Harold Myerson of the Washington Post is shrill about our new economic overlords’ skill at learning from America’s Best Capitalists(tm):
The military units that rolled into Beijing 20 years ago today came chiefly from the sticks. Isolated by geography and indoctrination from the liberalism flowing through Chinese cities and packed into Tiananmen Square, they were the perfect shock troops for Deng’s murderous reassertion of authoritarian power.
…
Two decades later, however, the troops who pulled the triggers have reason to wonder who won and who lost in the class-and-culture war in which Tiananmen was but the bloodiest battle. Today, the Communist Party has proven itself, in all but one particular, a friend to the urbanites and professionals who now prosper in China’s cities — socioeconomically, the very kinds of people it gunned down in Tiananmen Square… In the countryside, where hundreds of millions of Chinese still reside, the benefits of the nation’s economic miracle are far harder to detect. For many, the backbreaking drudgery of peasant life persists as it has for centuries. Some Sinologists believe that one reason the urban Chinese haven’t demanded more rights is their fear that in a democratic China, they’d be outvoted by a peasantry that would demand a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth.
Mandatory disclaimer: I understand it is objectively & patriotically ten thousand times better to be a rural American citizen than a rural Chinese citizen. (Believe me, every time I spend a couple hours failing to make much progress in my pathetic urban “garden”, I give fervent thanks to my late grandparents for getting the heck out of rural Connemara.)
On the other hand, it would be nice if America’s most popular business export was something other than MBA seminars on “How to Fvck Over Your Working Class While Ensuring They Blame It All on the Urban DFHs”.
Twenty years since Tiananmen Square. Damn, I am old.
TenguPhule
But you see the difference is that in China, when the corrupt overlords get too out of hand, they take the bastards out back and shoot them.
Something to think about.
cosanostradamus
.
Hm. So the message is… ?
Who are the DFH’s in China? The Yuppies?
And who’s the working class? The farmers? The soldiers?
How ’bout, it would be nice if China had not jumped directly from Maoism to crony communism with the help of people like Bush & Clinton? How ’bout, it would be nice if the differences between crony communism & crony capitalism were more than just stylistic? How ’bout, it would be nice if governments functioned in the best interests of the people, you know, like in a democracy? Anywhere.
How ’bout if our crony capitalists didn’t keep pushing us toward war. This time it’s N.Korea.
.
Bill E Pilgrim
@cosanostradamus:
That’s a very funny nick.
You’re very good at predicting when something will fall off a delivery truck. I assume.
2th&nayle
“How to fvck over your working class…” Isn’t that the very definition of capitalism/republicanism? Where’s the mystery here?
2th&nayle
@TenguPhule: “…take the bastards out back and shoot them.” Umm, I like it! I could work with that.
Woody
The Chinese are experimenting with a ‘new’ theory of governance, testing whether the people will accept ‘prosperity’ in lieu of ‘liberty.” Every regime in the whole world–including the US CorpoRats– is watching with interest.
cosanostradamus
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Yup. And I can make you an offer that makes no sense, but it rhymes.
Your nick, I’ve seen someplace before. Just a gut feeling. A vonne gut feeling.
.
aimai
Twenty years? Yes. My grandfather was dying in the hospital–though we didn’t know it was the end–and he said to me, at the start of the whole affair “The Tianamen protests won’t end until all the students from the sticks have been able to bus themselves in for it.” He was right about that.
aimai
El Cid
Remember, the Chinese “Communist” theory was that under their reform capitalism, they could gently guide the population into capitalism and thus eventual soci alism by having the Communist Party play the historical role of the bourgeoisie.
(In other words, after generations of thinking they could skip beyond them, they accepted the Marxian theory of stages of development, and then came up with a way of spinning it so that now capitalists could be among the leaders of China’s ruling Communist Party and that the Party’s role would be that of ushering the people into the capitalist stage of development, but hopefully more gently without all the chaos and bourgeois exploitation.)
The Party seems to have fell rather well into playing the role of the national bourgeoisie, and not just in the gentle encouragement roles, but even to the extent of being the class against which worker dissatisfaction is directed, albeit not too much outwardly manifested dissatisfaction.
On the other hand, with approximately 700 million peasants still largely outside the capitalist economy, you’re only talking about things which affect a mere 400 million or so people, or a little over 1/3 of the Chinese population, or 1/3 greater population than our entire nation.
bago
Greatest speech on websitin evar!
gex
@El Cid: China is an interesting and frightening country. Beyond the issues we’re discussing on this, I am very concerned about the results of the terribly misguided one-child policy.
Nations in which young men have virtually no ability to attain a mate are not stable nations. This is one of the contributing factors to Islamic terrorist groups. And the thing about China is the scale of things given the size of the population and the rising power and influence of the country. Imagine Saudi Arabia with China’s power and influence.
Xenos
@gex: Good observation. This may be part of the reason why the Chinese Government is so tight on religions. The Falun Gong movement really freaked the PTB out.
El Cid
The following gives some idea of numerical perspective here. In addition to a peasant class of some 700 million (which the government would like to reduce to some 300 million, so, um, yeah, they need to create enough non-peasant jobs to put every single man, woman, and child in the U.S. to work, good luck with that), the scale of those migrating from peasant-based agriculture in the rural areas (and a few from collective agriculture work) is likewise enormous, larger than the U.S.’ active working population by some 40%.
By “peasant workers” they discuss peasants who left the small-holder farms to seek paid work, locally or outside their home township.
There are roughly 225 million of these people.
From Boxun, an independent news source on China citing a statistics update from the Chinese government. H/T CFR. (And no, no box quote because I still can’t successfully paragraph and unbold it any more, and bolded non-paragraphed text looks like unreadable ass. What I used to do doesn’t work.)
******************************************************
******************************************************
Chinese Migrant Workers Totaled 225.42 Million at the End of 2008
By chinafreepress.org (translation) | Mar 27, 2009
PRC National Bureau of Statistics March 25, 2009
In order to get base numbers on the numbers of peasant workers leaving and returning to their homes in the countryside, the PRC National Bureau of Statistics took advantage of the return of peasant workers to their home areas for the Spring Festival holiday to conduct large sampling survey of 68,000 rural households in 31 provinces, 857 counties, and 7100 villages. The most important survey results were:
I. The Total Numbers and Structure of the Peasant Workforce According to the PRC National Bureau of Statistics Peasant Worker Statistical Monitoring Survey, as of December 31, 2008, there were 225.42 million peasant workers in China.
Of these, 140.41 million or 62.3% of the total, were employed outside of their own rural or urban township. Employed inside their own rural or urban township were 85.01 million workers, or 37.7% of the total.
Among the 140.41 million peasant workers employed outside their home township, 37.6% came from central China, 32.7% from western China and 29.7% from eastern China.
Eastern China employed 71% of all the peasant workers employed outside their own township, with central China employing 13.2% and eastern China 15.4%. Among the 85.01 million peasant workers who work in their own township, 62.1% live in eastern China, 22.8% in central China and 15.1% in western China.
II. The Number of Peasant Workers Returning to their Home Townships Before the Spring Festival and their Employment After the Spring Festival.
As of just before Spring Festival, about 70 million peasant workers returned to their home townships, or about have of the 14.41 million peasant workers who are employed outside their home townships.
After the Spring Festival, among the 70 million peasant workers who had returned home, about 80% had already left to work in the city; of those who had gone to the city, 45 million had already found work and 11 million were looking for work.
About 20% of them found work in their home township, created a business for themselves or were looking for work in their home township.
III. Characteristics of Peasant Workers Who Returned to Their Home Townships
1. Most returned in the fourth quarter of 2008. During 2008, the proportion of peasant workers who returned to their home townships was first quarter: 1.44%, second quarter 8.46%, third quarter 19.44%, and fourth quarter 70.65%. During the fourth quarter, the proportion who returned each month were 18.2% in October, 27.3% in November and 25.1% in December.
2. More returned from eastern China than from any other area.
The proportion returned from each region of China were: 62.4% from east China, 16.1% from central China and 21.3% from western China. Returning peasant workers who had been working in Guangdong Province accounted for 24.6% of the total. Returning peasant workers from the Yangtze River Delta accounted for 17.2% of the total.
3. The manufacturing and construction sectors were more seriously affected by the financial crisis.
If we divide up the peasant migrants by the sector in which they work, the two sectors which provide the most jobs to peasant workers are manufacturing and construction, accounting for 36.1% and 28.2% respectively of the peasant workers working outside who had returned to their home areas.
Peasant workers who had returned to their home areas accounted for 46.2% and 73.3% of peasant workers in the manufacturing or construction sectors. This is higher than the national average.
4. The peasant workers who had returned home were relatively poorly educated. Among the peasant workers who had returned to their home townships, the proportions of those who were illiterate or only knew a few characters was 2.4%, elementary school education 14.8%, middle school 65.8%, high school 11.1%, and vocational school 4% and higher education 2%. Peasant workers with a middle school or lower education accounted for 82.9% of the total.
This shows that it has become easier for relatively uneducated peasant workers to find jobs outside their home townships. Improving the education of peasant workers will make it easier for them to hold a job.
Balconesfault
Been saying for years – when the Chinese have enough US debt, they’re going to start cashing it in and buying US businesses as assets.
And if US workers thought US MBAs are hard asses … they’ve got some lessons to learn.
tc125231
tc125231
@TenguPhule:
Thomas Levenson
Apropos of not much. The comments above that focus on the sheer scale of Chinese demographics are totally on point, and understating the issue.
The speed of transformation in China ’76 (Mao’s death) – now (33 years) seems to me to be equivalent to nothing so much as that that overtook the British midlands, say, from the end of the Napoleonic War (1815) to the 1850s. Just a complete turnover of living conditions, family structures, cultural norms, environmental quality, class structure, total wealth and distribution of same…you name it. Throw in the digital revolution and, though the speed and availability of information in Victorian Britain and the US at the same time is often underestimated, you’ve got a population being shaken, rattled and rolled with unprecedented access to news about that fact.
I was in China in ’87, working on a series of films on the history of Chinese science (“The Genius That Was China” PBS-NOVA, 1989 or ’90) and it was stunning how fast the physical city-and-village-scape was being changed. Property rights law had shifted and the entire country was under construction. And that was just the warm up phase.
We shot the series before Tienanmen Sq.; I edited the final version after; what struck me and just about everyone interviewed for the series (outside China) was that the final attack was a shock, not a surprise. (As an odd aside, a woman whom I then did not know, but to whom I am now married was visiting her parents who were guest-lecturing at Beida that June. She was in the square until about 9 on the crucial night, when one of her parent’s students said that it was time to go right now. She went, for which I am very thankful.)
Last thought: my father, the sinologist Joseph Levenson, was working on a second trilogy when he died on the theme of provincialism vs. centralization over the long span of Chinese history. (His first trilogy was on Confucianism and its modern fate.) He died before he had completed more than a rough draft of the first of the planned three books, but his thinking about the Cultural Revolution, then just a couple of years into its ten year span, suggest that he would have seen that event as a preview of the tension that Deng would exploit to make the crushing of the protest so politically acceptable within China. The irony of Deng playing that note on that line of tension would not have escaped him.
Throwin Stones
You may be old, but you certainly are up late (early?) :)
Congrats AL. I look forward to reading you more. Really enjoyed your rant/post from 6/1, and need to catch up with yesterday’s.
It will be interesting to watch China in the next few years. I’m thinking of picking up Mandarin ;) I was just commenting to my wife last night I can’t believe it’s been 22 years since I first saw Pink Floyd live.
R-Jud
@gex: Yesterday I saw this item about China noting an uptick in the abduction of little girls, including toddlers, by families wanting to secure future wives for their sons. That’s going to end well.
schrodinger's cat
I guess I must have missed this class when I was in business school. I don’t like the tenor of this post and the one on abortion last night, and I actually agree with many of the points you are making. You can make your point without beating us over the head with it and overly broad generalizations.
Calming Influence
Not everything in Connemara is bleak…
satby
@aimai: My dad died the day of the Tianamen Square massacre, too aimai. I remember thinking how many families in China had to be grieving just like mine.
Many years later, I had an exchange student from China, when I showed him the pictures from that day, he told me that the news in China had reported it as a small protest that was dispersed with no casualties. The pictures of the crushed students and the man confronting the tanks shocked him. To this day, I wonder how many more people in China never knew that it had ever happened.
Emma Anne
Yikes. I just read here:
geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/chinapopulation.htm
that China’s population is still growing and won’t level out until 2030. That is amazing in a country that has had a one child policy for decades. Though the link says the fertility rate is 1.7, so the policy can’t be as strict as it is supposed to be.
Cathy W
@Emma Anne: My understanding is that the law is not enforced as strictly in rural areas, especially if a couple’s first child is a girl. Multiple births will also raise the rate slightly.
joe from Lowell
Don’t feel bad about your garden, Anne. Agriculture is high culture. Those farmers grew up in the life. They know the soil and crops and weather and their needs the way you and I know English. Trying to learn how to grow things later in life is like learning a second language.
Jackson
Agreed with schrodinger’s cat. Not sure when this blog decided that becoming as “shrill” as the posts it’s supposedly criticizing was a good idea, but it’s not very good at it.
I’m not sure which is worse – the pseudo-populist tirade or that the author either ignores or completely fails to understand the scope of the economic and social issues China is facing.
The tone of this post isn’t helpful.
Wallace
This is a funny video that made me think of this posting. Chinese video making fun of the US lagging behind.
youtube.com/watch?v=dmANxHJ6s9M&
gex
@Wallace:
Ouch. The part where they rub it in about how they will pass us by “while [our] pants down in oily desert” stings.
Wile E. Quixote
@schrodinger’s cat
Pop a Midol, they work wonders in ameliorating episodes of pearl clutching and those complaints about “shrillness”. Oh, and while you’re at it learn how to spell “Schrödinger”. If you can’t print an diacritic then the accepted spelling for the German umlauted vowels, ä, ö, ü is “ae”, “oe, “ue”, so the correct spelling, sans diacritic, is “Schroedinger”.
Wile E. Quixote
Oh, and Jackson, and schrodinger’s cat, after you’ve taken your Midol and are over your pearl clutching and complaints about shrillness you might want to read this article about attempts to reform labor laws in China. Interestingly enough one of the groups that is agitating against labor law reform is the American Chamber of Commerce in China, and their rhetoric about how horrible it will be if Chinese workers are actually granted some rights is exactly the same as the bilge they spew in the US.
Oh, and Jackson, I know you think it makes you look smart, but in reality using the phrase “pseudo-populist” makes you look like a retard and for the record I seriously doubt your understanding of “… the scope of the economic and social issues China is facing.” is any better than Anne Laurie’s, but you are better than she is at pearl clutching.
Joel
Sorry, I’m with shroedinger’s cat and Jackson. There’s something to be said for nuance and understanding. But hey, it’s a process. Keep up the postings, AL.
schrodinger's cat
@ Wile E. Quixote
What exactly is your point? And can you make it without casually tossing out personal insults. I never said anything about China in my post, nor do I agree with the American Chamber of Commerce. If you read my comment, I even mention that I do agree with most of what Anne Laurie has to say, I feel that the tone takes away from effectiveness of the very valid points she makes.
Also, I do know my Schrödinger from Heisenberg. We can discuss wave-particle duality or the Uncertainty Principle any time you want. The story behind the wrong spelling is rather silly. The first time I delurked and posted on BJ I made a typo while spelling Shroedinger, with the small case s and no e, well and since that’s how BJ recognizes me, I haven’t changed it in my subsequent postings. BTW I don’t wear pearls and prefer Pamprin over Midol.
Jackson
As long as we’re piling on, Wile, I’ve worked in China for over a decade, speak fluent Mandarin, and am married to a native Chinese. Thanks for illustrating our point so effectively, though.
RglrLrkr
@aimai: Ah, I remember that lovely post you did at your homepage on your grandfather.
tehipitetom.blogspot.com/2008/11/one-hundred-years-of-if-stone.html
tess
We’re both old AL. I remember watching Tiananmen coverage on CNN the morning after my high school graduation. (Also proof of being old: in 1989, CNN was a real news network.)
That fall, each morning I’d get up, open the door to my dorm room and pick up the daily newspaper, and another Soviet-backed government had fallen. That February, everyone in the dorm crammed into the tv rooms to watch Nelson Mandela be released from prison.
The world seemed way more hopeful then.
Wile E. Quixote
@Jackson
Yet despite these qualifications all you’re capable of doing is whining about “shrillness” and uttering empty phrases such as
without actually using the expertise and knowledge you claim to possess to enlighten us on the economic or social issues that China is facing or their scope. All you offer, unlike Thomas Levanson, is empty rhetoric and pearl clutching complaints about shrillness.
If you can offer something more substantive than the empty rhetoric and pearl clutching complaints about shrillness I’d love to hear it. Really I would. I don’t know much about China, I’d love to learn more, and I know I’m not the only one, so enlighten us.
Wile E. Quixote
Oh, and I’d love to see either Jackson or Shrodinger’s cat provide some examples of how the original Meyerson article or Anne Laurie’s post was shrill. Is it because he said bad things about WalMart? Or because he pointed out that the idea that increased prosperity in China would lead to a government that was less autocratic and authoritarian and increased opportunities for democratic participation on the part of the Chinese doesn’t seem to be happening? Or is it because Anne Laurie said bad things about people who went to business school?
Come on, step up to the plate. Also from re-reading the Meyerson article it seems to me as if he does have somewhat of a grasp of the economic problems that China is facing. Meyerson isn’t the only commenter to point out that China has a huge problem with the growing gap in wealth between urban and rural areas. C’mon, where’s this “shrillness”?