Review of Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell

*Invisible China* by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell (2020). Published by University of Chicago Press.

I was randomly wandering through the economics and politics section of my library, which I never do, when I found a bunch of hidden gems in that section. As someone interested in international affairs, politics, and relations, I can never get enough of reading about the world and its issues, especially when it comes to East Asia.

China was my first academic love ever since I began taking Chinese classes when I was in middle school, and I almost minored in Chinese in college if I hadn’t graduated early and was denied the opportunity to do more than four minors (the school threw a fit when I tried to register six, although I was going to complete them).

Anyways, I found this in my library in that section and knew I wanted to read it immediately. I think there’s a lot of misinformation and assumptions about modern China that people make based off of social media infographics and whatever the media puts out there, and trying to weed through all of this can be a monumental task.

So I did enter this book with a healthy dose of skepticism going into it because I was aware of how people represent China and its people, but I think this did a decent job overall viewing them as real people outside of the propaganda machine.

Onwards with the review!

A deep divide in class divides between the rural and urban populations of contemporary China.

This book is pretty brief, as it clocks in at only about two hundred and fifty pages, a good chunk of that page count actually accounts for the citations they used throughout their studies. I finished the book in a night because there wasn’t a ton of actual content, and the graphs scattered throughout take up a chunk of the page count as well.

This is the standard for books that are looking at public policy and economics in this way. Besides that, the thesis of this book is that China is going to become trapped in middle income status, and if it doesn’t play its cards right, it might end up like other countries that once had booming economies, like Mexico.

There’s a pointed finger towards the tigers of East Asia and how they managed to escape from middle income status, but China is not yet a part of that exclusive club. Considering the average Chinese person is dictated as rural or urban upon their birth, and that ends up being put on their state ID card, there’s some distinct wealth inequality going on here.

The facts presented go along the lines that China is deep in education inequality and actually ranks about the same as countries like Turkey and Costa Rica when it comes to actually getting its citizens a proper education and standard of living.

An important thing to note here is that the statistic is that the vast majority of the population in China is rural, which is alarming. Many people were going to the factories and sending their money home to their families, but if China’s production values begin to fall, there’s going to be a major crisis when it comes to labor and wealth distribution. Hell and Rozelle mention the stereotype of the wealthy Chinese tourist abroad and the lavish spending that happens in the cities, but in the rural portions of the country, people are just barely scraping by.

And up until recently, one had to pay for an education, even if they were in primary school. This stems from the Mao Zedong-era belief that intellectuals were bad, and colleges were shut down in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. People who were artists or professors were often sent to the camps in order to be reeducated or go through manual labor. Thus a lot of schools leading up to college were for-profit.

Several of the former students mentioned in the book described how their families could no longer afford the fees, so they never went back to school. Then there the vocational schools created by the government, which were also terrible quality or didn’t exist at all.

Several of the later chapters dive deeper into the schools located in the rural districts also faced unique problems. The students often were anemic due to the malnutrition and lack of access to healthy meals, and several students were also found to have worms in their stomachs, which drained their energy as well.

Research from another individual in China revealed that rural children also were cognitively developing less faster than their urban counterparts, partially due to a lack of stimulation from their parents and families, and partially due to the conditions they faced. So these kids were already way behind when it comes to walking and talking even.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a fascinating book, and although these kinds of books are harder to get through sometimes, I felt like I learned a lot about a very specific issue in contemporary China.

If something is not fixed, China, according to these authors, is going to face a situation where they no longer are going to find their economic growth sustainable and the poorest people, located in the countryside, are going to be paying the price for it. This is important scholarship and definitely a must-read for someone interested in these subjects.

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