| Volume 7, Number 1, January 2010 |
China’s Millions of Jobless Migrants
by 安替 Michael Anti |
The Biggest Threat to China is not
Social Turmoil but Social Decay
by 孙立平 Sun Liping |
GUANGDONG, CHINA—“With the Premier’s encouragement, we have exceeding confidence.” Zhang Wengui, 21, a peasant worker from Sichuan province, reads the slogan from a help-wanted board at the Likai Shoes factory on the outskirts of noisy Houjie Town, some 30 miles from Guangzhou, the capital of industry-heavy Guangdong province. Despite Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s reassuring smile in the photo that accompanies the optimistic pronouncement, Zhang still is not sure whether to pursue the job offer—it pays only $6 per day. It is February, which means at least 130 million workers, like Zhang, have just arrived in Guangdong and other coastal provinces of China searching for jobs, signaling the end of a tense month-long return to their rural hometowns over the annual New Year’s break, known as the Spring Festival.
Zhang Wengui’s dilemma is common: while this job promises only nominal revenue, there are painfully few posted on such billboards these days. Of serious concern, both to... [ Read more ] |
THIS is a post for discussion. My main thesis is that the largest threat to China is not social turmoil, but social decay. This idea is very preliminary, so this post is a work in progress. I welcome interested friends to participate in a constructive discussion.
1. Are we worried about the wrong issues? Many people are now concerned about social conflicts, confrontations, mass incidents, etc. The reason why there is such a concern is fear of major social turmoil. However, I think the biggest threat to Chinese society may not be social turmoil, but social decay.
2. Social turmoil means serious social conflicts that threaten the basic framework of the political system, whereas social decay refers to the necrosis of the cells that compose the body of a society. To illustrate the point with a medical metaphor, turmoil is to a society what an injury is to a healthy body, whereas social decay is like the failure (or death) of the cells and living issue of the body. Perhaps the concept of “social erosion” by Mr. Fei Xiaotong and “political decline” by Samuel Huntington... [ Read more ] |
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| Issue 7.1 |
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India’s Peaceful Rise
in World Politics
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