China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

14. The Gini in the Jar

254 14 The Gini in the Jar No sensible observer looking at China at the time of Mao’s death in 1976 could have predicted the country’s rapid emergence as an economic powerhouse and potential peer competitor of the United States. In the mid1970s it was not even clear that the CCP would survive the devastation wrought by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Now, thirty years on, few remnants of Maoism are visible, yet the CCP remains deeply entrenched in power, clinging tenaciously to its one-party political monopoly and the sovereign perks flowing therefrom. With the vast majority of existing Communist regimes, including the Bolshevik motherland, having collapsed in the Velvet Revolution of 1989–91, China’s authoritarian leaders defied the odds and survived this biggest of all political tsunamis. How to explain the CCP’s survival in an age of Leninist mass extinction ? It isn’t rocket science. It’s the economy, stupid! The plain fact is that most Chinese—in particular, most urban Chinese—have visibly benefited from Maoism’s demise, from Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, and from China’s full-bore global engagement. As Deng himself put it in 1992, “If it hadn’t been for the achievements of reform and opening up, we would not have made it beyond June 4.” Recent opinion surveys reveal that the great majority of Chinese people, 71–86 percent (depending on the poll cited), are currently satisfied with their country’s “national condition,” and an only slightly smaller majority, 69–83 percent, are generally optimistic about their own future prospects. Despite severe income disparities (indicated by China’s steadily rising Gini coefficient) and an alarming prevalence of official corruption, and notwithstanding Beijing’s dangerously the gini in the jar 255 polluted air, horrific traffic jams, and an overheated property market, most Chinese are not itching to see the walls of Zhongnanhai come tumbling down. The wellsprings of rising economic satisfaction are not hard to find. Along the heavily urbanized eastern seaboard, where most public opinion polling is concentrated, personal incomes have risen rapidly and life is getting better, at least for most. In 2006 Guangzhou became the first Chinese city to achieve an average per capita income of ¥62,000 ($7,500), with Shenzhen and Shanghai following close behind. By mid-2007, according to official statistics, just over 6 percent of Chinese families, roughly 80–100 million people, had attained middle-class status, with a median family income of ¥75,000 (around $9,000). According to various Chinese media sources, the typical middle-class family today is composed of an employed couple with one school-age child and no pets, living in a privately owned apartment with two mobile phones, a large-screen color TV with cable service, and an Internet-linked personal computer. Other common middle -class benchmarks include postsecondary education, white-collar employment, and—increasingly—a family car used mainly for weekend getaways. Not surprisingly, most members of China’s emerging middle class live in and around big cities. Material markers of China’s expanding urban middle class also include ubiquitous mobile phones (540 million at the end of 2008), Internet connectivity (310 million), private home ownership (65 percent), private automobiles (32 million, increasing at the rate of almost 10,000 per day), and foreign travel (34 million trips abroad annually ). Also notable are the rising numbers of ATM machines (120,000), lawyers (165,000), postsecondary students (23 million), and KFC, McDonald ’s, and Starbucks fast-food outlets (3,000). A satisfied, well-educated, upwardly mobile urban populace would not seem to provide particularly fertile breeding grounds for political unrest. But there is a troubling underside to this remarkable success story. A vast army of rural émigrés—members of the so-called floating population—lives and works on the margins of urban society. Freed from the oppressive household registration system that kept them moored to the land until the early 1980s, 150–200 million migrant workers—no one knows precisely how many—have poured into China’s cities, where they have provided much of the manpower fueling the country’s unprecedented development boom. Lacking effective minimum-wage protection 256 the gini in the jar and basic rights of urban citizenship such as police protection, access to public education, and affordable health care, however, they have become a marginalized underclass, severely underrepresented in census tallies and opinion surveys, and hence largely invisible. In early...