Wu Jiayao and Wu Jianfei are at opposite ends of China’s migrant miracle. One was there at the very beginning, and the other came on the scene only as the miracle began to fade. The lives of this father and daughter are like bookends to the economic transformation of China. What a difference a generation makes.

Jiayao, 28, has a car, a flat, two degrees, a white-collar job and a money-market fund — not to mention a husband, a baby and the coveted right to live as a permanent resident of the ultra-modern city of Shanghai.

Jianfei, 50, has a simple one-storey home surrounded by peanut fields and drying corn cobs. He lives in an ancestral compound, alongside his octogenarian mother, in the village of Qinghu, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province. It used to take a whole day to travel from Qinghu to Shanghai by boat; now it takes a couple of hours using a vast suspension bridge and multi-lane tunnel. What a difference three decades make.