Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [3]
That growth is largely driven by the multiplication of places like Liu Gong Li, self-built settlements of rural escapees, known in China simply as urban “villages” (cun), hundreds of which flourish around the city’s perimeter, even if city authorities do not acknowledge their existence. Their streets and blocks are tightly organized by the villages and regions from which their residents come; residents refer to their urban neighbors who’ve arrived from their own rural regions as tongxiang—literally “homies.” At least 40 million peasants join these urban enclaves across China each year, though a good number—perhaps half—end up returning to their rural village, out of hardship, desperation, or personal taste. Those who stay tend to be deeply determined.
To an outsider, Liu Gong Li is a fetid slum. The old pathway into the valley is now a busy street overhung with a shambles of thrown-together houses, its dirt lane lined with phone shops, butchers, huge steaming woks full of pungent peppers at streetside eateries, merchants hawking clothes, tools, fast-spinning bobbins of thread, a cacophony of commerce spiraling away for two kilometers into dizzying back pathways and snaking staircases whose ungrounded perspectives resemble an upturned Escher engraving. Electrical and cable television lines fill the air; raw sewage spills from the concrete, runs down the sides of buildings, cascades along open gutters into a terrible stinking river beneath the concrete bridges at the foot of the valley. Garbage and waste are seemingly everywhere, accumulating in a small mountain behind the houses. A chaos of vehicles with two, three, and four wheels clots every lane. There is no space without people, without activity, and none to be seen with greenery. It might seem, from this vantage, that this is a hellish refuge for the destitute, a last-ditch landing pad for the failed outcasts of an enormous nation—a place for those on the way downward.
The true nature of places like Liu Gong Li becomes evident when you walk off the main lane into the rough dirt side streets that descend into the valley. Behind each window, each crude opening in the concrete, is a clatter of activity. On the crest of the valley, near the place where Mr. Xu made his big decision in 1995, you are drawn to a noisy cinder-block rectangle, jammed into a steep corner, exuding a pleasant cedar scent. It is the shop-cum-home of 39-year-old Wang Jian and his family. Four years before, Mr. Wang moved here from the village of Nan Chung, 80 kilometers away, with the money he had saved from two years of carpentry work, a total of 700 renminbi ($102).† He rented a tiny room, accumulated some scrap wood and iron and began building, by hand, traditional Chinese wooden bathtubs, which have become popular with the new middle class. These took two days to make, and he sold them for a profit of R50 ($7.30) each. After a year, he had earned enough to get power tools and a bigger shop. He brought over his wife, his son, his son’s wife, and their infant grandson. They all sleep, cook, wash, and eat in a windowless area in the back, behind a plastic curtain, in a space that is even more exposed and cramped than the dirt-floor hut they endured in the village.
But there is no talk of returning: This, filth and all, is the better life. “Here, you can turn your grandchildren into successful people if you find the right way to make a living—in the village you can only live,” says Mr. Wang, in boisterous Sichuan dialect, as he bends an iron strap around a tub. “I’d say about a fifth of the people who’ve left my village have ended up starting their own businesses. And almost everybody has left the village—there are just old people left. It has become a hollow village.”
Mr.