Its first full-time residents will move in this year and, by 2020, Lanzhou New Area’s architects envisage its transformation into an industrial and logistics hub that is home to 500,000 people, with a hi-tech research centre dubbed “Wisdom Valley”. Officials hope it will generate £27 billion a year of output by 2030.

[…] Lanzhou New Area is part of a continuing “Go West” campaign to modernise China’s sprawling and underdeveloped hinterlands.

Perhaps even more importantly, it is also another step in a breathtaking push for urbanisation through which China’s incoming leaders hope to haul millions from rural poverty and create a vibrant home-grown consumer market to bolster the economy.

In March, when president Xi Jinping and prime minister Li Keqiang took power, Mr Li vowed to promote “a new type of urbanisation that puts the people at its heart.” [Source]

While some are excited at the prospect of urbanization, others are wary of its social and environmental consequences, particularly given its planned speed and scale. “If current trends continue”, Phillips notes, “China will be home to 1 billion urbanites by 2030, and by 2025 it will have 221 cities with more than 1 million residents.”

Read more on urbanization in China and the country’s rural-urban divide via CDT, including ‘8 Questions and a Podcast on ‘China’s Urban Billion’‘ with author Tom Miller.

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This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers.

The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering. Over the past decades, the Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’ rights to use land: giving small plots to farm during 1950s land reform, collectivizing a few years later, restoring rights at the start of the reform era and now trying to obliterate small landholders.[Source]

Logistical problems involving local government spending may also postpone the $6.5 trillion dollar plan. The Taipei Times reports:

“The urbanization plan could be delayed. Top leaders have seen potential risks if the program cannot be kept on the right path,” said an economist at a top think tank which advises the Cabinet.

“The leadership aims to jumpstart reforms, but local governments see this in a different perspective — they view this as the last opportunity to boost investment,” said the economist, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.[Source]

Read more about urbanization in China, via CDT.

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In just 30 years, China has risen from long-standing poverty to being the second largest economy in the world – faster than any other country in history.

From angry farmers to weary migrant workers, powerful politicians and everyone in between, what China says and does, has become of undeniable importance to the entire world.

Episode 1: The Dramatic Rise, focuses on the divides created in Chinese society by the rapid economic reforms:

Episode 2: Power and the People, looks at how Chinese citizens get their voices heard in the Internet age:

Episode 3: The Fire Inside, examines the fight for women’s equality in China:

Episode 4: Made in China, has not yet been broadcast but will look at China’s role in the global economy.

Read more special media reports on China, as well as more about China’s rise, via CDT.

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The 2010 census put the percentage of working-age women in the work force at 74. The figure stacks up well against other countries such as the United States and Australia, where about 75 percent of working-age women were employed in 2010. In Sweden, the female labor force participation for 2010 was 87.5 percent; France, 84 percent; Britain, 79 percent.

But China’s figure is high because it includes women working in the countryside, and unlike developed countries, nearly half of China’s population is still rural. The picture for urban women is very different.

China’s urban employment rate for working-age women fell to a new low of 60.8 percent in 2010, down from 77.4 percent 20 years earlier, according to census figures. The 2010 rate was 20.3 percentage points lower than that of men.

This troubling trend matters because the effort to move people from the countryside to the cities is a top policy priority of China’s new leaders — one that they see as crucial to boosting economic growth. [Source]

In BusinessWeek, Christina Larson makes a similar point and discusses challenges faced by women trying to move up China’s corporate ladder in a male-dominated corporate culture. Larson argues that China needs a movement similar to the Lean In movement launched by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg:

What explains China’s growing pay disparity? Wang Xiaolin, director of research at the International Poverty Reduction Center in China, told the People’s Daily that women more often chose to work in less lucrative industries. “Many female migrant workers stay at the low end of the service sector, such as working as waitresses in restaurants, while men take more positions in the manufacturing industry.” While this may be true, Wang’s explanation doesn’t sufficiently address the obstacles that college-educated professional women confront.

One hurdle may be the particular nature of China’s modern business landscape, which emphasizes guanxi—stoking a web of interlocking personal and professional connections. “Guanxi itself is such a male world,” explains Susan Brownell, an anthropologist specializing in China at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “Businessmen go to KTV bars and often patronize prostitutes together. It’s hard for women to share the same bonding experiences.” That’s why at least one successful female business owner, bowing to the fact that male clients expect to be wined and dined at karaoke bars and massage parlors (where there is at least the possibility of paying for sex), has designated a young man on her staff to take out clients on her behalf. Her solution is crafty, but it’s a depressing form of accommodation. “Successful women in China must develop tactics to handle the male aspects of guanxi,” says Brownell.

As both Hong-Fincher and Larson make clear, China’s rapid urbanization is hitting women especially hard as it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to find rewarding and lucrative work in urban areas. The women left behind in rural areas, meanwhile, are seeing some improvements in their lives as urbanization takes hold in society, but many challenges remain. Suicide rates of rural Chinese women, once among the highest in the world, have dropped considerably. But rural women remain largely powerless in Chinese society. From Eric Fish in the Atlantic:

By most measurable indicators, the lot of rural women has improved dramatically in the decade since Michael Phillips’ suicide study shocked the nation. In addition to the falling suicide rate, record numbers of women are attending college, rural healthcare has expanded greatly, and millions have been pulled from abject poverty.

But rural areas haven’t kept up with cities, and women haven’t kept pace with men. While per capita income tripled for rural residents from 2,253 RMB ($275) per year in 2000 to 6,977 RMB in 2011, incomes in cities nearly quadrupled from 6,280 to 23,979 RMB during the same period, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Rural women only earned 56 percent of what their male counterparts did in 2010, down from 79 percent in 1990. These gaps in money and power leave rural women vulnerable to exploitation.

Reliable statistics for sexual assault in China don’t exist, but Tsun-Yin Luo, a professor at the Graduate Institute for Gender Studies at Shih-Hsin University in Taipei, estimates that fewer than one out of ten sexual assaults are ever reported in China. “The patriarchal culture actually brings sexual violence to female victims,” she says. “Lots of victims of sexual assault feel ashamed of their victimization, and even if they don’t feel ashamed, their family ensures that they feel ashamed.”

Luo says that this disproportionally affects rural women, who don’t have the same access to information about their rights. “Women in the countryside tend to be left behind,” she says.

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China’s new leaders are planning a system of national residence permits to replace the household registration or ‘hukou’ regime, a government source said, a vital reform that will boost its urbanization campaign and drive consumption-led growth.

[...]In a speech to parliament on Tuesday that laid out the blueprint of the new leaders, outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao said hukou reforms should be accelerated to drive an urbanization effort that he said would underpin economic development.

[...]Wen said consumption was the key to unlocking the full potential of domestic demand in the economy and would reduce excess, inefficiency and inequality. It would also help deliver growth of 7.5 percent in 2013 – a level China barely beat in 2012 when growth eased to 7.8 percent, its slowest pace in 13 years.

An op-ed in the South China Morning Post has more on Wen’s urbanization-themed work report at the NPC, and outlines the shortcomings of previous attempts to reform the system before offering policy advice for successful hukou reform:

In addition to the city-level system, a metropolitan-wide hukou system could also be launched. In Shenzhen, the newest of the mega cities, fewer than 20 per cent of the population have local hukou; increasing this figure should be a social development priority.

Guangdong could try a new breed of metro hukou for the Pearl River Delta. The 50 million urban residents in the top six delta cities – Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan , Foshan , Zhongshan and Zhuhai – have similar income levels. So a new class of metro hukou, allowing full mobility within the delta area, could be offered. This would further improve the economic and social cohesion within the region.

Beyond the regional level, a national hukou system, allowing limited mobility across major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, could be considered at an appropriate time.

In 2011, China’s urban population passed 50 percent, and the central government projects that it will reach 60 percent by 2020 – the steady flow of rural workers to China’s cities is set to continue. China.org.cn reports on an NPC delegate who stressed the need to make migrant workers permanent residents in the cities that they work:

Ma Xu, a Beijing delegate to the first session of the 12th National People’s Congress (NPC) said during a speech that he hopes the term “migrant worker,” low-income individuals who leave their rural hometowns in search of work in larger urban areas, will no longer be relevant within five years.

[...]Ma stressed the importance of permanently moving migrant workers into urban areas. He saidthat the government needs to take into consideration the development of human resources of the floating population, with the migrant workers as the greatest group, in its urbanization plan, so as to make history the word “migrant worker” in China within five years.

To reach this goal, special funds need to be allocated to create a occupational skills training system for migrant workers with programs designed to help them start their own businessnesses.

Ma suggested that the integration of new city dwellers should be included in China’s urbanization plan, and detailed plans should be designed as soon as possible.

One oft-covered symptom of China’s dysfunctional hukou regime is a lack of public schooling for the children of migrant workers. The children who aren’t left behind in the countryside rely on unlicensed schools whose future’s are anything but certain. Another recent report from the South China Morning Post profiles the Xiangyang Primary School, a school for migrant children in Beijing:

Founded four years ago, the Xiangyang school has an enrolment of about 700 pupils from migrant families. The school’s principal, Luo Chao , said the school receives no financial support from the local government because they have not been able to obtain an operating licence from local authorities. In 2006, a freeze was placed on the issuance of licences for schools that cater to migrant children, but the schools are still allowed to exist and are even subject to safety and hygiene inspections.

Already struggling to keep the school open with a lack of public funding, Luo said he must charge pupils very low tuition rates because most of their parents are low-income migrant workers. He said the school charges students just 130 yuan a month for lunches, even as inflation pushes food prices higher.

“We know we might not be able to meet [education] standards, and pupils would be better off at public schools or government-funded schools,” Luo said. “But the fact is, we’re still sought after by parents. We’ve done the government a favour by providing pupils with the schooling that they have failed to deliver.”

Reporting from another of Beijing’s migrant schools, one they may soon be razed to make room for new development, CNN notes that local political and economic concerns stand in the way of national level hukou reform:

“The government is trying. They’re definitely making efforts, they realize that this is a big problem,” William Nee of the China Labour Bulletin said. “The problem is the finances of the health care scheme and education are all done at the local level, so I think it’s very difficult for the government at the national level to say, ‘Okay, let’s just reform the hukou system’.”

The political cost of reforming the hukou system is onerous. “The mayors and party secretaries of many major cities are concerned that if hukou is freed up, there will be a huge fiscal burden in providing services for these migrants,” said Yukon Huang, senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment and former World Bank director of China.

“If you ask the residents, the established residents of the major cities, they would say I don’t want more people coming, this may mean fewer job opportunities for us,” Huang added.

Also see a New York Times “Letter From China,” in which Didi Kirsten Tatlow looks at one migrant’s life and the difficulties that have come with urban living.

For more on migrant workers and the hukou system, see previous CDT coverage.

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[F]or all Mr. Xi’s celebrity wattage, the real manna began to rain down on Luotuowan after he and his entourage left. Money, quilts and pledges of government help have been pouring in from across the country. The government arranged for each household to receive $160 in cash, a bottle of cooking oil and a sack of rice, a precious commodity where corn gruel and corn cakes are often the main course.

That was just the beginning. A businessman from China’s northeast was so moved by Luotuowan’s suffering that he drove 500 miles with more cash and a carload of flat-screen televisions. A government work crew whitewashed the village’s stone walls, adding a band of turquoise paint for good measure.

Then came the government researchers, who were instructed to solve Luotuowan’s intractable poverty, perhaps by pursuing Mr. Xi’s suggestion that, with outside expertise, “the people can make yellow soil into gold.”

But whether the official visit by Mr. Xi, who was recently named Communist Party secretary and scheduled to be anointed president in March, will have a lasting impact on this isolated community — much less others like it — remains to be seen. The average per capita income here, about $160 a year, is less than half the official threshold for poverty, and it is a tiny fraction of the average urban income of slightly less than $4,000. Most young people have long since fled for jobs in distant cities.

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Last Monday, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) published its annual report on the nation’s internet usage and infrastructure. According to the report, the Chinese internet continues to boom, with usage swelling 10% to 564 million users in 2012. But the report also shows that the country’s internet use – much like its economy – is highly uneven.

While web penetration in Beijing surpassed 72% in 2012, fewer than 30% of residents in the interior province of Jiangxi are internet users. To put those figures in perspective, Beijing’s internet usage is comparable to that of Hong Kong or Israel. Jiangxi, on the other hand, lags behind Uzbekistan, Bolivia, and Tuvalu.

In terms of the production of online content, the gap is even wider. Beijing-based websites host over 38 billion web pages, or an average of 1,890 pages per city resident. Tibetan-based sites host fewer than 3.5 million pages, or just over one page per person.

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“I was deeply humiliated because I was not required to provide any hukou document when I was applying for visas to France and the United States after 9/11,” Yu told the Sunday Morning Post.

[…] The incident comes amid growing calls to reform the system from inside and outside the government. Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun yesterday ordered local police chiefs, who handle routine hukou matters, to co-operate with other agencies in reforming the system, state television reported.

[…] “I demand that the British government stop requiring Chinese applicants to provide a hukou document, which is a discriminatory system created under the planned economic era of the last century and conflicts with today’s common international values,” Yu wrote in an open letter to the British government.

The hukou is not normally required for U.K. visas: Chan implies that the professor’s customarily “tattered” clothing may have prompted the additional demand. Yu also spoke to Global Times about the incident. From Zhang Wen:

“I’ll never provide my hukou, even if it’s at the cost of not being able to attend the conference in the UK. It’s my principle,” said Yu.

[…] “What made me even angrier is that when I said I would never show them the hukou, an agent standing at the next counter immediately told me that he could help me to get the visa without me providing it,” Yu said.

“It’s blackmail. The agent is obviously familiar with the embassy employees,” he said.

[…] Liu Guofu, an expert on immigration law from Beijing Institute of Technology said an embassy can ask for any supporting documentation it likes.

For more on China’s hukou system, see two recent conversations with Tom Miller, author of China’s Urban Billion, via CDT.

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Around a third of the capital’s 20 million population are migrants, but many of their families become split by rules requiring their children to go to their “home” provinces — even if they have never lived there — sometimes for years, to study for and take the test, which varies by location.

[...] ”Either you let the country share in your education resources or you accept the reality that outsiders are stuck in your education gutter,” said Du Guowang, a 12-year Beijing resident from Inner Mongolia.

[...] But bigger cities are less willing to share residency or benefits, fearing doing so would burden their already strained resources and spur a new influx.

[...] Despite years of lobbying national and city education officials, the migrant parents in Beijing have received noncommittal answers — along with occasional warnings. Their website, where they posted their demands, stopped working recently.

Meanwhile, Chongqing has allowed migrant children to take gaokao in the city. Xinhua News Agency reports:

Chongqing is the latest metropolis to ease the household restriction on migrants attending gaokao, following Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces.

Outside the pilot regions, the exam restriction is still in place, although children of migrant workers can take the nine-year compulsory education (from elementary to high schools) without household restrictions.

[...] Wang Boqing, president of MyCOS, a Beijing-based higher education consulting and outcome evaluation company, said that the move would definitely boost equity of schooling but was more than that.

“It’s really about the rights of people. Migrant workers pay taxes and contribute to government revenues. So universities in cities where they work should be open to them, because these schools all receive funding from governments,” he said.

See also China to “Speed Up” Hukou System Reform, via CDT.

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The government will increase agricultural subsidies and ensure “reasonable returns” from planting crops, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Dec. 22, citing an annual work conference to set rural policy.

The goals, which include increasing rural incomes by at least as much as those in urban areas, reflect a new leadership’s focus on reforming the land system and addressing wealth disparities as it encourages migration into towns and cities to boost consumption. Li Keqiang, set to take over from Wen Jiabao as premier in March, is championing urbanization as a growth engine.

“A completely new policy approach is emerging under Li Keqiang,” said Yuan Gangming, a researcher in Beijing with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “It’s about giving farmers a bigger share from land deals, it’s about changing local governments’ reliance on revenues from land, and it’s ultimately about a fairer system of sharing China’s economic growth.”

Yuan said he expects the government to be appointed in March to announce “a slew of policy initiatives” from changes to the household registration, or hukou, system to trading in land-use rights as part of Li’s urbanization drive.

Watch the Bloomberg video report:

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The Gini coefficient, an index measuring income inequality, was 0.61 in 2010, based on a survey of 8,438 households by the Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance, a body set up by the Finance Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. The survey also estimated the urban jobless rate in July 2012 was 8.05 percent, almost double the official figure.

[…] “China’s wealth gap is so prevalent between regions, sectors, and urban and rural that it’s impossible to see a meaningful decline in the Gini coefficient in the short term,” Gan Li, director of the Chengdu-based center and a professor at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, said at a briefing in Beijing today. “Depending on market forces alone can’t resolve the gap and China must change the structure of income distribution and rely on massive fiscal transfers to narrow such a yawning disparity.”

Higher fiscal revenue and a bigger share of state-owned enterprises’ profits could give the government about 3.8 trillion yuan ($610 billion) a year to spend on income redistribution, said Gan, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the long run “China needs to beef up funding for education and reduce inequality of opportunity to lower the income gap,” he said.

Although higher than expected, the new figure may still be too low. From Chen Dujuan at Global Times:

Zheng Xinye, a professor at Renmin University of China, told the Global Times Sunday that the real Gini coefficient may be even higher than 0.61, since the super-rich are hard to reach for surveys.

“The widening income gap was caused by restrictions that kept small and medium-sized companies from entering high-profit sectors, as well as by employment discrimination,” Zheng said. Data showed that the wage gap between finance and agriculture, which earn the highest and lowest wages respectively, has widened to a ratio of 4.2 in 2010 from 2.24 in 1997.

Zheng said that low standards for labor and environmental protection have increased the wealth of the rich at the cost of the health and income of the poor.

[…] Greater urbanization will ease the income gap, Pan Jiancheng, deputy director-general of the China Economic Monitoring & Analysis Center of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said at the survey release press conference, noting that China needs to boost economic transformation and improve social security.

The Gini coefficient is not a definitive or comprehensive measure of inequality, however, its widespread use arising in large part from its simplicity and convenience. Mark Gimein described the measure’s limitations at Slate (via Trey Menefee) in 2008:

[…] Measuring inequality, or what most people think of as inequality, is not simple. And, perhaps more importantly, the standard measure of inequality tells us a lot less about poverty than we might think or hope.

To see why, let’s look a little bit into the mathematics of inequality. The Gini index is a number that expresses the proportion of income that goes to people on various steps on the economic ladder. In a country in which everyone has exactly the same income, the Gini coefficient will be zero. On the other hand, in a country in which all the income goes to one person, the Gini coefficient will be 1, and the Gini index will be 100 (technically, it’ll never reach the perfect 100, but it’ll be incredibly close). In real life, the United States has a Gini index of 45, and Norway’s is 28.

[…] The problem here is that Gini index alone does not yield enough information to indicate what proportion of a country’s people are poor—even if we know the country’s total income. A measure omitting that crucial concept doesn’t get to what people really mean when they talk about inequality. Take it out, and most of the rhetoric about inequality loses its soul.

Comparing the Gini coefficients of countries at different stages of development is also problematic, as Tsinghua University economist Wei Jie explained to People’s Daily Online in 2006.

At The Wall Street Journal, Tom Orlik described the study’s findings on unemployment:

The survey represents the most ambitious attempt yet to map China’s labor markets, household income and asset ownership—areas where the official data are widely regarded as inaccurate or deficient.

Employment is a hot-button issue for China’s ruling Communist Party, with the risk that high levels of joblessness could trigger destabilizing unrest. At the end of 2008, severe job losses for migrant workers helped prompt the government to unleash a massive stimulus package.

[…] Despite a significantly higher rate of unemployment than reported by the government,China’s labor market still appears to have weathered 2012′s growth slowdown relatively well. A loss of around 4.5 million jobs for China’s migrant workers in the past year has taken their unemployment level to 10 million, still well below the 23 million out of work in 2009.

That the official figure seems inaccurate comes as no great surprise. Last month, Caixin’s Zhang Huanyu pondered the official urban unemployment rate’s mysterious steadiness since the start of 2010:

The urban unemployment rate announced by the government has remained at 4.1 percent from the start of 2010 to June 30. Even during the worst of the global financial crisis in 2009, the figure climbed to only 4.3 percent.

When I talk to government officials and scholars, they unintentionally reveal the importance they attach to the statistic. But the fact the figure barely changes is a sign its accuracy can be doubted. Unfortunately, this is true of many statistics released by government agencies in China.

[…] The National Bureau of Statistics once promised that starting in 2011 it would release more accurate unemployment figures, but so far we haven’t seen them.

In March, bureau director Ma Jiantang was asked about the unemployment rate and said: “From the research we have done, the gap between our data and the real situation is narrowing.”

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Unlike individual accounts in nearby Hong Kong or Singapore, China’s nest-eggs are not carefully segregated and invested in financial portfolios, held in the contributor’s name. Instead, local governments use the money for other things, such as paying the bills, speculating in property, or paying the pensions of today’s retired—especially those shed by state-owned enterprises during the downsizings of the 1990s.

Despite this plunder of the pension pots, China has no shortage of saving and investment. It ploughed 49% of its GDP into investment last year, and almost 3% into foreign assets. The country as a whole is making provision for its future. But individual pension contributors do not have title to these assets. They must instead pray that their contributions will be honoured by local governments from whatever resources officials can muster in the future. And migrants fear losing their entitlements when they cross provincial lines.

One sensible reform would be for the central government to take charge of the pension system. It could fill the empty accounts, glue the fragmented system together and ideally make pensions much more portable. In terms of structure, the long-term goal should be to give individuals greater control over their own accounts, choosing their investments as they do in Hong Kong (with appropriate safety nets and so on). The problem here is that China still lacks the mature and open financial systems of Hong Kong and Singapore: its helter-skelter stock market is hardly ideal for retirement savings at the moment. So change will have to be gradual.

Although pension coverage is expanding, China is in the midst of a demographic shift that will see people aged 60 or above make up more than 30 percent of the population by 2050 (vs. 13 percent today), according to The World Bank. The chief economist of Haitong International Securities Group highlighted the need to reform China’ s pension system in a China.org piece in June, and Bloomberg Businessweek’s Dexter Roberts calls the situation a “brewing crisis” in a Thursday report:

About half of China’s 31 provinces are unable to pay their retiree costs and rely instead on financial transfers from the central government. The central government says it has enough money to cover its pension liabilities for now, but there’s a debate about how long that will last. “Many say it will become a real problem within 10 years,” says Hu Yuwei, who works for Spanish bank BBVA and who is exploring possible partnerships with local pension managers. “For now, the government can use central funds or transfer money between provinces. But in the next 10 years, the amounts will become too big to simply move money around.”

In the same print edition, The Economist frames the fragmented pension system in the context of China’s Great Divide:

In the countryside local governments pay a basic pension which varies greatly depending on their financial health. Personal accounts supplement this, into which individuals may put money over their working lives, encouraged by matching contributions from the state. In the cities the main system combines social insurance, paid for by payroll taxes, with individual accounts, into which workers must pay 8% of their earnings.

But a kind of apartheid is at work, distinguishing urbanites from country folk, and locals from migrants. Ma Wanzhi, who now lives in Heijingying, enrolled in a scheme through her employer, a factory making the incense sticks for temples. Her 61-year-old sister, on the other hand, still lives in the neighbouring province of Hebei, where she collects a meagre pension of 80 yuan a month. She supplements her income by travelling to Heijingying to sell peaches by the roadside.

Like these women, many of China’s workers are highly mobile. Yet China’s pensions are not. In principle, workers may take their individual contributions with them if they move, as well as 60% of their employer’s. In practice, the system struggles to keep track of the money. Only a quarter of migrant workers in the cities were covered by pensions in 2010, compared with four-fifths of locals, according to Albert Park of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

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“Before I left town for Shanghai, the women in my village stopped talking to me. They looked at me in a sort of sarcastic way – why on earth would a woman move so far away from home?” Zhao said. “All of them stayed at home, knitting, and most of them were laid off. They thought I was leaving to take part in some immoral business.”

In fact, Zhao was playing a crucial role in China’s economic history, joining hundreds of millions of other workers heeding Deng’s call to change their — and their country’s — destiny.

The movement was considered the largest human migration in history.

[…] Zhao’s two young sons moved to Shanghai to join her. Her oldest son finished junior high with some of the best grades in his class. But because he was a migrant, he wasn’t allowed to attend high school in Shanghai—only legal residents of the city are allowed to do that. It’s like this throughout much of China. By law, migrants are typically treated like illegal immigrants inside their own country. In the cities they move to, many of them aren’t eligible for social benefits like health care and schooling.

“This makes me so angry,” Zhao said. “How can it be that all of us are under the same leadership… We live in the same country… yet we’re not treated the same?”

 Read more about migrant workers in China via CDT.

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Post tags: Deng Xiaoping, hukou, migrant education, migrant workers, urban rural divide
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Viewers learn from Li Baicheng that during the years of the Cultural Revolution, blind men would travel and tell stories in groups of two to three. Late in the night, they would start telling fortune undercover, but a few in the audience would sometimes report their activities. The blind men would then be pushed to join the labor force. “It was rough for blind people… It was miserable,” Li recalled.

“Even today, fortune-telling is the target of the ‘crack downs’ and lies in a legal gray area,” Li Baicheng commented on the dire business in the documentary. Some local governments crack down on “superstition” along with anti-pornography and anti-crime raids. But Fengshui, a variation of East Asian Buddhist and Taoist mystical practices, fairs well in contrast to Baicheng’s fortune-telling. In Singapore, a company named “New Trend Lifestyle Group” provides Fengshui services and plans to file for an IPO in London:

[New Trend Lifestyle] earned pre-tax profits of £1.4m last year on revenues of £6.1m.

Over the next three years, it plans to open 50 shops in China, where it already has one office and six distribution partnerships.

“Feng shui is endemic in Chinese communities throughout the world and influences many aspects of personal, business and even government activities,” said NTL, citing as example recent reports of Hong Kong authorities making payments to people living near construction sites as compensation for disturbing their feng shui.

See also:

Hard-pressed Documentary Makers Keep Rolling

Chinese Documentaries Show Realities Missing from Chinese Films

Xu Tong introduces his film Fortune Teller

© Wendy Qian for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: documentary, fengshui, independent film, religion, urban rural divide, xu tong
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Ian Johnson:How do you account for Chinese officials’ frequent disregard of China’s own laws? Is it a lack of checks and balances—that officials think they can get away with anything so they do anything?

Chen Guangcheng: It’s also that they don’t dare do the right thing and don’t dare not do the wrong thing. Chinese police and prosecutors, do you think they don’t understand Chinese law? They definitely understand. But these people illegally kept me under detention. They all knew [that what they were doing was illegal] but they didn’t dare take a step to rectify the situation. They weren’t able to. Why is it like this? A Xinhua News Agency journalist came and saw me twice; as a result he lost his job. So you can see that once you enter the system, you need to become bad. If you don’t become bad, you can’t survive.

Chen also argues that some dissidents and China observers overlook urban-rural differences:

There’s nothing positive about urbanization?

I think for those who go to the city and work there’s a benefit. But the current way of villages being turned into towns—I don’t think there’s an advantage to that. People in the village often rely on ordinary kinds of labor to earn a living, like working in the fields, or raising geese or fish and things like that. So now what happens? They turn a village into one high-rise apartment building and that’s all that’s left of the village. Then the land is used for real estate projects controlled by the officials. Where are the people supposed to work? How is that supposed to function?

People abroad look at China’s human rights situation and they mainly see the situation of better-known people. But they don’t know about all the violations of ordinary people. You know my situation but you don’t know the situation of the huge number of the disabled in China, or the women who are bullied and abused, or the orphans in China. You probably don’t know much about them or just about a few of them. But this is why the officials are so afraid—because they know the true extent of the problem. They are terribly afraid of people organizing. It’s very delicate in the countryside now. This is why they constantly resort to detentions and so on. They don’t even try to find an excuse, they just do it—they are that scared.

Read more about Chen Guangcheng, who recently arrived in New York after escaping from illegal house arrest in his home village of Linyi, Shandong.

© Wendy Qian for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, dissidents, forced abortions, new york university, political system, urban rural divide
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