A Preface to the Other Half: From Handshake Buildings to High-Rise Dreams (Part 4, Pages 22-25)

If invisibility is the working class’s occupational hazard, misrepresentation is its shadow. It follows that in writing the eleven portraits, my central task is not to represent my interviewees; it is to channel their voices, which represent themselves.

The stories told by the media or the market are often of reductionist, homogenous archetypes: the migrant as the oppressed, the migrant as the empowered; the migrant as the illiterate, the migrant as the sophisticated; the migrant as the anonymous labor, the migrant as the heroic sacrificer; the migrant as the hopeless proletariat subjugated by and surrendered to state capitalism, the migrant as the role model of distinction that grows out of diligence and resilience without grievance or despondency. Whether they take on positive or negative hues, these simplifications of lives into patterns, of individuals into contours, is itself a political act against freedom because it defines what the public sees, thereby disciplining what is normal to expect and legitimate to demand. The eleven portraits in this book complicate those simplifications. A seamstress is also a parent strategist in saving for her child’s tuition. A driver builds a permanent sense of belonging in his itinerancy. A social worker reflects on the joy and stress brought by her work. Their stories assert subjectivity against erasure. They remind us that migrants are not units of production on supply-demand graphs, but persons who negotiate terms of their life, who carve out dreams of their futures. This insistence is itself a practice in anti-oppression. It opposes narratives that flatten human experience into pity or myth.

In revaluing subjectivity, this book also reflects on agency. When scholars write about agency they often mean strikes, legal claims, or the right to vote. Could there exist an agency of another type? For migrant workers, their agency manifests in a teenager’s decision to migrate, in a father’s determination to bring their children from hometown to Shenzhen, in a retired woman’s drive to take on three temporary jobs at once, in an urban village’s daring to manage collective properties through establishing joint-stock companies. Be it insubstantial or monumental, they are all attempts to assert belonging and claim a better life. Agency is not only protest; it is claim-making and decision-making at the ground level. This book uncovers agency of this type in its full complexity. If it errs, it will be when I fail to render fully the richness and autonomy of those I interviewed, as my aim is always to foreground their voices and choices, not to write from a distance.

If this book is an endeavor to assert self-representation against misrepresentation, its readers are witnesses of what is represented. In inviting you to perform this act of witnessing, I aim to inform the way we approach policy and recognition.

If we are to speak of social justice (I mean justice not as a rhetorical device but as measurable progress in the way burdens and benefits, responsibilities and rights, are distributed and redistributed), the eleven portraits suggest a few viable entry points. How could we redesign publicly funded services like healthcare and schooling to base access on actual residency, not Hukou registration? How could we revalue labor in a globalized world to close the gap between wages and the value extracted? How could we plan urban-renewal projects so that renovation does not become a euphemistic synonym for demolition and displacement? There is moral urgency to these policy questions because they affect, in one way or another, the other half of modern China, if not more than half. Shenzhen’s recent moves to restrain wholesale demolition-reconstruction in favor of infrastructure and safety renovation are steps toward acknowledging and preserving the social utility of “blighted” areas like urban villages, a recognition that owes much to migrant workers’ claims made over decades. Still, policy remains contingent, and must be continuously informed by lived realities that this book glimpses.