ABSTRACT
While Xiqiao surges ahead economically, many other parts of rural China do not. Compared to the recent past, China increasingly contains "two nations," to paraphrase Disraeli, one of prosperous households and one of poor households. To varying degrees, this is occurring within villages. Even more evidently, though, it is occurring between regions, as some boom and others stagnate. An analysis of State Statistical Bureau survey data for 1988 and 1995 showed that within that period of seven years deep rural poverty in the eastern region of China had fallen from 9 percent to 5 percent and in the central region had declined from 20 percent of the population to 13 percent; but in the western region it had actually increased substantially, from 26.5 to 31 percent of the inhabitants. 1
