Chapter 9 Chapter 8 The Unstoppable Torrent

Summer in Beijing is coming earlier and earlier.It's still May, and the whole city is so hot that it makes people restless. It seems that there are countless fire dragons in the air. Before you pay attention, they rush into your nostrils, your throat, your liver and spleen... But neither the early heat wave nor the constraints of the household registration system, nor the concerns of well-meaning people nor the blank eyes of discriminators, have failed to deter migrant workers from all directions.In Beijing, they are everywhere: you go to restaurants, you get your hair cut in a hair salon, you go to a small stall to shop, you stop a car on the street, you pass a construction site, you walk through an overpass tunnel, you will encounter people with accents from all over the world "Rural".

It was also very hot that day.When I walked out of the hotel, the sun was shining brightly, and I couldn't keep my eyes open.After my eyes got used to the strong light, I could see clearly that on the green belt in front of the hotel, several young men in their twenties were digging holes and planting trees against the sun. I went up and chatted with them.They are from Henan, and they all belong to the same village. "I am 23 years old, and I have been in Beijing for two years. I have been doing greening." A shirtless young man took the cigarette I handed, "I went out to work when I was 17, and I went to Dalian and Shanghai once a year. , Ningbo, Qingdao."

"Why change places every year?" I asked curiously. "When the farming is busy, I quit my job and rush home to help my parents with work. When the farming is slack, I go to my hometown and go out to work. I will go wherever my hometown is." He had a cigarette in his mouth and leaned on his arms. Holding a shovel, "After leaving Qingdao, I went home to get married. After getting married, I came to Beijing and haven't been back for two years." "Haven't seen your wife for two years?" "I haven't seen it. However, this year when the farming is busy, I plan to go home." He took a deep breath on his cigarette.

If it is said that the transition from the gathering-safari lifestyle of migration to the agricultural lifestyle of settlement in the village is the first profound change that mankind has experienced, then the process of industrialization and urbanization that began with the British Industrial Revolution is the beginning of human civilization. The second life style change I experienced. American economic historian Gregory Clark pointed out in his new book "Farewell to Handouts: A Brief History of the World Economy" that the term "Industrial Revolution" is partially misleading and does not fully summarize the first stage of human life style. The nature of the secondary upheaval, "Since 1800, agricultural productivity has increased as much as in other sectors of the economy, and modern economic growth would have been impossible without substantial improvements in agriculture."

Before this great change, 70% to 80% of the population in most human societies were engaged in agriculture, and it was precisely because of the substantial increase in agricultural productivity that some advanced modernization countries were able to complete the transition from agricultural society to industrial society with a small cost. A proportion of the agricultural labor force feeds the vast majority of the non-agricultural population. The UK was the first to complete this transition. At the end of the 19th century, the British agricultural population dropped to 20%, and the development of international trade and globalization caused this proportion to further decline sharply: in 2000, the British agricultural labor force accounted for only 1.2% of the national population, because about half of the food in the UK today is Bought from the international market.But even in the United States, a major food-producing country today, farmers account for only 2.1% of the country's population.The reason is simple, according to Clarke: "If we had free food markets, the world today would require only 2 percent of the population to be farming and everyone would be fed."

"The root cause of urbanization is the improvement of agricultural labor productivity." Mao Yushi, chairman of the Beijing Unirule Economic Research Institute, also explained the reason why more than half of the human population has become "urban animals" in an interview with me at home. "The same is true in China. The population has increased to 1.3 billion, and per capita food consumption has also increased. The arable land has decreased by at least a quarter, and the number of farmers arable land has decreased by half. However, there is more and more food, and the price of food has also dropped by half. So , it is no longer a problem for Chinese people to have enough to eat.”

However, judging from China's modern history, it is difficult to say that the country's ruling elite has been readily accepting or enthusiastically promoting urbanization transformation. Since the Opium Wars, China has repeatedly resisted this process of industrialization and urbanization without fear.In modern China, when the long-closed gate of the country was blasted open by the artillery fire of Western powers, some old-fashioned bureaucrats and pedantic Confucian scholars in the Qing Dynasty tried to resist this process; in modern China, although Mao Zedong tried to pass The method of "Great Leap Forward" quickly realized industrialization and urbanization, but after this attempt failed, he established a strict household registration system that separated urban and rural areas, shortened the school system and abolished the college entrance examination, and passed "educated youth going to the mountains and going to the countryside" and "five Movements such as the "Seven Cadre Schools" have carried out policies with a certain "anti-urbanization" tendency.

Scholars at home and abroad have different explanations for the motives behind these actions of Mao Zedong in his later years. Mao Yushi, who is over seventy years old, has personally experienced all these campaigns launched by Mao Zedong, but he does not agree with the view that Mao Zedong initiated the movement of educated youth to the countryside because of his small-scale peasant economic thinking.He analyzed: "Mao Zedong also wanted to engage in industrialization. He was not an agricultural supremacist. He also carried out the Great Leap Forward and the Great Iron and Steel Smelting, which shows that he also wanted to industrialize. But the economy is so bad, and industrialization The market and the capital are needed, all of which cannot be solved. The children in the city are growing up every day. There is no other way. If the students stay in the city, it will become a big disaster, because the energy of the students is very powerful, so Mao Zedong wanted to get them into the countryside. Killing two birds with one stone, on the one hand, pushed the employment problem of urban youths to the countryside, and on the other hand, avoided political turmoil.”

Maybe Mao Zedong really "wanted to engage in industrialization", but the road to industrialization in his mind was doomed to fail.The more profound reason is that China in the era of Mao Zedong was an agricultural country where 80% of the population was engaged in agricultural production. Even a great man like him could not escape the historical constraints of his time. "Farewell to Handouts: A Brief History of the World Economy" contains a passage about all agrarian societies that looks like it's specifically analyzing Mao's China: "In the pre-industrial world, if people spent 80 percent of their income on food, then 80% of the population is engaged in farming, fishing or hunting. Agricultural production also requires people to live near fields, so pre-industrial societies are agricultural societies with very small urban populations... as long as a society is dominated by the 'Malthus Trap', then the immediate priority of this society is food production."

After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping implemented the policy of reform and opening up, trying to achieve China's industrialization and urbanization through the market economy. At this time, China also had a golden opportunity for global industrial transfer. By chance, China became the "world processing factory". Industrialization created a large number of non-agricultural employment opportunities and called for a large number of surplus labor in rural areas. As a result, the largest wave of migrant workers in the history of the world emerged as the times require, surging magnificently across the land of China.

However, the latest wave of urbanization in China is not top-down, and it is not promoted by policymakers with a purpose and in a plan, but bottom-up. discipline" formed spontaneously. For this great creation of Chinese farmers, Liu Kaiming, director of Shenzhen Institute of Contemporary Social Observation, gave a vivid description.In an interview with me, he introduced the formation process of the wave of migrant workers in China, which was once called "blind flow" by the authorities: "China's reforms started from the countryside at the very beginning. Farmers in Gang Village. In 1978, the rural areas began to distribute land to households and contract production to households, and the hunger problem of farmers was solved. In 1984, there was a problem of difficulty in selling grain, and the income from agricultural production declined. At this time , People born in the 1950s and 1960s began to become laborers, and the countryside could not accommodate so many laborers. At that time, there was no way to sell food, so the central government issued a document saying that farmers were allowed to bring their own food rations and enter the city for commercial work. But how to get in, The above has always said 'orderly', and all the documents mean control and blocking." Liu Kaiming took a sip of water and continued: "In October 1984, China started urban reform, but it still planned the economy and developed state-owned enterprises, including Shenzhen, which also developed many state-owned enterprises at that time. However, migrant workers in these state-owned enterprises could not enter Yes. Then until 1988, it was discovered that the state-owned enterprises were always losing money, but the township enterprises developed, and the workers of the township enterprises were farmers, and the foreign-funded enterprises in Guangdong also developed, and the employees were also migrant workers. These two groups of migrant workers began to affect the reform of state-owned enterprises." Liu Kaiming pointed out that for the rising tide of migrant workers, the countermeasures of governments at all levels in China are still "blocking" and "blocking". "In 1989, the State Council issued a document calling for resolutely stopping farmers from blindly moving into cities. The Guangdong provincial government also issued a policy calling for a resolute stop of the so-called 'blind flow' that occurred at that time." It wasn't until the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century that China's decision-makers realized that the wave of migrant workers could no longer be "blocked" or "stopped", so they followed the trend and began to view and actively guide this tide of population flow. In an interview with me, Hu Angang, director of the National Conditions Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences-Tsinghua University, used the three-stage theory of "red light-yellow light-green light" to explain the changes in the Chinese government's policy on migrant workers—— "After 1958, there was a 'red light stage' in China's treatment of migrant workers, that is, migrant workers were not allowed to enter the city; after 1984, it became a 'yellow light stage', that is, you can enter the city, but you must Bring rations; the real fundamental change occurred in the late 1990s or after 2000, from the previous "yellow light stage" to the "green light stage". I think, most importantly, in 2001, the Chinese government proposed "Urbanization Acceleration" was introduced, and a special plan for urbanization development was specially formulated, which proposed: Except for a few megacities, which actually refers to Beijing and Shanghai, other cities should reform the employment system and household registration system." Hu Angang believes that the reform of the household registration system that has resulted in a dual urban-rural structure is the gradual shift from "one country, two systems" to "one country, one system." Peng Xizhe, a professor at Fudan University, also said: "We scholars all hope that China will be an orderly urbanization process, and hope that people living in cities will have a decent job and live a decent life. But in many cases, cities The process of globalization is not dependent on our will. Farmers often make rational choices based on their own judgment. If they think they can find better jobs in cities than farming, they will flock to cities. market forces are often more effective than government regulation. My conversation with the shirtless green worker also attracted the attention of his fellow workers. A stocky young man came up.I also handed him a cigarette: "Planting trees is hard work, why did you leave your hometown?" "Farm work is harder!" He grinned and smiled innocently, "Outside, freedom, at home, boring." "Are you much younger than him?" I pointed to the shirtless young man. "He is only one year older than me." He poked out eye circles skillfully, "I worked in a shoe factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong for a year, and my monthly salary was 1,200, but the working hours were too long, and I worked overtime until 11 o'clock every day. , and sometimes even to one o’clock.” "Why didn't you do it?" "Just like him. Go home and get married." "Why don't you go back to Guangdong anymore?" "Those factories in Guangdong later stopped accepting Henan people, saying that Henan people like to make trouble." "Hmph, he looks down on us, and we still look down on him!" The shirtless young man intervened and said angrily, "We're afraid that we won't have a place to go to such a big China!"