Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria [Book review]

This book examines migration between north and northeast China from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, making combined use of statistical, interview, and archival data. This migration was one of the great historical movements of population and arguably one of the first “modern” mass internal migrations in China. Many of the migrants went to work as contract laborers in newly established industrial enterprises. In some ways, this movement was a precursor of the current wave of internal migration in China. Nevertheless, this volume is one of the first on the subject to be published in English.