ABSTRACT
China is the world’s second largest economy and the world’s largest exporter (Central Intelligence Agency 2011), exercising significant global political and economic weight – an influence emphasized in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis that brought a number of developed economies close to implosion. This notable accomplishment has been realized in little more than three decades following the introduction of the socialist market economy in 1978. China has a World Bank classification as an ‘upper middle income’ country (per capita gross national income of US$3,976 to $12,275; World Bank 2012). However, this masks massive variation, as evidenced by China’s GINI Index of 41.5 as of 2007 (Central Intelligence Agency 2011), and in particular, disparities between the country’s more prosperous urban dwellers and those who live in the countryside. Even though the workforce needs of China’s developing industry have seen the internal migration of more than 200 million workers and their dependents from the rural hinterlands to the coastal and south eastern industrial zones, more than half of the total 1.3 billion population still live in rural areas. Here the principal means of livelihood remains subsistence farming, with agriculture comprising 38.1 per cent of the country’s labour force (Central Intelligence Agency 2011). According to 2007 data, the annual income of 21.5 million of China’s rural population fell below the official ‘absolute poverty’ level (approximately US$90 per annum), and an additional 35.5 million had annual incomes below the official ‘low income’ level (approximately US$125 per annum; Central Intelligence Agency 2011).
