English to Russian Art/Literary Idioms / Maxims / Sayings

Many of the locals have moved out of their traditional single story homes into newly built three and four storey buildings where the ground floor is reserved as a scrap-sorting workshop. Now they employ migrant workers from poor parts of Sichuan, Anhui, Hunan and other inland provinces to risk their health in this toxic business.

For the migrants, this is as close as they’ll come to ***bridging the digital divide.***
Xiao Li has never sat at a computer, logged on to the internet, used a printer or a photocopier but he has spent the last six years processing high tech equipment from around the world. He makes around US$ 5 per day melting lead solder off circuit boards and says that life is better here than in his remote farming village in the mountains of Sichuan. “If I had stayed there I’d be farming one mu (one sixteenth of a hectare) of land.
The great escape from rural poverty that is part of China’s wrenching economic transformation is never far away. “It’s just like sorting peanuts, corn and rice,” says 18 year old Chen when asked how he grades the different types of plastic scraps he is tossing into wicker baskets. “You just know the difference.”