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By Root 1570 0

they moved across the road into a 10-story apartment building, which was constructed by Mr. Xian, 46, and his crew. It’s a rudimentary structure of unpainted red bricks with a raw-concrete staircase running up the center, but the Xian family have turned their apartment’s spacious interior into something palatial: attractively tiled floors with big swathes of empty space, bright wallpaper, modernist chandeliers, a big orange sectional sofa, a large plasma TV and surround-sound system. Mr. Xian, a heavyset man with a balding pate and a permanent smile, spends his spare hours on shopping trips downtown or lengthy, smoke-filled, mah-jong games with his old village friends, a truly middle-class lifestyle, backed by a genuine middle-class income, that belies the six years he spent here, not long ago, exposed to the elements, with no money or possessions.

He came from the village of Shi Long, more than 100 kilometers away, in 1992, shortly after China’s economy liberalized and the government began tolerating some peasant mobility. It was a move of desperation, from a farm where six of them slept in a tiny dirt-floor straw hut. Buildings were beginning to rise in Chongqing, replacing the ancient wood-gable houses with crude high-rises, and there was a demand for construction labor. He had only his hands, his wits, and his wife. She cooked for construction crews, and he worked, at first for 50 to 75 cents a day, plus meals of rice, which contained pork every five days, and the right to sleep on the site. They spent their nights wrapped in sheets on the foundations of buildings, joining hundreds of thousands of other homeless workers in the city.

They sent all of their income back to Shi Long and went years without seeing their daughter. They joined China’s “floating population” of between 150 million and 200 million people. Under the country’s rigid household-registration (hukou) system, people living in the city but holding village registration papers are not entitled to urban housing, welfare, medical care or access to schooling for their children in the city. After reforms to the hukou system at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it became possible for migrants to apply for urban hukou—but this is, in practice, virtually impossible and means giving up their village homes. Very few peasants are able to do this in the first generation, because China’s primary-education, child-care, welfare, and unemployment-insurance systems are not even remotely sufficient to support the precarious life of a new city-dweller. So as many as a sixth of the Chinese population are neither villagers nor official urbanites.

Xian Guang Quan was determined to break into genuine urban life. In 1998, he organized 20 of his fellow village workers into a building crew and began operating as a company. They weren’t registered or accredited to national standards, which would have required an urban hukou. The money became good, reaching the comfortable middle-class level of $15,000 a year and up to $30,000 in good years. Despite their financial security, Mr. Xian and his wife kept living in a tiny concrete hut they had bought in Liu Gong Li. “We could have lived in a better place when we first made our fortune in the late ’90s, but we didn’t want to take that risk,” he told me. “First we had to put our daughter through school, set up our elders in the village with proper brick houses—we needed large amounts of money for future security in savings.”

This need for poor village migrants to sacrifice much of their earnings to health, education, and emergency savings is exactly what has kept thousands of Liu Gong Li residents like Mrs. Wang trapped in an uncomfortable world that is neither urban nor rural, isolating them from their own children, preventing them from becoming full members of the country’s economy. To mutual disadvantage, the Chinese state barely touches their lives. Mr. Xian broke through that barrier by hatching a plan. He gathered 14 of his most successful construction-worker friends, and they each pooled $15,000 to build three 10-story