Chapter 2 Chapter 1 The Largest Population Migration in History

May 23, 2007 seemed like an ordinary day.But for some reason, I woke up very early. My diary reads: "At six o'clock in the morning, I couldn't sleep, got up, walked out of the hotel in Chaoyang District, Beijing, and wandered aimlessly. "A small alley waiting to be demolished between office buildings with glass curtain walls. It is like a dead tree struck by lightning in a lush forest. At the entrance of the alley, there is a joint notice of 'Hujialou Street Office' and 'Hujialou Police Station' ': 'This area has been listed as a public security chaotic area...', and a banner hangs high at the exit of the alley: 'Resolutely crack down on all illegal business and criminal activities'. But the small vendors selling vegetables and fruits are like mushrooms after the rain. They grow densely on the rotten wood. They all speak foreign accents. The contrast between their skin color, clothing, and behavior, and the Beijing residents who buy vegetables before going to work is like the contrast between the white of mushrooms and the green of the forest.

"An 'old Beijing' told me: There are not many local residents in this large courtyard to be demolished, and they have rented their bungalows to vegetable vendors from rural areas in Anhui and Henan..." In May 2007, for nearly a month, I conducted interviews in various places in the north and south of China, collecting materials for a series of reports called "China's Urbanization". The following are some excerpts from my interview diary—— Sanya City, Hainan. Outside major hotels.As soon as a guest walked out of the hotel, the tricycles scattered on the streets outside the hotel quickly gathered and flocked to the guests: "Go to the beach for a walk, it's only one dollar!" "One dollar, I'll take you to eat seafood!" There is definitely no standard Mandarin, and there is definitely no authentic Hainanese.

"Sanya is basically occupied by outsiders: tourists and migrant workers." A taxi driver from Liaoning told me. "Where have all the locals in Sanya gone?" I asked. The driver smiled and said, "They all work in Guangzhou and Shenzhen..." Guangzhou New Baiyun Airport. The taxi driver put my luggage in the trunk of the car. "What's in it? It's so heavy!" He shook his arm. I have lived in Henan for several years and am familiar with his accent. "Are you from Henan?" I asked. "Yes, I came from Zhoukou Village," he readily admitted.

We talked all the way.He introduced to me the "route" of Guangzhou's "taxi industry" in this way: "There are not many locals in Guangzhou who drive taxis, and the drivers from Youxian County, Hunan Province are the most, followed by our Zhoukou in Henan Province, and the rest are from Guangdong Province. Farmers in other areas, like Zhanjiang, Shantou..." On the long-distance bus from Dongcheng District, Dongguan to Fenggang Town. The car is full of young men and women in their twenties, with a southern accent and a northern accent, but they don't seem to have a local Dongguan accent.

Chatting with the girl next door, she works in Fenggang Town.During the May Day Golden Week, she went back to her hometown in rural Sichuan to visit her parents. Now she is driving back to Fenggang by car, and she has to go to work early tomorrow morning. There are many towns along the way, all of which are under the jurisdiction of Dongguan. There are many factories, hotels, and bustling commercial streets, which are busier than some small and medium-sized cities in northern China.People kept getting out of the car.The girl sitting next to her said that among the people who got off the bus were her fellow countrymen, who had all rushed back to work in the factory from their hometown.

Is this the world-famous "world processing base"? Shenzhen Futian District. Unexpectedly, in this modern city that is less than 30 years old, there is such a "village in the city", and it is just a few steps away from my hotel.The streets are narrow, and it seems that only two people can pass side by side, but the shops on both sides of the street are very busy. Above the shops, the housewives of the residents of this building and the residents of the other building can open the windows to chat and give each other a bottle Hot sauce, a handful of green onions... Therefore, during the daytime interviews, this urban village became a good place for me to have supper, take a walk, and chat at night.Interestingly, the residents here are all migrant workers who came to Shenzhen to work in other places, because the rent is cheap; Drinking tea and playing mahjong in the entertainment room.

It is said that this place was originally a rural area, a real rural area. When the rumbling footsteps of the urban expansion of Shenzhen came here, they were blocked by farmers who demanded extremely high prices. The bargaining failed, and the farmers each lived on the homestead of their own private houses. Built a small building with about ten floors, and became a "hands-off" landlord... Shanghai East China University of Science and Technology. After interviewing a senior student from rural Anhui at school, I walked out of the school gate and went to the food stall opposite to buy a bowl of wontons.Both the boss and the guys are from rural Sichuan.

After eating the ravioli, I checked my watch: with more than an hour before the next interview, I went to a nearby hair salon to get my hair cut.Chatting with the hairdresser, I found that his Anhui accent is very strong. After the interview, on the way back to the hotel, the taxi driver told me that there are so many Sichuan farmers working in Shanghai that the Sichuan hot sauce in the supermarket is out of stock... May 23, 2007 was not an ordinary day.For me, and for our planet. According to the statistics of experts from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia in the United States, on May 23 this year, the world's urban population was 3,303,992,253, and the rural population was 3,303,866,404.They marked the day as a "watershed moment": for the first time in history, the world's urban population surpassed its rural population.

I know that there are about 180,000 rural people flocking to cities every day around the world, but I don’t know whether the balance of the global urban-rural population is decisively in favor of the hundreds of thousands of people on the city side, including May On the 23rd, I saw those Chinese peasants with their shoulders on their shoulders and their faces in bewilderment on the streets of Beijing? In the history of human evolution, there are not many "turning point days" that mark major changes in human lifestyles.American writer Bronowski once said in the book "History of Scientific Evolution": "The biggest step in the ascent of human beings is the change from nomadic life to village agriculture." The "turning point day" has no way to check.But no one denies that May 23, 2007 must be another well-documented "turning point day" for historical changes.If the transformation process from nomadic civilization to agricultural civilization is migration to settlement, then the transformation process from rural civilization to urban civilization is probably another sense of settlement transformation.

However, not all countries and ethnic groups passed the "turning point" of urbanization on the same day.The United Kingdom was the first country in the world to achieve urbanization, and it passed this "turning point" in 1851; the United States crossed the "watershed" of urbanization in the late 1910s; although it led the world through this The hundreds of thousands of rural migrants at the "turning point" probably included many Chinese "migrant workers", but China's current urbanization level is still lower than the global average, only about 43%.

However, according to Hu Angang, director of the National Conditions Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences-Tsinghua University, the growth rate of China's urbanization process since the reform and opening up has been significantly higher than the world's average growth rate. I didn't realize at the time that I scheduled the interview with Hu Angang to be May 23, 2007.I discovered this inexplicable coincidence only later when I was looking through my interview diary. In the ecological building of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is located next to the dusty and bustling Shuangqing Road in Haidian District, Beijing, Hu Angang fidgets in the spacious office, showing an unreasonable excitement: "In the past 30 years, China has become the world's largest economy. One of the countries with the fastest urban population growth rate. According to the data of the United Nations, from 1975 to 2003, the average annual growth rate of urban population in developing countries was 3.6%, the world average growth rate was 2.5%, and China was 4.1%; Around 2010, China's urbanization rate will exceed the average level of developing countries, and by 2030 it will reach 60.5%, 3.4 percentage points higher than the average level of developing countries." I told Hu Angang what I saw and heard during my trip to China.Hu Angang smiled: "What you see, hear and feel are just a few waves of the largest population migration in the history of the world so far. This population migration is China's urbanization process." Hu Angang's thinking and language leaped extremely fast: "I think that in order to truly solve the three rural issues in China, we must liberate farmers, invest in farmers, transfer farmers, reduce farmers, and enrich farmers. The most important thing is to reduce farmers. " Today, I am still wondering: Did Hu Angang already know the epoch-making significance of May 23?But the possibility is extremely small: because the news was announced a few days later! This is the first time I have met the so-called "Memorial Scholar" Hu Angang.No matter in terms of appearance, manners, temperament or demeanor, Hu Angang does not look like a person over fifty years old, and it is also quite different from the imagination formed by reading his books and articles.He looks more like a young man in his early 30s. He keeps gesticulating and walking back and forth in the office, throwing me a report on the state of the country that he presided over the writing, and taking me to his computer. , showing me the data or graphs of China's urbanization, and then walked to the window, and opened the curtain with a "wow"—— I thought he was going to show me a huge map of China's urbanization trend, but I didn't expect that when the curtains were opened, there was a huge floor-to-ceiling window, under which was the dusty Shuangqing Road with noisy vendors. "You see, this road is a portrayal of the life of migrant workers. Most of the people coming and going on the street are migrant workers who have gone to the city to work and do business." Hu Angang said excitedly, "Look, they hawk The goods are either carried on their own shoulders or transported here by tricycles that do not cause exhaust pollution. They do not have Beijing household registration or even apply for a temporary residence permit, but they are looking for a better future for themselves and their families. Convenience for the lives of Beijing citizens, and even contribute to China's GDP, although their contributions are not included in the official GDP figures..." I don’t know whether it’s because of the condescending look down, or because of Hu Angang’s outline interpretation, now in my eyes, this noisy and noisy Shuangqing Road that I had to cross when I visited, and countless similar roads in China’s large and small towns Streets are suddenly endowed with a brand-new meaning: the Chinese way of life is undergoing rapid evolution right before our eyes, on these dusty streets; , in less than 30 years, the transition to industrial civilization and urban civilization has been accelerated; and these disgraced, shoulder-to-shoulder country people are the bearers of this huge social transformation mission... At that time, I suddenly had a whim: the picture presented by the floor-to-ceiling window in front of me is actually the most vivid "trend map" of China's urbanization process...