Abstract: China has achieved unprecedented economic growth since its economic reform and opening-up policy in 1978. The concept “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” pronounced by Deng Xiaoping has prompted the country’s transition from a planned economy to a mixed economy. By and large, the “success” of China’s economic reform has been welcomed, and praised—deepening integration with the global economy, launching China on the road to modernization, and lifting millions out of poverty. However, China’s experience of rapid modernization is achieved at a cost—one that disproportionately affects the rural population. This article examines the uneven nature of China’s modernization efforts, a dichotomy between the centres, and the peripheries. The desertion of the countryside, development of large-scale infrastructure projects, and marginalization of migrant workers have aggravated the divide between the rich and the poor rather than their convergence through development. The social ills resulting from China’s ambitious economic growth are crucial for it to reinterpret the notion of “success,” and adopt a modernization framework that is both sustainable, and inclusive.
Keywords: China, development, rural, urban, social conditions
Old Huang, who resides in the abandoned Qinghe County, finished his interview with a request, “Tell them that we need a road.”[1] Over a span of just 40 years, the Chinese government has successfully turned China into an economic powerhouse. China has enjoyed explosive yet unequal economic growth. Urbanization presents cities as engines for growth and locus for modernization, thereby being of vital importance to China’s economic development strategy. To modernize the nation-state, the government has actively transformed agrarian societies into industrial economies. China’s rapid modernization efforts have generated an immense amount of wealth, and just as many regional disparities. Old Huang’s request contradicts the state’s desire to transform the rural society. The desertion of the countryside, development of large-scale infrastructure projects, and marginalization of migrant workers are indicators of China’s haphazard urbanization. Instead of characterizing the countryside as the periphery to modernity and an antithesis to progress, China should reevaluate its aggressive urban policies to work towards modernization schemes that are both sustainable and inclusive.
As China accelerates its urbanization process, a significant portion of the working-age population in rural China has moved out to pursue economic opportunities in urban areas. Rural migrant workers would only return to their hometowns during holidays, rendering villages obsolete. Miriam Driessen has attributed the widespread out-migration and the subsequent hollowing of rural settlement to the emergence of “void village.”[2] The rationale behind the outward movement of settlements comes down to the connotations attached to rural and urban regions. Rural is often associated with a lack of development or backwardness, while urban is the equivalent of modernity or progress. Driessen identified the changing patterns of migration in Qinghe County in Hebei, China. The first generation of migrants left in the 1990s to escape poverty, whereas the second generation moved out in the hopes of attaining greater wealth, and integrating themselves into the modern world starting in the 2000s.[3] As younger generations are increasingly drawn to the seemingly affluent lifestyle in urban centres, rural villages are perilously depopulated. The widespread belief that peasants and rural residents are the pitfalls of modernization has had governments “eager to find urban solutions to rural problems.”[4] Local governments are unwilling to invest in the near-empty villages, and instead paint resettlement as a promising way to achieve greater personal well-being and life satisfaction. However, the top-down approach to poverty alleviation is merely a band-aid solution to China’s uneven spatial development. Instead of advancing rural development and securing sustainable livelihoods for relocated households, China has dismissed the idea of a complementary countryside to the city, leaving rural residents in limbo.
On a similar note, another measure implemented to reduce poverty as well as rural and urban disparity, both of which are counter-productive, is development-forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR). As of 2012, approximately 70 million people have been forcibly displaced because of development projects. Moreover, the demand for urban environments has increased due to the growing size of the urban population. As a result, about 4 million hectares of rural land have been transformed into cities and towns over the past 20 years.[5] However, it is ironic that infrastructure development projects intended to provide essential social goods and services to societies, as well as the promising return of urbanization have been far from positive. DFDR often bears the “the paradox of impoverishment,”[6] whereby development has exposed individuals to risk of greater poverty. The prospects for economic growth in the future has nevertheless caused the Chinese government to compromise the livelihoods of displaced persons in the present.
The process of urbanization has engendered an influx of migrant workers to urban areas, but the realities of cities are far less appealing than portrayed. Rural migrant workers represent an irreplaceable aspect of China’s economic miracle, but desspite their contributions, they often find themselves in vulnerable positions in the larger scheme of urban development due to the hukou, or household registration system. Introduced in the 1950s, China’s hukou is analogous to that of a system of social stratification where the population is bifurcated into an “agricultural” or “non-agricultural” hukou; thereby drawing the line between “rural” and “urban” residents. Individuals with an urban hukou are perceived to have a higher social status than those who possess a rural hukou, and privileged to welfare entitlements that may otherwise be unavailable to rural residents.[7] A form of social control for China’s internal migration, the hukou nonetheless exploits the labour of migrant workers to generate economic growth while keeping welfare costs to a minimum. Although the long hours, low wages, poor working conditions, and lack of access to welfare programs have pressured the state to reform the hukou system, there has not been substantial improvements, and migrant workers are still subjected to discriminatory treatment in cities.[8] Especially amid the coronavirus pandemic, China’s migrant worker population bore the brunt of the two-month lockdown. Many migrant workers who have travelled back to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year are unable to return to the cities under China’s stringent lockdown measures. For those who have returned to the cities from the countryside, they were greeted by the widespread shutdown of factories, service industries, and most obnoxious of all, discrimination. Local officials have discouraged employers from recruiting rural migrants by painting them as potential carriers of the virus.[9] Migrant workers are constantly reminded of their inferior status and that they are outsiders who will never truly belong. The migrant labour force has always lived on the margins of society, but the travel restrictions, loss of working hours, access to affordable care have exacerbated their challenges in times of uncertainty.
The inverse consequences of China’s modernization through urbanization is consistent with the central argument in James Scott’s Seeing Like A State (1998). Scott argues that states have tend to simplify the reality of societies to facilitate administration by implementing utopian schemes which have often failed due to the ignorance of local, practical knowledge.[10] Scott’s first case study of scientific forestry in Germany illustrates the state’s attempt to manipulate nature for extractive purposes. Trees planted in linear alleys survived during the first year following planting, but subsequent trees were dying at an astonishing rate. The reason being, the rows of trees arranged in linear patterns have caused major disruptions to the nutrient cycles hence, their decline.[11] Parallels can be drawn between Scott’s application of high modernism to trees and China’s urban biased land development. Viewing rural landscapes, communities, and economies as minuscule drivers of economic growth, China boosts economic strength through rapid urbanization. Urbanization, based on a one-size-fits-all philosophy, has denied the differences, and complexities of local communities. It subsequently caused profound changes to the rural lifestyles and forced rural populations to adopt an urban, more modern way of life.
China’s urban policy has failed to keep pace with its urban transition. With villages denuded of younger generations, and governments reluctant to pursue rural development, those who are left behind are unable to escape the cycle of poverty. The number of individuals being uprooted from homes and off their homelands in China because of development is on the rise. Commercial and residential developments have made affected households worse off by forced resettlement, and inadequate restoration of their livelihoods. The working-age population in rural communities has looked to cities for upward mobility, but the hukou system remains an enduring political-economic institution that notoriously treats migrant workers as second-class citizens, depriving them of their rights to enjoy the same benefits as their urban counterparts. Rural residents in agrarian societies, depicted as the antithesis to modernization, are particularly vulnerable to urban developments, and often have to pay the dire price of urbanization. China can only fulfill its dream of continuous growth, and betterment once it reaches the hardest to reach.
Christal Cheng is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, pursuing a Specialist in International Relations, Minors in Contemporary Asian Studies, and Political Science.
Bibliography
Driessen, Miriam. “Rural Voids.” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (January 2018): 61-84.
Hernández, Javier C. “Coronavirus Lockdowns Torment an Army of Poor Migrant Workers in China.” New York Times, February 23, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/business/economy/coronavirus-china-migrant-workers.html.
Jacka, Tamara, Andrew B. Kipnis and Sally Sargeson. Contemporary China: Society and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Wilmsen, Brooke and Michael Webber. “Displacement and resettlement as a mode of capitalist transformation.” In Global Implications of Development, Disasters and Climate Change: Responses to Displacement from Asia Pacific, edited by Susanna Price and Jane Singer, 59-73. New York: Routledge, 2016.
[1] Miriam Driessen, “Rural Voids,” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (January 2018): 80.
[2] Miriam Driessen, 63.
[3] Miriam Driessen, “Rural Voids,” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (January 2018): 62, 65.
[4] Miriam Driessen, 71.
[5] Brooke Wilmsen and Michael Webber, “Displacement and resettlement as a mode of capitalist transformation,” in Global Implications of Development, Disasters and Climate Change: Responses to Displacement from Asia Pacific, eds. Susanna Price and Jane Singer (New York: Routledge, 2016), 59, 61.
[6] Brooke Wilmsen and Michael Webber, 62.
[7] Tamara Jacka, Andrew B. Kipnis and Sally Sargeson, Contemporary China: Society and Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 66-7.
[8] Tamara Jacka, Andrew B. Kipnis and Sally Sargeson, 74-6.
[9] Javier C. Hernández, “Coronavirus Lockdowns Torment An Army of Poor Migrant Workers in China,” New York Times, February 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/business/economy/coronavirus-china-migrant-workers.html.
[10] James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): 4-6.
[11] James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): 18, 20.
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