Guest Editor's Introduction

As if all the profound problems in China's reform-era economy previously documented by He Qinglian were not enough, in this the last segment of her book titled >i>China's Descent into a Quagmire>/i>, the courageous author sets her sights on the broader social consequences of what she terms the "marketization of power." Most troubling is the enormous problem that has affected virtually every major urban center in China: the flood of rural laborers swelling the ranks of the under- and unemployed. Under the old Maoist system of social control imposed on the countryside, China's cities were for years largely spared the influx of surplus rural workers into their midst, with all the attendant problems of not just inadequate employment, but crime, threats to public health, and poor or nonexistent housing that have so devastated many underdeveloped countries of the world. But once the rural reforms demolished the people's communes, and cities were no longer made off-limits to rural denizens, a virtual "tidal wave" of rural migrants entered Chinese cities. The numbers are staggering: in the year 2000, according to He, 200 million rural laborers were surplus, and while many have been absorbed in both rural and urban enterprises, China, like many other parts of the world, now confronts a serious problem of urban and rural unemployment to which no one in the government or elsewhere seems to have the solution.