China: A Million Steps Ahead

In the past decade, more than 100 million people have moved from China’s vast hinterlands to work in the nation’s booming, industrialized eastern and southern cities. They come seeking a better life for themselves and for the families they leave behind in the countryside. They are the motor driving China’s economic “miracle.” China: A Million Steps Ahead chronicles the phenomenal migration, personalizing it through the story of a young woman from Central Mongolia named Bai. The TVE team members—including producers Carlos Jeronimo and Susana Jimenez, writer Vicenc Sanclemente, and director Juan-Antonio Sacaluga—document the enormous challenges Bai and the millions of other migrant workers face as they travel into an unknown future. While China itself grapples with contradictions implicit in a communist state’s embrace of dynamic economic development, workers by the tens of millions capitalize on opportunities afforded by that relentless economic growth. For illuminating and individualizing a little known aspect of the world’s most populous nation, a Peabody Award goes to China: A Million Steps Ahead.