Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Life in China

Joel Kotkin writes in City Journal,
China stands as the primary exhibit of twenty-first-century urbanism. At a time when elite cities in the West barely manage to grow in population, Chinese cities have emerged out of virtually nothing, as hundreds of millions of people have moved from farm to city. The nation’s urbanization rate has exploded from 19 percent in 1979 to nearly 60 percent today; it is expected to hit 80 percent by 2050. In 1980, China, still laboring under the antiurban Maoist regime, was home to none of the world’s megacities; today, it is home to six. By 2035, ten of the world’s 50-plus megacities (urban areas with more than 10 million people) will be located in the Middle Kingdom.

...China’s “civilization state,” rooted deeply in thousands of years of history, has extended its influence beyond its historical base in East Asia north to Siberia, but also far afield in South Asia, South America, and especially Africa, where an estimated 1 million Chinese now live. For people in much of the world, Beijing and Shanghai provide the direction and inspiration, not New York, London, or even Tokyo.

...Yet for all their achievements, China’s cities also offer a cautionary tale about authoritarian planning, excessive density, too many unneeded units, rising class tensions, plunging birthrates, heavy pollution, and, perhaps most ominously, the imposition of increasingly sophisticated population surveillance.

The scale of urban migration is staggering. The Maoist Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, instructed millions of urban residents to move to the countryside, to “learn” from the peasants. But with the rise in 1979 of the far more pragmatic Deng Xiaoping, urbanization accelerated dramatically. With coastal city jobs luring them, a net 250 million people—many without urban hukou, or resident permits—traveled from the impoverished countryside to find work. In the process, a massive, and potentially politically charged, urban underclass has emerged. Unable to claim legal residency in the cities, China’s migrants often lack access to education, health care, and most forms of insurance. Though migrants perform many of the most dangerous jobs in manufacturing and construction—they’re largely excluded from other work—barely one in four has any form of insurance if injured.

China may be the “world’s factory,” notes author Li Sun, but largely unprotected migrants do much of the work—1 million alone toil for Foxconn, the manufacturer of the iPhone. China’s great wealth derives, she points out, from a “worker-made” economy of people laboring 60-hour weeks for barely $63 a week. They reprise the role played for millennia by peasants, who built the wealth of the Middle Kingdom but shared in little of it.

Compared with their Western cousins, these workers have few rights. Union membership in China is essentially worthless, as unions must conform to the Communist Party’s priorities. Apple manufactures virtually all its products in China, where conditions have been linked both to strikes and to several suicides of workers claiming to be treated no better than robots. Wealth in China increasingly adheres to a class of entrepreneurs well connected with the Communist Party; 90 percent of China’s millionaires, notes Australian political scientist David Goodman, are the offspring of high-ranking officials.

...The problem is particularly severe among urban migrants. Researcher Li Sun estimates that rural areas contain some 60 million “left-behind children” and another 58 million “left-behind elderly.” Stanford professor Scott Rozelle found that most kids left behind in the rural villages are sick or malnourished, and up to two-thirds struggle with combinations of anemia, worms, and uncorrected myopia that set them back at school. More than half the toddlers, he predicts, are so cognitively delayed that their IQs will never exceed 90.

But perhaps the most precipitous damage to the country’s demographic future is taking place in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, which have fertility rates almost one-third of that necessary to replace their own populations. The rates are lower even than in other East Asian cities, such as Hong Kong and Tokyo. China’s demographic disaster could be at hand: some experts project the overall fertility rate of the country to be a mere 1.2, well below replacement level for the current generation. Future prospects are made worse by a huge unbalance, reaching 33 million, of marriage-age boys over girls. By one estimate, 37 million Chinese girls were lost to abortion or infanticide since the one-child policy came into force in 1980. The Party has relaxed the one-child policy, but rising housing costs and women’s labor participation have made having even one child, let alone two, almost impossible in China’s cities. No Chinese equivalent of a Westchester, North Dallas, or L.A.’s Inland Empire yet exists to support family formation.

As a result, China could experience a reduction of 60 million people—approximately Italy’s population—under 15 years of age by 2050. It will gain nearly 190 million people—approximately the population of Pakistan, the world’s sixth-largest country—65 and over. By then, China’s ratio of working to retired people is expected to have more than tripled, one of the most rapid transitions in history, but without the wealth that a country like Japan has accumulated to get it through the approaching demographic winter.

Given these tensions, social control is likely to become a greater priority. With the decline in the Chinese family, the state may feel compelled to extend its role over even the most private details of personal life. China’s rise as a technological power makes advanced surveillance technology even more threatening, particularly as China enlists American tech firms, including Apple, to help perfect it. Chinese officials enjoy untrammeled access to data in a country with few privacy protections. This includes the experimental use of devices to monitor workers’ brains, while other machines scan for changes in mood. The Communist Party is already invested in a high-tech scheme to determine every Chinese person’s “social ranking,” which includes everything from creditworthiness to political reliability. China is also putting artificial intelligence to work in monitoring businesses, in part to ensure that their activities square with Party priorities.

In western China, where Muslim dissidents pose a perceived threat, Chinese authorities are testing a facial-recognition system that alerts officials when targets stray more than 300 meters from their home or workplace. In this region, wearing a beard, giving your child a Muslim name, or failing to celebrate the Lunar New Year by eating pork and drinking alcohol can draw the attention of police and end in internment in Sinicization camps. Once one gets caught up in the criminal-law system, chances of acquittal are estimated at less than one in 100.

Such facial-recognition systems, designed to modulate behavior in ways approved by the state, are being implemented throughout the country, making it hard to express dissent or, for that matter, to cross the street against a red light. By 2020, China is expected to deploy more than 400 million surveillance cameras in cities around the country. The government is also making efforts to harvest biometric data, track smartphones, and install compulsory satellite-tracking systems for vehicles.

...As it copes with new demographic and economic changes, China needs to move beyond vainglorious display, algorithmic efficiency, and uniformity, and focus instead on quality of life. Creating a more humane, less hierarchical, and more affordable urban future may prove more important to the fate of Chinese civilization than trade deals or perfecting technology. To thrive in the years ahead and avoid a Japan-like decline, China should reinvent its cities as places both of economic opportunity and flourishing families.
Read more here.

No comments: