A well researched and well written must read for anyone interested in China m only criticism is I think it should have been longer

Much has been written about the rise of China, and especially about the rise of China's cities. I should know - I spent a few months in Shanghai in the summer of 2015 as an intern working abroad. The amount of growth in building and infrastructure was breathtaking; it truly felt like every second I spent on Shanghai's streets was another step forward in China's modernization. Like most others with firsthand experience in China, I knew little about the problems facing China's rural population before reading this book. Invisible China provides exactly that - an analysis of where the rural Chinese have fallen behind to their urban counterparts and what can be done about it. The authors' firsthand knowledge of these areas and the very striking and useful charts gave me new perspective of what one might expect in China's urban-rural divide. My one complaint would be for greater perspective on the government side, where one would expect many of the necessary reforms to be implemented. However, such information could easily be unreliable or kept secret from the authors, so this criticism might be unfair. Nevertheless, this book contains a lot of good information that has informed my insight and is helpful as I continue to observe China from afar. For those interested in learning more about rural China, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Very interesting read. China is not a popular place at the moment. Which made reading this book all the more interesting. It really opened my eyes to a lot of issues. Definitely worth a read

Over the past month and a half, China has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Engaging their Indian Army counterparts in a bloody border skirmish at the Sino-Indian border in Ladakh that resulted in casualties on both sides, intruding into Taiwanese air space before being ‘driven out’, and increasing their aggressive posturing in the South China Sea, the second biggest economy of the world has been indulging in a set of tactics that seems inexplicable in addition to being downright indiscreet. In his recent book, journalist Howard French brought out an inextricable link between two planks on which the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”) relies, for a stable functioning of China. While the first plank is the economic philosophy of fast growth, the second constitutes the purely ideological pillar of nationalism. The political ramifications of either of these pillars failing to be in lockstep with the other could be enormous. For example, in the event, China’s pace of economic growth was to slow down or even stagnate, the CCP might have no alternative but to whip up the nationalism rhetoric to a frenzied level. Such boosterism might even include overt military moves to seize the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands thereby lighting the fuse that is the South China Sea. Howard French seems to be a man endowed with a fair degree of prescience. But is China really stagnating from within? Is there something that is ailing the dragon from within triggering an extraordinary burst of irksomeness, from which it wants the world’s attention to be deflected?

In an eminently readable book, “Invisible China”, Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell illustrate from a development perspective, an insidious divide that is threatening to cleave the hegemon, resulting in the creation of a vertical divide. This divide is the massive Urban-Rural gap that has set off one of the biggest (if not the biggest) in-country income-inequality scenarios in the world at the time of this writing. Mr. Rozelle, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Co-director at the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) in addition to being a Faculty affiliate at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, brings to bear his extensive “China experience and exposure” in educating his readers about the potential perils that China is facing domestically. This is the problem of “Invisible China”, a China that is oblivious to the world and is hidden from every scrutinizing gaze.

Due to a rapidly risking wage rate for unskilled jobs, China’s hitherto unchallenged title as the Factory Of The World might be at great risk of being dismantled. As Mr. Rozelle illustrates, in the long run these rising wages would distort China’s competitive advantage in low-skilled, labour intensive production. “In a globalized world where wages rise, companies simply find cheaper labour elsewhere or (increasingly) find a way to automate.” This unfortunate situation leads to what Mr. Rozelle terms, “The Middle-Income Trap.” Quoting the economist Paul Collier, Mr. Rozelle explains the fact that development is a game of Chutes and Ladders. “if a country is lucky enough to land on a “Ladder”, it gets whisked to a higher level on the Board. Landing on a “Chute” on the other hand, means moving, just as quickly to a lower point in the game and having to retrace one’s steps.” This Chute is known as the Middle-Income Trap. This is where Mr. Rozelle’s book gets really interesting. In order to avoid this perilous Middle-Income Trap, Mr. Rozelle argues that there is an inherent need to invest in and enhance human capital. On this critical parameter, China is rendered susceptible in more ways than one. An “inconvenient truth” as Mr. Rozelle puts it, is the fact that a teeming majority of China’s population just does not possess the requisite skillsets to move up the supply chain or to trade a blue-collar job for a white collared one. This woeful dearth of human capital is starkly borne out by the fact that currently about 70 percent of the Chinese labour force is unskilled with no more than a junior high school education. A yawning gap in education and skill levels means a fertile ground for dangerous polarization. The urban-rural ‘gap’ is more of an abyss than a chasm as Mr. Rozelle illustrates in the book. “The average citizen in urban Shanghai makes twelve times the income of someone living in rural Gansu. In the United States by contrast, the average income differential between Manhattan and West Virginia is less than a factor of four.”

Exacerbating this problem is the singularly unique dichotomy, courtesy the One Child norm. This myopic policy coupled with a preference for the male child has meant that around forty million men in China will neither have a wife nor a family. As Mr. Rozelle highlights, a well-established fact in criminology is one that links celibacy to crime and gangs. Young unmarried men are more likely than their married counterparts to engage in crime and join gangs regardless of the circumstances. True to logic, crime rates in China are already rising. “From 1998 to 2004, criminal offense increased by 14 percent every year. Over the same period, the number of arrests for both property crimes and violent crimes nearly doubled.”

However, the primary reason for the plummeting human capital and the consequent urban-rural divide is a draconian and antediluvian Government policy that ensures that inequality in the form of an urban-rural divide is deeply entrenched within the populace. Under a household registration system termed, “hukou”, “at birth all citizens are assigned either a rural or an urban identity. This status fundamentally affects every moment of life in China and is very difficult to change….all public services depend upon one’s hukou status. For example, rural and urban children move through almost entirely separate educational systems. Rural students, with few exceptions, are allowed to attend only rural schools, and urban students go to urban schools. Even if rural families migrate to the cities to find work – as hundreds of millions have done – in most places they are not allowed to put their children into urban public schools. Instead, most migrant parents must choose between leaving their children behind to live with relatives in the countryside so that can go to public school (the genesis of the infamous “left behind child”), or keeping their children with them in the cities but sending them to low-quality and legally provisional private schools for migrant children.”

Just take a couple of minutes and read the aforementioned paragraph aloud to grasp the unfortunate ramifications of a crazily denuded system.

The Hukou has spawned a gap in human capital that is hard to fathom in the ordinary course of economic and social perception. According to the 2015 micro census, while 97% of urban students attend high school and graduate, only 43 percent of the rural youth go to high school. However, of late, extensive efforts by Government to rapidly expand access to education has ensured in pushing nearly 80% of rural kids to attend school.

The quality of schooling is also an area of concern in the overall Chinese landscape. While the elite Chinese students attend privileged high-quality schools, for the unluckier ones unable to ace their tests, there are vocational institutions as alternative learning streams. The vocational high schools are three-year programmes, where students divide their time between in-class instructions and professional internships. While there are some excellent institutions providing quality education to the enrolled students, on the whole the Vocational high schools are in an appalling state of functioning. Here is a nightmarish experience as recounted by one of the students. “As he walked to class on his first day, there were no adults in sight. He passed groups of kids hanging out in the courtyard, smoking cigarettes and laughing…The teacher were cold and unfriendly. Some would lecture woodenly from the front of the room, writing on the chalkboard with their backs to the students, never turning around to see if anyone was paying attention. Other teachers would come into the classroom, mumble a sentence or two about the new assignment, and walk right out again. The few students who came to class spent most of the time sleeping on their desks, playing games on their phones, or listening to music through headphones….Outside class, students spent their time in the dorms drinking beer or in the computer lab playing League of Legends, chatting online, or watching porn. Sometimes Tao’s (the student) math teacher would stop by a group of students to sell them cigarettes.”

It came as no surprise when Mr. Rozelle’s team found that 91% of the students scored the same or worse after an additional year of schooling. Students majoring in “natural gas pipeline design” were delivering gas canisters house-to-house or working as cashiers in roadside gas stations.

When it comes to infant and child health parameters, “Invisible China” does not score good either. Millions of children inhabiting Invisible China, suffer from iron-deficiency anemia. This disease has significant physical and cognitive effects, interfering with the body’s ability to ferry Oxygen to the various organs, including the brain. As a result, this causes fatigue, poor attention and long-term cognitive impairment. A research conducted by Mr. Rozelle’s team between 2009 and 2012 revealed that greater than 30% of elementary school students in rural China suffered from iron-deficiency anemia. Poor vision is yet another menace that is plaguing the children of Invisible China. “In rural China, the rate of nearsightedness (myopia) ranges from about 10% among third graders to 30% among sixth graders. In other words, the rate of poor vision in rural China’s schools is two to three times in other countries.”

Many of the children, even while infants in rural China, fail the classic Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bayley test), a test employed to measure babies’ and toddlers’ cognitive and motor development. This is basically due to a lack of engagement between the parents and the children. As Mr. Rozelle evidences, inexpensive and perfectly implementable interventions such as provision of multivitamins and de worming tablets, issuing corrective glasses to children, and enhancing the interaction between children and their parents may go a long way in mitigating these adverse outcomes.

China finds itself at a crossroad today. Jobs are being ferreted out of the country at an alarming rate and tens and thousands of people are being laid off. The putative destination of choice is now a mere alternative. In the year 2015, the Korean Chaebol, Samsung declared its intention to move its production base from China to Vietnam. Meanwhile the footwear industry, has commenced relocating its factories to countries such as Ethiopia, where the shoe export segment has increased fivefold over the past five years. Close to forty thousand factories are shutting shop every single year. In spite of the Government instituting a slew of reforms, the country is nowhere close to achieving an acceptable traction in so far as human capital is concerned. And unlike what Mr. Rozelle alludes to as the “Graduate” countries – countries that managed to avoid the Middle-Income Trap – such as Portugal, Spain and Ireland, there is no European Union to bolster China in this endeavour. This lesson of China is a clarion call for other countries such as India etc. to act before the situation moves beyond redemption.

Meanwhile, the hegemon embarks on its ill-advised strategy of ticking off a multitude of neighbours and threatening to envelope the whole world into a perfectly avoidable geopolitical stalemate.

(Invisible China How the Urban-Rural Divide threaten’ s China’s Rise – Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell is published by University of Chicago Press and will be released on the 6th of October 2020.)

Invisible China provides a stunning overview of economic, health and education policies in rural China. China may have one of the largest economies in the world, but it has one of the lowest levels of education. If low-skill work in construction and manufacturing slows or is replaced by automation technology, China’s emerging workforce won’t have the ability to adapt to different work or industries.

As part of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP), public health researchers, economists and education specialists from universities in both the US and China mass collected data from across China. It’s an extraordinary effort in a country where credible statistics can be difficult to come by, especially in the “poor, rural interior.” Overall, their rigorous research shows that the education and well being of rural Chinese children has not kept pace with the country’s swift development and rising wages. In fact, it’s unbelievably bad.

Many workers don’t know how to learn, even if they are given opportunities for advancement by their current employers. If China loses their competitive edge and cannot advance into high-value-added industries, the country will become stuck at this level – a ‘middle income trap.’


This trap could cause problems with investment rates, social stability and further divert funding away from education and towards policing and welfare support.
Since rural families have historically been permitted to have more children than those in the cities, China now faces the alarming possibility that the vast majority of their future workforce is malnourished, socially neglected and under educated. Although China has an elite class of workers, such as business people, engineers and programmers, they are not strong enough to support the rest of the country with universal basic income. Alongside higher wages for low skilled workers, China is now leading the world in robotics technology and is the main global customer of the robotics which are replacing those low skilled workers.

Although the Chinese government has recently made moves to remedy this issue through reducing or abolishing school fees, improving access to textbooks and expanding vocational schools, there was no early investment in human capital or a well laid plan to transition the country from a manufacturing to an innovation-based economy. Unfortunately many of these problems started during the Cultural Revolution and were neglected by Deng Xiaoping. He is rightly credited with the economic miracle, but unfortunately mass education was not given priority. Now, the current leadership must implement policies that may not show positive results for a generation. It’s terribly difficult to implement policies that take so long for results. It is even more difficult if those policies must be implemented by rural leadership who feel that the benefits of those policies will only go to urban areas. According to the authors, upgrading the education level of the entire labour force would take 45 years.

Each chapter provides comparative research to other countries which have fallen into or avoided the middle income trap. Thankfully, they include many simple graphs and charts to explain their economic theories. Although they recognise the difficulty in comparing China to a much smaller country, such as Ireland, it’s incredibly useful for understanding what steps could be taken now to improve the situation of China’s children. Outlining how Mexico’s growth stalled and resulted in widespread criminal activity and economic stagnation reveals how important it is to take this problem seriously. China’s rural and migrant workers are ‘invisible,’ but their welfare could impact the country’s elite and global economic stability. The authors also explain why vocational schools in Germany have been so incredibly successful, while those in China have been, for the most part, an expensive disaster. They certainly don’t discount differences in economic history or local culture, but this comparative research does show how China could reshape their policies to mimic the success of South Korea and avoid the social upheaval of Mexico.

I came to this book with some background knowledge. I conducted research at a Shanghai university on the hukou system, social capital, and schools for internal migrant children. I also volunteered at migrant schools in Shanghai. The hukou system is a household registration system which divides Chinese citizens into agricultural and non-agricultural residency status. However, the problems and solutions in this book require no background knowledge in China or economics. If anything, the summaries of their arguments in each closing section are a bit too long. That may be due to their fears that even those living in China might not be able to recognise this looming problem in a population that remains invisible and separate to the elite of the mega cities.

The hukou categories shape where the individual and their family can live, work, or study and what benefits or services they can receive. More than 70% of China’s children have rural status. Many internal migrant parents face a difficult choice of staying in their rural hometowns in poverty, leaving their children behind in the care of others, or bringing their children to cities where they will be unable to access proper health and education services. Even parents who are able to keep their children in local schools might find that corruption and incompetence leaves their children far behind urban children.

The human suffering outlined in these chapters was almost impossible to read without setting the book down for a moment. Many of the recommended actions and policies are surely within the ability of the Chinese government, but they describe how education in China is fairly decentralised. Although this situation was only briefly described, higher levels of government could take harsh action against those unscrupulous individuals in rural areas who set up Potemkin schools. These “schools” take education funding meant for China’s poorest students but have no teachers or students. Each chapter includes a very human story, such as descriptions of job fairs, adult workers struggling without general education skills, young students unable to see the blackboard because their caretakers think glasses will ruin their eyes, children too weak to play because of anaemia and worms, young girls blocked by their families from taking parasite-killing medication in case it harms their fertility, young men looking into bride kidnapping as a source of income and babies failing intelligence tests before they are anywhere near a school. It is a moving and sobering read, but not without hope. Every section describes crushing poverty, ignorance and corruption, but the authors provide just as many solutions.


There was only one section that I wish the authors had expanded on. In describing how the hukou system prevents rural children from attending urban schools and hospitals, the solution was to abolish the system and to implement policies similar to Taiwan. Why the hukou system is still in use or what justification the government provides for it was not presented and this leaves the reader wondering how lifting these restrictions would work in practice. Would urban schools and hospitals maintain their quality if class sizes and hospital waiting times skyrocketed? Unfortunately this policy recommendation was a little thin compared to more pragmatic steps of providing parenting classes and opticians. That said, I’m sure other texts have studied the hukou system in full and overall this is an important book that provides a clear call to action.

The first challenge this book faces is convincing the reader and government authorities that China’s children are indeed suffering terribly. This is hard to imagine for those who associate Chinese cities with top international education rankings and tiger mothers. For those travelling by plane or high speed train across China’s rural areas, it’s difficult to see that many of China’s children are suffering from health problems (especially invisible health problems), social isolation and a lack of education. Despite the best efforts of the government to provide funding, many families face an issue with the opportunity cost of staying in school. Many families know that their children are not receiving a good education in the their local schools and could make a small fortune by dropping out of school to work in construction, even if it means lying about their age. China has one of the highest male-female sex imbalances in the world due to sex-selective abortions. If there is an economic downturn, many young men who are unable to find work or partners may turn to gang activity and organised crime. The authors take pains here to explain that employment also provides self-respect and a sense of connection to the community. The second challenge for this book is that it may have trouble distinguishing itself from the numerous other books out there arguing that China isn’t as great as everyone thinks. This would be a shame, as Invisible China is based on careful research and makes persuasive policy arguments for improving the situation of Chinese children and avoiding the middle income trap.

This book was provided by the publisher for review.