Rural China and the Return to Youth

When Xi Jinping officially declared the defeat of poverty last February, the officials assigned to the project were transferred to “rural revitalization,” with the task of dealing with even more complex problems such as depopulation, the ageing of the population, and the chronic lack of work in the internal areas. “China is still the largest developing country in the world,” the deputy propaganda minister Xu Lin stated at the time. And he added: “To face inequality, the inadequate development of the internal areas of the country, and to reduce the imbalance between urban and rural territories, there is still a long road.” The local authorities must monitor the situation to ensure that citizens’ income does not fall below the poverty threshold again, set at 2.30 dollars a day. There are subsidies and development policies underway that will last for at least the next five years. The aim is to rethink agriculture, develop tourism, and above all, to bring to the countryside youth who are able to use technological infrastructure to reduce the gap that separates the countryside from the cities.

Even though the guidelines issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and by the Council of State recall the initiative promoted decades ago by Mao Zedong that forced educated youth to become re-educated in the country, the problem is much more serious. The People’s Republic must avoid falling into the “middle income trap,” by facing the largest inequality in the country head on: 44 percent of the population lives in the rich and industrialized coastal areas, but the average per capita income of inhabitants in rural areas represents just 39 percent of that of inhabitants in the richer areas.

We know that for 40 years the Chinese economy has been among those growing the fastest in the entire world, an era inaugurated in 1978 by the so-called “father of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Deng Xiaoping. “Let some people get rich first,” he said in 1992 in confirming the reforms and opening. And he was taken literally. In 2021, the People’s Republic became the country with the most billionaires in the world[1]: 1,058 versus 696 in the United States. The country’s GDP has doubled every eight years and a total of 800 million people have been raised from poverty.[2] In the meantime, though, the gap between new poor and new rich, and especially between the countryside and cities, has expanded. But for Beijing it’s time to invert the trend.

The new policy is called “fanxiang qingnian,” or the return of youth, and is assisted by a growing intolerance for large cities among the new generations. Rent is high and the quality of life is no better than that of the provinces, or even worse. High-speed trains allow for rapid travel at low prices, and internet further shortens distances. Since the middle of 2019, at least 100,000 influencers have moved to the country and begun to sell local products online, creating a market for quality where before there was only exploitation.

The approach towards work has also changed. There is a constant drop in the number of youth willing to spend long days on assembly lines, hundreds of kilometers form their families. They prefer to be deliverymen, or find some odd jobs that allow them to survive without going too far from home. The official statistics speak of a number of migrants below thirty years old that has fallen by half in the last decade.[3] And the Party supports them.

The Young Communist League is helping 100,000 young migrants to find work in their towns of origin. There it will be easier to access the school and health systems, although the quality of both is significantly lower. It is what Scott Rozelle calls “invisible China,”[4] 840 million people – approximately 1/9 of the global population – that until now were off the radar, and that according to the author, could be “the biggest problem China faces… that no one knows about.”