To understand just how poor rural Guizhou is, you can look at the statistics. Or you can look at the children in Qixin village.
Zhao Ai is nine, but is so short he appears three years younger. He eats nothing between leaving home at 6:30am — for a two-hour trek down the mountain to Ruiyuan primary school — and returning at 5pm.
Last year, Shanghai took the top spot in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) international rankings for reading, mathematics and science in state schools. Meanwhile, at Zhao’s primary, the big educational challenge is “no food,” headteacher Xu Zuhua says. Malnutrition stunts her pupils’ growth and hampers their concentration.
There is no better illustration of the growing gulf between cities and the countryside as China transforms itself from a rural to an urban nation. Between 1990 and 2009, China slashed its numbers of rural poor from 85 million to 35.97 million, thanks in large part to the wages sent home by migrant workers. The government hopes further urbanization will lift children like Zhao out of poverty.
Yet many fear that two Chinas are emerging, with the countryside falling ever further behind.
“Even though we are developing, it feels like urban areas are running while we are strolling,” says Zhou Liude, who oversees Ruiyuan and nearby schools.
For every yuan (US$0.15) of a rural resident’s income, a city-dweller enjoys 3.23 yuan in disposable income — and that may significantly understate the gap.
Include the extra services and benefits enjoyed by urbanites, such as subsidized housing, and “many observers believe that the ratio would easily be in the range of four to five and is arguably among the highest in the world,” says Kam Wing Chan, an expert on migrants at the University of Washington.
“China’s incomes are increasingly polarized. This large income gap is definitely a contributor in the background to the more frequent and violent protests and unrest in the last few months,” he says.
Even farmers who reach the cities as migrant workers are in effect second-class citizens, because China’s hukou — household registration — system classifies people as urban or rural and allocates rights to services accordingly. One Chinese academic has described the result as “counterfeit urbanization” — cities full of people who cannot enjoy much of city life.
The government has sought to invest in rural areas, and the benefits of growth are spreading. In the towns around Qixin you see stores with gleaming yellow motorbikes and adverts for 3G and coffee.
However, these remain unimaginable luxuries for families like Zhao’s, who survive on basic farming and wages sent home by relatives working in cities. Their poverty is disguised by development: the further away from the road people live, the poorer they are — and the worse their children’s grades — Ruiyuan’s headteacher says.
Education has always been the great hope for China’s poor. Villagers built Ruiyuan themselves to improve their children’s opportunities. However, rural scholars lag their peers from the start.
Zhao Ai’s father died in a mudslide; his mother is a migrant laborer hundreds of kilometers away. He is one of China’s 50 million “left behind” children, raised by grandparents because the hukou system makes family migration difficult. They have inferior educational results and more behavioral problems than the average child. Relatives can be unable or unwilling to care for them properly; sometimes, they are carers for sick and ageing grandparents. With few adults around, they must help with household chores and farming before they can turn to homework.
Zhao Ai is lucky; his family make up in warmth what they lack in income. However, he is an anxious child, noticeably quieter than his boisterous schoolmates. He struggles on the steep climb back home, a punishing scramble through woods and fields, on an empty stomach.
Education officials want to build a boarding school and have even found a company willing to donate 400,000 yuan — but would need three times that to pipe water to the site. So for the foreseeable future, Zhao Ai and his friends are stuck with their long journeys and school days in an ageing, cracking building with no running water or heating. Finding suitable staff is hard because few young graduates want to live somewhere so remote. English is compulsory, but Ruiyuan has nobody capable of teaching it.
Experts say the disparity between rural and urban educational standards is one reason why the proportion of rural students in universities — particularly the top ones — is falling rapidly. According to Chinese media, pupils from the countryside made up 62 percent of those sitting national college entrance exams last year, but only 17 percent of those entering the elite Tsinghua University.
In recent years, Chinese leaders have sought to give rural areas more help. Official statistics suggest the income gap may have closed slightly within the last year, though experts suspect this reflects sampling changes.
Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang (李克強), who is expected to become prime minister next year, has suggested urbanization could “pull up” the countryside as a smaller number of farmers consolidate land, leading to increased productivity. Yet the best prospect for most farmers remains a move to the cities.
Wang Fang and her husband, Chen Shuangfu, arrived in the provincial capital, Guiyang, 10 years ago, with just 10 yuan in their pockets. Their hard, unappealing work — collecting and sorting rubbish for recycling — earns them as much as 20,000 yuan a year, compared with their 1,000 yuan income back home.
However, their rural hukou means they are not entitled to many services — and, since the hukou is inherited, neither are their sons. Schools do not receive extra funding for migrant pupils; many claim they are full, or charge hefty illicit fees. The couple have spent 50,000 yuan since their sons reached school age in “donations” to get them into a public school and illicit extra fees.
“I can’t read or write; I can’t even speak standard Mandarin well. We don’t want our children to be like us,” Chen says.
Migrant workers build China’s cities, clean their homes and clear their rubbish — but other residents “call us beggars and use dirty words,” Wang said.
That might not have mattered so much to an earlier generation of workers, who planned to return to their villages in retirement. However, many younger migrants have little experience of farming, and believe their futures lie in towns.
“[Urbanization] is better than an economy without growth. But when you grow, you also have to provide services to [migrants] and not only use them as cheap labor ... You need children to move with their parents to cities and you need services for the left-behind elderly,” says Tao Ran (陶然), an expert on rural affairs at Renmin University.
There are promising pilot projects that attempt to tackle the urban-rural gulf. Cities such as Chongqing and Guangdong have been experimenting with limited hukou reform.
However, such programs are often tightly restricted and cover workers who have moved from country to town within a province. In many cases migrants have been wary of switching registration, fearing the compensation for lost land and home is insufficient to establish them in the city.
Chan said reforms needed to go deeper and to involve Beijing.
“Hukou reform has to be gradual, but it has to tackle the core of the issue,” the Washington professor says. “The core issue, for example, in Guangdong, is to gradually accept migrant workers from outside the province — the majority of the migrant workers — as equals.”
Wholesale hukou reform is an alarming prospect for officials, raising the specter of an expensive and uncontrollable surge to the cities. However, the alternative is an unbridgeable gap between town and country — with children such as Zhao Ai stranded in poverty as his urban peers romp ahead.
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
As Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s party won by a landslide in Sunday’s parliamentary election, it is a good time to take another look at recent developments in the Maldivian foreign policy. While Muizzu has been promoting his “Maldives First” policy, the agenda seems to have lost sight of a number of factors. Contemporary Maldivian policy serves as a stark illustration of how a blend of missteps in public posturing, populist agendas and inattentive leadership can lead to diplomatic setbacks and damage a country’s long-term foreign policy priorities. Over the past few months, Maldivian foreign policy has entangled itself in playing
A group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers led by the party’s legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (?) are to visit Beijing for four days this week, but some have questioned the timing and purpose of the visit, which demonstrates the KMT caucus’ increasing arrogance. Fu on Wednesday last week confirmed that following an invitation by Beijing, he would lead a group of lawmakers to China from Thursday to Sunday to discuss tourism and agricultural exports, but he refused to say whether they would meet with Chinese officials. That the visit is taking place during the legislative session and in the aftermath