Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Chinese Economic Development & Rural Women

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 as household workers.

At the same time, factories have sprung up in many rural districts. These factories have broadly the same fundamental economic impact on the countryside as does economic growth in the urban areas. They have this impact, however, without the pressure to migrate with its various disruptive effects on individuals and families, the rural communities they leave, and the cities to which they migrate.

Rural factories most obviously offer an employment alternative to agricultural labor. For women, whose opportunities for earning wages even as agricultural workers tended to be limited, factory jobs also offer an alternative to paid or unpaid household work. Factories generally offer higher wages than these traditional alternatives. Moreover, by their presence they tend to bid up wages in general.

Thus, both f...

Page 1 of 9 Next >

More on Chinese Economic Development & Rural Women...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Chinese Economic Development & Rural Women. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:29, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1710017.html