The drivers don’t even need to honk.

As the boxy, well-worn Mitsubishi Delica vans arrive, the workers we’ve been interviewing hightail it to the curb of the sprawling, six-lane highway outside the Guiyang labor market. Doors slide open and brusque bosses pop their heads out, shouting day rates and specific jobs as men jockey to get in their vans.

A minute later, the vans are gone. Most of the workers remain, disappointed. They continue to mill about, but as the clock ticks, they grow increasingly worried about their ability to earn a wage that day.

Bayarmaa, a former herder from Inner Mongolia, fears she is losing her culture.

She recalls the Nadamu Festival, an annual Mongol tradition of community celebration. The festival was like Christmas in the West, with a large banquet for the community along with Mongolian traditional activities: dancing, horse-racing, and wrestling.

The festival was also an important part of the community identity. It served as a valuable opportunity to share practices and tips on farming or raising cattle with Mongols from nearby communities who would come to partake in the celebrations.

In Xuanwei, Yunnan, an elderly couple invites us into their living room. Wistfully, they show us the shrine in their home, dedicated to Chairman Mao. Those were better times, they say. Even though life was difficult, it was stable.

Ni Lar, 56, like her mother and grandmother, used to breed and sell cows and sheep in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. An ethnic Mongol, she is among the 55 ethnic groups clustered in autonomous regions that comprise 64 percent of China’s landmass but account for little of the country’s economic activity.

Old Peng, 67, has lived in the same 90-person section in the small village of Changjiao his entire life. With government investment focused on urban areas to support export-driven growth, this corner of Guizhou Province, like many rural areas of China, has been left in the dust.

Old Peng shares his small, mud-brick home with his wife, his 34-year-old son and daughter-in-law, and their 8-year-old son. The nearest town with a bank is an hour away by motorbike and four hours by foot.

Wang Jun, 27, is a migrant worker. He is among a floating population of 250 million strong with no legal status that has been the engine behind China’s economic boom.

Ten years ago, at the age of 17, Wang Jun packed a small bag, left his village in northeastern Hebei Province, and boarded a 40-hour train to bustling Kunming in China’s southwest. He left behind his parents and grandparents, all of whom worked as subsistence farmers on the family’s meager plot, and traveled to a big city.