Chapter 24 Chapter 5 China: Don't beat yourself up

The widening gap between the rich and the poor in China is an indisputable fact, and we need to deal with it calmly and seriously.If we handle it well, our development will be relatively smooth and harmonious. If we handle it poorly, we may experience setbacks or even crises.From the perspective of the world, the gap between rich and poor has widened in the process of modernization in all countries. The industrial revolution period in European history was also the time when the gap between rich and poor was the largest. However, through economic development, the implementation of social improvement policies, and the middle class The problem has been alleviated by the growth of the class and the transfer of the crisis to the third world.As far as China is concerned, we must first have an accurate and realistic grasp of the current situation of the gap between the rich and the poor in China in order to better deal with this problem.Some scholars believe that the gap between the rich and the poor in China has surpassed that of many developing countries, even India, and has become the largest in Asia.Some people even say that China's "cities are like Europe, and rural areas are like Africa".The gap between the rich and the poor in China has indeed widened, which has caused many serious problems, which need to be taken seriously. However, the above-mentioned views are quite different from the conclusions I have observed in many places in the world. I would like to talk about my own Observe, and make some comparisons with the situation in China.

I have been to many cities in developing countries, such as Mumbai, New Delhi and Calcutta in India, Karachi and Rawalpindi in Pakistan, Manila in the Philippines, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil, and Mexico City in Mexico , have been to Nairobi in Kenya, Johannesburg in South Africa, Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, Lagos in Nigeria, and Antananarivo in Madagascar.Field observations in these places tell me that the scale of slums in cities in these countries is 3 times, 5 times, 10 times or even more than that in China.The gap between the rich and the poor in our big cities is not small, and there are also shabby houses in cities within cities and urban-rural fringes, but that is not the concept of slums in developing countries.The slums in developing countries refer to a kind of stretches of or even endless, very crowded, dirty and poor living conditions of simple shacks.

Take Mumbai, India's largest city, for example, 60% of the urban population still lives in slums.The harsh living conditions are unimaginable: most of the shacks are made of scrap iron sheets, asphalt felt, and plastic sheets, and there are garbage and dust everywhere. On average, thousands of people have a public toilet, and the crowded people line up in long lines every day to go to the toilet. Long queues waiting for the arrival of water supply trucks.The gutter is an open stinking ditch, full of all kinds of filth, flies and mosquitoes are flying all over the sky, and various infectious diseases occur frequently.There are also a large number of homeless people sleeping on the streets in Indian cities.Once, I arrived in Kolkata by plane at 6 o'clock in the morning. It was about half an hour's drive from the airport to the hotel in the city center. I saw hundreds of homeless people sleeping on the side of the road, bridge holes and corners along the way. Down.Every city in India has a large number of ragged and unkempt beggars. If you give one of them a little money, a dozen or so beggars will gather at once. Some of them can follow you all the way to the hotel, and even come to the hotel door to wait for you tomorrow. .As far as I personally feel, the poverty I have seen in Mumbai and Calcutta is more than the poverty I have seen in China in the past 20 years combined.

I have also seen a slum called Kibera in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, Africa.50% of Nairobi's population lives in slums.The driver only took me around the outside of the slum and explained, “If you give me $1,000, I won’t go in unless two police cars clear the way, because I won’t be able to get out if I go in. The people inside will definitely take my car.” They took away money and money, and they lost their lives.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the poor in this slum under the protection of heavily armed forces, and the local residents welcomed him with slogans: “We are starving!” “We are sick!” "We are dying!" "Our children are not going to school!" There are 750,000 people in this slum alone, no electricity, no running water, only 50% of the households have radios, and the incidence of AIDS is three times higher than that of other parts of the city .

There is also a special phenomenon of "Spring Festival Transport" in Chinese society: Every year during the Spring Festival, hundreds of millions of migrant workers return to their hometowns to visit their relatives, and then return to the city.Why do most migrant workers return home?Why is there no such mass return in cities in other developing countries?People also have their own festivals, but there is no such situation of returning home.An important reason for this difference is that most of our migrant workers not only have relatives in their hometowns, but also own or relatives' land and private houses.Many developing countries, such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Brazil, and Kenya, have not carried out real land reform or social revolution, or have undergone some kind of reform, but due to various reasons, the land of farmers is deprived of by the rich A large proportion of farmers have no tiles on the roof and no land to stand on, which is the real poverty.Often, the whole family, old and young, migrate to the city. Once they have worked hard to enter the city, they will never leave, and they are reluctant to spend money to return home.I have seen some statistics saying that our Gini coefficient has reached 0.47, exceeding the warning line of 0.40 recognized by the international community.The numbers themselves may be roughly reliable, but the problem is that the Gini coefficient generally only calculates income disparities and does not take into account whether a person actually owns land, private homes, and the value of such properties.Whether there is land and private houses, for a farmer, or even for the people in the whole society, it may mean a world of difference in the quality of life.I think that scholars who are interested in studying the international comparison of the gap between the rich and the poor should also take into account relevant factors such as land and private houses, and then make international comparisons, so that the results will be more convincing.Our social science workers should also exert their originality, put forward standards with international influence, and make independent, objective and comprehensive judgments on China and world affairs, so as to correct the deviations that may be caused by using standards formulated by the West.

I can even make a rough comparison: you can drive in any direction from the center of Beijing or Shanghai, as long as you don’t drive into the sea or cross the border, drive for 20 hours, and you will see In many rural areas and cities, if you add up the poverty you see along the way, it may be less than the poverty you see in Mumbai, New Delhi, and Calcutta in India when you drive 2 hours outside the city.These Indian cities and their surrounding areas are still relatively developed areas in India, but you can still see the kind of abject poverty that can be said to have disappeared in most parts of China from time to time: large slums where hundreds of thousands of people live, the kind of shabby clothes , homeless abject poverty.Through more than 30 years of reform and opening up in China, the number of people living in extreme poverty has dropped significantly, while India is still far from achieving this.

In addition, the Shanxi black brick kiln incident in my country in 2007 was shocking, alarming the general secretary and the prime minister, as well as all the media in the country. Many people inferred from this that there was a directional crisis in China's market economic reform.Problems such as black brick kilns must be dealt with seriously, and market-oriented economic reforms are not a panacea for all problems.But at the same time we need to have a realistic estimate of the size and nature of the problem.Still take India as an example. According to the estimates of different NGOs, there are at least 10 million to 15 million (some even estimate about 60 million) "child bonded slaves" in India. They work 12 hours a day and 7 hours a week. Today, parents sell them to employers to toil around the clock to pay off their debts, which are often only a few dozen dollars.These children of school age can only work as slaves for employers who buy out their fate for ten years. They are concentrated in carpet, quarrying, garbage disposal and other industries."Child bonded slavery" is pretty much an open secret in India.The Indian constitution clearly prohibits this kind of practice, but the government, courts and media seem to have become quite numb to this kind of thing. There are probably four reasons: one is that the law does not punish the public; One glance; third, these children belong to low castes, and people of other castes seldom care about their fate; fourth, governments at all levels are corrupt, and many of them are bribed by employers.

The British Broadcasting Corporation made a documentary called "Child Slave of India" (Child Slave of India), interviewing Indian officials at all levels from the central to the local level. They either denied or prevaricated on this issue, but British reporters did not grasp the facts. Fang, who visited only one town, learned that there were 15,000 such child slaves in the town, but officials at all levels still shirked their responsibility.How many government officials in the so-called largest democratic country in the world really care about the tens of millions of child slaves of low caste origin?A country like India, which has such problems at least a hundred times more serious than China, feels good about itself and is very optimistic about the future, while many of us in the country believe that incidents such as black brick kilns indicate that the sky is about to fall.This kind of incident is serious and bad, we must correct it, follow the clues, solve similar problems one by one, and turn bad things into good things.But the sky will not fall, and we can continue to go far ahead of India and most developing countries to achieve the modernization goals we have set ourselves.

As for China's argument that "cities are like Europe, and rural areas are like Africa", especially "rural areas are like Africa", it may be out of well-intentioned ignorance.I don't know if people who hold these views have ever made field trips to rural Africa.I have been to 18 African countries and visited farmhouses in Ghana, Kenya, Swaziland and other places, all of which are within a quarter of an hour’s drive from the capital. A shed built with tree branches on the muddy ground, even if it is a brick house, has a roof covered with straw or a roof covered with iron sheets and a few bricks.Houses often have no doors, only a curtain.Most of them have no electricity.Semiconductor radios have not yet become popular.However, most farmers in China have built brick houses in the past 30 years, and many of them have been flipped over more than once. Color TVs have become popular, and the number of rural Internet users has already exceeded 100 million.

This is just a superficial comparison.From a deeper level: Africa is facing some major problems that China's rural areas do not have, such as wars, social disintegration, and AIDS on a plague scale.Africa is the place with the most wars in the world. From the 1980s to the present, more than 10 million lives may have been lost in the wars.In the 1990s alone, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that began in 1998, also known as "Africa's First World War," involved nine countries and killed more than 6 million people.Genocides in Rwanda and Burundi killed more than a million people in three months, and Sudan's 1983 civil war is estimated to have killed more than 400,000 people.

According to the latest statistics from the United Nations AIDS Organization, one person in Africa dies of AIDS every 13 seconds, and one person is infected with AIDS every 9 seconds.There are currently 25 million people living with HIV in Africa, and 2 million people died of AIDS in 2005.I have been to Swaziland, which is one of the most affected countries in the world with AIDS, 30% of its adult population, because too many people died, the coffin industry became one of the fastest growing industries , in short supply.A friend from Swaziland told me that he attends the memorial services of relatives and friends almost every week. Most of the dead are young and middle-aged, and they are the backbone of society.The government is simply unable to deal with AIDS, and medicines cannot be distributed to the grassroots. Another fastest-growing industry in Africa is the security industry, because vicious crimes are developing explosively. In many African cities, there are many robberies during the day, and it is even more dangerous to go out at night.what is the reason?One is poverty, and poverty leads to change.The second is the disintegration of family and society. Many parents of children died of AIDS. These orphans have now grown up. Taking Zambia as an example, the number of orphans has exceeded a quarter of the population.They have never experienced the warmth of family.A comprehensive indicator that reflects all these problems is that the average life expectancy in Africa is only around 50 years old.The civil servants in Rwanda strongly demand that pensions should be paid from the age of 45, because the average life expectancy in Rwanda today is only around 40 years old, and the pensions of civil servants are only paid at the age of 60 according to the old regulations, which is out of date. In contrast, the average life expectancy in our rural areas is also over 65 years old.According to my observation, the overall living standard of African rural areas is significantly lower than that of Chinese rural areas during the Cultural Revolution.The widening gap between urban and rural areas in China is a big problem that we cannot ignore, but it can be said that it is an international joke to compare today's rural China to Africa.Some parts of our rural areas may be similar to African rural areas, and may even be worse than some areas in Africa, but in general, the lives of most of our rural areas and most of our farmers are much better than those in Africa.The United Nations once adopted a "Millennium Development Goal": before 2015, developing countries should reduce their extreme poverty by half, and the world's extreme poverty is mainly in rural areas. China achieved this goal in 2003.But for most African countries, that goal will be decades away without massive international aid.We can also use the aforementioned analogy for comparison. If you drive from Beijing or Shanghai for 20 hours, if you add up the poverty you see along the way, it may be less than if you drive from Lagos, Nigeria. The poverty you see when you drive two hours out of the city, or Antananarivo, Madagascar. Of course, many countries in Africa are also making serious efforts, and have made considerable progress in some areas.For example, Kenya, Uganda and other countries, with the help of the international community, have begun to implement free and compulsory primary education.Kenya's average life expectancy is only 55 years, and Uganda's average life expectancy is only 45 years. The two countries are far behind China in economic and other aspects, but they have also begun to implement free compulsory primary education.In addition, China's investment in Africa has increased rapidly in recent years, driving the economic development of many African countries.In recent years, the rise in international prices of raw materials such as oil has also benefited many African countries.But on the whole, Africa's development still faces extremely severe challenges. The above are just some of my personal observations and comments, trying to make us have a broader international perspective and a more diverse reference coordinates when observing the gap between the rich and the poor in China.But doing so does not mean that we do not need to pay attention to China's own problem of the gap between rich and poor. On the contrary, we should attach great importance to solving this problem.Under China's specific political, economic and cultural conditions, the widening gap between rich and poor and the resulting social conflicts may be more difficult than in other countries, and we must not take this lightly.