Выбрать главу

The influx of people into Manchuria was especially pronounced after 1923, and incoming farmers rapidly brought a vast area of virgin grassland under cultivation. About two-thirds of the immigrants entered Manchuria by sea, and one-third came overland. Because the region’s winter weather was so severe, migration in the early stage was highly seasonal, usually starting in February and continuing through the spring. After the autumn harvest a large proportion of the farmers returned south. As Manchuria developed into the principal industrial region of China, however, large urban centres arose there, and the nature of the migration changed. No longer was the movement primarily one of agricultural resettlement, and instead it became essentially a rural-to-urban movement of interregional magnitude.

After 1949 the new government’s efforts to foster planned migration into interior and border regions produced noticeable results. Although the total number of people involved in such migrations is not known, it has been estimated that by 1980 between one-fourth and one-third of the population of such regions and provinces as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, and Qinghai consisted of recent migrants, and migration had raised the proportion of Han in Xinjiang to about two-fifths of the total. Efforts to control the growth of large cities led to the resettlement in the countryside of some 20 million urbanites after the failure of the Great Leap Forward and of nearly the same number of urban-educated youths in the decade after 1968. However, most of these “rusticated youths” subsequently returned to the cities.

The economic reforms begun in the late 1970s have unleashed a tidal wave of both rural-to-urban and west-to-east migration, reversing trends of the previous three decades. This has further exacerbated the country’s uneven population distribution, bringing enormous influxes to the urban areas of the eastern provinces and further depleting the population in the western regions. However, tens of millions of rural people who go to the cities to find jobs also return home for periods of time during the year. These individuals have tended to group themselves according to their native area for mutual benefit, much as ethnic groups have done in other major world cities. However, the unregulated influx of so many migrants and the instability of their lives and work have put considerable strain on the host cities, notably the environment and public security.

Economy

General considerations

Despite China’s size, the wealth of its resources, and the fact that about one-fifth of the world’s population lives within its borders, its role in the world economy was relatively small until late in the 20th century. However, since the late 1970s China has dramatically increased its interaction with the international economy, and it has become a dominant figure in world trade. Both China’s foreign trade and its gross national product (GNP) have experienced sustained and rapid growth, especially since foreign-owned firms began using China as an export platform for goods manufactured there.

The Chinese economy thus has been in a state of transition since the late 1970s as the country has moved away from a Soviet-type economic system. Agriculture has been decollectivized, the nonagricultural private sector has grown rapidly, and government priorities have shifted toward light and high-technology, rather than heavy, industries. Nevertheless, key bottlenecks have continued to constrain growth. Available energy has not been sufficient to run all of the country’s installed industrial capacity, the transport system has remained inadequate to move sufficient quantities of such critical commodities as coal, and the communications system has not been able to meet the needs of a centrally planned economy of China’s size and complexity.

China’s underdeveloped transport system—combined with important differences in the availability of natural and human resources and in industrial infrastructure—has produced significant variations in the regional economies of China. The three wealthiest regions are along the southeast coast, centred on the Pearl (Zhu) River Delta; along the east coast, centred on the lower Yangtze River; and near the Bo Hai (Gulf of Chihli), in the Beijing-Tianjin-Liaoning region. It is the rapid development of these areas that is having the most significant effect on the Asian regional economy as a whole, and Chinese government policy is designed to remove the obstacles to accelerated growth in these wealthier regions. At the same time, a major priority of the government is the economic development of the interior of the country to help it catch up with the more-prosperous coastal regions.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and is among the principal sources of wheat, corn (maize), tobacco, soybeans, peanuts (groundnuts), and cotton. The country is one of the world’s largest producers of a number of industrial and mineral products—including cotton cloth, tungsten, and antimony—and is an important producer of cotton yarn, coal, crude oil, and a number of other products. Its mineral resources are probably among the richest in the world but are only partially developed. China has acquired some highly sophisticated production facilities through foreign investment and joint ventures with foreign partners. The technological level and quality standards of many of its industries have improved rapidly and dramatically.

The labour force and the pricing system are still areas of concern. Underemployment is common in both urban and rural areas, and there is a strong fear of the disruptive effects that widespread unemployment could cause. The prices of some key commodities, especially of industrial raw materials and major industrial products, are still determined by the state, although the proportion of these commodities under state control continues to decline. A major exception is energy, which the government continues to regulate. China’s increasing contact with the international economy and its growing use of market forces to govern the domestic allocation of goods have exacerbated this problem. Over the years, large subsidies were built into the price structure, and these subsidies grew substantially from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when subsidies began to be eliminated. A significant factor was China’s acceptance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, which carried with it stipulations about further economic liberalization and government deregulation.

The role of the government

China has been a socialist country since 1949, and, for nearly all of that time, the government has played a predominant role in the economy. In the industrial sector, for example, the state long owned outright nearly all of the firms producing China’s manufacturing output. The proportion of overall industrial capacity controlled by the government has gradually declined, although heavy industries have remained largely state owned. In the urban sector the government has set the prices for key commodities, determined the level and general distribution of investment funds, prescribed output targets for major enterprises and branches, allocated energy resources, set wage levels and employment targets, run the wholesale and retail networks, and controlled financial policy and the banking system. The foreign trade system became a government monopoly in the early 1950s. In the countryside from the mid-1950s, the government prescribed cropping patterns, set the level of prices, and fixed output targets for all major crops.