152 China in World History
1.3 billion people today, China will probably have 1.5 billion by 2015,
in part because the one-child policy is diffi cult to enforce in rural areas
and is now being relaxed to address the problem of an increasingly
aging population. There are serious resentments of Chinese control of
traditionally non-Chinese regions, particularly in Muslim Xinjiang and
in Buddhist areas of Tibet and Inner Mongolia. Buddhist and Islamic
practices are tolerated in China today (in contrast to the Cultural Rev-
olution era), but any sign of challenge to the Chinese government is
met with quick and severe repression. When 10,000 practitioners of
Falun Gong, a form of meditation and spiritual and physical exercise,
demonstrated outside the living quarters of top government leaders in
1994, the Communist Party immediately cracked down on the move-
ment, even though it had encouraged it in the 1980s as a traditional,
cost-effective way to promote health and well-being.
Deng Xiaoping and his successors have made a gamble that the
Chinese people will be willing to tolerate a one-party political system
as long as they have relative economic and cultural freedom, and free-
dom from the forced political participation of the Maoist era. Chinese
fi ction, art, music, fi lm, and fashion are thriving today as never before
under Communist rule. There is once again room for subtlety and irony
in Chinese art, as long as artists make no frontal attacks on the Chinese
Communist Party.
In some ways, the status of women, ironically, has declined in China
since the Maoist era. Prostitution has returned, and in very poor regions,
women are sometimes kidnapped and forced to marry into families that
could not persuade any women to join them willingly. Social inequali-
ties usually impact women especially, and when some people are des-
perately poor in a society where some are rich, those at the bottom
easily fi nd themselves in degrading circumstances, such as prostitution,
for the sake of their own survival. Nonetheless, despite this seamy side
of the post-Mao reforms, few women (or men) today would advocate
returning to the Maoist era.
The Chinese government has promoted rapid economic develop-
ment in such “minority regions” as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mon-
golia and has also sponsored massive Chinese migration there, making
the minority cultures more diffi cult to maintain. The most immediate
threat to China’s economic stability is the more than one hundred mil-
lion rural migrants who have fl ocked in recent years to the cities, where
they often live in poverty and look for jobs. The industrial economy
needs to create so many new jobs every year to employ this fl oating
population that anything below 8 percent annual economic growth