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China Rural-urban Wage Gap Widens

As food prices declined last year, incomes in rural areas of China fell even further behind those of city dwellers, according to official statistics. The BBC reports:

The latest statistics from China’s Agriculture Ministry suggest that on average, city dwellers earned 3.36 times more than those in the country.

Equality was one of the demands that helped the Chinese communist party to power nearly 60 years ago.

Now as the world’s third largest economy, China’s rural population are seeing their incomes fall further behind than ever before.

The average wealth gap has now reached 11,100 yuan or $1,620 (£1,100), $200 more than it was in 2007.

For more on this and related topics, see CDT’s News Focus section The Great Divide.
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- January 16, 2009 12:00 PM
Contradictions in China, and the Rise of a Billionaire Family

The New York Times tells the story of the Liu family in Sichuan, who grew up in poverty and amid public scorn during the Cultural Revolution, only to become one of China’s richest families:

The Lius are China’s first-generation billionaires, born into a world of Mao suits, food rations, price controls and Communist slogans. And the story of how they made their fortune is considered one of the guiding myths of China’s Communist party, a symbol of this country’s transformation over the last 30 years, since its unlikely embrace of capitalism. But their story also betrays the contradictions of modern China — a country where the average factory worker makes less than $50 a week.

“The puzzle is not why the Liu brothers succeeded, but why there are not more like them in China,” says Huang Yasheng, who teaches at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an expert on Chinese entrepreneurs. “Rural China represents a vast pool of entrepreneurial capabilities and substantial business opportunities.”

As the global economy enters its first drastic downturn since China opened to the world, analysts say this country is searching for a more sustainable path to growth.
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- January 2, 2009 10:49 AM
China’s Huge Poverty Gap Slowing Growth, UN Says

The Guardian reports on the latest United Nations Human Development Report:

It tracks the vast and increasing gaps between rural and urban areas and regions of China - warning that differences in income are matched by disparities in social welfare, education and elderly care.

While Beijing and Shanghai have reached the development level of countries such as Cyprus and Portugal, provinces such as south-western Guizhou are comparable to Namibia or Botswana.

The Human Development Report argues that pressing ahead in providing basic healthcare, education and welfare to all Chinese citizens will boost the country’s economy in the face of the global slowdown.

Read the UNDP report here.
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- November 16, 2008 9:25 PM
Shanxi Coal Mine Bosses-What’s It All About?

A fake online post was published last week by Lao Po, who claimed to be a Shanxi coal mine boss, on Tianya forum to attract applicants to become his son-in-law. After receiving a large number of responses, the post has drawn much attention from netizens and been picked up by other commercial sites including Netease and Mop.

It turned out to be a fabricated post simply for the purpose of entertaining. The photo of the “daughter” was randomly selected online without permission. Lao Po didn’t even know who the photo was of until other netizens pointed it out. It’s been widely discussed in online forums and grabbed a couple of headlines. Coal mine bosses are once again been in the spotlight in cyberspace. Why are they such a popular subject that never gets boring for netizens? What if such a post was published by a Shanxi peasant? Would it have been more likely to get sinister remarks in response rather than enthusiastic applications?

When it comes to coal mine owners, an image of unethical, immoral and greedy profit-seeking businessman is reinforced by intermittent coal mine accidents, notoriously in Shanxi province. As materialism prevails in China, those wealthy bosses are at the same time looked at enviously by others. The conflicting ideas about them have generated confusion in cyberspace-they are cursed for taking lives due to poor coal mine safety measures but looked up to for being able to live a luxurious life. People condemn the ways in which coal mine bosses build up wealth while envying their lifestyle. This is probably the reason why this post drew far more applications than condemnations.

Coal mine safety is associated with issues of human rights, law, government corruption, cover-ups as well as censorship. Xinhua reported that 3,786 miners lost their lives in 2007.

There have been quite a few online posts about young Chinese showing off their luxurious lifestyles by uploading pictures of the labels and brands they buy. Chinasmack last month published a post-”Daughter of Shanxi Coal Mine Boss Shows off Her US Lifestyle.”
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- October 20, 2008 11:45 PM
China Land Reform Disappears from Radar

From Los Angeles Times:

A funny thing happened on the way to the Third Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee, where China’s Communist Party leaders were expected to finally enact a bold land reform program allowing farmers eventually to buy, sell or lease their fields.

Coverage of reform issues had been stepped up in the official press. And President Hu Jintao made a high-profile trip to rural Anhui province, where state media said he told farmers that they would be able to transfer their land rights.

Yet by the time the closed-door meeting wrapped up Sunday, the issue had all but disappeared from public view. It wasn’t even mentioned in the final communique from the 368-member decision-making body.

The New York Times also reports on questions being raised about the new program:

Scholars and analysts inside and outside of China are discussing this week why the leaders have remained silent on the issue. When the Communist Party’s annual four-day planning session began last Thursday, officials in attendance began reviewing a draft of a sweeping land reform policy that President Hu Jintao was believed to have been backing.

Scholars and government advisers said the proposed policy centered around two major changes: allowing peasants to engage in the unrestricted trade, purchase and sale of land-use contracts, and extending those contracts to 70 years from 30 years. Senior leaders including Mr. Hu intended to push the policy changes through at the session, scholars and advisers said.

But the communiqué issued on Sunday night did not mention that particular land reform policy. Instead, the party said broadly that it was adopting a rural reform policy that would double the per capita disposable income of farmers by the year 2020. Xinhua, the state news agency, said in general terms that the government planned to “set up a ‘strict and normative’ land management system in the countryside.”
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- October 15, 2008 11:57 AM
China Announces Land Policy Aimed at Promoting Income Growth in Countryside

The Chinese government is hoping to bridge the rural-urban income divide through a new economic reform plan. The New York Times reports:

Chinese leaders said Sunday that they would adopt a rural growth policy aimed at vastly increasing the income of China’s hundreds of millions of farmers by the year 2020, setting in motion what could be the nation’s biggest economic reform in years.

The new policy is intended to stimulate market-driven economic growth in the countryside and to narrow the enormous income disparity between rural and urban Chinese, one of the largest such gaps in the world. Its adoption is another significant step away from the system of communal farming and collectivization put in place under Mao.

Scholars and government advisers said in interviews during the four-day session that the new policy would allow China’s more than 800 million peasants to engage in the unrestricted trade or sale of land-use contracts, good for decades, that are given to them by the government. Adopting such a system would be a significant move toward privatization.

An earlier article has details of the discussion of the decision to approve of the economic reform package. More background on the history of China’s economic reforms under CCP rule can be found here.

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- October 13, 2008 11:45 AM
China Civil Society Report: Mass Incidents in China

The Nautilus Institute has published a report on social unrest in China, which discusses several recent incidents:

We can identify several common characteristics in these incidents: first, they were all caused by accidents, without personal petition, administrative litigation or other legal process. All of the events happened suddenly, and rapidly escalated into conflicts. Second, there was no definite organizer of the events. Most of the participants had no direct relationship to the original incident. The participants sought to defend the weak against the strong and express their dissatisfaction with what they perceived as unfair official actions. Their main reason for participating was to vent their frustration at local authorities. Third, during the occurrence and development of these incidents, information dissemination had new traits; the rapid flow of information through networks has played a very important role. Fourth, the beating, smashing, looting, burning and other criminal acts arounsed in these incidents, which not only caused property losses to the state, the collective, and the individual, but also had a negative social impact.[5]

These mass incidents are generally thought to be caused by several factors. First, the widening gap between rich and poor.
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- August 27, 2008 11:08 AM
Lack of Public Oversight, Wealth Inequality: Worrisome Signs In 2008

Written by Zhong Peizhang (钟沛璋), former Chief of the News Bureau at the Central Publicity Department of the CPC, from China Elections and Governance:

After the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the eleventh session of the National People’s Congress opened. Both meetings focused on the topics of democracy and the people’s livelihood, and both paid great attention to improving the situation for China’s rural residents and improving the well-being of the people. As an element of political system reform, administrative reform also took a step forward. This demonstrates that China is continuing to move forward with reform, and that the tide of history is in the hearts of the people and the party.

In its thirty years of reform and opening up, China has achieved huge successes, which have been praised by both Chinese and non-Chinese alike. There are even those outside of China that summarize China’s experience as “the Beijing Consensus,” which is praise enough to make one drunk with happiness. Open a Chinese newspaper and the “main themes” all sing the country’s praise, while other voices are rarely or never heard. Turn on the television and on each channel you can see performances that extravagantly and luxuriously sing a song of peace and prosperity as well as spectacular feats of engineering. Because of this, people cannot help but adopt the mindset of those passengers aboard the Titanic, entirely unaware that they could hit an iceberg or suffer the surprise attack of a storm. According to a study by the American Pew Research Center on the degree of optimism in seventeen countries, 76% of Chinese respondents believe that the future is bright, more than in any other country.
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- May 8, 2008 5:17 AM
China’s Growing Income Gap

Frank Langfitt, former Beijing bureau chief for The Baltimore Sun, returns to the capital to revisit old acquaintances, the Gong brothers, who once lived together under a single roof in their hutong home. But over the past six years much has changed. The Gongs’ house was torn down and the brothers were scattered across the city. Now, one brother drives a BMW, another lives a modest life. The third, who is not covered in this, the first of two programs, faired the worst. Listen to Part I here.

For more information about Beijing’s changing cityscape, in particular its hutongs, check out the following video about Michael Meyer, an American who has spent years living in and researching the capital’s alleyway neighborhoods (h/t Danwei.org). Meyer recently published The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed.

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- April 1, 2008 10:12 AM
Dichotomies Endure, But the Pressure Builds - Howard W. French

In the International Herald Tribune, Howard French writes about the gaps in China between capitalism and communism, rich and poor, and urban and rural lives:

At a casual glance, the giant boomtowns of the country’s east seem very much like first world cities, with the dizzyingly rapid proliferation of skyscrapers and expressways, shopping malls and traffic jams.

Travel a couple of hours inland to the west, though, and you can find parts of China that seem stuck in a past 20 or 30 years distant; places where subsistence is the rule and income levels hover closer to Africa than to the Group of 8-style wealth of Beijing’s dreams.

Or don’t travel at all. Poke around any big eastern city, and amid all of the frantic striving in this new culture of acquisition, and you can find deep pockets of the third world that persist just around many a street corner. [Full text]
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- January 20, 2008 9:21 PM
Trail of Risky Investments in China - Mark Magnier

The Los Angeles Times takes a closer look at the victims in the Yilishen ant-farming scam:

The story of Yilishen illustrates the get-rich-now mentality here, the constant search for a new angle by those struggling to make a go of it with the communist economy having all but given way to private enterprise, and the frequent collusion of government officials in shady dealings.

Old rules of caution don’t carry much weight in a society that has seen some become absurdly wealthy, seemingly overnight. And government officials often are first in line to fleece the laobaixing, or common folk.

Instead of siding with Yilishen’s victims — mostly poor farmers, construction workers and the unemployed — the government has blocked Internet postings and ordered reporters off the story, ant farmers say. Attorneys in the nation’s capital have been discouraged from representing any of them, according to the website of the Beijing Municipal Lawyers Assn. [Full Text]

See also “Ants and pyramids: China scams abound,” about the phenomenon of scamming in China, from Asia Times.
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- January 12, 2008 10:25 AM
Inflation Tops List of Public Concerns in China - Xinhua

From Xinhua:

Rising prices of consumer goods have become the top concern of urban and rural residents, followed by “income gap” and “corruption,” according to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

Results of the survey on urban and rural residents’ life satisfaction were published in CASS’s 2008 Blue Paper of Society on Friday.

Director of the Institute of Sociology under CASS, Li Peilin, said that 30.5 percent of the people surveyed chose “rising prices of consumer goods” as the most serious social problem, followed by “income gap” and “corruption.” [Full Text]
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- January 4, 2008 6:40 PM
Important Issues In China’s Next Stage Of Development - Wu Jinglian (Âê¥Êï¨Áêè)

From China Elections and Governance:

Does Chinese Communist Party’s reform and opening up policy since the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee a correct path to be upheld or a wrong path to be discarded? Over the past two years this has been the focus point of reform contention spreading from the Party to the society. Traditionalists reiterate the line they advocated back in 1989-1991 to criticize reform, asserting that “abolishing the planned economy and opting for the market is tantamount to shift from socialism to capitalism.” They criticized reformist leaders as capitalist roaders who have betrayed Mao Zedong thought of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of proletariat. They condemned continuing pushing forward economic privatization and political liberalization, whose manifestations are said to have abandoned or betrayed Marxist theories of class struggle and proletariat dictatorship. They charged that these two years central authorities have, without reason, put forward slogans and propositions devoid of class and revolutionary characteristics, such as “people-centered policies,” “peaceful rise,” “harmonious society,” and “well-to-do society” etc. They reproached the new party leadership for continuing to practice capitulation and compromise on foreign policies, no longer mentioning about Marxist internationalism or imperialism. “During reform, privatization, westernization, corruptionization, and polarization have basically completed, and have been again and again consolidated by institutional measures under the pretext of reform and opening up, cultivating a class of pro-American bourgeois.” They also asserted that the current problems with the medical and educational systems, the loss of state assets, polarization between the rich and the poor, and frequent mining calamities etc. are all brought about by “capitalist” policies. [Full Text]
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- October 10, 2007 10:02 AM
Extra, Extra, Extra: Robb Report To China

Trends Media Group is China’s premier glossy magazine house, publishers of mainland versions of Cosmo, Esquire, and Men’s Health among other fancy titles. In August, Trends launched a coordinated marketing campaign to turn its readers on to “lifestyles of health and sustainability”, i.e. LOHAS, the latest consumer cult to enter China. “Look good, feel good, do good,” Trends exhorted, by which the publisher seemed to mean, in effect, spend good. The group Web site offered some specific tips from recent spreads in the magazines. Cosmo Bride prescribed “home spas” and yoga to soothe the stresses of wedding preparations. Food & Wine recommended brunch, high tea and tapas over the typical three meals a day. Autostyle previewed the BMW Hydrogen 7. And Harper’s Bazaar proposed a raggedy white-on-white look it tagged “Life Detox”: LV jacket, Valentino dress, Chanel skirt. No, not exactly serious lifestyle adjustments. But with green in and hedonism out, Trends is only keeping up with the protocol of fashion trends worldwide, not to mention the Party’s present policy slant.

Trends might have a harder time incorporating its newest title into the LOHAS campaign, however. Corporate-level sources there say the company is soon to launch the Chinese version of the Robb Report, the American bible of conspicuous consumption. The luxury guide originally was supposed to debut on September 28. But its rollout might very well be delayed, said one source, for reasons related to production that were not entirely clear.
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- September 17, 2007 7:44 AM
Income Gap Widening Between Rural, Urban Areas In China - AFP

From AFP:

The income gap between rural and urban areas is widening in China, government data published Friday showed, despite years of efforts from the top echelons of government to bridge the divide.

Last year, the average Chinese city dweller earned 3.28 times as much as his fellow citizen in the countryside, up from 3.21 times in 2004, according to figures published on the agriculture ministry’s website.

“Although farmers’ income has been growing quite fast in recent years, the pace is still slower than the growth rate of urban residents’ income,” Vice Minister of Agriculture Ying Chengjie said in comments on the website. [Full Text]
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- September 15, 2007 3:46 AM