Contemporary China: Demystifying Economic and Social Changes

Good evening. I'm Janet Gornick, director of the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality, and our center is co-host of this evening's event in conjunction with the China at CUNY initiative, the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, and the Graduate Center's Office of Public Programs. And it's my pleasure to welcome all of you here, those of you in the in-person audience here in the Elebash Recital Hall, and welcome to the large virtual audience as well. This evening's event is one of the many public lectures, panels, and conversations offered here at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York throughout each year. And at the Graduate Center, we're proud of our history of applying research and scholarship to addressing current societal challenges. And tonight's conversation fits in with this tradition. These days, China is in the news here in the United States nearly daily, with most of the focus on trade disagreements and on military and strategic rivalries. But that said, our interests this evening lie elsewhere.

Despite China's high profile in American public conversation, our perception — those of us who planned this evening — is that among those of us here in the United States, we actually know remarkably little about life in contemporary China, and we lack an understanding of the many dramatic societal, social, and economic changes that have unfolded in China in the last decades. So our goal this evening is to contribute to the process of demystifying China, which we know is a vast and complex country. So we chose this evening to focus on four particular areas of change that are of great interest to many. One is China's remarkable strides toward eradicating poverty. A second is the simultaneous growing inequality and the rise of a new and growing billionaire class. The third is the decline in the birth rate despite the end of the one-child policy, and you're going to hear about that this evening. And finally, the increase in access to technology and its effect on the social landscape in China. So we've been very fortunate in that tonight we've gathered experts on each of these four areas. Let me first introduce our three guest panelists. That would be Yong Cai, Xin Gao, and Ran Bin Han.

Yong Cai, who's sitting here closest to me right here — well, second seat there — is associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on China's one-child policy and the implications for fertility and for social policy. His work helped to provide the empirical foundation that persuaded the Chinese government to end the three-decade-long policy, and he continues to monitor China's birth rates in the post-one-child era, now especially with a new focus on international comparisons and on population aging.

To his left is Xin Gao. Xin is a professor of social policy and social work practice at Columbia University School of Social Work. She's the founding director of Columbia's China Center for Social Policy and a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. She's a leading authority on poverty, inequality, and social policy in China. Among her work in this area is her 2017 book, Welfare, Work, and Poverty: Social Assistance in China.

To her left — yes. [Applause] To her left is Ran Bin Han. He's professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia. His research interests cover digital politics, political participation, popular contention, and state-society relations in authoritarian settings with a focus on China. He's the author or co-author of several books, including Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience, and more recently, Digital Dissent in Autocracies: How China Wins Online.

I'm equally pleased to introduce our two other participants, both faculty members — oh yes, sorry, thank you. And our other two participants this evening are both faculty here at the Graduate Center. So sitting on the far end is Branko Milanovic. He's research professor here at the Graduate Center and a senior scholar in the Stone Center. Before coming to CUNY, he served as lead economist in the World Bank research department for almost 20 years before we enticed him to come here. His main area of work is income inequality, both within countries and globally as well as historically. Among his many books are two, both of which were launched on this very stage: Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World, and Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War.

And finally our moderator, last but not least, our moderator is John Torpey. He's professor of sociology and history and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies here at the Graduate Center. He's the author or editor of several books focused on an array of social and economic and intellectual transformations through comparative and historical lenses. He currently edits a series for Temple University Press titled Politics, History, and Social Change. So, welcome to our guests. And John, I turn the panel over to you.

Thank you very much. Thanks, Janet. Thank you all for coming. This evening is kind of the realization of an aspiration I've had for a long time, which is to see us here at the Graduate Center pay more attention to China and to, you know, bring that knowledge to a broader audience, not just to our students and our faculty, but to the general public. And so I'm very glad to see you all here. And in that spirit, I wanted to start with what might seem a sort of ironic question, but we mean this in a certain sense seriously, since this evening's point is to, you know, bring expertise to a broader array of people. We thought we would start with a kind of question about what people think that the American public thinks they know about China. So, let me ask each of you to spend 30 or so seconds, not very much, but just to get us started. You know, what do you think that the American public knows about China, and what are the sort of mistakes that they may be making in their understanding of China?

Thank you for the question. First of all, I want to say it's truly an honor to be here and to share my expertise. To answer your question, I thought about this — this is actually not an easy question to answer because not only do we need to assume what do we know about the American public, but also know the Chinese public as well. So from my perspective, I think one thing is if you read today's newspaper, there's so much tension there, and I think it's right for the Americans to view China as a competitor, but it's probably not the best way to approach China as an enemy, as we saw, you know, that kind of rhetoric is already there. And the reason I'm saying this is that I've recently visited China, and from my personal experience and from what I have read, there's a lot of goodwill and a lot of respect from China toward our political, social, and, you know, economic system. So I think we should cherish that and we should find a way to cooperate, you know, between these two societies, two great countries. That's my take.

Great. Thank you very much. And the words competitor and enemy came up in that answer, and they may come back around. So, let me turn it over next to Xin.

Thank you, John. Thank you, Janet. I'm so happy to be here. I've long admired the CUNY Graduate Center. Wonderful to be in this space with you. To answer your amazing question, John, I think most Americans think of China as one China. They may consider China as rich, as unequal, as oppressive, as anything, but they may not realize how big and diverse China is in any of those regards. So just as most Chinese people may think of America as one America, they have one perception, but they may not realize the whole picture and the diversity and depth to that picture.

Big and diverse. I think that's very important. Ran Bin.

Okay. Thank you very much, John and Janet. Thanks to the CUNY Graduate Center for bringing me here. It's a privilege and an honor. About China, I think both Professor Cai and Gao have already said quite some of the things that I want to say. But also I think the US public is pretty diverse as well. There are people who know China incredibly well, and there are some people who don't know much about China, and there are people who are not interested in learning more about China. But generally, I think, in addition to kind of China's big, complicated nature, I also wanted to highlight that China is a society that changes so fast, and that's a very incredible part of the whole story. Because 20 years ago we didn't see China as a competitor or an enemy, because China was basically not that significant. Now it's the second, like, you know, largest economy in the world, or chief competitor, if not an enemy or what. Right. So the speed of change is something I want to bring to the audience.

Great. Thank you very much. Next is Branko Milanovic.

Great. Well, thank you very much. I think those are great starter responses. And I want to turn now to our first expert, Yong Cai, who's basically a specialist on demography and comparative demography, demography and the history of populations. And I want to ask him to talk a little bit about the one-child policy, which is probably broadly known about, but the one-child policy came to an end a few years back, and now he's working on other things, and we'll get into that. But maybe you could start by telling us, you know, what was the one-child policy all about, and what were the consequences of that policy for Chinese society today?

Yep. Thank you for the question. So I would like to, you know, start from the idea of one child — seems like it's a very simple idea, one child per couple. And this idea came out at the end of 1979, early 1980s. And we attribute a lot of things to the one-child policy, for example, China's rather drastic fertility decline. It turns out, if you look carefully, China's fertility decline happened before the one-child policy. China, on average, the number of children per woman was about six-ish in 1970. By 1978, it had already declined to 2.7. And for the first decades of the one-child policy, fertility stayed above two. So there's a kind of mismatch between the rhetoric and what really happened on the ground. So demographically speaking, the one-child policy's direct effect is actually relatively speaking small. The other factors, like what we demographers call demographic transition, just like industrialization, it's a social force basically predicting when we live better, we have a better life, mortality would first come down, and with a delay, fertility — people start to realize, hey, we don't need to have that many kids. So that's exactly what happened in China early on during the first decades of the communist revolution. They reduced the mortality rate rather dramatically, and then the population pressure started to kick in. People started — you know, the government started to put in some more soft approach to control fertility and to facilitate people's reducing their fertility. So that's why in the 1970s fertility came down rather quickly. The idea behind the one-child policy was interesting because China indeed, you know, was very much an impoverished country. GDP per capita was $250 per person, and there was not enough food for everyone. That was the concern, and the concern was very much real. Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping essentially said this is our biggest problem, and we try to put our effort in. But even with that kind of draconian effort, fertility has its own, you know, rules. It came down only rather late, after China's economy started to take off, people started to move into urban areas, the grandparents had less influence on the younger generation, and people — you know, the most recent development is that the education level has skyrocketed. Half of Chinese young cohorts are college-educated. China is turning out about, you know, 10 million college-educated kids per year, and all those things change China's, you know, perception about life and what kind of life they want to have. I think on one hand I want to say the direct effect of the one-child policy on fertility is relatively speaking small, but at the same time the one-child policy did change the way people perceive fertility. It put a lot of emphasis on the economic side and less so on the social side. Why do we have kids? It's not for the purpose of economic gain. It's the meaning of our life. But that part has been diminished rather dramatically. People now, if we ask people why don't you want to have kids, 'It's too expensive' — they immediately turn to the economic calculation. So I'm...

Let me follow up on that. I mean, I think you've raised a really important issue, which is the declining fertility phenomenon. And it's not just in China. We're seeing this more and more around the world. Since you work on comparative demography, maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, how is China similar or different to the countries in the rest of the world in this regard.

So I think more than half of the world population now live in a country or in a place where fertility is what we call below replacement level. Replacement level is roughly that every couple needs to have two kids to replace our population. And the United States was, rightly so, about two-ish for about 20-odd years. But ever since the economic crisis of 2008, our fertility has been declining rather dramatically. You know, most of East Asian countries — Japan's fertility has been below replacement since 1972. Korea's fertility is now returning a bit, but it's below one. China's fertility is about 1.1, 1.1-ish, right around that corner. And Eastern European countries, you know, many Western European countries are on that boat. So there is a great anxiety about this. For a while we were worried about a population bomb, that basically, you know, we will not have standing room for everyone. Now suddenly we feel that there's a pressure, and oftentimes that's also very much a racist tone, because we are competing against each other with that very much narrow nationalistic view. So we are in this situation together, and the whole idea of the reason behind that is, I think, we all face, yes, economic pressure, and we are taking away the meaning of reproduction, the cultural and social meaning of reproduction.

Let me turn now to Xin Gao, who's a scholar basically of China's welfare and poverty policies. And this has already been hinted at, but I wonder if you could tell us, you know, how it is that — I mean, somebody said it used to be that China wasn't really anything worth paying attention to. Well, after 1978 roughly, things started to change, and probably most people know something about this, but maybe you could talk about what happened, what did they do, what were the policies, and what worked.

Thank you. So China's poverty reduction certainly is a very successful story. We look at the world poverty picture. If you remove China, it's not so much a great success story. But if you put China in, it's a sharp decline in the world poverty rate. So China made great contributions to poverty reduction in the world. How did they do it? I think it's a combination of three things. One, some political loosening up so that people have room to be creative, to be innovative, to do what they can to move ahead. So that is one area, the political environment. Economic reforms certainly helped a lot. So the rising tide was lifting all boats. The millionaires, billionaires, there were so many more in China during this period, but also those who are at the low-income bottom of the income distribution also got lifted. Thus poverty got reduced. Then the third aspect is what I study, which is social policy. So China did move forward in social policy in many different areas. For example, Dibao, which is what I study, called minimum livelihood guarantee. It's a cash transfer to low-income population. As long as your income is below the local poverty line, you get cash transfers. It's what we call an unconditional cash transfer. So that's very powerful. That helped many people who face different challenges: disability, unemployment, children, older adults, hardships in different ways. So that was very powerful. The second area of social policy or public policy is infrastructure building. That is an amazing and unique area of growth in China. So I lived in a rural village, a small village in northern China, before age six. About 300 families lived there. I remember vividly we were desperate for water. It was a mountainous area. To get water, not even clean water, you needed to just pray for the rain god to give us some rain we could save in the wells so that we would have a reserve. And that kind of challenge or deprivation — you can call it poverty, it's more than that, it's a kind of survival-level deprivation — which the Chinese government saw and addressed in infrastructure building. So clean water, electricity, internet, they brought to all these remote areas, and roads. So all those supported poverty reduction, and coupled with economic development and political reforms during those periods, really lifted people out of poverty.

Great. Thank you very much. I mean, to me this is just an event, a phenomenon of world-historical proportions. It's not just about China, however, although China constitutes a big part of the change. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, how does this — how did it take place in other places? Did they have similar policies? Did they have different policies? I mean, what makes China unique or similar to other places?

Thank you. Another great question. I think in China what was unique about this period of rapid development and poverty reduction was the combination of the strong power of central mobilization, political will, if you would, and then room for local creativity, local autonomy. So a lot of local governments said, 'We want to resolve local poverty.' So that's how Dibao came about. Some wealthy cities — Shanghai was the first one, and a few other cities followed — said, 'We want to reduce our city poverty.' So they spent money, they set up the policy, and then other cities followed. So I think the room for that local autonomy, experimentation, was really powerful. So this combination of central power and will and local room for experimentation and autonomy — China, I hope, will continue that and expand this amazing combination, because that is a good lesson to learn from China itself. Other countries also tried many different versions of social policies, such as this kind of unconditional cash transfers, but also conditional cash transfers. For example, if you want to get cash transfers to get out of poverty, you need to send your kids to school, you need to go to regular health checkups. Those are also very beneficial, but they need close monitoring and bear high administrative cost. And in China, that's also being experimented, but very costly in terms of administrative cost.

I mean, I think this is very interesting in the sense that, you know, there's a certain amount of local autonomy that I think people might not expect. They might expect a top-down, you know, heavy-handed kind of approach, and it's not necessarily like that. So maybe we can get into that in the next questions. But first let me turn to Ran Bin Han, who, as Janet announced, has worked basically on online politics, contention, political contention in China, but particularly the online, the digital sort of side of things. Maybe you could start by telling us about the role that technology plays in politics in China and how it affects outcomes.

Thank you very much for the great question. First of all, I would highlight the role of technology in China. So generally, I would argue that technology plays a very central role in Chinese society in a number of ways. But there are reasons. Partially, people familiar with Chinese history know that China sees itself as the victim of the century-long humiliation. A big part of that story is that China lags behind in science and technology, so they need to catch up. So if you look at Chinese official narrative and also popular narrative, there's a strong urge of national revival, and at the heart of that is, like, catch up technologically. So that's one point. Another point is that I said, for instance, China changes very fast, and one of the contributing factors is because China adopts the technologies very fast. Anecdote story: I was in Beijing in 2015. I was the only idiot there standing, kind of paying cash to get McDonald's. Everybody else was kind of cashless payment. It was only a few years before I visited China again. It's like, you know, only like two or three years, all that happened just within that kind of short time span. So that was very incredible. But anyways, as a political scientist, I'm interested in the relationship between technology and politics. So let me just briefly zoom in and try to kind of answer the question from a certain perspective by looking at what does that mean for the Chinese government? How does the Chinese government see everything, the technological development? I try to be brief and simple here. So generally, I think the Chinese government sees the technological development as an opportunity, a source of many different challenges, and also can be very useful tools. So it's an opportunity for the Chinese government because the Chinese government has long seen the development of technology, especially the information technologies, as an economic opportunity to catch up with the West as well as a technological opportunity there. So you look at China, China has created its own digital ecology, essentially curated a number of those huge IT giants. So instead of Google we have Baidu, instead of like Twitter or X there's Weibo, and instead of YouTube you have Bilibili and everything. And some of the apps now, in some of the realms, China is a leader. Even like I remember a few years ago, The New York Times had a short video introducing the super app WeChat, which is banned by a number of the states within the US, and also TikTok, right? You have heard about that story. And it gave China a huge boost in the economy, right? And it's also a technological kind of catch-up story there. People looking or reading news, it's not difficult to find headlines saying that China is catching up there, or China is a major competitor with the US in AI, right? So there are so many stories. The Australian Policy Institute had a study who tracked, like, they track the technological development for about two decades and identify the leaders in like, you know, 16 or 64 technologies. China was only leading three or so at the beginning of the century. Now guess how many sectors China is leading? 57. So you can see a huge change, and China is becoming a leader now in technologies, not just digital technologies. Now I don't want to spend too much time on this, but then China — the government sees technology as a source of many challenges. I'm going to talk primarily about two. One, the information technologies empower people, right? People use the internet to better communicate with each other, to organize, to mobilize, and sometimes to challenge the government. So the government introduces a number of mechanisms trying to control and regulate there. And in addition, the technological development itself is a huge challenge to regulate. You might have heard about the problems of privacy, for instance, or monopoly, those issues the government have to take care of. Now finally, technological development provides tools for the government to better govern and also to better control. So there are two stories. We have heard a lot about the control stories, right? The government uses the new technologies to surveil people, to control people's mobilization. You probably heard about the red or green code system during COVID. But at the same time, technology provides the government powerful tools to enhance its governance, to deliver service to people. And the Chinese government have a lot of those kind of websites right now. On each government website, typically you will find a petitioning channel or a kind of a mayor's box where people can submit petitions or complaints, and the government do respond, and that actually is very, very important.

Great. So maybe you could follow that up with a little bit more discussion about the relationship between state and society, between, you know, somebody I think in the first questions used the word repression or oppression. I'm not sure, but, you know, that might be the main way that we think about contemporary mainland China, but maybe you could add a little nuance to that perception.