The Chinese 35The Forgotten Farmers
In all the hype about rapid industrialisation, moving up
the manufacturing value chain and becoming ‘workshop
to the world’, it is easy to forget that China today is still
predominantly rural.
It is true that China has experienced an urban population
explosion the likes of which the world has never seen, from
an estimated 72 million urbanites in 1952 to an estimated
540 million in 2004, a migration of nearly half a billion
people. Current UN estimates foresee 900 million Chinese
living in cities by 2020. That said, as of today, some 750 to
800 million people, which is between six or seven out of
every ten Chinese, still live in the countryside.
Some 150 million of these villagers now work for ‘township
and village enterprises’, often at the dirtiest and most dangerous
of industrial jobs. The rest are still largely subsistence-level
farmers, struggling with everything from erosion and falling
water tables, to fixed grain prices and corrupt tax collectors,
to disappearing rural healthcare networks.
Because little foreign investment takes place in rural areas,
and because most Chinese villagers are too poor to appear
on the marketing radar screens of global companies, foreign