Urbanization brings with it a disparity between rural and urban living standards. Nonetheless, in China this gap has started to become quite severe and has become a cause for concern (Naughton 113). Chinas Gini coefficient is currently at .415, which displays the increasing disparity in the country ("DISTRIBUTION OF FAMILY"). The rural-urban divide begun with the different ways the Chinese government ran the rural and urban areas. The urban areas were fully under control of the central government and since they were seen as the building blocks of the country they received many governmental subsidies. Workers in urban areas received pensions, healthcare, had job security, cheaper consumer goods due to subsidies and often had access to commercial housing. On the other hand people in the rural areas received non of those advantages and due to the hukou system were also unable to move out to urban areas to obtain better paying jobs. The government suppressed farmer’s wages to extract more money from agriculture in order to further invest in the urban areas. Additionally, rural citizens land was held in a much more collective form, which did not allows for individuals to use it as collateral, discouraged investment into the land and allowed for corrupt government officials to benefit monetary from the sale of the land. This legacy of unequal treatment of rural citizens resulted in the beginning of the urban rural divide that has been increasing even more in recent years. Today, the gap is continuing to grow because of the lack of education opportunities in rural areas, and lack of appropriate monetary help with health care and old age security and because of market forces.
It is the lower government tiers that are “responsible for muc...
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Naughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy. London: MIT P, 2006. Print.
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Meng, Xin, and Nancy Qian. The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959-61. Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010.
Deng Xiaoping felt that the quickest way to build a better China was to improve living conditions immediately, to give people the level of morale they need for further development. At that time, he realized that China’s economic need to reform; he found very effective ways to reform the China’s economic. His goals were to open up the China’s market to the outside world, breaking down the collective farms, getting rid of state-run enterprises and providing more jobs for people in the industry. He found that the most important thing was the modernization of agriculture because 80% of the population derived their living primarily from agricultural production. The new contract responsibility system allowed farmers to rent land for individual farming families. Farmers had to sell a certain percentage of their crops to the State with the State’s price, and they could sell the remaining for their own profits. This system had helped the rural income to be doubled (Benson, 47). It marked a successful modernization of agricultural.
Programs such as collectivization and land reformation were essentially a microcosm of Mao's impact on China. Under the policy of collectivization, the government promoted cooperative farming and redistributed the land on the principle that the product of labor could be better distributed if the la...
Yang, D 1996, Calamity and reform in China: state, rural society, and institutional change since the great leap famine, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
Many Chinese social changes occurred during the Han dynasty. Nuclear families became more common due to the free peasantry that developed in China. However, joint families also remained common throughout the countryside. Women in China continued to be less dominant than men in society. They were expected to be selfless, humble, diligent, and courteous. Advanced cities increasingly developed along trade routes and rivers, despite many Chinese people persistently living in rural regions. The biggest and most extravagant of these cities was Chang’an, the capital.
Tan, G. (2012). THE ONE-CHILD POLICY AND PRIVATIZATION OF EDUCATION IN CHINA. International Education, 42(1), 43-53,107. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1285120304?accountid=32521
Sicular, T., Ximing, Y., Gustafsson, B., & Shi, L. (2007). THE URBAN–RURAL INCOME GAP AND INEQUALITY IN CHINA. Review Of Income & Wealth, 53(1), 93-126. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4991.2007.00219.x
7) Richards, Lucinda. “Controlling China’s Baby Boom.” Contemporary Review Jan. 1996: 5-9. Wilson Select Plus.
China and India both have extremely rigid social structures. They have noticeable similarities of individuals being considered higher than another. In India, the caste system was created by the higher class to restrict the lower classes by their amount of education, freedom and way of thinking (Dushkin Scheduled Policy in India). China's social system varied from India by not creating as a strict social ladder. It had a simple structure with only four social classes compared to the 25,000 sub castes India had at one point. Even though China did not have such a strong social structure, there were still people considered “higher” than others. Bureaucrats and landowners were considered to be of a higher class than traders, farmers and peasants.
Urbanization (or urbanisation) is the increasing number of people that live in urban areas. Urbanization has been the result of economic growth for most countries. In fact, every developed nation in the world has gone through urbanization and this is no news to Chinese leaders. To turn the nation of China from being a developing nation to a developed nation, China encouraged the migration of citizens from the countryside to move to large cities and fuel the industrializing nation. Though urbanization has been a process many countries have gone through, China’s urbanization plans are very distinct compared to western examples. The main reason for China’s urbanization distinctions is its sheer magnitude and pace. In this paper, we will review this mass migration, the economic growth, China’s environmental concerns (specifically air pollution) due the urbanization and the focus on industrialization, and we will briefly see China’s newest seven year urbanization plan.
Chen, Juniie and Gale Summerfield. “Gender and Rural Reforms in China: A Case Study of
First of all china's population law is destroying the future of China. There are more elders than young adults or kids and when the elders grow old and retire there are not as much replacements for the jobs. And soon there will be less people in china. When people grow old it's a custom to take care of the people to take care
Second, overpopulation leads to the result of a rather low SOL( Standard of Living) in China. SOL means GDP per person, and it is an important index of the real national economic status. Although China makes great economic achievements and improvements every year, the economic achievements is not that glorious when divided by the large denominator of population. B...
When the new Chinese Government was set up in 1949, the new government faced a lot of problems. First on their agenda was how to re-build the country. As Communist Party of China (CPC) is a socialist party, their policies at the time were similar to that of the Soviet Union’s. Consequently, the CPC used a centrally planned strategy as its economic strategy when it first began. For a long time, the Chinese economy was a centrally planned economy in which none other than the state owned all companies. In fact, there were absolutely no entrepreneurs. As time went on, the problems of a centrally planned economy started to appear, such as low productivity, which was the key reason for restricting the development of China. With the population growing, the limitations of the centrally planned economy were clear. In 1978 China started its economic reform whose goal was to generate sufficient surplus value to finance the modernization of the Chinese economy. In the beginning, in the late 1970s and early 19...
The People’s Republic of China has been one of the key growers of the global middle class throughout the past decades. It houses a middle class population of approximately 300 million people. A massive shift is occurring to increase marketing and increasing urban middle class populations in China. Millions of people are being encouraged to move to the cities which will springboard economic growth through domestic consumption. In addition to urbanization and consumption, the PRC is investing in programs designed to boost infrastructure, healthcare and education. This includes new transportation technology, designed to make domes...