Will Hutton (London Observer): China's poorest will suffer

[Jack Rabbit]

From the London Observer (Sunday supplement of The Guardian Unlimited)
Dated Sunday August 28

China's poorest will suffer
We claim cheap labour threatens our clothes industry. But China's workers are flexing their muscles
By Will Hutton in Beijing

It is difficult to convey to those who haven't seen it just how vast and poor is China's agricultural hinterland. Westerners see the 21st-century skyscraper skylines of Shanghai, Beijing or Guangzhou, the exploding city 100 miles from Hong Kong, and think they are astonishing. Which they are; the spectacle never fails to take my breath away. But even more astonishing is the poverty of peasant villages sometimes only a few minutes' drive away.

Eight hundred million peasant farmers occupy a country almost exactly the same size as the USA. Most farm tiny plots of land leased to them by the village co-operatives, often the same plots their families have farmed for 2,000 years or more.

One of China's best-kept secrets is that the communists never succeeded in breaking patterns of land ownership that were first legally registered in 350BC. A property-owning, one-party state has been transmuted into a lease-holding, one-party state .

China's peasantry, unlike any other in the world, has a tradition of empowerment as well as a long experience of living on subsistence incomes. Today's villages are testimony to the harshness of life. Houses are rarely more than a storey high and most have dirt floors with no more than rudimentary facilities; human waste is another useful source of fertiliser. Outside at this time of the year, vegetables are being dried ready for storage over the long winter. A family gets by on a weekly income of no more than £10.

Read more.

[CountAllVotes]

1. actually ....

Since China became communist after WWII, the quality of life has greatly improved. My father was in what was known as Peking, China at the end of WWII and he was there for quite some time and really liked it a lot. He always used to tell stories about China and how he strongly believed (and knew) that Communism was the best thing that ever happened to China being people were no longer found dead on the streets every morning. They had either froze to death during the night or starved.

Maybe China is still not the greatest place in the world to live, but it has improved greatly in the past 50 years which is good for the Chinese people.

However, on a salary of £10 or less, it is unlikely their lives will get any better anytime soon, especially with the oil prices going up every single day.

We live in a global economy. The sooner everyone realizes this the better IMO.

:kick:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Definitely China has made a lot of strides, but the point of the article

is that the latest economic developments have created tremendous inequality. Wide Angle once featured a segment on the rural unemployed who move to the cities illegally, leaving destitute villages of old people and children. The illegal workers, mostly in construction, are so badly off and have so few rights that they survive by camping out in their half completed construction projects. Meanwhile, the rich live as well as anyone in the world.

When China has political protests these days, it's not for political freedom, but against corrupt officials who favor the rich over the poor.