Confronting Discrimination and Inequality in China: Chinese and Canadian Perspectives

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Everyone knows that China produces a dizzying range of products that Canadians enjoy and rely upon to stretch their budgets. Few, however, have any idea what this tsunami of cheap shoes, electronics, and housewares actually costs the Chinese who produce them. It’s the underside—and downside—of China’s spectacular economic advance that the contributors to Confronting Discrimination and Inequality in Chinaanalyze and reveal.

For all its authoritarian muscle, the Chinese government has rarely coped effectively with the pace of social change accompanying the country’s rapid growth and modernization. Of all the aspects of China’s social transformation, none rivals the shift of population from rural to urban areas after 1949. Indeed, the sheer scale of this migration, upwards of 200 million people, is without precedent and stands among the largest movements of people in history. Several papers in this collection argue that the price for China’s first-world urban prosperity is the impoverishment of legions of migrant workers who build, maintain, and service cities like Shanghai and Beijing that the Chinese government touts as the true representatives of the “new” China.

Life for the mobile, formerly rural proletariat and the peasantry can be brutal. As cities and industrial suburbs grow and impinge on agricultural lands, farming communities fight and often lose legal battles against industrialists and corrupt local officials over land rights. Factories quickly displace farmlands and few peasants can muster the resources necessary to mount legal defences of their rights to collectively held lands. Women, particularly, have lost ground over the last 20 years. Often left to manage farms as husbands and sons seek work in cities, or exploited in multinational sweatshops in coastal factories, women enable the export economy that builds China’s huge foreign exchange reserves.

Other papers survey the fates of equally vulnerable populations the Chinese government does little to protect. The disabled—a small but much disadvantaged group—receive relatively little support and protection, as do persons living with HIV/AIDS, from a government aspiring to international respect.

The essays presented in this significant compilation show that China’s spectacular economic ascent must be evaluated not just in terms of macroeconomic performance but also as a human rights issue.