Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise

"Invisible China is a great book by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell. It was published in 2020 and is based on surveys across many villages. The book points out many things about China that the average person doesn’t know, because the whole investment community and most journalists have only visited the more developed areas, the coastal cities, and maybe the second-tier cities, and really don’t go to rural China. Rural China is really far behind urban China and behind most of the developing world. It has the educational attainment of Algeria, for example, and a whole lot of health problems that are not prevalent elsewhere and could easily have been fixed. For example, a big portion of Chinese rural youth are myopic. This could be fixed by just getting eyeglasses to them, which are really not very expensive and yet that hasn’t been done. So there are kids out there who just can’t see the blackboards (or the whiteboards) and so can’t complete school. There are also problems with worms and vitamin deficiencies. These can be easily fixed by giving a supplement every day to children, or by giving them a de-worming medicine, but these things are not done. So you have a rural population in China—about 60% of the total population—which is very, very significantly behind the rest of the country and behind other developing nations. It’s particularly sad given the amount of money that was poured into physical development since 2009. In China you have hundreds of looming, dark, empty cities, and yet you have hundreds of millions of people who lack in very basic nutrition and education. In the major cities, the educational opportunities and the nutrition and so forth, tend to be very good. But rural China tends to be forgotten, and the hukou or residential permit system has allowed that to persist while the rest of the country is developing."