China After 1978

The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 60th anniversary on 1 October 2009. December 2008 marked 30 years since the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to launch ‘market reforms’. The breathtakingly rapid economic growth witnessed after 1978 has attracted worldwide attention. But the condition of more than 350 million workers is abysmal, especially that of the migrants among them. The stagnation of peasant incomes had fuelled a huge, historically unprecedented migration into the cities—over the past 25 years, some 150-200 million persons, including women, migrated from the countryside to the urban areas in search of jobs.

Why do the migrants put up with so much hardship in the urban factories? Has post-reform China forsaken the earlier goal of ‘socialist equality’? What has been the contribution of rural industries to regional development, alleviation of poverty and spatial inequality, and in relieving the grim employment situation? How has the meltdown in the global economy in the second half of 2008 affected the domestic economy? What of the current leadership’s call for a ‘harmonious society’? Does it signal an important ‘course correction’?