Make no mistake: rural China faces a crisis. Today the amount of money that farmers have left after paying taxes and local fees is not enough to purchase seeds and fertilizer for the next planting. Farm incomes have shrunk, while production costs have skyrocketed. The countryside’s basic infrastructure is a shambles, with education, health care and other public services existing in name only. Whereas 85 percent of rural children attended high school in the early 1980s, now the same percentage drop out during the first nine years of school. In the past the critically ill died in hospitals; today they die at home. Small-scale farms are failing, and they are pulling down millions of Chinese peasants with them.
Part of the problem is that the weight of the state rests more heavily on the countryside. China’s farmers fork over almost three times the taxes paid by people in the nation’s bustling urban centers. And Beijing often seems oblivious as to the best way to address this mounting crisis. What funding has been funneled to the countryside usually gets devoured by local officials, never reaching the people who need it most.
But Beijing need not fear a peasant army storming the gates. First, who would lead the revolution? In imperial China, rural society was governed by scholar-officials. When the people’s interests were trampled on, it was these elites who would spearhead a rebellion. Today, however, the countryside’s best and brightest have already moved to the cities. Peasants still talk about Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, the famed leaders of China’s first widespread peasant rebellion, in 209 B.C. But today’s Chen or Wu is living along China’s booming eastern seaboard, building new, modern skylines.
What is also seldom appreciated by foreign China experts is that the peasants–for all their trials and heartaches–don’t even blame the party. Unlike 100 years ago, today most farmers believe that the state is fundamentally good and, if given enough time, will be able to solve the problems facing rural China. If peasants point their fingers at anyone, it is at local officials or a handful of corrupt cadres who they believe–probably rightly–are on the take. But by and large the party still has the people’s faith and support.
The countryside, however, is Beijing’s No. 1 headache. The nightmare scenario for the party would be if the rural crisis were somehow to migrate to the cities. Think about it in terms of numbers: China has more than 900 million peasants, and this number climbs each year by about 11 million. Although the rural work force numbers more than 450 million, 100 million farmers are all that is necessary to meet the countryside’s labor needs. If the living standards in rural areas do not improve soon, the cities could collapse under an avalanche of migrating farmhands. Today about 8 million folks from the countryside drift into China’s cities every year. It is not farfetched to imagine that number at 30 million, 50 million, or more. Although raising the quality of life for China’s peasantry is usually considered an economic problem, I believe it could become Beijing’s most pressing political challenge.
Prime Minister Zhu Rongji says the thing he thinks about night and day is how to save China’s farmers. But since the prime minister is also preparing to retire from public life, let’s hope he’s not the only Chinese leader wise enough to see the next big thing.
title: “Voting With Their Feet” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-15” author: “Frances Johnson”
In better times Germany was renowned for its Gastarbeiter–guest workers drawn by the millions from Italy, Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. These days it’s Germany that is sending its own downtrodden abroad. Last year a net 111,000 people moved out of the country–five times the rate of emigration in healthier times. The overwhelming majority were young workers and their families. Frustrated with their government’s economic failures, they are leaving for the United States, Australia and the more dynamic parts of Europe. These days that’s almost anywhere.
This wouldn’t be Germany if the phenomenon didn’t spawn its own bureaucracy. Labor offices around the country now boast full-time emigration advisers. State-financed training centers teaching Dutch, Norwegian or Swedish have recently been set up in major cities. The vocational-training academy in depressed Neuruppin, northwest of Berlin, offers a three-month Fit for Sweden program that prepares unemployed Germans for new lives up north. Many labor offices these days not only finance language classes but actually advertise and promote jobs abroad. They even cover up to 4,500 euros in moving costs.
Other countries are often happy to get well-trained German workers. “There’s a big demand for Germans in Holland,” says Wim Jansen, owner of a Dutch construction company. “They’re thorough and punctual.” He has 50 German immigrants working for him and doesn’t mind paying the extra money his Germans cost compared with, say, Poles. The Netherlands, where unemployment is a mere 3 percent, is particularly keen on German cooks and construction workers, Sweden is taking nurses and bricklayers, while Ireland profits from an exodus of German IT specialists.
For Germany all this is ample evidence of how badly things are going at home. Those who are leaving tend to be the best-trained and most flexible of its workers–exactly the sort the country should be attracting instead of driving away. They also tend to be young, not a part of the population rapidly aging Germany can afford to lose. The fact that the German government is funding and promoting this drain–instead of effectively solving the underlying economic problems that cause it–shows just how desperate it has become.
