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Paperback $ 19.00
by Amit Ranjan Alok 15 December 2022
Scott Douglas Rozelle is an American development economist and one of the directors of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) at Stanford University, Rozelle has spent over 30 years doing research heavily based on agriculture, economics, and education in mainland China. Rozelle knows China very well, and his research is mainly associated with agricultural policies, economic institutions, and poverty and inequality in China.
Rozelle has written some books like Agriculture and groundwater development in northern China: trends, institutional responses, and policy options (2007); Governance structures and resources policy reforms: Insights from Agriculture transition (2009).
Natalie Hell is a writer and researcher, part of the REAP program as well. She, along with Rozelle, has done much work related to Chinese education and health issues inside China.
Both authors are experts in health education, agriculture, and so on. Moreover, they dedicated their important time to understanding Chinese developmental statistics.
ARGUMENTS OF THE BOOK
Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, in this book, have explored how the great disparity in human capital across rural and Urban China is inhibiting China’s rise from a middle-income to a high-income country. The title of the book, invisible China, deals with rural China, which remains invisible for the main idea and for outsiders. Out of the 1.4 billion population, 85 % of the Chinese population live in rural communities, often working as farmers or in rural factories.
After several decades of unprecedented high growth rates, the Chinese economy has reached a critical turning point. The developmental strategies of China, initially were the exploitation of natural resources and utilising the vast demographic dividend, i.e labour force in China. Cheap labour was used to open up its economy and attract more foreign direct investment into China.
The People’s Republic of China has experienced unprecedented economic growth for nearly three decades after introducing economic reform under Deng Xiaoping in 1978. However, the rapid increase in growth became tepid in 2010. China continues to rise, but growth remains uncertain. Invisible China addresses the question of what China can do to avert economic stagnation and the middle-income trap. Authors Rozelle and Hell suggest that China’s next growth spurt may be unlocked by tapping the human capital potential of rural China, which they called invisible China.
The authors, in response to why rural China is invisible, contend the story of urban-centric growth. China’s system of development is not symmetric all across China, as China’s rural population is barred from development through a discriminatory restrictive household registration system (Hukou), and led to widespread socioeconomic inequality between urban and rural China. The core issues concerning the people’s lives and future in rural China are rendered invisible due to state control media of the party-state, which only focuses on the achievement of urban China and downplays the statistics of rural China.
The central and foremost argument of the authors in this book is that, to continue the regular pace of economic growth and to escape from the middle-income trap in China, it needs to pay greater importance to human capital formation, which at this time, is centred on the urban population. Rural China remains outside this sphere. To put it bluntly, China, in the growth process, unlike the others who graduated from labor-intensive to skill-intensive and innovation-led industry, remains stagnant on the labour wage manufacturing ladder and lacks the know-how for future growth trajectory. The authors feel China should introduce twelve years of free school education and improve the quality of education. They should invest in the physical and cognitive development of preschool and primary school children.
The authors in various chapters have argued about China’s current economic situation, the world’s second-largest economy, which is now on a declining path or enmeshed in a Middle-income trap. In the first few chapters, they describe the predicament which caused the current situation. Slowing economic growth rates, rising wages, and the rapidly aging population make the possibility of falling into the middle-income trap real, in the current chapter, how the human capital crisis is a stumbling block in its downturn. In the following chapters, the role of the political leaders was highlighted in the current downturn of the economy. It pointed to the role of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The former channelled all efforts to the political front, and the cultural revolution and the latter fared better than the former by bringing reforms to the Chinese economy and lifting its stature in the world through compliance with a multilateral agreements like the signing of WTO and others.
In later chapters, they analyse the problems plaguing rural education and propose simplistic solutions. While extending the educational concern to vocational high schooling, here, authors point out that China can rely on an elite alone, a few hundred million strong cadres of highly educated professionals, for its future economic growth. As a solution authors suggested, to reap future economic growth, it must equip its entire labour force with lifelong learning skills to be able to adjust to the changing needs of the labour market. This requires focussing not exclusively on vocational skills but instead building a solid foundation for future learning needs with general academic skills such as maths, reading comprehension, logic, and information technology.
Rozelle and Hell convincingly argue that a prosperous China is of international benefit, especially the United States of America. The economic downturn in China can adversely affect the international economy and trigger another global financial crisis. It may also trigger social turmoil and political instability, which can become a cause for regional security concerns. Most importantly, the authors cited China’s goal of becoming a moderately prosperous society (xiao kang she hug ) by 2021 cannot be considered fulfilled if a vast majority of its citizens are not taken into its fold of beneficiaries.
It is worth noting that both authors wrote this book from a development economics perspective, taking reference from a research study conducted by Stanford REAP. The approach takes a fresh perspective on the problems with immediate impacts on Chinese citizens. Still, it may not be sufficient to solve complex problems intertwined with the political and economic structures of the nation. For China, the contribution of this book is too little and too late. The book’s suggestions may not help China. Still, it is constructive for other developing economies like India to learn from the past experiences of China and avoid looming human capital crises along with time inconsistency between its peak growth and time of human capital.