Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [58]
The “hollow village,” as these rural enclaves of children and grandparents are known in China, has become a global phenomenon, as subsistence farming is forced to serve as a substitute for a proper social safety net. In Romania, hollow villages have become a national issue for related reasons. The millions of working-age peasants who have moved to the arrival cities of Italy and Spain to work have discovered school systems and social-service agencies that are closed to new arrivals (even from within the European Union) settling down or, in the case of Italy, a police and legal system that is actively hostile to arrival-city families. So Romanian villages consist of grandparents raising children with support from distant parents.
Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear, especially after the dramatic migration followed by return in the 2008 crisis, that China’s floating population creates true arrival cities, employing every strategy they can to become a permanent part of the city. As recently as 2002, only 7 percent of China’s rural–urban migrants were able to bring their families with them. This number is gradually increasing, as the more successful arrival cities allow villages to die out. Shuilin, the home of Dong Lin and Ming Lin and their grandparents, is moving quickly in this direction. “We’ve passed the stage of just sending migrant workers,” Pu Ze Shi, the retired village party official, tells me. “Now people are finding ways to leave completely.” In 2000, the population was 2,500; now it is barely 1,000, almost all of them over 50 or under 15. Of this, village elders tell me that perhaps 10 percent are genuine permanent residents; the rest are searching for ways to leave. He Su Xiou, the grandmother, tells me that she is ready to give up the home that her family has possessed for hundreds of years.
“If Jun can do well in the future, if he can get over his financial troubles, we would love to move to Chongqing permanently,” she says. “We’re very old, we can’t farm much longer, and I do not want my children to have to experience farming. If we could all move there, Jun will get to live with his children for the first time, and we very much want that. I know it will be bad for the village, but the village was never such a good place. We lived very badly there for a long time, and we owe it nothing. When we’re gone, I won’t ever come here again.”
THE VILLAGE WITHOUT A CITY
Dorli, Maharashtra, India
The power of urban arrival may have a disfiguring effect on the shape of peasant life, but that should not be taken to mean that the lack of an urban connection is a peaceful alternative. I witnessed this vividly in the sun-blasted center of India, where a village of dung-and-mud huts distinguishes itself from its identical neighbors with a sign painted boldly on the outer wall, visible to passing vehicles: “This village is up for sale, including houses, animals and farms.”
Like many visitors to Dorli, population 270, at first I took this Marathi lettering to be a gesture of protest or a rhetorical cry for attention, the sort of political statement that might not be out of place here on the outskirts of Wardha, formerly the seat of Gandhi’s Indian Independence Movement. I was led into a dung-floored hut whitewashed the cheery local light-blue color; inside its single room, a dozen village men, young and old, squatted