|
|
|
 Regional
disparities between urban-industrial centers and the vast,
predominantly rural hinterland are a serious problem in China.
The “economic miracle” of the past two decades was mainly generated by
a small number of coastal provinces and special development zones in
southern and eastern China. In these prosperous areas, we can also
find a large share of the Chinese population. The cities and towns in
the East and South are growing rapidly due to rural-urban migration -
despite a strict household registration system, which should (in
theory) keep peasants from interior provinces in their villages.
Credible estimates have placed the number of temporary rural-urban
migrants (the so-called “floating population”) in the order of 80
million. None of the big cities, from Beijing to Shanghai could
function properly without the huge “army” of unqualified migrant
workers from the rural hinterland. These migrants work primarily in
the urban construction industry, in waste collection, the transport
industry, as well as in household services. Those farmers, who could
not get jobs in the major cities have often migrated to smaller
towns and cities in the South and East, where numerous private
companies – particularly in the textile and electronics industry - had
been opened up in recent decades. This abundant labor supply from
rural areas has created the „low-salary“ advantage, which economists
have identified as one of the key driving forces of China’s economic
miracle. |
| Vast rural areas in the central and
eastern parts of China, on the other hand, have seen little economic
growth after the first wave of development in the early 1980s, when
family farming was reintroduced after decades of centrally planned
agricultural communes. Today, small-scale agriculture and animal
husbandry are still the dominating economic activities. Typically,
each family has a plot in the range of only 0.25 to 0.55 hectares,
which is far too small for competitive commercial agriculture. With
agricultural modernization, however, a large number of farmers would
lose their subsistence. It is estimated that China has an agricultural
excess population in the order of 200 million people, most of
them in the central and western parts of the country. No wonder that
the great majority of China’s poor lives in these interior rural
areas. There
is a consensus among experts that the gap between increasingly
prosperous coastal provinces and stagnating interior regions has been
widening in recent years, with great risks for the political stability
of the nation. With its Western Development Program in the latest
5-year plan, the Chinese government has acknowledged the seriousness
of this internal development gap and implemented a scheme of massive
infrastructure investments and other measures to reduce disparities. |
| The SRD research activity is
currently developing tools for analyzing regional diversity in China.
A prototype of a Regional Analysis and Planning System (RAPS) at the
province level is already completed and will soon be available through
this web site. |
| |
|
