| | So Amnesty International put out a report today that describes in pretty deep detail all of the fun trevails migrant workers in China get to deal with (this is ground that I tread in some detail in my thesis, except I was looking more at the economic explanations for why we see the migration patterns we do despite the fact that life sucks for a huge proportion of urban migrant workers. Short version: despite the fact they're descriminated against in the cities, they still make a whole lot more there than they would at home, so they migrate. I know, a revelation, right? The interesting part is not that people migrate, but who migrates, and how those patterns differ from migration patterns seen in other parts of the world.).
You can read it here (I haven't read the whole thing, but I will at some point, probably after my midterms are over Thursday. Or maybe when I'm supposed to be studying for them Wednesday.).
There is real concern in Chinese leadership circles that, as the report says, migrants will become a "permanent underclass" in Chinese cities. Wen Jiabao in particular seems to be taking the lead on this one, which would be in line with his image as the fuzzy-cuddlebear half of the Wen/Hu tandem. Cracks on Wen aside, the problem is deadly serious, and as with so many of the problems we see in China today, much of the explanation here can be traced back to conflicts in the objectives the CCP seeks to accomplish with the means which they utilize to accomplish them.
As part of the CCP's bargain with the Chinese public, the party has committed itself to continual economic growth as an engine for expanding prosperity and reinforcing the legitimacy of its rule. One of the most important ways it goes about this is through a system of incentives for administrators at the local and provincial levels wherein their promotion up through the ranks is tied with their promotion of economic growth in their respective administrative areas. While economic growth is not the only criterion by which cadres are evaluated, it is the most important. Aspiring political superstars are thus given the incentive to put economic growth at the top of their agenda, with the human costs of that growth important only in the sense that they might contribute to social instability that would undermine further growth. There's all sorts of nasty side effects to this, the discussion of which could probably just about fit into a 400-page book (Ph.D. dissertation, anyone?), but the one most pertinent to our post today is the way the system strips said administrators of any will to challenge the current economic status quo, which spits out wonderful growth numbers quarter after quarter (and which, to be fair, has produced massive properity in the cities for hundreds of millions of people, not the least of which are my girlfriend and her family), but which is, to a large extent, built on the back of exploited migrant laborers. The government started to address this issue in earnest a couple years ago, but apparently they haven't been able to make the reforms they had in mind then stick.
And why would they? The incentives system remains largely the same. It would seem that changing the way cadres are promoted to include a more wholistic set of evaluative criteria would go a long way towards making the party an engine of positive social change, but no one really wants to take that step. There's too many risks involved, too many entrenched interests. I was going to say "in the US we call that wholistic set of evaluative criteria 'democracy'", but geez, this is starting to sound a lot like US politics.
And while were making that comparison, if the migrants are already well on their way to constituting a permanent underclass, is there any chance that they'll start to develop some sort of collective identity, some sort of collective consciousness of the fact that they've been locked out of the system by virtue of nothing more than where they (or their parents) where born? In my view it's unlikely, at least in the short term, not least of all because of the wildly diverse cultural backgrounds the migrants are coming from (a migrant from Sichuan would be very, very unlikely to hang out with a migrant from, say, Hebei. Different languages, different culinary tastes, different lots of stuff). Now, if a generation from now the kids of all those migrants, who grew up in the big cities speaking Putonghua a lot better than their padres do, are still disenfranchised, still by in large denied any opportunities for advancement up the ladder, then all bets are off. If that's the case, God help the CCP.
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| | Posted 3/6/2007 2:32 PM - 12 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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