Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’

collective social rights earlier established within the communes ––

weak though they may have been –– meant the peasants had to face

burdensome user charges for schools, medical care, and the like.

This was not the case for most permanent urban residents, who

were also favoured after 1995 when an urban real-estate law con-

ferred real-estate ownership rights on urban residents, who could

then speculate on property values. The urban/rural di

fferential in

real incomes is now, according to some estimates, greater than in

any other country in the world.

7

Forced to seek work elsewhere, rural migrants –– many of them

young women –– have consequently 

flooded––illegally and without

the rights of residency –– into the cities to form an immense labour

reserve (a ‘

floating’ population of indeterminate legal status).

China is now ‘in the midst of the largest mass migration the world

has ever seen’ which ‘already dwarfs the migrations that reshaped

America and the modern Western world’. By o

fficial count, it has

‘114 million migrant workers who have left rural areas, temporarily

or for good, to work in cities’, and government experts ‘predict the

number will rise to 300 million by 2020, eventually to 500 million’.

Shanghai alone ‘has 3 million migrant workers; by comparison, the

entire Irish migration to America from 1820 to 1930 is thought to

have involved perhaps 4.5 million people’.

8

 This labour force is

vulnerable to super-exploitation and puts downward pressure on

the wages of urban residents. But urbanization is hard to stop, and

the rate of urbanization stands at something like 15 per cent per

year. Given the lack of dynamism in the rural sector, it is now

widely accepted that whatever problems there are will be solved in

the cities or not at all. Remittances back to the rural regions are

now a crucial element in the survival of rural populations. The dire

condition of the rural sector and the instability it is generating is

today one of the most serious problems facing the Chinese

government.

9

When the communes were dissolved their previous political and

administrative powers were turned over to newly created township

and village governments set up under the Constitution of Decem-

ber 1982. Later legislation allowed these governments to take pos-

session of the communes’ industrial assets and restructure them as

TVEs. Liberated from central state control, local administrations

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