- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Despite the US’s economic success, income inequality remains breathtaking. But this is no glitch – it’s the system
The Chinese did rather well in the age of globalization. In 1990, 943 million people there lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago.
The data is not super consistent with the narrative of the US’s inexorable success. Sure, American productivity has zoomed ahead of that of its European peers. Only a handful of countries manage to produce more stuff per hour of work. And artificial intelligence now promises to put the United States that much further ahead.
This is not to congratulate China for its authoritarian government, for its repression of minorities or for the iron fist it deploys against any form of dissent. But it merits pondering how this undemocratic government could successfully slash its poverty rate when the richest and oldest democracy in the world wouldn’t.
Eh…
I’m glad my homeland is doing a lot better these days, but still, for my family, we end up doing better in the US (we moved around 2010 for context, way before this admin), the first few years in the US was a struggle, the similar stuggle as before in Guangzhou, but eventually we have a house and then we started saving up and we have a small bussiness and some investments here in the US. So it really depends on personal circumstances…
In China, everyone has an ancestral house, but that is in your village; in the city, unless you are from the city, you probably won’t have housing. Jobs were in cities, so people migrate there, migrant workers… most of them have to rent a small apartment unit, probably in some slum. There are handweitten “for rent” posters everywhere. My family didn’t have to rent, they “bought” an apartment in Guangzhou (bought in quotes because the 70 year lease thing… which we still don’t know how it works… 70 years have not passed), its a very shitty one, in a slum neighborhood, but that was all they could afford. Most had to rent.
Prior to the Opening Up and Reforms, people weren’t allowed to move around, so you’d just get stuck on your farm… and farming manually… which really sucks.
After the Opening Up and Reforms, the relaxed the restriction on movements. But the Hukou still had restrictions.
I was born in Guangzhou, but wasn’t allowed into their public schools, no Guangzhou Hukou, my hukou was Taishan, my mom had to pay for a privately-run one that she said was inferior to the public school. Some migrant workers just left their kids beind in their village to attend school there. So those kids rarely get to see their parents. I did see them because I was going to school in Guangzhou so we didn’t really get separated like those kids did, but usually we didn’t get to see out parents for most of the day, so either grandmother was home to watch me and my brother, or sometimes we just get left at home alone.
I think most of the kids in that school I went to were all kida of migrant parents… because a Guangzhou kids would just go to public school.
Someone with Taishan Hukou also can’t like get any healthcare benefits of Guangzhou.
It’s like a internal passport system. Countries withing countries…
Then there was another issue with me essentially being an “illegal child” since my mother violated the 1 child policy, as I was the 2nd to be born, so my parents had to pay a huge fine before I can even get registered in Hukou and legally exist and have identity documents.
Converting to Guangzhou Hukou was practically impossible. Somehow, getting US citizenship was easier… 🤷♂️
Maybe one day this stupid Hukou thing goes away, because it is stupid af.
Believe it or not, there are plans to “overhaul” the Hukou system.
https://thediplomat.com/2024/08/china-unveils-ambitious-5-year-plan-to-overhaul-the-hukou-system/
Recently I think they make it so couples can register their marriage in any jurisdiction. And not have to go to one of the couple’s birth town.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202505/1333785.shtml
I couldn’t fully understand whether or not their children’s Hukou will now be in the location of their marriage registration. But it’s a good step forward and they saw a brief spike in marriage registration overall.
It’s so weird that they’ve been so stubborn about it for so long, even as their cities expand to accommodate migrants and the population growth is slowed.
Haven’t things changed a lot there since 2010?
Too late, PRC does not do dual citizenships lol. I have US citizenship now so PRC citizenship is automatically revoked. No going back. (It’s not like I want to tbh).
But AFAIK, Hukou issues is still a problem.
Language is probably my biggest issue. My English is literally like 10x better than my knowledge of Chinese, so there’s no way I’d fit in, I mean I could probably read signs, but I can’t do any serious conversations.
I think people are still trying to emigrate, during the Biden admin, there were supposedly a lot of Chinese nationals trying to enter without permission via the Mexican border, I think thery were trying to claim Asylum or something, but with this admin’s autocratization, that went down. But there are still a lot of other (Non-US) western countries people try to go to.
I was there several years ago, working in beijing. Decent apartments were crazy cheap. General cost of living is jokingly tiny in comparison to the US. And the kicker, because I was from the west, they were willing to pay may a salary nearly equivelent to what I was making in the states. I only came back to the US because my wife was there.
What work did you do btw?
I feel like this is the important part to remember, the average locals probably don’t get paid as well as you do.
i wont go into my work, but no the locals definitely didnt get paid as much as me. That really doesn’t change the reality how cheap the cost of living is over there though. If I was making the same as the locals over there when I was there, i’d be living just as comfortably there as i currently live in the states. And considering current inflation, I would argue i’d probably be living even more comfortably.
Do they have any way of knowing you’re a US citizen? As long as you use your chinese documents to enter to China and say you’re only a US resident you should be fine. Just don’t flash your US passport.
Alternately, the US tourist visa is 90 days if applying from the US, but the application process sucks and can be renewed just by jumping out of the country or into HK for an hour.
It’s weird to raise this as a concern relative to the history prior to the revolutionary era. Like folks who bemoaned the loss of the antibellum American South or the Batista Era Cuba or Peronist Argentina.
It’s different because this affected the people who are still alive today.
The reform being talked about started in 1980, and didn’t become available to the broader population until pretty recently. Even today, children aren’t allowed to attend public schools outside of their ancestral home town.
So if you were born in 2000 to parents who had moved to Shenzhen, they’d still have to send you back to whatever rural village your grandparents were from, and didn’t have access to schools or healthcare otherwise. Now, you’re 25 years old and lived most of your life seeing your parents once a year, and still have an internal passport-like document tying you to that ancestral village.
There are more reforms on the horizon, but trying to explain just how pervasive the hukou system still is (and how much it affected the people who are alive today) is really hard to grasp for people not familiar with the system.
A lot of that is simply issue of capacity and social management. The famines that everyone loves to blame Communism for in the 1960s came out of an urban economic boom that drew in peasant farmers without regard to the ecological consequences. We saw similar catastrophes in Europe and the Americas during early industrial periods, with a bad crop year spiraling into food riots and panics as farmers abandoned their crops in droves.
The fundamental difference between Chinese commune policies and, say, American sharecropping or Cuban sugar plantations is that the workers had no title to their land, not that they couldn’t leave it.
Your parents would have moved to Shenzhen to take advantage of the enormous export boom out of Hong Kong. You’d be drawn into the factory system just like your parents, with minimal education and poor social services.
But, as a consequence, Shenzhen enjoyed an equivalent dividend in wealth, resulting in the construction of new schools and clinics which were subsequently opened to the public as fast as the state bureaucrats could stand them up.
Compare this to, say, London or Miami or Mexico City during this same period. Wealth wasn’t captured for the benefit of the working classes. Instead, the cities privatized their public amenities and inflated speculative real estate bubbles.
Ten years down the line, people in Shenzhen had access to education, health care, and transit comparable to anything you’d find in the developed world. Meanwhile, Westerners were watching the Housing Crash erode their way of life and imposing brutal austerity measures on their local people.
I’m not talking about Chinese commune policies. I’m talking about the hukou system, and its effects on how children were raised in China between 1990 and 2010. As in, the lived experiences of Chinese people between the ages of 15 and 40 today.
It’s absolutely relevant to people today, not least of which was the original comment you were responding to, a firsthand experience of what happened to that commenter’s migrant family in Guangzhou as recently as 2010.
A consequence of early communal capital allocation. The state had already built up a surplus of health and education inventory, having failed to anticipate rapid migration to the cities. Rather than overflow the existing system, they told people to return to their native villages for services.
You can debate the ethics or efficiency of this system. Hardly the first time ranking bureaucrats failed to anticipate a sea change in social behavior and decided punitive measures would work better than short-term rapid expansion of social services. But the state bureaucracy quickly sought to rectify the system by expanding capacity in the cities, culminating in a reform of Hukou in '86 and another in '93.
But this created its own crisis as people back in the rural communities recoiled at what they saw as an abandonment of the Communist ideals of the Maoist Era. So they flooded into the cities in protest, culminating in the famous Tienanmen Square riots and subsequent military repression. Any policy that has a negative consequence is a form of authoritarian villainy, without regard to the intended consequences or broader benefits. When you’re a communist. If you’re implementing unpopular policies on a restive public when you’re a capitalist, the rules are reversed.
If I had a $1 for every person on the internet I ran into who had a “I just happen to have a first-hand account that proves I’m right, take my word for it”…
Hell, I’ve got more than a few. I just don’t consider “my personal anecdote” irrefutable proof that an entire country is run by cartoon villains.