indeed very poor. Grandpa and grandma passed away early, and only my aunt and uncle's family remained in my hometown. My aunt gave birth to 14 children, but 7 died, and only half survived.Memories of my childhood and teenage years are naturally inseparable from happy things such as sitting cross-legged with my aunts and uncles on the rural kang, eating oysters, and fishing with my cousins ​​at the seaside, but most of them are listening to my aunts crying about the death of their children. The pain of a daughter, listening to my uncle sigh that he has no money to build a house for his married son, and hearing my cousin complain about her in-laws treating her unfairly.

Later, I learned that there was a famine in my hometown at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China. Many people "went into the Guandong" and later settled in the Northeast.Many of their descendants have become "city dwellers" in Northeast cities such as Harbin, Shenyang, and Dalian.When I go back to my hometown, I often see these "urban people" from the Northeast following their parents or grandparents, carrying large and small parcels, and taking a long-distance bus, returning to their hometown in Jiaodong to find their roots and visit relatives. The respect and hospitality of the folks in the farming village.

I did not catch up with the "going to the countryside" at that time, but when we were in elementary school, we were often organized by the school to go to the countryside to help farmers pick up wheat ears; After going to the countryside to live and work for more than a month, we were arranged to eat and live in the farmers' homes, and to do farm work with the farmers during the day, which was called "study farming".At that time, the people's commune system had not been abolished, and what impressed me the most was the hardship of rural life, the peasants' indifference to the collective economy, and the young generation's desire to leave the countryside.

After graduating from middle school, I served as a soldier for three years.Most of my comrades in arms are rural soldiers.I ate, lived, trained, and was arrested by the leaders. I am familiar with their thoughts, thoughts, and desires, just as I am familiar with their breathing, yawning, snoring, and belching.At that time, although China had resumed the college entrance examination, it was still rare for rural children to be admitted to university. Serving as a soldier was probably the only feasible way for them to escape from farming.The biggest dream of these peasant soldiers is to be promoted in the army and climb up the ladder of officers; Non-agricultural household registration; if they can neither be promoted nor join the party, they can only return to the countryside to work in agriculture, and their circle in the army will be considered in vain.I clearly remember that there was a rural soldier who had just joined the army. In order to be the first to grab the broom for sweeping the floor in the morning and to impress the squad leader, he got up ten minutes before the wake-up call and quietly put on his military uniform. , then lay down in the bed, and as soon as the wake-up call sounded, he jumped up like an arrow and went straight to the corner where the broom was placed...

Li Ming (pseudonym) was my best comrade-in-arms when I was a soldier, and he came from rural Henan.In the 1950s, Li Ming's father caught up with the rare opportunity for urban enterprises to recruit workers in the countryside and became a worker in a factory in Luoyang. A few can only farm in their hometown in the countryside.Li Ming is the youngest at home, and his biggest wish after joining the army is to join the party, be promoted, and leave the countryside forever.He is smart and capable, and he won the first place in every assessment during the training camp of the radio operator teaching team. Before the training camp ended, he was rated as the only "excellent student". Very confident.

After the training camp, we were assigned to different units, but we kept in touch by correspondence.Li Ming performed very well. He has always been a technical pacesetter no matter whether it is sending or receiving reports.Unexpectedly, just one year after our training camp ended, a major change took place in the Chinese military: officers were no longer promoted from ordinary soldiers, but officers were trained from military academies. Students are admitted through cultural examinations.In this way, those rural children who had no hope of going to school were blocked from trying to escape from the farm by serving as soldiers.Extremely disappointed, Li Ming decided to demobilize.I still remember the gray mood in Li Ming's letter to me at that time.

At that time, the "replacement system" was still fashionable in Chinese enterprises.After Li Ming was demobilized, his father did not want the last child in the family to be trapped on the land, so he decided to retire early and let his son enter the factory to "replace".In this way, Li Ming's father paid for his early return to his hometown, allowing his youngest son to realize his dream of becoming a worker in the city and changing his household registration to a non-agricultural one. In 1980, I was also demobilized and was admitted to a university in Shanghai in the same year.Among my best college classmates are some students from rural areas. They study the hardest, treat people with the most sincerity, and have the best grades.But there is one exception.His name is Zhao Qixiang (pseudonym), and he comes from rural Anhui.Xiao Zhao has a withdrawn personality and rarely interacts with people. During college, my deepest impression of him was that every time he was in class, he would hide in a corner and sleep. Although he passed all subjects in the exam, his grades were mediocre.The most interesting thing is that in the review class before the exam, the teacher specially emphasized that the attendance will not be recorded, and the students can come or not, but every time Xiao Zhao comes, but he still hides in the corner and sleeps.The students jokingly said that Xiao Zhao needs the hypnotic lecture voice of the teacher in order to fall asleep.

When he is sleeping in class, he occasionally makes a shallow snoring sound. The classmates sitting near him may smile at each other, but they will not report it to the teacher.But one time, his snoring might have been too loud, and he was finally heard by the teacher. The teacher walked up to him and called him a few times before he woke up. Amidst the laughter of his classmates, he rubbed his eyes, as if Don't understand what's going on.After that, he continued to hide in the corner of the classroom to sleep as before in class, but probably because of the obvious improvement in his breathing method during sleep, we have never heard his snoring since then.

Later, we discovered that Xiao Zhao is definitely not the kind of person who dawdles.He sleeps during class during the day, but he stays up all night, studying more advanced courses by himself, reading many extracurricular books by himself, and more importantly, studying English hard.When graduating, others were busy with activities to manage the assigned counselors, trying to get a good job, but he was admitted to a master's degree in a famous university in Beijing by virtue of his professional knowledge and English ability in evening self-study, and got a master's degree. Shortly after his degree, he was admitted to the graduate school of a famous law school in Canada with a full scholarship with good professional grades and high TOEFL scores.

Xiao Zhao is the first among our classmates to pass the postgraduate entrance examination, the first to study abroad, and the first to settle overseas.Later, when we talked about him at a class reunion, someone said half-jokingly and half-seriously: Xiao Zhao is the most ambitious and farsighted person in our class, but he is also the best at disguising. His ambition and vision are all disguised in class during the daytime. Occasional snoring sounds... In the mid-1980s, when I was working for the China Youth Daily in Beijing, I happened to catch up with the time when China’s rural reforms continued to produce new ideas, while urban reforms were struggling. The period when farmers were "better" than citizens. During that peculiar period of "urban-rural inversion", once, an out-and-out Shandong farmer was unreasonably oppressed by the local government because he made money from fish and shrimp farming. Mouping County, he drove all the way to Beijing to file a complaint. His actions impressed many reporters from the central media, so a group of Beijing reporters, including me, drove back in the van of this Shandong farmer. Shandong Muping. I still remember that when we interviewed in Muping, Shandong, we were deeply shocked by the wealth, self-confidence, and bullishness of the local farmers. I couldn't believe it. This is the poor and decaying hometown of Jiaodong that I saw when I was a child!The farmer, who was in a lawsuit with the local government, built a small building that was regarded as "magnificent" in the eyes of us reporters in the capital, and bought several cars that the city people could not even imagine at that time. What is even more surprising is that his level of wealth did not rank high in the rural areas of Jiaodong at that time, because the truly wealthy were the peasant entrepreneurs who ran township enterprises. It's a pity that the good times don't last long. This rare "urban-rural inversion" period in Chinese history was shorter than the "brain-body inversion" period that was noisy in the media at that time.As for why Chinese farmers have changed from relatively rich to relatively poor, and why township enterprises have changed from relatively prosperous to relatively declining, there have been a lot of analyzes at home and abroad, so I don't need to repeat them. It probably started in the late 1980s, when a wave of migrant workers, which was officially called "blind flow" at that time, emerged in China.This book is an attempt to describe and interpret the wave of migrant workers in China and the urbanization process it drives. This wave of population migration, which later scholars called the largest population migration in human history, was driven from the bottom up by Chinese farmers who pursued a better life. It resulted in a net increase in China's urban population in less than 30 years. Four hundred million.But in fact, it is nothing but the continuation of farmers in northern China "going to the West", "crossing the Guandong", and farmers in southern China "going to Nanyang" and "traveling in America". It is my comrade Li Ming, my classmate Zhao Qixiang and thousands of others. The continuation of the dreams and hard work of peasant children like them. Twenty years ago, after I had been engaged in journalism for a year, I had an opportunity to go to Luoyang for an interview. I went to visit my old comrade-in-arms Li Ming.At that time, Li Ming was still working in the factory where his father used to work as an ordinary clerk in the security department; at that time, he had just married in Luoyang and had a family, and the factory provided the newlyweds with There is a room in the dormitory building of the factory. Although the size of the room is small, he is very satisfied: He told me that our comrades who were training together in the teaching team at that time could not be directly promoted because of the reform of the Chinese military cadre training system. Dry, most of the people have been demobilized and returned to the countryside to work in agriculture, and there are very few demobilized soldiers like him who can enter the factory. Li Ming still likes to play basketball after work as he did when he was in the army; the only difference from when he was wearing military uniform is that he opened up a vegetable field in the grass behind the factory dormitory building, and planted radishes and daikon Cabbage, as he puts it, "saves money on vegetables." "You like farming so much, why didn't you go back to the countryside after demobilization?" I asked jokingly. His answer was nonsensical: "If you really want me to go back to the countryside, I won't be so busy farming." I have been pondering the exact meaning of Li Ming's words for 20 years. Until I went to China this time to interview many migrant workers and entrepreneurs from migrant workers, until I interviewed many first-class Chinese scholars and experts on various questions in China’s urbanization process, until I talked with Ping Su The witty father had that conversation, and for the first time knew my father's life experience and my grandfather's experience, and I felt that I probably understood what Li Ming said 20 years ago. When I write this article, in addition to the 20 years mentioned above, it is also the 58th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and it has been nearly 30 years since China’s reform, opening up and urbanization started.At this moment, the autumn wind hits the house in London, England, and the rain hits the window. I am writing at the desk at the other end of the world. Once again, I would like to express my sincere thanks to all the people who have interviewed me or provided me with help during this trip to China. , Dedicate my deepest blessings to those Chinese farmers who have broken into the city in pursuit of a better life.