“China’s Great Migration is an excellent book on how liberty is the key for Chinese economic development. The Chinese migration movement, 260 million strong, is the largest freedom movement in the world and the key for Chinese development. The book is also great in terms of comparative value. It will further be a good book for college students to use, and I will use it in the future.”

– Kate Xiao Zhou, Professor of Comparative Politics and Political Economy of China, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa; author, How the Farmers Changed China: The Power of the People and China's Long March to Freedom: Grassro

“Economic growth requires large migrations of workers from unproductive agriculture to more productive industrial and service jobs, and China is no exception. The size of that country and its very fast economic growth since the 1980s has necessitated and been supported by a vast internal migration of workers and their families. Bradley Gardner’s book China’s Great Migration documents this ‘great migration’ with plenty of examples of real-life experiences, explains its origins and how it . . . draws lessons both for China and the rest of the developing world. China’s Great Migration is timely and makes good reading at a time when political forces in the developed world are turning against freedom and its benefits.”

– Sir Christopher Pissarides, Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences; Regius Professor of Economics, London School of Economics

“By skillfully employing primary data and secondary sources in his book China’s Great Migration, Bradley Gardner sheds a bright light on China’s great liberal leap forward. It is a free-market story of how China removed the chains from human capital and how that facilitated an explosion of entrepreneurship and the greatest migration in world history—a migration from unproductive work and misery to productive private work and prosperity.”

– Steve H. Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics, Johns Hopkins University

“China’s Great Migration is a fascinating book. What the author Bradley Gardner calls ‘the great migration of China’ is an important engine and an integral part of the extraordinary Chinese market transformation. The whole story brings home the wisdom of the ancient Chinese dictum, ‘migration breeds vitality’ (???, ??? or Ren Nuo Huo, Shu Nuo Si). Moreover, as Gardner suggests, what has worked in China can work even better globally, if we change our entrenched views about international migration. An open, global, labor market can make the 21st century more prosperous and peaceful.”

– Ning Wang, Fellow, Coase Institute of Law & Economics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; author (with Nobel Laureate economist Ronald Coase), How China Became Capitalist

“Using the Chinese experience, Bradley Gardner beautifully demonstrates that it is less capital formation, tax reform or a strengthening of property rights (all good things) that has eliminated most of the world’s poverty, but more the free, unimpeded movement of people seeking better lives. China’s Great Migration makes a powerful case against heavy-handed government restrictions on migration.”

– Richard K. Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus, Ohio University; author (with Lowell E. Gallaway), Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America