Expanding the Gap: How the Rural Property System Exacerbates China’s Urban-Rural Gap

Abstract

There is a certain amount of romanticism attached to the Chinese peasantry. Few objects are more “Chinese” than a scroll painting of sun- darkened men and women with pointed straw hats tied to their heads working the rice fields beneath towering granite mountains. In addition to its simple serenity, there is also a calm consistency to this image, summarized in the following quotation: More people have lived in China than anywhere else. Upwards of 10 billion human beings have moved across her good earth; nowhere else have so many people lived so intimately with nature. A thousand generations have left their indelible impression on soil and topography, so that scarcely a square foot of earth remains unmodified by man…. Few landscapes are more human. Though the importance of the peasantry to Chinese history is beyond dispute, the focus of the modernization process that propelled China’s miraculous economic growth has been the industrialized cities. As a result, the average Chinese rural household today makes less than one-third of the average urban family, and the gap is widening.3 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders fear that a further increase in this gap could lead to social instability and potentially jeopardize their ability to control the country in the current unitary fashion. This is of such a concern to the Party that it made the promotion of modern agriculture and the improvement of the position of peasants the focus of its 2007 Number One Document.