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China-Japan-Koreas

Road to riches ends for 20 million Chinese poor - Back to the Farm

2009-02-20

Tang Hui and his family prospered as migrant workers during China's economic boom, earning $10,000 a year: enough to build a house, send a cousin to school and pay for his grandmother's medical bills.

Tang Hui lost his manufacturing job in October just days after getting married.

But those good days are over. The family's cash earnings have evaporated, snatched away by a manufacturing crash cascading across China caused by falling global demand for its goods. The nine people in the Tang family are facing an income of zero; their best hope to survive is to grow rice and raise pigs at home in the Sichuan Mountains.

Posted by:GolfBravoUSMC

#4 Yes but if the Chinese national government was smart, they would start a BIG infrastructure project of road improvement in the poor farming provinces. It would not even need to be a paved roads project -- just doing a decent job on building usable graveled roads using manual labor would undo a lot of the economic issues in the countryside. Plus, the locals would be even more supportive of the central government that way.

Posted by: Shieldwolf 2009-02-20 20:23

#3 ...minus that nasty interruption caused by the boys out of Mongol.

Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-02-20 16:49

#2 But the Tangs have never heard about such programs. When asked about the central government's plan to invest billions of dollars in countryside infrastructure as a part of a huge stimulus package, they expressed anger. "The central government has good ideas and intentions, but the local officials often ignore them. The road in our village was built by the local government but we had to pay for it. Every family had to pay $100 or more. We get nothing from the government," says Hui's father, Tang Zhong Min.

Their anger is misplaced. Central governments throughout Chinese history have turned the unfunded mandate into a fine art, and then blamed local government for not building the castles in the air they dreamed up. Unlike Europeans, who usually blame the central government, the sheep-like Chinese masses have also traditionally blamed local government for their travails. This is why the Chinese empire has endured, whereas the Western Roman empire fell over a thousand years ago.

Posted by: Zhang Fei 2009-02-20 15:46

#1 "A few months without jobs would be disastrous for us," Tang Hui frets.

When they say the average Chinese household saves a quarter of its income, that's like saying the average American household has 1.7 children. There is no such average Chinese household. The poor save almost nothing, and the very rich save huge amounts of money.

Before they ventured out as migrants, the Tangs lived in a wooden shack. Now, they live in a two-story brick house, with 10 rooms, concrete floors, an open fire pit for cooking. Still, it has no running water and one outdoor latrine.

These people are clearly prime targets for the government's white goods discount program (in reality a scheme to keep quasi-state-owned factories operated by well-connected cadres afloat) - a washing machine and a refrigerator for every home.

Posted by: Zhang Fei 2009-02-20 15:34

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