Why are some parts of China so rich while other parts are so poor Free Essays

In China there are so many places where most people are sleeping in poverty, living on streets and begging for money everyday. But so many people were rich as well, the extremes from rich to poor are in the same country. The main reason for the different economy in China is that the country is communist, under the control of Jiang Zemin. We will write a custom essay sample on Why are some parts of China so rich while other parts are so poor? or any similar topic only for you Order Now Communist means that the country runs by paying each person the same wages even if they are a more authority over people and are higher up the hierarchy. Some families were also very poor because they would have a lot of children, which they could not afford to bring up. There is a lot of poverty in rural areas, whilst many people in cities are getting richer. In China there are around 1. 28 billion people, there are about 14 million unemployed people in urban areas and there are about 120 million in rural areas. This means that something must be wrong about China and why so many people can not get jobs. It is wrong to say that the main cause of the situation of people being so much rich in some areas than in others go back only to 1976. Things like the incident at Tiananmen Square in 1989 where thousands of innocent people died and got mowed down by machine guns. Through this many people were on a hunger strike where many people starved and so people got ill and couldn’t afford medicine and poverty was the inevitable which was the cause of Deng. In China when Mao was emperor he had many ideas and most of them failed or did not help him get out any competition. Some of his ideas were ‘The great leap forward’ and ‘100 hundred flowers campaign. ‘ In ‘the great leap forward’ Mao told the peasants to make steel to make their industry more successful. But this failed because the steel was weak and the crops had been forgotten about and the dry weather made the country have a famine. The ‘100 hundred flowers campaign’ in 1957 was meant to let the peasants have a say in the government and new ideas, Mao said ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ which was meant to let new ideas bloom. But this didn’t happen, all that happen was that Mao new who his rivals were put in jail and the campaign ended. After this people where even more afraid of speaking out against Mao, which meant they could not improve their lives. When China was under control of the Emperors there were people called the Mandarins who were the Emperor’s local officers that taxed and tortured people. At this time 80% of people were peasants and they worked very hard and tried to grow rice or millet. Population growth was a problem because in 1750 there were 100 million people and at the end of the 19th century there were 400 million people. This obviously made families poor and not enough food for everyone, which means that poverty and famine became a problem. By 1962, however, Mao began an offensive to purify the party, having grown increasingly uneasy about what he believed were the creeping â€Å"capitalist† and antisocialist tendencies in the country. As a hardened veteran revolutionary who had overcome the severest adversities, Mao continued to believe that the material incentives that had been restored to the peasants and others were corrupting the masses and were counter revolutionary. To arrest the so-called capitalist trend, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement, in which the primary emphasis was on restoring ideological purity, rein fusing revolutionary further into the party and government bureaucracies, and intensifying class struggle. The Cultural Revolution saw rapid industrial growth mainly because unlike the rural sector after the Great Leap Forward, the urban sector still concentrated upon heavy industries. The Cultural Revolution did have an adverse impact on China’s foreign trade however, as trade was attacked as humiliating to China and as worshipping things foreign. Throughout the period of the Cultural Revolution, China in effect cut off from the rest of the world. However, it still conducted trade relations with other countries it did not recognise, but only on a limited scale and with very little growth. Until 1976, three key elements were central to Mao’s economic policy, these were the collectivisation of land, centralised control over the accumulation and reinvestment of capital, and state ownership of major industries and banks and entailing strict limitations on foreign capital and external economic factors. Land reform was the first step in the collectivisation of rural areas. However, the redistribution of land away from the landlords and rich peasants to smaller private holdings was not as successful as Mao initially hoped. Private farms were not a part of Socialist policy, and new divisions, exploitation and uneven land ownership showed signs of re-emerging. During the 1950s, therefore, collectives were established that enabled Mao to control the means of production even further, and were given quotas to supply the state with a portion of their output at pre-determined prices and also acted as pools of labour that could construct irrigation networks, roads and railway tracks. Collectives also enabled the generation of a gross operating surplus that paid for education and health services. Mao felt that industrialisation was still too slow and in a bid to quicken its pace, collectives were further organised into ‘people’s communes’ under the guise of the ‘great leap forward’ in 1958. Peasants were directed to build roads, dams and other projects relating to improving China’s infrastructure. Millions of ‘backyard furnaces’ appeared, producing mainly low quality pig iron and steel of little use for anything. Cotton was also planted throughout China – at the expense of staple crops – but had little success because of wide climatic variations. This futility came at the expense of agriculture, and resulted in widespread famines and illness. As for the industrial sector, large-scale industrial enterprises were allowed to operate independently from the state for a short period of time after liberation. But from the early 1950s on, the nationalisation of industries commenced China made a rule that every couple could only have one child and this helped the amount of people and helped families with money. One of the short term problems with Deng’s one child policy is the lack of girls. Due to population growth in China, Deng thought up a one child policy, this meant that couples are only allowed to have one child between them. Deng made a graph of the population growth for each family if they had 1, 2 3 or four children. The graph concluded that for China to have plenty of food and wealth families were only allowed to have one child. Families then chose to have baby boys and not girls, reason for this is mainly long term. Boys have been favoured over girls for most of China’s history, so when only one child was allowed per family boys were an obvious choice. But people can’t choose what the sex of their child will be, so why are there so many boys? Is there a drug that stops women from having girls, no the reason is much more sinister. If a baby girl is born they are thrown in with the rubbish or left somewhere to die! This is very brutal but it happens all over China. If a women has two children then there is great punishment, even when she is pregnant, they are forced to have an abortion, then they are sterilized and imprisoned. The harsh punishments given is enough to put anyone off having a second child. In 1974 the article in the ‘People’s Daily’ it tries to encourage modern attitudes â€Å"There is still the attitude that ‘women go home to cook meals, feed the pigs and shut up chickens, while men go home to smoke their pipes and wait for food and drink. ‘ Some even laugh at those males comrades who help their wives with the housework. † When the Chinese people had more than one child it would usually cause money problems because people didn’t have enough money, so this made families poor and so they could not help themselves. With the population getting greater and greater more and more people with no money which made the divide between rich and poor bigger. I think the reason for China being so different in economy is that the country had been so communist for many years that some people did not have good enough paid jobs and with so many children it was hard to pay for everything. The way that so many people did not have work and that China as a country did badly in exporting and importing, this made people have bad pay and long hours. This situation did not just go back from 1976 because of events like in Tiananmen Square. Deng Xioping is not to blame for the problem of poverty because he tried to help the workers by motivating them, but was just discredited by Mao. I think that that the most important person that helped create this problem was Mao because of his ideas and plans that went wrong and that when people tried to speak out and make a point across to him he just put them in jail and murdered them, so the Chinese people could not help themselves from him. How to cite Why are some parts of China so rich while other parts are so poor?, Papers