The Wall Street Journal - 07.03.2020 - 08.03.2020

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E


ven as the coronavirus
spreads globally, there
are some small signs of
recovery at its source in
China. After unprece-
dented control efforts—mass quaran-
tines, blockaded cities, halted trans-
portation—new reports of infections
have slowed. Under government or-
ders, and with the help of low-interest
loans, shuttered businesses have be-
gun to resume operations. The online
ferment of angry urbanites who had
criticized the government’s mishan-
dling of the crisis has dwindled for
now. Even Starbucks has reopened
stores, though only for takeout orders.
So is China set to resume a stable
course of growth? Don’t count on it.
The country could still get hit by a
second wave of the virus as the quar-
antines end, and its all-important ex-
port sector will receive a harsh blow
later this year as the global economy
slows. Worse, the virus has revealed
the vulnerability of a pivotal, under-
valued part of China’s economy—the
hundreds of millions of migrant work-
ers and their relatives in the country-
side, who together make up roughly
half of the population but have gained
far less of the country’s wealth.
Migrants are the Achilles’ heel of
the China growth story. They are still
facing unprecedented virus-related
disruptions in their lives and work.
The majority have seen their incomes
dry up, unable in most cases to return
to jobs or get their farm goods to

BYDEXTERROBERTS predicted that China’s middle and up-
per classes will rise from 182 million
households in 2012 to 303 million by
2022, and multinationals have
counted on this growth. China’s lead-
ers also have stoked the idea that
with urbanization, the country would
transition to a more consumption-
driven service economy, That, they
predict, would end reliance on pollut-
ing factories and on excessive invest-
ment, which has led total debt in
China to surge to a dangerously high
level of more than 300% of GDP.
The trouble is, neither belief is
true. In 2003, I wrote a
commentary piece for
Businessweek entitled
“How SARS Is Invigorat-
ing China’s Commu-
nists.” Now, as then, city
residents likely will wel-
come a strengthening of
political and social con-
trols by the central
party committee in the
aftermath of the new vi-
rus. As the political sci-
entists Lynette H. Ong
and Donglin Han concluded in a 2018
paper based on survey research,
China’s middle class is essentially a
conservative force. “Those with
higher income and education levels
have considerably more to lose than
the impoverished and poorly edu-
cated,” they wrote in the journal Polit-
ical Studies. “The opportunity cost of
participating in protest actions, a
high-risk activity in authoritarian
states, rises as one progresses up the

market. Industrial workers who have
made it back from their villages now
face two-week quarantines in factory
dorms, with little or no pay, as at the
facilities of Apple supplier Foxconn in
Zhengzhou and Kunshan. Restaurants
and other service-industry businesses,
which rely on migrants but are partic-
ularly concerned about spreading the
virus, have been among the slowest to
reopen and rehire.
Even before the virus, migrant
workers were increasingly unwel-
come in China’s cities; millions had
started to flow back to the country-
side as their opportunities had begun
to fade. When a fire in a rundown
Beijing apartment building killed 19
of them in 2017, the incident sparked
mass evictions of migrants in cities
across the country. Now locals who
fear the spread of the disease and
have long viewed migrants as outsid-
ers—expressed by the Chinese epi-
thetwaidiren—are blocking their re-
turn to neighborhoods. Meanwhile,
China’s badly skewed health care sys-
tem relegates most migrants to un-
derstaffed and underfunded clinics
far from where they work, leaving
them particularly vulnerable to the
disease’s spread.
After years of giving theirxue-
han—or “blood and sweat”—the mi-

grants face an uncertain future. Their
wages have gained ground only
slightly compared with city dwellers,
who still earn about three times as
much. Some policy makers see these
rising wages as a problem and are
pushing for more automated factory
floors, with municipalities subsidizing
companies that shed
workers. The policy is
literally called “robots
replacing humans.”
What does this stark
divide mean for China’s
trajectory? For several
decades, most China
watchers have shared
two core beliefs. The
first is that pressure to
liberalize the political
system would come from
the urban elite. With ris-
ing living standards and better educa-
tion, this group would build on the
failed efforts of the student protesters
of Tiananmen Square, eventually de-
manding not just better policies on
quality-of-life issues like pollution but
also real government accountability.
The second belief is that the Chi-
nese economy would continue to be
buoyed upward, despite challenges,
on the backs of an ever-expanding
middle class. McKinsey & Co. has

The coronavirus has exacerbated
the economic divide between middle-class
urbanitesand the country’s rural underclass.

Migrants
are the
Achilles’
heel of
the China
growth
story.

The Discontent of Migrants


Looms Over China


social ladder.”
As for the continued expansion of
the middle class, that can only hap-
pen if China integrates more migrants
into economic life and stops treating
them as second-class citizens.
Two policies have ensured that
they mostly remain outsiders in the
cities to which they’ve moved. One is
the household registration policy or
hukou, which binds them to their ru-
ral homes and bars them and their
families from using the better hospi-
tals and schools where they actually
work. Second is China’s land owner-
ship system, which makes it nearly
impossible to make much money
from leasing or selling land in the
countryside—a stark contrast with
the cities, where sales of apartments
have led to an explosion of wealth.
Inequality in China has become a
fast-growing and increasingly dan-
gerous problem. Its Gini coefficient—
the standard international measure
of inequality—according to some
studies now stands at 0.5, one of the
highest in the world. One result of
this divide in economic fortunes is
that household consumption in China
makes up a comparatively small por-
tion of the GDP, currently about 40%.
After repeated promises, officials
have done little to reform these poli-
cies, worried about the cost of giving
migrants better health care and edu-
cation. City dwellers themselves
have no interest in sharing their ad-
vantages. One prominent cause of
urban protest in recent years has
been their opposition to the occa-
sional government effort to bring
more migrant children into city
schools. Migrants are now increas-
ingly expected to return home to
generate wealth, despite the many
obstacles there.
In research on life satisfaction in
China by the economists John Knight
and Ramani Gunatilaka, migrants un-
surprisingly reported being less
happy than urbanites. Less intuitive
is that they were also unhappier than
those who remained in the country-
side. It’s not hard to understand why,
says Dee Lee, a Guangzhou–based la-
bor consultant; it’s because migrants
are more aware than distant farmers
that their living standard falls far be-
low that of their urban counterparts.
This growing disillusionment con-
tributes to an expanding number of
migrant labor strikes.
The coronavirus may eventually
fade as a threat, but it has exposed
the deep inequities that divide Chi-
nese into two classes, an urban elite
and an equally large underclass from
the countryside that sees its small
gains stalling. That split remains the
biggest obstacle to China’s develop-
ment. Rather than ascending to a
new urban middle class helping to
power China’s growth, the country’s
migrant workers—left behind, as
they are—pose the biggest threat to
its economic and political future.

This essay is adapted from Mr.
Roberts’s new book, “The Myth of
Chinese Capitalism: The Worker,
the Factory and the Future of the
World,” which will be published on
March 10 by St. Martin’s Press. He
is the former China bureau chief
for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Migrant workers eat lunch
outside a Beijing
construction site in 2019.

REVIEW


when it was coined by the po-
litical scientist David J. Roth-
kopf in an opinion piece for the
Washington Post. Rothkopf was
addressing the SARS epidemic,
writing, “A few facts, mixed
with fear, speculation and ru-
mor, amplified and relayed
swiftly worldwide by modern
information technologies, have
affected national and interna-
tional economies, politics and
even security in ways that are
utterly disproportionate with
the root realities.”
While “infodemic” may be a
novel portmanteau term, its
building blocks are much older.
“Information” started getting
clipped down to the snappier
“info” as early as 1904, when a
purveyor of horse-racing tips di-
vulged in the San Francisco Ex-

THE WORLD HEALTHOrganiza-
tion has avoided labeling the
spread of the new coronavirus a
“pandemic” and it remains an
“epidemic’’ at least for now. In a
media briefing on Feb. 24, WHO
director-general Tedros Adha-
nom Ghebreyesus explained that
the decision is based on assess-

ing “the geographical spread of
the virus, the severity of disease
it causes and the impact it has
on the whole of society.”
Meanwhile, WHO has ap-
proved of another, more innova-
tive “-demic” term: “infodemic.”

In a report last month, the
organization warned of “a mas-
sive ‘infodemic,’ an overabun-
dance of information—some ac-
curate and some not—that
makes it hard for people to find
trustworthy sources and reliable
guidance when they need it.”
That warning was seconded by
the MIT Technology Re-
view, which observed
that the virus has the
makings of “the first true
social-media ‘infodemic,’”
as “social media has
zipped information and
misinformation around the
world at unprecedented speeds,
fueling panic, racism ... and
hope.”
“Infodemic,” as a shorthand
for “information epidemic,” has
been circulating since 2003,

[Infodemic]


WORD ON
THE STREET

BEN
ZIMMER

aminer, “Here’s where I got
the ‘info’ straight from the
barn door.” As a combining
form, “info-” took off with
the rapid rise of information
technology in the 1970s (“infos-
phere,” “infostructure,” “info-
mania,” “infographic”) and
the 1980s (“infomercial,”
“infotainment,” “infoholic”).
The element “-demic,” shared
by “epidemic” and “pandemic,”
goes back to the ancient Greek
root “demos,” meaning “people.”
“Epidemic” literally means
“prevalent among a people,” and
started getting used for conta-
gious diseases affecting whole
populations in the early 17th
century. “Pandemic” followed,
using the Greek prefix “pan-”
meaning “all,” for an epidemic
that strikes a wider geographic
area, spreading over multiple
countries or continents.
When Mr. Rothkopf blended
“info-” and “-demic” to create
“infodemic” in 2003, he re-
counted to me in a recent
email, he was “struck by the
fact that there were strong sim-
ilarities between the way a dis-
ease spread through a popula-
tion and the way an idea would
‘go viral’ on the Net.” In the
case of SARS, he said, “the info-

demic impacted more people
than the underlying epidemic
that triggered it.”
The word “infodemic” had its
own viral success after its initial
coinage. Just two years later, in
2005, “infodemic” was included
in the New Oxford American
Dictionary, where it was defined
as “a surfeit of information
about a problem that is viewed
as being a detriment to its solu-
tion.” Since then, the term has
re-emerged regularly regarding
global health scares: in 2006 for
the avian flu, 2009 for the swine
flu and 2014 for the Ebola virus.
Mr. Rothkopf told me that he
was surprised at how quickly
“infodemic” caught on, but that
he appreciates that the term has
led to a greater awareness of
how the spread of information—
and misinformation—can carry
its own risks. Understanding it
is essential to managing public
health crises, he said, “and, in
fact, any kind of situation in
which viral spread of informa-
tion can become a factor that
may be bigger than that which
triggers it.” With social media
whipping up a global panic sur-
rounding the coronavirus, we
just might be facing the biggest
infodemic of all. JAMES YANG

When


Unreliable


Information


Spreads


Far and Wide

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