China’s growing social polarisation

[Hannah Bell]

China now consumes 27.5 percent of the world’s luxury goods, more than the United States, and second only to Japan, according to the World Luxury Association’s annual report...The growth in China’s rich has been rapid. In 1999, the year when Forbes produced its first rich list for China, it took just $6 million to make the top 50. In 2009, only 10 years later, the figure was $1.3 billion.

China’s turn to market reforms in 1978 required active state action, repression and violence. It has been accompanied by rampant corruption, racketeering, kickbacks and blackmail as evidenced by the articles every single day in China’s press. It has spawned a small, privileged layer that enjoys enormous wealth at the expense of the vast majority of the population. The Gini coefficient, which measures wealth inequality, is said to have grown to 0.46 in the last 30 years. Just 10 percent of urban families own 45 percent of total urban wealth.

Workers, far from benefiting from China’s economic growth that has averaged 9 percent a year, have seen their income decline from 51.4 percent of GDP in 1995 to 39.7 percent in 2008. Under conditions where more than 167 million rural migrants—about one quarter of the total urban population—have moved to the cities to find work and millions of state owned enterprise workers have been laid off, workers are forced to accept subsistence wages, long hours and harsh conditions...

Under such polarised conditions, social tensions and conflicts have risen...Official figures, only a pale reflection of the actual number of riots and mass protest actions, show that the number of mass incidents, just over 10,000 in 1995, had risen to more than 87,000 in 2005...It is the fear that worse is to come that lay behind premier Wen Jiabao’s report to the National People’s Congress last month, which was notable for its populist rhetoric and emphasis on social justice. But more significant was the announcement that the rate of growth in social spending would be halved, with no major initiatives to redistribute income more fairly, and that spending on “public security” would be increased.

[JVS]

1. Please post the link.

[Hannah Bell]

2. editing period ended, so here it is:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/chin-a07.shtml

[blindpig]

3. That's Capitalism for ya..

k&r