Beijing
The peasant villager, in a straw hat and weathered hands, has long been at the heart of China’s self-mythology. Chinese tend to think of themselves as a nation of villagers, some of whom have been living in the city for generations, but whose soul remains located in a cluster of wooden huts amid the paddies. It’s a vision that infuses their art and culture and, sometimes tragically, their politics.
That village myth is increasingly misleading – and to the extent that Beijing is trying to keep it true, damaging China’s progress.
China boasted that it became an urban-majority country last year, with more urbanites than villagers. Many people here are well aware that this is untrue: That milestone was passed years ago and as many as 200 million of those half-billion “villagers” have been living and working in cities for years.
They fill the big cities of China’s southern and eastern coasts, providing the largest source of industrial labour. They are known as the “floating population,” because they are legally villagers, unable to send their kids to school in the city, buy houses or settle, trapped halfway between rural and urban life.
China won’t let them become urban citizens – in part for macroeconomic reasons (peasant savings are a cornerstone of China’s industrial capitalization) and partly because villagers don’t actually own their officially collectivized land, so they have no reason or ability to sell it.
I spent an evening talking with Qin Hui, a Beijing historian renowned for his outspoken criticism of policies. He knows peasant life intimately: During Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, he was one of 20 million people who were force-ruralized. He spent eight years in unpaid peasant labour and near-starvation.
Today he says he is deeply worried about an even larger group of people forced to be peasants.
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Photo of Sanfengzhen village, Sichuan, by Doug Saunders
As I listened to these warnings, I couldn’t help thinking about how my week had begun in London.
To Rebalance the World, Exporters Need to Start Spending
If you wake up early in Frankfurt, you can drive to Madrid in time to have a late beer, without encountering a border crossing or a currency change along the way. Yet you will traverse an imaginary border between economic miracle and financial catastrophe, between booming Germany, the world’s second-largest exporter, and crisis-ridden Spain, a country so debt-troubled that it is in danger of crashing the euro.
You may notice that many more truckloads of German goods are headed through France to Spain than are going in the opposite direction – a one-way flow of goods and services that is the root cause of this continent-wide crisis, the reason why debt piled up along the Mediterranean coast in the first place.
Europe is now in a war, possibly unwinnable, against that debt, much as the United States has spent four years battling crisis levels of private-sector debt rooted in its trade imbalances with China. The root problem, however, is not borrowing or banks, but one of the most dangerous dilemmas of our age: People who live in exporting nations don’t spend money. They’re not paid enough to buy imports, so inequality soars and debt piles up.
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