China’s Great Migration – How the poor built a prosperous nation

By Bradley M. Gardner

Published by the Independent Institute in 2017

A review

According to a 2015 article in the Washington Post, China used more concrete in the three years between 2011 and 2013 than the United States used in the 20^th Century. In his book, China’s Great Migration Bradley M. Garner credits this tremendous development primarily to 260 million Chinese who migrated from the countryside to China’s cities to work at industrial jobs. This number of migrant workers exceeds the number of immigrant workers in the world.

Bradley Gardner works for the State Department of the United States. He believes that the capitalist system is the ultimate way for humanity to advance. So, in reading this book, I felt the need to effectively translate Gardner’s ideas into a language that working people will find relevant.

In order to gain a perspective to this book, I feel it is useful to look at an outline of hundreds of years of Chinese history.

Tremendous projects are not new to China

Huge projects are not new to China. China’s Great Wall spans about 3,700 miles. To put this in perspective, the distance from New York City to Los Angeles, California is less than 3,000 miles.

China’s Grand Canal is the longest human made waterway in the world. It spans 1,104 miles. While the Panama Canal is considerably wider, its length is about 50 miles.

From 1405 to 1433 China had a fleet of about 300 ships that sailed across the Indian Ocean to Africa. The largest ship was 300 feet long and 150 feet wide. One of those ships was larger than the three ships used by Christopher Columbus to sail to the Americas in 1492.

China, as well as Korea, invented the printing press that transformed printing in the world. Throughout the Greek and Roman Empires all literature was written by hand.

China also has a long history in medical as well as agricultural research.

So, before we can look at the question of why China has had such astronomical growth, first I think we need to look at another question. Why did China go from being the most developed nation in the world, to become an effective colony to European powers?

European development

In his book 1493 – Uncovering the new worldColumbus created Charles C. Mann wrote about an important chapter in Chinese history.

In the year 1545 Diego Gualpa discovered a deposit of silver at the southern tip of Bolivia. This turned out to be the largest discovery of silver in the world.

The Spanish had three goals in their colonization of the Americas. These were God, Glory, and Gold. So, this discovery of silver sparked changes throughout the world.

In Europe the mining of gold and silver in by Native American slave labor led to the financing of the industrial revolution. The European discovery of potatoes in the Americas allowed farmers to spend less time tending to their crops. This allowed for a migration into the factories of European cities.

While China had a highly developed economy for those times, it had one weakness. The Chinese currency was unstable.

So, when Spanish ships landed in their colony, the Philippines, loaded with silver, the Chinese made it a top priority to trade anything and everything for those sixty-pound bars of silver.

This trade became such a priority, the Chinese Emperor ordered farmers to plant mulberry trees that would feed silk worms used to make silk to be transported to Europe. Trades people in Europe went out of business because they were unable to compete with imported goods transported from China half a world away.

As in Europe, the introduction of American crops to China transformed that nation. Areas that hadn’t been used for cultivation could now be used to grow sweet potatoes, potatoes, and corn. This development allowed the Chinese population to grow significantly.

The Opium Wars and 100 years of rebellions against imperialism

Starting in the 1600s momentous changes began to unfold in Europe. Up until that point, Europe had been ruled by feudal monarchies. This meant that only those who were born into these monarchies had full rights.

Those monarchies forced peasants who worked the land to live on manors for their entire lives. The word villain comes from those peasants who had permission to travel away from the manor.

Craft guilds controlled all manufacturing that was by its nature primarily designed to fulfill the needs of the royal families. Under these conditions the Royal families ruled in conjunction with religious clerics.

Then, beginning in the 1600s a new class emerged that would eventually take power away from the royal families. This class of doctors, lawyers, bankers, journalists, and entrepreneurs would change society from one designed to benefit the royal families, to one designed to gouge out profits for the owners of corporations.

While feudal societies had limited production facilities, under the new system of capitalism mass production factories began to take hold. This meant that the laws needed to change in order to allow peasants to leave the land in order to work in the factories located in cities. This also meant that workers would experience nightmarish conditions in the first years of capitalist production.

Spain never developed and industrial base. Aside from relying on China, most of the immense wealth Spain collected from Native American slave labor went to the other European nations.

Britain became the world’s superpower, but that nation had a problem. Because China was self sufficient, the British didn’t manufacture anything the Chinese wanted. As a result the Chinese initially became wealthy in British silver because of the trade imbalance.

We should keep in mind that China never had a pro-capitalist transformation as many European powers experienced. Instead, the deteriorating Chinese monarchy was conquered by the minority nationality known as the Manchus. This meant that masses of Chinese peasants remained on the land and China became relatively underdeveloped with respect to Europe. 

The British dealt with their trade imbalance with China by selling opium. The Manchu Emperor began to understand that opium was a drain on their economy and it’s use ruined many lives. So, the Manchu Emperor banned the importation of opium.

The British responded by doubling its opium exports to China. The Chinese eventually responded to this illegal trade by boarding a British vessel and throwing an expensive shipment of opium overboard. This act was similar to the Boston Tea Party when colonists of the thirteen colonies protested unfair taxes by boarding a British vessel and throwing a shipment of tea overboard.

This act sparked the beginning of three Opium Wars where the British forced the Chinese to continue to purchase opium. The British also forced the Manchu rulers to pay for the opium that the Chinese had thrown into the sea.

We should keep in mind that the primary concern of the Manchu rulers was not to free China from this trade, but to maintain their positions of privilege in the country. Had the Chinese people been mobilized, they could have easily defeated the British. However, that kind of mobilization would have jeopardized the position of the Manchu rulers.

The Chinese defeat in the Opium Wars had a horrendous effect on the country. Resources that had been used to feed the people were used to pay the debt to Britain. As a result the Taiping Rebellion erupted. 20 million Chinese might have perished in the war. However, the Manchus, with British support were able to maintain power.

Many Chinese from the southeast of the country looked to escape from the horrors of the Taiping Rebellion and came to the United States to mine gold and to aid in the construction of the railroad.

The defeat of the Taiping Rebellion, as well as British domination of the economy led to more horrors in China. Mike Davis wrote a book titled: Late Victorian Holocausts, where he documented the fact that during the late 1800s about 30 million Chinese starved to death.

Davis looked at how the Chinese dealt with droughts before the British dominated their country. When there was a drought in one part of China, the Grand Canal was used to transport food throughout the country. However, the British had no interest in maintaining a waterway that would only benefit Chinese, and made no effort to transport food to the starving Chinese people.    

     

These horrendous conditions sparked the Boxer Rebellion, the Nationalist Rebellion of 1910, the rebellion of 1927, and finally the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

The 1910 rebellion or revolution made the political organization the Kuomintang a political force. Sun Yat-sen was the first leader of the Kuomintang and his successor was Chiang Kai-shek.

In the revolution of 1927 the Chinese Communist Party became a political force. However, this party was aligned with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That party had betrayed the goals of the Russian Revolution and was headed by Joseph Stalin.

Stalin urged the Chinese Communists to support Chiang Kai-shek, who at that time had aligned himself with imperialist interests. As a result, the Kuomintang organized to destroy the Communist Party and thousands of its members were murdered. China’s famous Long March was an arduous effort of the Communist Party to escape from the advancing Kuomintang.

At this time the Chinese Communist Party had an opportunity to take power on it’s own, but that opportunity was lost because of miss-leadership. Had the Chinese working class taken power at that time, Chinese history might have been completely different. As it was, the Chinese Communist Party developed a strategy based on the peasants and not the workers. This would have a horrendous effect in the years to come.

After the Second World War, financiers demanded payment for loans they made in support of the Chinese independence struggle against Japan. These demands for payment on loans created astronomical inflation throughout China. These conditions caused most Chinese to abandon the Kuomintang. As a result the Chinese Communist Party took power in a relatively bloodless revolution in 1949.

The Chinese Communist Party takes power

William H. Hinton reported on the change that took place in a Chinese village because of the revolution in his book Fanshen. Women were no longer forced to have their feet bound and broken. Peasants who routinely lived in extreme poverty experienced an improved standard of living. All of this was because of a more rational organization of the village.

However, the government of Mao Zedong was not about creating a workers democracy. That government attempted initially to create a block of four classes. These classes consisted of workers, peasants, capitalists, and landlords.

Once the revolution triumphed capitalists and landlords mobilized to defend their interests. Mao understood that he needed to counter this mobilization and he nationalized all major Chinese corporations, as well as the property of large landowners. As a result, capitalists refused to invest in China for many years. 

Because Mao was determined to carry out his top down leadership, it was inevitable that his policies would end in disaster. First came his Great Leap Forward that might have cost the lives of millions of Chinese. Then came his Cultural Revolution that forced millions of Chinese intellectuals and young people to move to the countryside and engage in farming.

Initially China supported the Korean people against the invasion of their country by the United States. Then, China supported Vietnam in their war to defend their nation from U.S. aggression. However, Mao was not motivated by international solidarity, and this became clear with his actions.

While the United States carried out a horrendous bombing campaign towards the end of their war against Vietnam, Mao met with U.S. President Richard Nixon. Mao also supported the monstrous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge, China responded by invading Vietnam.

These actions, as well as the death of Mao Zedong led to momentous changes in China. Bradley M. Gardner documented many of these changes in his book China’s Great Migration.

Gardner reported that the percentage of the Chinese economy controlled by the state in 1998 was 60.5 percent. By the year 2010 the Chinese government controlled a mere 19.4 percent of the economy. Gardner credits this immense change to the migration of about 260 million Chinese from the countryside to the cities.

We should keep in mind that China had never experienced a capitalist revolution. Because of this, Chinese authorities forced peasants to remain on the land where they were born for their entire lives. Remarkably, the government of Mao Zedong continued to enforce these horrendous regulations.

Gardner reported on the Chinese system of Hukou that explains the background to the great migration. These were the regulations that restricted the travel of Chinese who lived in the countryside. The regulations of Hukou needed to be reformed in order to allow for mass migration to the cities. However, remnants of this system remain in effect in China today.

This means that Chinese access to health care, education, housing, and pension are all regulated by where a Chinese citizen was born. So, Chinese traveling from the countryside to the cities to work in factories are, from a legal point of view, second-class citizens.

This system might make us think that the Chinese government would prevent any confiscations of the homes where people live. However, Gardner pointed out that one of the primary means that local governments have of raising funds is through confiscations of Chinese homes.

Gardner gave the example of Jia Lingmin, who protested the confiscation of her home. She was then kidnapped, and thrown into a ditch. Her home was eventually confiscated after she waged a long battle to prevent a forced evacuation. Lingmin then conducted an educational campaign to prevent further forced evacuations. The government eventually responded to her efforts by sentencing her to four and one half years in prison.

We can see similarities to this reality in the United States and other capitalist nations. In the U.S., they call forced evacuations eminent domain. There is also institutionalized discrimination against Blacks, women, Latinos, Native Americans, as well as immigrants. Funding for education varies widely between the urban centers and the affluent suburban communities. In China this discrimination is based on the location of where people are born.       

China’s great migration

Gardner places China’s great migration in an international context in the following paragraph:

“Between 1800 and 1900 the population of London expanded from 1 Million to 4.5 million, while between 1890 and 1930, immigrants and rural migrants pushed New York’s population up from 2.5 million to 6.9 million. The scale if not the size, is similar to many Chinese cities—between 1980 and 2010, the population of Beijing expanded from 9 million to 21 million people, while the population of Shanghai grew from 11 million to 20 million. Shenzhen, which grew from a town of 300,000 people to a city of over 10 million people, is in a league of its own.”

Gardner credits the Chinese city of Wenzhou with the beginning of the great migration. Before the revolution Wenzhou was a trading center of the region with contacts from around the world. Then, with the rise of Mao, the city was neglected and suffered relative poverty. The city is on the Chinese southern coast, but was isolated from the rest of the nation and its language is difficult to translate.

Because of its isolation and the fact that the soil in the area is difficult to farm, many farmers from the Wenzhou area migrated to the city. Wenzhou eventually became a center for spare parts for cars and motorcycles, as well as for buttons and zippers. The economy grew at an amazing rate of 19% per year.

Gardner also gave the story of the other side to this development in the following quotation:

“The city is badly polluted, with trash clogging the streams that lead to the Ou River. Wenzhou is also one of the only cities in China that turns a blind eye to urban slums. Makeshift housing made out of concrete blocks and corrugated iron is thrown up in the middle of abandoned lots, occasionally only a few blocks from downtown.” However, the wages for migrant workers is the highest in China.

The Cultural Revolution took place between the years 1966—1976. During that time 17 million youth were sent to the countryside. After that time most of those youth returned to the cities and looked for work. This was the initial impetus for allowing private enterprises to exist in China. While those enterprises were only supposed to have seven employees, this law was routinely broken.

Ultimately the larger influx into the cities came from farmers from the countryside. These former farmers also set up their private businesses and started the mass migration.

In the year 2003 Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao abolished the law that allowed the police to detain and repatriate workers who didn’t have the proper papers. Migration throughout China became a right.

Before this change in the Hukou law, Gardner described the treatment of migrants as “often abysmal, with prolonged detention without trial, extortion of the detained or their families, as well as beatings and deprivations of those held in custody.”

However today foreign corporations own over forty percent of the Chinese economy. One of those corporations is the electronics giant Foxconn that is based in Taiwan.

Foxconn has several factories in Shenzhen in southern China. Hundreds of thousands of workers live in dormitories where guards are stationed twenty-four hours every day. Foxconn requires employees to have the proper identification at all times. Family members are not allowed to enter the city where the workers live. So, Foxconn treats Chinese workers as immigrants in their own country.   

Zhengzhou is the provincial capital of Henan province. Henan is an inland region located far away from the coastal cities. Between the year 2011 and 2013 about 300,000 people moved to the Dazhai Village on the outskirts of Zhenghou. If you purchased an IPhone after 2012 it was probably made in this Dazhai village.

Foxconn or Hon Hai owns the factory that produces these IPhones. Hundreds of thousands of workers toil in the Foxconn factories at Dazhai and there is a 20 percent turnover rate. This means that Foxconn needs to hire 700 workers every day.

There are three requirements for workers. They must be 18 years of age. They are not allowed to have tattoos. They were not fired by the company. Workers who meet these requirements are eligible to work making IPhones. One of the reasons why there is so much turnover at the company is because the wages at Foxconn are lower than most wages in the rest of China. One of the reasons why workers are attracted to this area is that it is closer to the countryside where many workers live.

John Smith wrote about the Foxconn electronic factories of Shenzhen in his book: Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century –The globalization of production, super-exploitation, and the crisis ofcapitalism. He reported that Foxconn initially centered their production in Shenzhen, located in the southeast near Hong Kong. In the following passage Smith reported on the relationship between Foxconn (Hon Hai) and the Apple Corporation.

Workers who have jobs with Hon Hai do all the work necessary to produce Apple products like the iPhone.  In 2013 Hon Hai had sales of $132.1 billion and profits of $10.7 billion.  Hon Hai had a workforce at that time of 1,232,000 employees.  Employees for the Apple Corporation do none of the work in the manufacturing of it’s products.  Yet, in the year 2013 Apple had $41.7 billion in profits on $164.7 billion in sales with a workforce of 72,800 employees.

Smith also reported that the “2013 production cost of 16GB IPhone 5C was $156, rising to $213 for a 16GB IPhone 5S, while the retail price for each unlocked hardset is $549 and $649 respectively, yielding profit margins of 61 percent and 67 percent.” “The value of the share price of Hon Hai is $32.1 billion while the share price of Apple is valued at $416.6 billion.” This has made Apple one of the most profitable corporations in the world.

Chinese workers protested against these kinds of conditions with about 2,700 strikes in the year 2015. The number of strikes in China has been increasing since 2011. In the past three years the number of strikes have peaked at around 2,700 per year. One of the primary issues for labor is the refusal by employers to pay about one percent of the workers in the 260 million migrant labor force.

There has been a film made of the Chinese labor movement titled, We The Workers. The Chinese government responded by arresting several of those who worked to make this film. This attitude of the Chinese government is typical of their opposition to the strike wave in that country.

Conclusion

Bradley M. Gardner uses the last chapter in his book to conclude that migration as well as immigration is good for capitalist economies around the world. This is a stark polemic against President Donald Trump who has made the deportation of immigrants his central priority. We can also say that the number of deportations in the United States has been increasing with both democratic and republican presidents.

Gardner ignores the issue of factory workers in the United States who have seen jobs eliminated due to huge investments in nations like China. While Gardner is aware that extreme crisis can unfold in the capitalist system, he is unwilling to even consider the idea that a workers government is a rational alternative.

Gardner’s idea of communism is the Chinese government that has accommodated itself to massive capitalist investment. He also correctly argues that the government run enterprises in China are not as efficient as the privately owned corporations. Here Garner is in agreement with Fidel Castro who made a similar argument because of entirely different reasons.

Because of the embargo against Cuba by the United States, that nation needed to establish trading relations with the former Soviet Union. Cuba discovered that many of the commodities Cuba purchased from the Soviet Union were sub-standard and at times useless. For this reason, Fidel Castro concluded that in a sense, capitalist methods of production were more efficient from those methods in a bureaucratic state like the Soviet Union.

However, Cuba has a different kind of leadership from the bureaucracies in Russia and China. Because of this, Cuba has lower infant mortality and a longer life expectancy than the United States. This is in a nation that is 100% Latino and 40% Afro-Cuban. This example shows that there is a clear alternative to the Chinese example.

On the other hand, in John Smith’s book on Imperialism, he argues that there were two reasons why there hasn’t been an economic collapse already. One has been due to a tremendous amount of debt from financial speculation. Because corporations are continually obsessed with selling more products and cutting costs, there is a tendency for the economy to produce more goods and services that people can purchase.

This creates an atmosphere where there are more goods on the market than people are buying. If there are fewer sales, profits decline and corporations have no reason to invest. Therefore the crisis of capitalism is about having more commodities on the market than people will buy. This fact explains why capitalists invest about $200 billion in advertising every year.

Because there is a continual decline in the percent of profit on investments, capitalists are continually driven to cut costs. This explains why they have invested so much money in China and other nations where wages are abysmally low.

Most economists blamed the 2008 economic crisis on the housing market. Housing was overvalued and many borrowers were unable to pay on their loans. This crisis resulted from the fact that the return on investments in manufacturing had deteriorated. The crisis of 2008 was only temporarily postponed by a massive government bailout known as quantitative easing.

Understanding all of this, we can conclude that while I’m opposed to all deportations, increased immigration will not save the capitalist economy. People are willing to work and there are sufficient materials to make a profound improvement in the standard of living. Yet a capitalist crisis is inevitable because capitalists will simply refuse to invest because they will see that those investments will not yield sufficient profits.

Another road for China

Today many corporations are not interested in investing in Cuba. While corporations routinely invest in nations that have horrendous wages and working conditions, they don’t typically like to invest in Cuba.

This is because Cuba has made it their top priority to provide for the needs of literally everyone on the island. Capitalists don’t like the fact that all Cubans have access to a lifetime of health care and education. Capitalists would prefer to have the resources used for these services in their profits.

Had China followed a similar road as Cuba, I would argue that most capitalists would not have invested in that nation. It is possible that the tremendous growth of the Chinese economy would not have been so dramatic.

However, had the Chinese government made a priority of the needs of every Chinese citizen, and aligned with workers and farmers around the world, I believe the standard of living in China would be better than it is today.

If there was a Chinese government that supported the interests of all Chinese, the creativity of the people of that nation would flower. The Chinese would have found ways of resolving problems using the resources of that country.

China would have become a beacon for workers and farmers from around the world. We can question if the political economic system of capitalism would have been able to survive when one-sixth of the human race is outside of its orbit.

Today Chinese workers have the power to take control of the government in their country. We might keep in mind that shortly before the Russian Revolution there was also a massive migration from the countryside to the cities where former peasants toiled in factories.

However, today Chinese workers have already experienced repression from a government that claims to be communist. They have seen how there are ghost towns in China built to house thousands of people. Yet these towns are empty because workers who have produced all the wealth of China aren’t able to afford to live there. Added to this, the Chinese government announced that it may eliminate 1.8 million jobs from the state run enterprises. Yes, there is reason for the Chinese people to want a profound change.    

I think we need to keep these ideas in mind when we think about the future of China today. Workers throughout the world will welcome strikes by Chinese workers. These workers are our brothers and sisters who are engaged in the international struggle to make this a world where human needs are more important than profits.