To me the most interesting passage in the above Foreign Policy article is this:
“In its first phase, Wang writes, industrialization “took off in situ.” Rather than moving to cities, farmers began to work as industrial laborers in their villages. “By the mid-1990s, 40 percent of China’s rural labor force was producing industrial goods in the Chinese countryside,” he writes. “In 1995, China’s rural laborers generated more than half of all China’s industrial output.” In 1987, Deng revealed his surprise over this to a visitor from Yugoslavia: “In the rural reforms our greatest success—and it is one we had by no means anticipated—has been the emergence of a large number of enterprises run by villages and townships. They were like a new force that just came into being spontaneously.”
It was only in the second half of the 1990s, well after the onset of rural industrialization, that an exodus to China’s cities took off in earnest. Historically, urbanization has been a key feature of many economic takeoffs, including that of Japan and, much earlier, of the United States. In China, though, urbanization had two special features. Because so many newcomers to cities had industrial experience, they were much better prepared to step directly into factory jobs”.
How amazing ! And what a big contrast indeed to the style and pace of development in our own rural India ….where vast sections of population still continue to be laggards, economically speaking, and our policy-makers and governments even after 75 long years are still struggling to meet social expectations of tangible outcomes such as employment, skill-development, productivity etc . with scheme after scheme being rolled out year after year, decade after decade… but none having any great impact yet on the ground —- I’m talking of MNREGA and PM Mahila Kisan SashaktikaranPariyojana (MKSP), Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Programme (SVEP), National Rural Economic Transformation Project (NRETP), Deendayal Upadhyay Gramin Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY), Rural Self Employment Training Institutes (RSETI) etc. …
The FA article above also concludes with this yet other amazing statement :
“None of these transformations [described earlier in the article] were initiated by the state. “Instead, they were all born out of the strong desires of the population, who were desperate and determined to improve their lives,” Wang writes. “Such grassroot initiatives were often resisted by the government at first, before being accepted and embraced by them.” It was the Chinese people, and not their leaders, he argues time and time again, that produced the “China miracle.”
In sharp contrast to Chinese people, in India however, we people still look upon the government to be our wet nurse with copious unending supply of warm breast -milk and inexhaustible TLC. We keep expecting the Govt. provide us with everything from toilets to irrigation systems to roads , skill-development vocation centres, primary schools and health-care centres …. And come every election time, all that our politicians scramble over each other to do for us is to promise us all more and more schemes and programmes designed to make us only ever more dependent on the state to provide everything ….
The supreme irony of it all is that it is all done … yes, you guessed it right! … in the name of “atma nirbhar “!!
For the elected MPs and MLAs, though, it’s all often only more about “pate bharo” (Hindi) … filling one’s own belly !
Sudarshan Madabushi