70 million is a lot of landless peasants
Joshua Muldavin International Herald Tribune:
Rural unrest is the biggest political problem China faces today, even though lethal violence in such events is rare. In 2004, according to official estimates, there were 74,000 uprisings throughout the country – a result of widening gaps between rich and poor, and between urban and rural areas, and between the rapidly growing industrial east and the stagnating agricultural hinterlands…..
While avoiding full land privatization and, until recently, massive landlessness of the rural majority, Beijing still allows unregulated rural land development for new industries and infrastructure. Land seized from peasants reduces their minimal subsistence base, leaving them with what is called “two-mouth” lands insufficient to feed most families, thus forcing members of many households to join China’s 200 million migrants in search of work across the country. In many areas where I have carried out research, some households have lost even these small subsistence lands, swelling the ranks of China’s landless peasants, who number a staggering 70 million according to official estimates….
The Chinese state is very clear on the rural roots of the 1949 revolution, ones emanating from massive inequality and social insecurity. But there is a new clarity now for peasants and rural workers, who have seen the state increasingly side with the newly rich over the past two decades, often at a direct cost to themselves, their families and communities. This harks back to the period prior to China’s 1949 revolution when enormous numbers of landless peasants formed the core of the largely rural movement led by Mao and others. Following their victory, it was the redistribution of land to the poorest peasants that gave the Communist Party its greatest enduring legitimacy in rural areas.
We have been saying for over a year that China has some big bumps ahead in the road to development. Something is seriously out of control when the country revises its GDP upward by 17% in a single year to appear more normal to the world, as we have written, and as AFP noted: One immediate consequence of the survey would be to make China appear a more “reasonable”, “healthy” and “ordinary” economy by reducing its investment-to-GDP ratio and raising the consumption-to-GDP ratio to levels that are closer to those of other East Asian countries. Something is out of control when there are 74,000 uprisings going on. And 70,000,000 landless peasants, not to mention 200,000,000 migrant workers, are trouble in the making. How much? Well, if the “official” 70 million estimate of landless peasants is as accurate a number as China’s GDP, then perhaps China’s problems have also been seriously understated.