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‘The world’s factory floor,” an American resident of China announced, pointing out the car window to a vast industrial landscape in south China. Between Shenzhen and Guangdong, here are made the routine goods of the modern economy. Here pour the children of China’s poorer peasants. The dormitories may be crowded, the air filthy, the water unsafe, but the money is good. A capable worker can earn $1 an hour at a factory bench or on the construction site, maybe three times as much as can be gained from peasant labor on China’s farms.
But there remain still maybe 700 million people on those farms. They are poorer than city people. They are taxed more heavily. They are more vulnerable to the whims of local power-holders. Their environment is just as polluted in its way as the urban environment, but without the schools and hospitals available to urban Chinese. The thrilling new world of television, telephone and Internet is closed to them.
Nor is it easy for them to move. The Chinese government regulates the right of urban residency. Only legal city residents may use city schools, hospitals or other facilities. These rules are fiercely enforced by budget-conscious local governments. A peasant who moves to the city without permission enters a much harsher world than a Mexican national who illegally migrates to the United States.
People who study these things believe that Chinese agriculture made rapid progress in the 1970s and 1980s, but that it has now stalled. While city-dwellers earn maybe twice as much as they did a decade ago, farmers earn about the same. The Chinese have bumped against the limits of what peasants can achieve working small farms with their bare hands.
Consider China’s most important livestock industry: pork. Back in 1980, before economic takeoff, the average Chinese pig weighed 71 kg. at slaughter. Thirty years later, the average pig is not much bigger, only 75 kg. By comparison, Danish pigs, the world’s quality leaders, typically weigh 90 kg. at slaughter. Why can’t China raise bigger pigs? Heavier pigs have to be housed in sturdier barns, moved over stronger planks and trucked in bigger vehicles. Bigger pigs have to be fed longer, their turnaround time is slower. Chinese farmers will not or cannot make the required investment. Instead, they are trying to meet consumer demand by raising more pigs: about 500 million today up from 300 million in 1980. Multiplying the number of pigs demands more labor. Farmers earn more money, but not more money per hour.
To raise rural living standards higher, Chinese agriculture will have to mechanize and modernize, substituting machines for people and merging little plots into larger fields.
Think of what happened to southern sharecroppers between 1900 and 1950. Now multiply by about 70 times as many people. That’s China’s next revolution. If China’s urban economy continues to grow at 9%, 10% and 11% a year, it can maybe employ those displaced rural people. But what if the migration from countryside to city accelerates? What if the rate of urban growth slows?
Visitors to China spend most of their time in the cities. We talk to educated people unhappy about the regime’s censorship of Facebook and YouTube. We worry about pollution of the air and water. But we never meet anybody who is angry. We never meet anybody angry enough to do violence. Yet China has never had any shortage of such people: Angry peasants brought down imperial China in a series of rural uprisings stretching from the 1850s to the 1950s. And if growth here ever falters, there will be many more angry people again.
Brutal Communist repression kept the Chinese countryside quiet in the 30 years after 1950. Zooming prosperity has quieted the countryside since 1980. But the repression has subsided — and the growth of prosperity in the countryside may be faltering. What then? Will rural discontent spark China’s next revolution?
Originally posted in the National Post.
dendup // Apr 24, 2010 at 6:30 pm
The Chimerica (China/America) economy worked for both partners through the 1990’s as China found in the US the perfect partner for globilization, and the US found the banker it needed to give us our nation equity loans we needed to buy our big ass screen TVs.
China pursued globilzation only after a long power struggle. Durng that power struggle, protests and revolts increased in rural China and subsided when the national leadership was unified. The “cracks at the top, chasm at the bottom” phenonomen expessed itself when the leadership was divided and was unable to repress revolt with its customary ruthlessness.
China is again at a point of transition. It needs both to contiue this growth and adjust to the changes in its society. In particular, in the rural areas it need to develop a legal system the people perceive as both fair and not corrupt.
An improtant question is: Will any of the ruling elite try to use this time of transition to try to increase their power? This knd of instability is a necessary component for widespread unrest.
Go Dog Go! // Apr 24, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Having just returned from Shanghai (and surrounding countryside) this week, I think this is a pretty solid position. China’s class war has begun and the people on the losing end are seriously p/o’d. The stunning disparity between those who purchase Ferraris (at a cost of well over $500k US) and those in indentured servitude is astonishing. If anyone thinks those 700 million are just happy to be working, you’re wrong. They see the disparity every day and it makes them angry.
But what’s interesting is that the same thing is happening right here at home. The increasing concentration of wealth in this country is at an all-time high, creating a disparity well beyond even the feudal system of the dark ages. With a fast-declining middle class, and a burgeoning poor looking up at the fraction of our population controlling over 80% of the wealth, revolution could happen here too.
It’d be foolish not to recognize that glaring similarity.
mlloyd // Apr 24, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Poli Sci 101 question (not being obnoxious, it’s something I should know but don’t): is there such a thing as a rural revolt in a modern or modernizing state? Can it ever work? Chiapas springs to mind, but as serious as that was, it was limited in region and effect.
I’ve been reading about the prospect ofa revolt among the rural poor and unemployed in China for about a decade. Could it be that they are too disconnected, and too monitored, to change much? Or have things been worsening all along?
Thanks for all your thoughtful reporting from China. Lots of good stuff here lately.
sinz54 // Apr 24, 2010 at 9:22 pm
mlloyd: is there such a thing as a rural revolt in a modern or modernizing state? Can it ever work?
One could argue that the secession of the Southern states in the U.S. in 1861 was an example of such a rural revolt. It represented the last gasp of agrarian feudalism.
And no, it didn’t work.
Even though they had fine military commanders (Lee, Jackson) and fought valiantly.
nhthinker // Apr 25, 2010 at 8:32 am
In some ways it parallels the red precinct, blue precinct contention of the US.
In the US, the Constitution was set up intentionally by the founders to give the red precinct a slight advantage. They did this because they knew that unchecked the populous states would abuse their power over states that were more rural.
The more likely scenario is that China will produce a city based disaffected affluent underground that will clandestinely support the rights of the country-side dwellers. Like the Israelis that will go out and video tape settlers beating Palestinians, these Chinese will find ways around the media control of the Chinese government. It may take 50 years, but the rising affluence of the Chinese will be the grease for more independent thought.
ottovbvs // Apr 25, 2010 at 11:03 am
….Quite possibly but this is as unlikely to disturb the fundamental course of the Chinese trajectory as the campaign for free silver in the late 19th century which was essentially a rural revolt. China is experiencing it’s economic take off rather as the US experienced it’s own in the period 1875-1925. In a society as huge and complex there are going to be upheavals as the pursuit of economic freedom brings a desire for more political freedom. At the moment the Chinese political class seem to established a rough bargain to extend ever more economic freedom whilst denying extensive political rights and as long as living standards are rising most Chinese seem happy about it. This situation therefore, seems likely to persist for some time since even the apparently monolithic communist govt can’t be totally oblivious to popular opinion and indeed actually show some sensitivity to it as they are constantly adjusting course in large and small ways to accomodate social or economic unrest. Implicit in this piece by David is the hope that domestic upheaval will in some way change or weaken China to the advantage of the US……it doesn’t seem very likely to me.
otherlisa // Apr 25, 2010 at 6:18 pm
What’s misguided about this post is the seeming assumption that the countryside has been quiet in the last few decades. By the Chinese government’s own reckoning, there were something like 90,000 “mass incidents” — protests — last year, and a good share of those occurred in rural areas, prompted by land seizures, pollution, etc.