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 i

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will consider below what the development experience of Chinese rural women has to teach about effective means of population growth limitation. We will also see below how the household culture has influenced wage disparities in China's rural factories. The conditions of rural women have also been influenced by the structure of development, both in the countryside and in the cities. The overall progress of the economic revolution in China's cities, and even of its impact on urban Chinese women (as distinct from rural female migrants to the cities) lies outside the scope of the current discussion. The evolution of rural economic development, however, is worthy of specific attention. The Chinese Communist system borrowed numerous elements from its Soviet Russian mentor and prototype, but a notable element it did not borrow was the Soviet system of highly centralized economic control. Whereas Soviet factories were under ministerial control, largely bypassing local and regional governmental bodies, the Chinese vested broad authority in local government. As a result, when the national governments of the postMao era successively relaxed ideological demands upon local and regional authorities, and then called for active develo
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Some common words found in the essay are:
China China's, Ibid Women, Chinese Revolution, Overseas Chinese, China India, Jean Oi, Knippers Black, China Rural, Denise Hare, Rural Chinese, rural women, economic development, rural chinese, rural factories, chinese women, rural chinese women, rural china, economic growth, women china, rural women china, women rural, reservation wage, rural factories tend, particularly southern coastal, southern coastal provinces,
Approximate Word count = 2411
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)