ABSTRACT
After three decades of rapid industrialization, the problems of inequality in the PRC reflect the geographical trajectory of the planned reform economy. From south to north and coast to interior, the uneven geography of reform has contributed to generating uneven development between regions and inequality between urban and rural areas (cf. Fan 1995; Findlay et al. 1995; Wang and Hu 1999; Goodman 2008b; Frazier 2010). While the major gaps are between the coast and interior and cities and the countryside, profound disparities also exist between registered urban residents and internal migrants, and between women and men (United Nations Development Program 2008). Economic inequality in China has challenged the social legitimacy of the PRC’s platform of rapid economic growth as the basis of societal development. Understanding these spatial inequalities is only partly explained by the history of prioritizing economic development in the coastal regions–the Pearl River delta, the Yangzi River delta and the Bohai Rim. In the words of Wang Shaoguang (2008: 20–1), ‘From a historical perspective, China has experienced an unprecedented transformation from a moral economy to a market society. … [Thus] people started to realize that economic growth did not necessarily mean social progress.’ In growing recognition of the most serious disparities, the central government has introduced policies to address inequality between the regions and between urban and rural areas. The major development policy at the regional scale shifts priority to central and western regions through the ‘great opening of the West’, xibu dakaifa, campaign, known as the Western development strategy, introduced in 1999 and developed in the 10th (2001–05) and 11th Five-Year Plans (2006–10). To improve conditions in rural areas, a suite of new policies accompany the ‘shehui zhuyi xinnongcun’ (new socialist countryside) campaign, set forth in the 11th Five-Year Plan (People’s Daily 2006). The current rural policies are associated with the broader political-ideological policy programme, quanmian xiaokang (‘all-around small well-being’, or ‘xiaokang society’), introduced in 2002 (People’s Daily 2002), which the United Nations DevelopmentProgram (UNDP) helps promote in the rural sector. All these new measures are simultaneously imbricated in the prevailing state ideology, ‘hexie shehui’ (harmonious society), introduced in 2005 (People’s Daily 2005), which appears widely in contemporary policy documents and economic plans, as well as in propaganda signage.
