Recommended reading
Whose miracle?: how China's workers are paying the price for its economic boom
Economic growth causes rise in inequality in China
Authors:
; Workers' Voice @ WTO
Publisher:
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions , 2005
This report examines the rapid economic growth of China, and argues that this boom could only occur on the backs of the people it was supposed to benefit. It debunks the myth that everyone’s a winner in the country’s transition from a slumbering rural economy to a manufacturing powerhouse, and demonstrates that China’s rise in inequality is among the fastest seen at present and its trend of social exclusion historically unprecedented for the country.
The report highlights:
- China is still sweat-shopping its way to success, basing its competitiveness on unnaturally low wages and the exploitation of a workforce which has no means of representing itself
- China might have as many newly unemployed people as the rest of the world together and will have to create up to 300 million new jobs in the next decade to keep unemployment from rising to unbearable levels
- China’s successful poverty eradication in the early 1980s has stagnated in the 1990s and the new millennium, and risks worsening further with the country’s deeper integration into the WTO
- China is experiencing a surge in inequality, creating not one country and one people but winners and losers through discrepancies in living standards within and between cities and provinces
- China’s rulers find themselves trapped in a Catch-22, trying to keep social control by denying workers the freedom to organise in independent trade unions, yet fuelling social unrest and disorder through their authoritarian rule and crackdowns on any initiative to show alternative paths to the future.
