Economic Development and Rural Women in China
China, along with India, are the two largest countries that are now undergoing economic "takeoff" from developing to newly-industrialized country (NIC) status. Since these two countries alone account for somewhat more than a third of the world's six billion people, their economic transformation arguably affects more human beings than any other event in history. In each of these countries, at least 100 million people have joined what may broadly be called the world middle class. Hundreds of millions of others are knocking on the door.
In both of these countries, however, the modern urban sectors are still relatively dwarfed by their rural sectors, which in China alone numbers about a billion people. Not yet modernized, these people are nevertheless touched by and undergoing modernization. The following discussion will concentrate on the impact of economic development on rural women in China. This classification sounds narrow until we consider that it includes about 500 million people. Perhaps one out of 12 human beings on Earth is a rural Chinese woman or girl. They are a significant group.
The rapid industrialization and economic growth of China is associated primarily with its urban areas, and particularly with the southern coastal provinces and cities such as Shanghai. However, industrialization has also had an extensive impact on rural China, where most of China's population still lives. This impact has been both indirect and direct.
On the indirect side, the rapid economic growth of China's urban economic zones has created a powerful draw reaching into rural China. In spite of governmental efforts to limit internal migration, millions of rural Chinese have flocked to the cities in search of greater opportunities. To take only one dimension of this internal migration, some three million young, unmarried rural women have gone to the cities to take jobs there ...