China Law Blog

One important point that gets missed. Chinese land tenure is very different from US land tenure. If you are a resident of a rural township, you have a legal right to farmland. All farmland is owned by the state, and it is parceled out to farmers who farm the land and then and sell the produce that the produce on the open market. What this means is that farmers cannot sell all of their rights to land. This may seem like a bad thing, but what that means is that if the farmer ends up unemployed in the city, he can go back to the village, and he will be assigned a plot of land that he can farm.

There was at some point some talk of allowing farmers to completely sell their land holdings, in the same way that city dwellers can sell their land use rights. The basic problem with that idea was that suppose the farmer sells out their land use rights, goes to the city, and then loses their job completely. What happens next?

One thing that this reveals is who different countries have radically different economies. For a typical American, unemployment is a total disaster, because they usually have relatively little savings, and without an income, rent and credit card bills will destroy the household financially. Chinese rural farmers, usually have high savings, which means that unemployment is not a total disaster for a household.

Interesting. I had been wondering about this.

What about the students?

Chinese students today are a very different bunch than people that were students in the TAM generation. Most of them are interested more in career than political activism. Where they are interested in activism, it's likely to be aimed at nationalism. There is a rough parallel here between the yuppie generation of the 1980's and the hippie generation of the 1960's.

One big cultural difference was that for students in 1989, Western democracy was part of "Western culture" which the Communist Party at the time was trying to stamp down as being decadent. There was a campaign against "bougeious liberalization." There was a time in the early/mid-1980's, when wearing blue jeans, listening to Western pop music, and dating were considered revolutionary actions against the Party.

At some point in the early 1990's, the Party figured out that it was more likely to stay in power, if it just cracked down on overtly political dissent, and stopped caring about the music people listened to, the clothes people wear, or who was sleeping with who.

Like peasant, unemployed college graduates could potentially be a source of unrest, but the government has responded to this by creating lots of civil service jobs for college graduates, and encouraging college graduates to enlist in the military.

One curious thing that illustrates how unlikely it is for there to be a peasant uprising is TAM itself. In the 1980's, farmers saw their incomes increase dramatically, and in 1989, farmers and peasants were very supportive of the Communist Party but because they were hard to mobilize, their support was pretty much useless.

I wrote about this in March in a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Migrants are not a force for instability, and rather than debating that we should look at the structural issues - can China successfully redeploy workers disenfranchised by a significant slowdown in exports? See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680436558899933.html for more.