Nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Security Initiative and a veteran China journalist Dexter Tiff Roberts’ new book “Myth of Chinese Capitalism” was featured in an article on Global Atlanta on September 22, along with his remarks during a virtual lecture hosted by the Georgia Tech Center for International Business Education and Research and the Atlanta-based China Research Center. The article highlighted how Roberts uses on-the-ground reporting to look through the lens of migrant families at how China’s top-down growth model has created societal fissures, as well as his remarks during the lecture on how China should approach economy reform to tackle its core problems such as wealth gap and urban-rural disparity post-COVID.
But some of China’s core problems remain the same as when Mr. Roberts began observing how masses of peasants were moving from rural farms to urban factories in the early 2000s…Thanks to the hukou system of household registration, an internal passport system enacted in the 1950s, hundreds of millions of migrant laborers, from factory hands to construction workers, remain stuck in a sort of societal limbo, unable to permanently relocate to cities or access schools and services because of their ID cards. But they’re also forced to move by lack of opportunity in their home regions.
