Hundreds of millions of peasants have left rural China seeking work in the cities and industrial zones of coastal China. Millions more are poised to leave in the coming decades. The migration—probably the biggest of it’s kind in human history—has helped increase the global workforce by 50%, according to some economists, as China has entered the global economy. Since the global job pool did not increase in step, there are now more workers chasing the available jobs, putting downward pressure on wages everywhere. Changes on Chinese country-side are likely to intensify this problem and have have profound implications for workers around the world.
First, some historical context. The mass migration of people from the country-side to the city that is playing itself out in China today is part of the history of virtually all industrial societies. Sometimes the migrations have been the result of direct force, such as the enclosures of 18th and 19th century Europe, when peasants were forcibly driven off their land by big landowners. Sometimes the migrations have been the result of a shift to large scale capitalist agriculture and/or the introduction of new technologies. What ever the cause, changes on the land have meant a steady march to the city for generations of peasants and rural workers the world over for the past 200 hundred years. These migrations created the urban working classes which powered the industrial revolutions and the subsequent industrialization that transformed and revolutionized human society. US industry was built on the backs of migrants from the fields of the US, Europe and the world.
About 800 million people—two-thirds of China’s 1.3 billion population—still live in rural areas where living conditions are harsh.
Here is what the official People’s Daily On-line reports on the urban, rural gap:
The following are statistics about the gap between China's urban and rural areas.
Income: The average income of urban residents was 2.57 times that of rural residents in 1978, but the gap expanded to 3.22 times in 2005. In particular, the gap has widened markedly since 1997.
Education: The ratio of lecturer-level teachers in rural primary schools was 35.9 percent in 2004, 8.9 percentage points lower than that in urban primary schools.
Medical care: Eighty percent of medical resources are concentrated in cities. Only 22.5 percent of rural people are covered by rural cooperative medical care system.
Infrastructure: Half of villages do not have access to tap water. More than 60 percent of rural households do not have access to flush toilets. The houses of nearly 70 million rural residents need to be improved. Some 150 million rural households face problems in fuel supply. Six percent of villages are still beyond the reach of highways. Two percent of villages have no electricity supply. Six percent of villages do not have telephones.
Unemployment in the country-side is in double digits.
While hard living and a lack of jobs has pushed many off the land and into the cities, force has also been a factor. Corrupt local officials frequently conspire to cheat peasants out of their land. Under Chinese law peasants cannot own land, but they can hold long-term leases. Corrupt local officials are able to void leases and compensate peasants for the land at its value as agricultural land. These officials then lease the land based on its much higher commercial value, often making windfall profits in the transaction.
The land seizures have not just led to migration, they have also led to social unrest. Last year 87,000 protests—about 200 major events each day— many the result of land seizures, were reported by the government.
The crisis has focused the attention of the central government which is obviously nervous about the wide-spread unrest. Its legitimacy at stake, Beijing has launched a campaign to curb corrupt land seizures engineered by local officials. The Financial Times reports:
Wen Jiabao, China's premier has directly blamed local governments for a rise in "mass incidents" in the countryside, saying officials had provoked unrest through illegal land grabs and unfair compensation.
"On land issues, we must not make historic errors," said Mr. Wen, using an old-style political language which underlines the ruling communist party's concern about losing the political battle in the countryside.
Mr. Wen's comments were contained in a speech to a meeting of the party's central committee on December 29, but only released on Friday.
"Some local governments have taken over farmland illegally without giving reasonable compensation, and this has sparked 'mass incidents' in rural areas," he said.
Mr. Wen also expressed concern about the impact of the increasing loss of rural land to industry on China's grain production, an issue which is central to Beijing's policy of "food security.
In the seven years to 2004, China has said it lost 5 per cent of its arable land to industry, a loss which coincided with the country becoming a net food importer for the first time in decades….I
"In the long run, the contradiction between population growth and shrinking farmland, as well a shortage of water resources, will assert itself, and raising food production will become more and more difficult," he said.
Mr. Wen also acknowledged the problem of rural migrant workers who leave their villages to work in cities and large towns, and send their money home to their families.
As well as having to toil in poor conditions and without access to basic social services, many workers complain they are not paid the wages owing to them....
Another Financial Times report describes how the campaign is working in one village:
Wagging his finger like a stern headmaster, Zhang Dejiang glares at passers-by from posters plastered along the alleyways of Nanting village, warning local party bosses not to cross "three red lines" in handling land disputes.
Mr. Zhang, the party secretary of Guangdong, issued his province-wide "red lines" directive after a series of violent disputes pitting villagers against local governments, including one in which paramilitary units shot protesters.
But the residents of Nanting, who are refusing to vacate their village to make way for a new university complex without more compensation, take little encouragement from Mr. Zhang's order, issued in late December.
"Whatever Zhang Dejiang says, the local officials will not listen to him," said Guan Wolun, one of the protest leaders in the village that is nestled next to the bustling Pearl River, a few hours by boat from Hong Kong.”….
If Nanting is a microcosm of Mr. Zhang's challenges, he faces an uphill battle. Residents of villages nearby, already razed to make way for the university, have established a squatter's camp by the river, festooned with big-character posters attacking corrupt local officials.
And in Nanting itself, cynical villagers fret they will be left with neither a home nor a job once they are shifted for the university project. A woman pointed to the fate of an adjoining community. "Out of 100 people there, only 10 got jobs as security guards and gardeners at the university," she said. "Why should it be any different for us?"
Imagine the Nanting situation repeated thousands of time. That’s what China is facing. In early March the Chinese government announced plans for a major initiative to narrow the urban rural gap. It remains to be seen whether it is more rhetoric than reality, according some.
China says it plans to use revenues generated by its fast-growing economy to launch a series of initiatives to overcome the "deep-seated problem" of the gaping rich-poor divide between wealthy cities and rural areas….
However, the initial figures provided….’and a separate report by the finance ministry record relatively modest spending commitments for rural areas, home to about two-thirds of China's 1.3bn people….an increase of about 14 per cent from last year, equal to the percentage increase in the military budget.”
The rural crisis is receiving a great deal of attention in Chinese political discourse, it has provoked a major ideological debate within the Chinese elites, and it has prompted some ameliorative actions. But there seems to be little indication that the strategic drift of China’s rulers is changing. They appear to be sticking to their policy of opening up vast areas of the Chinese economy to global corporations and their suppliers looking for cheap labor, and lax regulations. This policy requires a steady flow of workers from the country-side and continued repression of workers' fight to improve their lot. But make no mistake: the “China problem” is in large measure the problem of global corporations exploiting Chinese workers. And issues like the US trade deficit with China are really about US based global corporations producing goods in China and “trading” them back to the US.
China is now almost fully integrated into the global economy. Workers all over the world have a stake in what happens in rural China. In fact, the crisis demonstrates that the world's workers and the global labor movement need to be concerned about what happens to the all of the world's farmers/peasants/rural people. The policy of global capital and the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO is to drive them off the land and into the cities to staff the factories of global corporations and their suppliers. But this is not an inevitability. If economic development is geared toward encouraging, rather than destroying, small farmers, there can be viable, prosperous rural society. But it requires 1) protection against rampaging global food corporations that demand markets for cheap food whatever the social and environmental costs, and 2) direction of credit and resources to help small farmers get the inputs they need to be productive.
The brilliant dissident Chinese intellectual Wang Hui has written that:
“The logic of transnational capitalism demands the globalization of labor movements, but the reality we are facing is this: a global labor movement has yet to take shape, while the evidence of cooperation and collusion between transnational capital and the nation-state is visible everywhere.” [China’s New Order, Harvard University Press, 2003—a must read.]
Wang Hui is right: a transnational labor movement capable of confronting transnational capital and its political allies does not yet exist. Building such a labor movement is very much a work in progress. In fact, confronting China’s role in the global economy is itself an important step in the creation of a global labor movement since what happens in China affects workers all over the world—north, south, east, and west.
Wang Hui argues that in the absence of a fully developed global labor movement, the role of the Chinese state will be crucial to the future of China and the global economy. Will it be an agency for raising standards and creating the conditions of freedom for Chinese workers, or will it continue to be primarily an agent of repression? That question may well be even more important for workers in the rest of the world than the more limited question of labor organization—which forms only one, though an important, part of the question of democratization for China.
The crisis in China reminds us that the global labor movement—today still in its formative stages—needs to pay attention, not only to traditional trade union issues such as collective bargaining strategies but also to the broader issues of socially just development programs, the role of global institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, and the fight for democracy and human rights everywhere..
[For more recent posts exploring many of the themes in this post, click on "China" under Categores in the box to the right.]
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