A rare glimpse of just how shocking Chinese poverty can be

Isabel HiltonMon, May 11, 2026 at 8:00 AM UTC

0

Xiao Hai’s life was ruled by the demands of the production line. Pictured: Workers in a giant textile factory in Guangzhou, June 2024 - Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images

Karl Marx died in London in 1883, more than three decades before the Russian Revolution. He never got to see what happened when a sovereign state tried to implement his ideas on socialism, and we will never know what he might have thought of it. He certainly would have been intrigued, and perhaps bewildered, by the People’s Republic of China, today’s longest-lasting, self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist state, a workers’ paradise where, at the end of a long economic boom, income inequality is greater than that of the USA.

For the most part, in China as in America, national attention has been drawn to the successful – be they charismatic entrepreneurs such as the Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma, movie stars or political leaders who serve as inspiration to the rest. But in more recent times, as economic growth has slowed and faith in a rising tide lifting all boats has faltered, focus has begun to shift to those at the bottom of the heap: people condemned to a life of unremitting grind with no end – or even modest progress – in sight.

That is the life that Xiao Hai describes in Adrift in the South, his autobiographical account of coming of age in Deng Xiaoping’s China. The author was born in Nanhuzhuang village in Henan province – a province notable even in China for having suffered more than its share of misfortune, from a catastrophic cascade-dam collapse in 1975 to a blood-selling scandal that spread Aids through its impoverished villages in the 1990s.

Children in Shenzhen wave at a poster of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping - Reuters/Bobby Yip

Xiao Hai was born in 1987, the ninth year of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, and China was embarking on a radical new path. For the author’s immediate family, however, life was hard. They had once been prosperous farmers, so when Mao Zedong’s revolution came, they were dispossessed and persecuted for being landlords, a stain that lingered through several generations. His father was not allowed to go to school, and by the time Xiao Hai was born, the family was barely feeding itself.

Almost every family in the village had more than one child, but the government had imposed a one-child policy across China in 1980 and couples had to pay large fines for each extra child, further impoverishing already desperate families. (Forced abortion and the preference for sons left 30 million surplus males in the population: the author is one of them.) Like many over-the-quota children, the author was hidden – in his case in the horse shed – to avoid discovery, then handed over, dirty and malnourished, to a relative who took care of him.

Advertisement

As a child, writer Xiao Hai was hidden in a horse shed as his parents attempted to avoid paying over-the-quota fines - Ma Junyan

As a child in rural poverty, Xiao Hai developed a passion for books and poetry. When he was 15, the family could only afford schooling for one child, and so he was sent 150 miles away to a city cousin to learn how to be a barber. The hopes of his entire family rested on his shoulders and the possibility that, if he worked hard, they might finally escape their near destitution.

Thus began a life of constant movement from one dead-end job to the next, living in crowded dormitories, working at least 12-hour shifts and six-day weeks for wages that barely covered expenses. Too young to work in the barbershop, he paid an agency to take him to Shenzhen, a booming new town just over the border from Hong Kong, where he found work in a garment factory. At every turn, it seemed, someone was trying to prey on him: the “sewing school” that barely taught basic skills but charged an exorbitant fee; the fake public bus driver whose crew tried to extort money from all its migrant passengers by threatening to leave them stranded; the police who demanded a bribe from him, under threat of forced deportation.

Xiao Hai moved from factory to factory, town to town. In one factory he was sewing the shirts of the English national football team, in another, t-shirts that he later saw on sale for astonishingly elevated prices. Apart from one brief romance, it was a lonely existence. His parents were eager for him to marry, but successive matchmakers failed to deliver. His life was ruled by the demands of the production line and the need to eat and sleep.

It was not until Xiao Hai began to read poetry again, and eventually to write, scribbling on scraps of paper while he worked, that he began to feel that life was worth living. An online connection with a musician he admired led him to Beijing, and a cultural centre run by and for migrant workers like him. He even found a job there, managing a second-hand clothing store while his literary talent blossomed in the writing classes the centre provided.

His story has resonated in China at a moment when many Chinese are losing faith in a system that imposes a brutal work rhythm for little reward. Those at the bottom of the heap, the men and women who built China’s economic “miracle” with their labour but were never rewarded, are telling their stories – ones that reveal a China which foreigners rarely see.

★★★★☆

Adrift in the South is published by Granta Magazine Editions at £12.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Money”