On March 6, 2020, Dexter Tiff Roberts, nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Security Initiative and a veteran China journalist, published an article on the Wall Street Journal. His article focuses on how China’s experience with COVID-19 has revealed the existing “vulnerability of a pivotal, undervalued part of China’s economy—the hundreds of millions of migrant workers and their relatives in the countryside, who together make up roughly half of the population but have gained far less of the country’s wealth.” He also recounts two policies that have excluded migrant workers from fully integrating into Chinese economic life.
As for the continued expansion of the middle class, that can only happen if China integrates more migrants into economic life and stops treating them as second-class citizens.