What Future for Chinese Society ?

According to the objectives of the leaders of its Communist Party, China should become a relatively prosperous society by 2020. But what would it look like ? Urban or rural growth ? This question is at the centre of the debate about whether changes in the way the country will be modernised are necessary.

Almost half of the 1.3 billion Chinese people live in the countryside. “It’s too much,” says the economist Hu Angang, director of the Centre for China Study at Tsinghua University, Beijing. “Domestic migration drives China’s economy. The move from the countryside to the cities must increase. Among 700 million country people, 320 of them still rely on a piece of land which is hardly enough for them to survive.” Hu recommends to “halve this figure by 2030, even if it will still be too high compared to the United-States or Europe.”

This prospect seems absurd to Wen Tiejun, Dean of the School of Agriculture & Rural Development, at Renmin University of China. “How can we imagine that the country has enough resources to feed an urban population of 1 billion people ? Someone in the city consumes twenty times more than someone in the country. China’s population accounts for 21% of the world’s population but we have only 7% of the arable land and 6% of water resources. China’s future does not lie in a frenzied urbanisation but in a sound modernisation of the countryside by investing sufficient public funds while allowing farmers to have initiatives without crushing them with directives from the government or local authorities.”