Following a nationwide urbanization drive since 2008, on a scale of which the world has never seen, the country is now left with an estimated 65 million empty apartments and 200 million small household farms.
In the late 1800s, European communists were eagerly looking out for the disappearance of the peasantry in their own countries. This would signal the arrival of capitalism – a necessary stage they needed to pass through on the way to communism. When the peasants were not disappearing as expected, they were stumped. This gave rise to the so-called agrarian question – where the peasantry is not disappearing, what should we do about it?
In a new paper, I argue that what we are seeing in China now is the flip side of this – the urban question: Where the cities are not filling up, what should we do about it?
Published in the journal Made In China, the paper outlines three challenges China’s policymakers are currently grappling with.
Firstly, many rural householders do not have high enough, or stable enough, income to purchase an urban home and, without sufficient job skills, see no long-term prospects in the cities.
Moreover, in a further ironic twist, the extension of welfare benefits to temporary migrants in cities, not just permanent residents, means that those from the countryside working in the cities do not need to move there permanently to get these benefits. Many are deciding that working in the cities for a few years, while not giving up their rural land back home, is the better option.
Secondly, who gets to live in China’s largest megacities and, in particular, whether low-paid migrant workers from the countryside should be allowed in, is a hotly contested question.
The intentions set out in national planning documents to keep first tier cities as the preserve of wealthy elites and ‘high level talent’ are being robustly challenged in policy circles.
This is seen in the ongoing ‘street stall debate’.
The question of whether the informal labour of street stall vendors - many of whom are from the countryside - should be allowed in China’s larger cities has proved so heated that the division over it between China’s top two leaders, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, broke into the open in 2020 at such a volume that it made the international media.
Thirdly, the problem requires a reconsideration of the role of the countryside
The Chinese government is now asking: how do they organize these millions of still existing rural smallholders who continue to resist urbanisation?
For a long time, these discussions were dominated by the idea that largescale corporate farming was the future. This way of thinking fitted well with the plans for urban developers, who appeared to have forged an alliance with agribusinesses as they worked together to shift rural people out of their villages and into tower blocks.
Now, policymakers have recognised that a policy based on moving rural villagers into cities is not working out as planned. There seems to be shift back to thinking about how to organize the economy given that rural smallholders are going to continue to be a part of it for a long time to come.