The last thirty years have seen the creation of many millions of jobs, mostly in the private sector, and mostly taken by peasants moving from the countryside to better their living conditions. This engendered tremendous support for the regime, but now things are different. The migrant workers are no longer grateful for being given a job, any job; they are demanding decent wages and conditions. At the same time there is tremendous resentment in those areas which houses the giant SOEs and where living and working conditions are much worse than ever before. These developments have been accompanied by an enormous and growing polarisation between the classes. Huge social disparities are evident: in a generation, the top richest 10% have acquired 85% of the nation’s assets.[51] Of course, there is no inheritance tax.
Incomes are similarly skewed. The top 5% pay themselves 23% of China’s total household income but the bottom 5% receive a miserly 0.1%.[52] A new wealthy bourgeois class is being created but there are many millions unemployed or under-employed, particularly in the so-called rust belt. It is now a common sight, even in Beijing, to see poor locals clamouring to wash the windows of the Rolls Royces of dollar millionaires.[53] These glaring social inequalities are a major source of discontent, as is the obvious corruption of state and Party officials.
The Gini coefficient is an internationally recognised measure of how a nation’s income is distributed amongst its citizens. A Gini coefficient of zero represents a society in which all citizens have equal income. A Gini coefficient of 100 is where one single citizen receives all the income and every other citizen receives nothing. The OECD, United Nations and other international bodies claim that a Gini coefficient of greater than about 40 represents a society with an unacceptably skewed income distribution and potentially destabilising social inequality.
China has not made its Gini coefficient public since 2000, when the figure was 41. Unofficially, Chinese media reported that it stood at 47.4 in 2012. At that level China is more unequal than Indonesia at 34.3, India at 36.8, and the US at 40.8. The urban Gini has remained between 47 and 49 for the past decade, indicating that China has become one of the most unequal societies in the world.[54]
Giant luxury skyscrapers sprout but are surrounded by immense areas of urban poverty. This growing social divide is symbolised by the fact that far fewer Chinese have access to clean water than to a cell phone. This alone would be enough to provoke class struggles in China, where the manners and practices of the newly rich are increasingly reminiscent of the behaviour of pre-revolutionary landlords resulting in the Xinhua agency claiming: “If the trend goes unchecked, … the widening gap may trigger social unrest.”[55]
For women overall, participation in the workforce increased from about 30% during the early years of the reform, to 40% in the 1990s and to about 45% today. However, when the SOEs were preparing for privatisation it was policy to sack women before men, thus the employment rate for urban female labour declined from 75% in 2000 to 61% in 2010, the lowest for thirty years.
At the same time relative pay has decreased. In 1988, the average woman worker earned 55% of the wage of an average male worker, by 1994 this figure had declined to 42%, and today, on average, is about one third. The government has a policy of equal pay for equal work, but even where men and women do the same work, the pay of a Chinese woman is typically only about two-thirds that of the man. The proportion of women in work is rising but their wage rates are falling, relatively. The explanation is that under the reforms women are increasingly being employed in unskilled, low-paid jobs while, simultaneously, pay differentials have risen sharply.[56]
Market forces are exacerbating gender earnings inequality. Cross-sector analyses show that the gender earnings gap is smallest in government and public institutions and largest in the private sector. Increasingly, women are employed on a production line, in a service industry or clerical job with lower income and fewer fringe benefits. As would be expected, few of these women are CCP members.[57]
At a time when the Chinese government is bewailing a shortage of skilled workers, women receive significantly less education than men, on average 7.5 years as against 8.5 years. Universities blatantly enforce gender discriminatory entry policies. Because women now regularly score better marks in China’s all-important college entrance exams, universities and colleges raise the admissions standards for women leaving women with higher marks than male entrants without a place.[58] Many university courses regularly refuse female applicants; no women are allowed on many engineering degrees which guarantee a senior job after graduation.
That discrimination is increasing, is important. Practices which put the man on a pedestal simply because he is male show how centuries-old discrimination can resurface in the 21st Century if social conditions are right. The drive towards capitalism has strengthened and encouraged practices from the imperial era that even the Stalinist regime of Mao considered abominations.
Since about 2007 the government, with the active support of the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF, staffed by Party bureaucrats), has been waging a widespread, raucous and misogynistic campaign against those women who dare to choose not to marry. The reason given is that unmarried males are turning to activities which “endanger the social order, including, gambling, rioting, stealing and gang fighting.”[59] China has one of the highest male to female ratios in the world, about 120:100. For comparison, India has a ratio of about 115:100. Both imbalances are due primarily to sex-selective abortions. This implies that in some rural areas of China as many as one in ten foetuses which would have been born a girl are aborted. This is an astounding number. The practice remains illegal but the figures show that while the law was largely enforced in the workers’ state, the capitalist regime closes its eyes to the matter.
Long gone are the days when members of the ACWF would publicly confront a violent husband and teach him the error of his ways. Instead, China is in the middle of an epidemic of violence against women. There is no law in China specifically concerned with domestic violence and police officers attend an incident as enforcers of social stability, not to protect the victim. Yes, China classifies intentional injury as a criminal offence but in domestic cases only long-term and repeated violence, supported by independent evidence is sufficient for a judgement on behalf of the wife. Even then, the husband is likely to be awarded the family home![60]
In considering birth defects, it is notable to observe that as China’s pollution levels increase there has been a sharp rise in the number of babies born with a deformity. The link between the two has been the subject of numerous scientific, even government, publications.[61] However, the official line is to place the blame for these defects on the behaviour of the mothers, marrying later in life or neglecting their health during pregnancy.[62]
The anti-woman attitude of the Deng administration showed itself early on with the enforced retirement of many leading women in the Party and state hierarchies and their replacement by men. In 2012 the Party’s Organisation Department published figures to show that, at Minister level or above, 11% of officials were female, though more than 40% of Party members are women. There is no woman on the Standing Committee of the Politburo (7 members) and only two, Liu Yandong and Sun Chunlan, on the Politburo itself (25 members). Of these two, Liu Yandong is an established member of the ‘Prince Party’, the closed circle of senior officials who carve up money and influence in China between them. Her father was Liu Ruilong, a former Vice-Minister of Agriculture. She has taken care never to voice a political point of view in public.[63]
-
Li Liao, et al., Family Finances in Urban China, J. Family Economic Issues, Vol 31 pp259-279, 2010.
-
New York Times, 19 July 2013.
-
Forbes Magazine, January 2013 and March 2014.
-
World Bank, Challenge of High Inequality in China, Aug 2013.
-
http://news.xinhuanet.com/English.
-
Burnett, Op. cit.
-
Nie, L. et al. Gender, Family, Socioeconomic Status, and Work Values in China, Am. Int. J. Soc. Sci. Vol. 3 No. 2; March 2014.
-
BBC News 17 Oct. 2013.
-
People’s Daily, June 2012, quoted in Fincher.
-
Fincher, L. Leftover Women, Zed Books. 2014.
-
Bienkowski, B. China’s Babies at Risk from Soot, Smog. Environmental Health News, April 2014.
-
Fincher, Op. cit.
-
The Telegraph, 16 March 2013.