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Kaxton Siu, The Accidental Capitalist: A People's Story of the New China, Community Development Journal, Volume 48, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 344–346, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bst012
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In 2007, Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian-born professor living in the United States, travelled to Shenzhen (an industrial city in South China) to live among the growing population of internal migrants working in the country's sprawling factories. Between 2007 and 2009, Yaghmaian paid daily visits to a local village, the Li Family Village, and collected life stories of migrants in the city. The Accidental Capitalist is a collection of these life stories. It tells a narrative of China's economic and social transformation through personal biographies of migrants. Through the author's jargon-free journalistic writing style, this book gears towards a wide audience rather than an academic audience. However, the book is impressive and surprises its readers. It reaches beyond its title and addresses more far-reaching issues for China's future development that cannot be overlooked by academics.
The book is divided into four parts. It starts out in the ‘Introduction’ by addressing the importance of internal migration in Chinese history and introduces the subject of the book: China's internal migrants. In the first part of the book, the author tells stories of migrants who settled permanently in the Li Family Village. Apart from telling stories of two migrant families, the author devotes a long section to an old peasant migrant's biography and allows readers to see important historical events in modern China (the Civil War, the Great Famine, and the Great Leap Forward) from a peasant's perspective. In the second part, the author shifts to tell stories about the dreams and aspirations of young migrant women. Through telling stories of middle-aged and young women workers, Yaghmaian compares the situations confronted and aspirations possessed by women workers of different ages. While middle-aged women migrants have to leave behind their children in the countryside and make a living in cities, young women migrants escape from the countryside to explore the urban way of life. In the third and fourth parts, the author changes to talk about another type of migrant – the capitalists. Through telling two capitalists' stories, Yaghmaian uncovers many social problems behind the successes of the capitalists and China's market-oriented reforms: corruption, child labour, exploitation, violations in occupational health and safety, and so on.