When Mao died in 1976 and China changed direction from revolutionary Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party wrote a new Constitution in 1982 and set out to reinvent China.
This did not happen in an instant and more than three decades later China is still changing.
In 1953, when China had its first modern census, it was revealed that China had a population of 583 million. By 1982, the population had almost doubled to a billion. Source: Columbia University
The poverty rate in China in 1982 was 64% of the population. By 2004, that rate had declined to 10%, which means about 500 million people left poverty behind during this period.
The World Bank says poverty refers to people whose income is less than $1.25 per day.
For three decades, most of the economic development took place in the cities. Deng Xiaoping said that a better life would eventually reach almost everyone but some would have to wait longer for it to happen.
Last year, China shifted the focus on economic development to rural China.
No one knows the exact number of migrant workers. However, estimates run from 200 to 300 million.
These people represent the largest migration in human history—three times the number of people who immigrated to America from Europe over an entire century.
As in the US, migrant workers in China and around the world are often required to work longer hours for lower pay than the law requires. Yet, most still earn more than from where they came from.
For example, when my wife first came to the US from China, her first job was in a restaurant where she waited on tables for no pay. She earned only the tips customers left behind.
Back in China, the migrants work in factories, construction, restaurants, beauty salons, housework, childcare, and brothels. Some work in the recycling industry.
In 2010, China set goals and started projects to extend electricity, roads and railroads into rural China to improve lifestyles there.
These modern improvements in rural China have already created jobs closer to remote villages and migrant workers are returning home to find jobs that pay the same as distant urban cities.
A government survey of migrant workers in 2009 found the number returning home had increased by 8.2% from the previous year and now accounts for almost half of the total migrant population.
To discover more about China’s migrant workers see China’s Stick People
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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