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village. State pensions in China are negligibly small, and private pensions don’t exist for most of the working class—Mr. Pu’s father, who is a Korean War veteran and a former Communist Party village official, receives only $14 a month, and his is larger than most. Unemployment insurance and welfare are effectively non-existent for the floating population; the urban program known as the Minimum Living Standard Guarantee Scheme is unavailable to the village-born. Some estimate that 500 million people may be without any form of social assistance.7 The village, and its subsistence crops, provide the closest thing to a social safety net for most arrival-city residents.

There is another, distinctly Chinese reason why families like the Pu clan are remaining on the farm. Agriculture is still officially communal. This has been only symbolically true since the reforms of the 1980s introduced the Household Production Responsibility System, in which farm families lease their land from the collectives and act as autonomous agricultural producers, able to consume, sell, or trade their produce as they wish. Nevertheless, the collective has the power to reallocate the land for best use. If the village committee decides that a family is no longer active on its farm, it can seize the land and deploy it more productively; if the collective decides to boost rural non-agricultural business—a good idea in principle—it will take land away from families who have moved to the city. In other words, families do not really own their farmland and cannot sell it to finance a full-scale move to the city. (Reforms in 2002 made this legally possible, but it remains very difficult in most villages.) And, conversely, the fear of having social-buffer land seized forces families to maintain a hold on the farm long after they have fully urbanized themselves.

At some point after 2004, the largest source of rural revenue in China ceased to be farm earnings and was replaced by remittances from the city;8 much of this pays for the maintenance of the village home, as the village is functioning as a de facto child-care facility and retirement home. This remittance cost is one of the main factors that prevents arrival-city residents from saving enough to buy a property. The economic crisis that began in 2008 demonstrated how dependent China’s arrival cities are on the village. In the early months of 2009, an estimated 20 million of China’s arrival-city workers (from a total population of perhaps 150 million) returned to the village, abandoning their city quarters. But by September of 2009, after the economy had improved, Beijing reported that 95 percent of these migrants had returned to the city.9 The village had functioned as an unemployment-insurance system, one whose price is the fracturing of families.

These millions of divided families have rendered the countryside incomprehensible. Although China’s commercial farms are now able to produce enough food for the entire country and for the government to stockpile enough grain and pork for all of China to survive a nationwide famine of several months’ duration, agriculture is nowhere close to the powerful export industry it could be, in large part because the land remains a fractured mess of non-commercial farms that serve social rather than nutritional or commercial needs. China now has about 200 million farm households with an average farm size of just over half a hectare.10 Remittances from urban areas, combined with increases in farm income, have lifted more than 400 million Chinese, almost all of them rural, out of absolute poverty. Nevertheless, about 99 percent of those families that are still in absolute poverty live in rural areas.

Thus, the Chinese ex-villager is caught in an endless paradox, in which the farm village and the arrival-city neighborhood support each other’s worst qualities, causing migrants, families, and entire communities to be trapped without a permanent and secure home. The reason why China has hundreds of millions of people floating rootlessly and inefficiently between arrival city