Invisible China

What Hacker News says

1. ajmurmannAug 2023
   You do the cheap manufacturing to get from low-income to medium-income. Once at that level you need skilled workers to get to high-income. If you don't have these, low-cost jobs will move to other countries affected you are trapped. Germany already had a highly educated workforce and is high-income. No need to go back to square one.

   Source: Invisible China by Scott Rozelle which does a great job explaining economic development and comparing different countries.

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2. eej71Aug 2022
   If anything, the decline in needing cheap labor is going to be a problem for large countries like China. China needed those cheap labor factories to be the engine to help lift people out of rural poverty.

   Unfortunately that engine will now falter and many will be left behind.

   For an eye opening survey here, I highly recommend the book Invisible China.

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3. alephnerdAug 2022
   +1 on Invisible China. Scott Rozelle's group at the FSI has been doing some good work on trying to alleviate the opportunity gap that exists in several prefectures in the PRC.
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4. eej71Jun 2022
   Agreed. Scott Rozelle's _Invisible China_ is very much worth a read on this topic.

   The author is not a China hater - far from it. But he lays out in sobering detail the substantial demographic challenge they still face and why they may not escape what is known as at the middle income trap. If anything, I came away with the understanding that while many fear a rising China, it is a China that stumbles that can be more worrisome.

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5. ajmurmannNov 2023
   I recently read Invisible China by Scott Rozelle which raises concerns that impact this strategy.

   TL;DR: Most of Chinese population lives in rural China. Birth rates in rural China are also much higher than in cities. Education and childhood development in rural China have severe issues. Quality of education, but also access to equivalents of highschool. Simple health care issues like worms, iron deficiency and lack of correction of simple sight issues that could be addressed with glasses. There is cultural pushback against remediations due to believes that glasses will ruin children's sight in the long run and work deworming will make young girls infertile and that you need some worms. Due to the hokou system rural children cannot attend school in the city in the many cases that parents from rural areas work in the city. Children get raised by grandparents who, as the book put it, know how to raise subsistence farmers. All these issues matter because to not fall into the middle income trap you need educated workers who can work in hightech manufacturing. China is becoming too expensive for cheap manufacturing, but struggles with a educated workforce for high-end work in much of the country. A concern with this is that this will create structural unemployment for badly educated workers who will make money in the informal sector (black market, but also crime) which drags everyone else down. Examples of this would be Brazil and Mexico. Countries like SK, Japan and Taiwan avoided this trap by creating a highly educated workforce before they need it.

   One of the most surprising things in the book to me was that school, even before college, requires tuition and many poor families couldn't afford it. Quite the communism...

   Edit: Given the massive urban/rural split in education the book describes, I could see limited success of the 2025 initiative in urban areas, but a total falling behind of rural areas with migrant workers as we've been seeing for the last 20-30 years not migrating any longer and no longer bringing money back home. This feels like a recipe for some form of upheaval. That combined with the cursed demographics, we have some interesting times ahead.

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6. ajmurmannNov 2023
   I looked this up again in the book:

   "In particular, according to hukou status, only about 36 percent of China’s overall population is urban and fully 64 percent is rural (some 800 to 900 million people). Owing to uneven birthrates between the cities and the countryside (until recently urban families could have only one child, while rural families often had two or three), China’s children are even more concentrated in rural areas. More than 70 percent of China’s children have rural hukou status today. This means that China’s future workforce is predominantly growing up in rural villages, where educational outcomes are still lagging far behind."

   Rozelle, Scott; Hell, Natalie. Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise (pp. 8-9).

   So the difference here might come from where the population lives vs. their houku status. As I understand it from the book, the houku status dictates where your child is allowed to go to school. So while 36.11% might now "live" in a urban area, many of the children of those urban residents likely will have to live with grandparents in the rural hometown. Unfortunately, this is one of the sections where I cannot quickly find a reference to the source in the book. Maybe if I read the whole chapter again, but I cannot do that right nwo.

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