Will Hutton (London Observer): China's poorest will suffer [View All]

[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.

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