Mara Hvistendahl writes in The New Republic this week about the possibilities of future unrest and social ills as unintended consequences of China’s One Child Policy. I wrote a little something about this last year:
There are many factors that can contribute to social instability and political unrest, but having a large population of young, underemployed, and unmarried males is a big one. By way of example, I give you the Old “Wild” West in the United States, rural China in the mid- to late-19th century, and Sanlitun’r on any given Saturday night.
Ms. Hvistendahl concurs:
In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People’s Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States–frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps–are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are– today as well as then–disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term
There’s a new essay at OpenDemocracy by Kerry Brown, author of the book Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century. Brown argues that while the Olympics currently dominate both the headlines and the attention of Chinese government officials, the twin problems of corruption and inflation will remain once the spotlight has been turned off, the athletes go home, and the One World, One Dream banners start to come down. When August’s celebration ends and September’s hangover subsides, will the people’s attention once again return to rising food prices and a culture of endemic local corruption?
First off, as a historian, I’m not sure I completely agree with the historical parallels Brown uses in his essay if only because China will be a very different place in 2009 than it was in 1989, never mind 1949, but as politicians the world over are all too well aware, pocketbook issues need to be taken seriously, even in places where the vast majority of people are shut out of the political process.
The CCP’s legitimacy rests on its perceived competence at managing economic development. Discontent over spiking food prices coupled with growing frustration over corruption, especially at the local level, threaten the Party’s
Professor Li Xiaojiang, of Zhejiang University, is a pioneer of women’s and gender studies in the PRC. She published Renlei jinbu yu funu jiefang (“Human progress and women’s liberation”) in 1983, one of the first scholarly articles in her field ever published in the PRC. In 1988, Professor Li wrote an essay analyzing the situation of women in the 1980s, arguing that easing the burdens placed on women was key to continued social progress in China.*
“The travesty is that these pressures women endured [before] and continue to endure are never seen as social problems; they are construed as merely individual problems. Criticizing society as unfair is to no avail. The balance of justice has never been the moving force in the progress of history. If one is willing to face reality, then one must see that the emergence of women’s problems is actually a means for society to resolve many other social problems that emerged with reform (such as excess labor, labor productivity, and so on). Women have thus been the cornerstone in the development of society’s productive capacity. Historically it has been so; in reality is is so. No wonder authoritative sociological publications are unwilling to print much
In the wake of last week’s protests in Shanghai over construction of a new mag-lev train, historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom has a great piece in The Nation looking at the history of collective action in Shanghai. It would be a mistake to ignore parallels between the current Shanghai protests and earlier events in the city’s history that began with daily-life concerns and calls simply for greater government responsiveness, yet ultimately swelled into broader movements that challenged the legitimacy of an authoritarian ruling party. Protests of this sort took place in the 1940s against the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek, triggered by hyperinflation. When students of the Tiananmen generation first took to the streets in Shanghai in the mid-1980s, their grievances were largely about the living conditions on campuses but mushroomed into a much more radical set of demands that caught the world’s attention in the Beijing Spring of 1989.
A must-read.
Heartbreaking story out of rural China via the LA Times: poor farmers defrauded in a pyramid scam involving–would you believe it–ants. Somewhere, a grasshopper is smiling a little too smugly. The story illustrates the get-rich-now mentality here, the constant search for a new angle by those struggling to make a go of it with the communist economy having all but given way to private enterprise, and the frequent collusion of government officials in shady dealings.
Old rules of caution don’t carry much weight in a society that has seen some become absurdly wealthy, seemingly overnight. And government officials often are first in line to fleece the laobaixing, or common folk.
It’s hardly the first case like this here, in fact it’s probably not even among the first 10,000, and it certainly won’t be the last, especially if local officials and the central government stick with a policy of covering their own asses rather than trying to fix the problem.
It’s the dark underbelly of a reemerging China. The noveau riche zip around the country with their new cars and the latest in man-purse fashion. But while the economy is booming, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to grow.
|
|