Balance Tips to China’s Cities

China has passed a milestone, that more Chinese now live in cities than in rural areas.

This sounds impressive from one angle, that just over 10% of Chinese lived in cities when the Communist Party came to power in 1949, and not quite 19% when economic reforms started in 1979. (By comparison, more than 50% of Americans lived in cities by 1920.)

Since China’s economic reforms started, a rush of migrant workers from villages has provided legions of construction workers, factory workers, and other workers who have provided the muscle and verve to power their part of China’s economic transformation. Some 250 million rural migrants now live in China’s cities.

The problem is, the system is still skewed against them. On the one hand, China’s leaders say they want China to become ever more urbanized. They see how bigger cities breed innovation, and use energy and other resources more efficiently on a per capita basis. They also see how infrastructure construction keeps economic growth up, especially for the state-owned enterprises they care about most.

But the migrant workers who are pouring in the cities are not being given a fair chance to transform themselves and their children into China’s urbanites of the future. Deep urban prejudices against rural migrant workers haven’t gone away. The condescending sneers might be slightly more hidden than before, but many urban parents still don’t want their kids in classes with rural migrant kids. In a fiercely competitive environment, they don’t want these ‘backward’ village kids to slow down the rest. They don’t seem to care that many of these village kids will become fellow citizens of the city, so it’s in the interests of those already living there that they be well-educated, socialized to urban living and able to contribute to the fullest of their potential.

The government isn’t exactly helping. It has resisted getting rid of the “hukou,” or residence permit system, that Mao Zedong had put in place to keep the farmers on the farm, while preserving urban privileges. So much for the Communist revolution waged in the name of workers and peasants. Migrant laborers, when they come to cities, may or may not be able to get their kids into established urban schools. And many purpose-built migrant schools have been shut down by local city governments.

Even if migrant kids get into urban primary schools, they’re still required to go back to their villages for an inferior level of education in high school. And then they have to take national college entrance exams, where the students who live in cities from birth, and go to the better urban schools, need lower scores to get into university. It effectively enforces an established hierarchy – great for the urban elite, not so much for the aspiring rural poor.

It should then come as no surprise that as income disparity and underclass frustration grow, so does the number of protests in China. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank, now pegs it as about 180,000 protests a year, or almost 500 a day.

Most are linked to land grabs by local governments, eager to make a buck by taking land away from villagers and selling it to developers. This has happened so much, throughout China, that the central government is concerned China is coming close to not having enough land under cultivation to feed its people.

China has passed another milestone this past year – now, some 500 million Chinese are online. Most are in cities, but a growing number are in China’s rural areas. Most Chinese now also have mobile phones, including villagers – and it’s given them a powerful tool to communicate and organize when they feel aggrieved, and want to be heard. China’s leaders are scrambling to keep up, and control the conversation.

The story of China in the decades to come will likely not just be one of economic and urban growth – but of an ever-more sophisticated population, challenging the status quo, and – in virtual and urban environments — having an ever-richer conversation about what they’d like China to be and become. The challenge for China’s leaders is to do more than try to contain or keep up with this conversation. It’s to recognize the change, and transform themselves. Whatever great leaps China has made, in urbanization and the embrace of the Internet, this challenge stands as potentially the biggest leap of all.