Joe Cash reviews Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, published in 2020 by The University of Chicago Press.
Unless China takes drastic action, around 300 million people could soon be left structurally unemployable. It is a bold claim, but Invisible China does not shy away from the fact that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) still has a long way to go if it is to escape the middle-income trap.
As Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell explain, a sizeable proportion of China’s population either lack the skills required to participate in the formal labour force or are at risk of being expelled from the informal economy because it is moving beyond their reach due to a mixture of credential inflation, industrial automation, and factory closures. With China’s zero-Covid policy resulting in opportunities in the informal economy drying up nationwide, this book, and the plight of the country’s migrant workers more broadly, deserves renewed attention.
Scott Rozelle is a leading scholar of the economics and politics of inequality at Stanford University and has been researching poverty since the early 1980s. With the assistance of Natalie Hell, he has spent a large part of the last decade considering the effectiveness of China’s numerous poverty alleviation campaigns and exploring the side of the country that foreign businesspeople and journalists – even most Chinese citizens – seldom get to see.
Researched and written before the onset of the pandemic, Invisible China shines a light on various weaknesses in the Chinese economy that have come about due to the government’s failure to pursue public health and education reform in rural areas with the same vigour as it has in the cities. In doing so, the book challenges numerous popular perceptions of China. In fact, the authors begin by describing how shocked their students often are when travelling to rural areas for fieldwork for the first time, with conditions on the ground so different to the predominant narrative coming out of the country that it is a rising superpower. Throughout the book, Rozelle and Hell regularly challenge the reader’s assumptions, too, asking them to consider, for example, whether China’s rise is sustainable, given that 70% of Chinese children do not graduate from high school, according to 2015 data.
Rozelle and Hell take the reader to the villages, follow ordinary people from the farms and onto the construction sites, and use their stories to illustrate the socio-economic issues China faces with great empathy. As they do so, the authors set out a wealth of empirical data demonstrating the size and scope of the balancing act that the Chinese government must perform to keep the country’s economy on the rails—an act it was struggling with even before the implementation of its zero-Covid strategy.
The titular “Invisible China” are the 800 to 900 million citizens that the government has thus far failed to incorporate into its plans to bring more people into the cities. Rozelle and Hell take inspiration from Michael Harrington’s seminal work, The Other America, which challenged prevailing presumptions at the time that the New Deal had practically ended poverty, a state of development that the PRC also claims to now to have achieved.
Like Harrington, Rozelle and Hell set out to test the validity of a number of statements concerning China’s rise, drawing on close to 40 years’ worth of studies across the country. Their resultant argument is simple: unless the Chinese government undertakes wide-ranging societal reforms that see it invest in rural education and reduce the extent to which the hukou, or social welfare system, differentiates between those that have and those that have-not, the PRC risks turning out more like Mexico at the turn of the millennium than a rival to the United States of America.
Invisible China is excellent if only for its bottom-up account of how the Chinese economy has developed since the reform and opening-up period. However, the book most definitely deserves renewed attention today, as it offers answers to many of the questions analysts are now asking concerning the broader socio-economic ramifications of the government’s zero-Covid policy. Indeed, in some cases, Rozelle and Hell seem almost prophetic. Take how they predict that neglect of rural health provision in China could come to hamstring economic development, for example. The lack of health facilities in rural areas has become one of the Party’s main justifications for maintaining strict movement controls at the expense of economic growth.
The book’s principal warning that 300 million could soon be left permanently out of Chinese economic life seems particularly relevant today. Analysts anticipate that the Chinese government’s zero Covid policy has already resulted in a similar number becoming unemployed, as stringent lockdowns, hitting city after city, force factory and construction workers to down their tools. And while Rozelle and Hell’s interviewees all have unique reasons for being unable to move out of the informal economy, they share a common fear: job opportunities for unskilled labourers will dry up, forcing them back to farms and a subsistence way of living.
While it is still too early to assess the full extent of the damage China’s zero Covid policy will do to the country’s economy, Invisible China does contain several predictions as to what might await. With millions now out of work – in this case, by chance rather than design – China’s situation looks pretty bleak. Some of the author’s predictions are hard to swallow, though, such as the warning that pooling uneducated, unemployed, and unmarried men in rural areas could lead to the creation of cartels and China suffering problems with organised crime. On the other hand, their points concerning how poor healthcare provision in rural areas could lead the economy into a period of stagnation are very well reasoned. The authors draw across public health and industrial policy, as well as fieldwork Rozelle carried out in Southeast China in 2012, to explain why the 40% of elementary students in rural China who live with parasitic worms, for example, could lead to a drag on economic productivity in the coming decades.
Invisible China methodologically exposes the hurdles the Chinese government must overcome before it can lead the country in its entirety out of the middle-income trap. Furthermore, it deals with the Chinese economy and its prospects with an empathy that can be lacking in other assessments, particularly those that fixate on aspects such as the government’s annual GDP growth target, tariffs and trade tensions. While researched and written before the onset of Covid-19, Rozelle and Hell’s testimony-based account of the problems facing the Chinese labour market and society make Invisible China very worthy of renewed attention today, as the country grapples with the unintended consequences of its zero-Covid strategy.
Joe Cash is a policy advisor based in Beijing, researching the UK’s relationships within the Asia-Pacific region.
This piece previously appeared in our 7th print issue, “Looking South.” You can read the full issue here: https://issuu.com/oxfordpoliticalreview/docs/opr_issue_7_final.