Introduction: By the Millions -- Prologue: Wishful Thinking -- Floating City of Peasants: City Builders -- Embroidered Insoles: Those Who Stay Behind -- Tiny plots of Land: Poverty -- Garbage for a living: Garbagemen -- Halfhearted Welcome: Rules -- Purchased Innocence: Offering Their Bodies -- Cost of Rain: Corruption -- Roses Wrapped in Plastic: Flower Peddlers -- Doctors and Soldiers: Education -- Trust to the Threshold: Caregivers -- Affair of the Cut-off Tongue: Justice -- Always a Peasant: Substitute Sowers -- Epilogue: Fear and the Peasant Migration.

In A Floating City of Peasants, Floris-Jan van Luyn - who spent six years living in and reporting from China - relates the remarkable tales of migrant workers who have helped fuel the explosive growth of the People's Republic. In a series of a dozen intimate portraits illuminated by wide-ranging reporting, we meet Wang Hong, a prostitute who has become a mami (a female pimp) in order to make enough money to send her son to agricultural college in Chengdu; Chunming, who stole money from his parents to pay for the long trip to Beijing and found work on a garbage dump; Lusong, who campaigned for a village school and against corrupt government employees and as a result was tortured almost to death; and others with equally gripping stories.