Oakland, CA—A book chronicling the largest migration and uplifting of the poor out of poverty in history has received two prestigious book awards.

The book, China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation, was published in 2017 by the Oakland-based Independent Institute and written by its Research Fellow Bradley M. Gardner, a former East Asia correspondent for The Economist who has since become a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State.

The awards come from two leading organizations in the independent book-publishing industry:

• Independent Publisher awarded China’s Great Migration an IPPY Gold Medal in its Current Events I (Political/Economic/Foreign Affairs) category.
  
  
• Independent Book Publishers Association gave China’s Great Migration top honors with its esteemed Benjamin Franklin Award in the Political/Current Events category.

“That is the best winning combination we have ever had by one of our books,” said David Theroux, Founder and President of the Independent Institute, which has received scores of awards for its book program since its founding in 1986.

Like other books from the Independent Institute’s Center on Global Prosperity, China’s Great Migration shows how people interacting voluntarily through their own initiative and market-based enterprises—rather than through bureaucratic central planning—are the engines of wealth creation and economic progress.

Over the course of three decades, the book explains, 260 million people left China’s countryside in search of urban jobs. From 1981 to 2011, the resulting urbanization helped pull 753 million Chinese out of poverty. It’s estimated that more than 20 percent of China’s GDP growth has come directly from the free transfer of workers from agriculture to industry.

China’s Great Migration reinforces a growing body of academic research showing that migration barriers are the largest obstacles to prosperity in the global economy, and that their impacts are felt mostly by the poor. The book’s vital lesson is that economic migrants are not a burden to be demonized, but a powerful resource that raises living standards for both newcomers and non-migrants.

The Independent Institute is a non-profit, research and educational organization that promotes the power of independent thinking to boldly advance peaceful, prosperous, and free societies grounded in a commitment to human worth and dignity. For media inquiries, contact Communications Manager Rob Ade: [email protected]; (510) 632-1366, ext. 114.

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