| Volume 6, Number 3, July 2009 |
The Poverty of Rights and the Third Challenge to the Rural Development of China
by 黄岩 Huang Yan |
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| A SUDDEN crisis that emerged last year has quickly thrust the problem of China’s rural labourers onto the world stage. China is a manufacturing nation: the advanced manufacturing industry of China’s costal regions attracts a truly incredible amount of labour power from every corner of the country. For a reasonably long period of time, the problems of rural labourers have been thought of as merely a domestic issue and, when I have communicated with a few European China experts, I have been surprised that they haven’t taken any interest in the phenomenon of rural labourers. So to what extent is rural labour an international rather than a domestic issue? The tensions created by the current economic crisis may have brought this issue to a head. According to official releases, there are now more than ten million unemployed rural labourers, though this problem was already on the government’s agenda. Unemployment among rural labourers is always a big issue, particularly around Spring Festival, the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative |
Congress—the Premier worries away, academic circles argue away, and the media constantly reports on it. The methods of the Office of Statistics do not take into account any kind of statistic or indicator of unemployment rates among farmers or rural labourers because, legally speaking, all peasants have land and if they go to the city to work that merely counts as a temporary migration of labour. Once the city’s demand for labour has been met, as the reasoning goes, they can return to the land to work. The land itself is their guarantee and so city governments do not need to bear any responsibility for their social provision.
This group of up to 100 million people did not even have an agreed name until 2005, when various terms like “vagrant”, “outside labour”, “service labour”, and “people’s labourer” all found their way into official documents. Only in 2005 and in the “Study on the Distribution of Rural Labourers”, published by the State Department Research Group, did they start to become known as “rural labourers”. The State Department also offered... [ Read more ] |
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| Issue 6.3 |
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Remembering—
A Shared Duty
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