Qin Hui, "Looking at China from South Africa"

Qin Hui, “Looking at China from South Africa” [1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

Readers of Qin Hui’s “Dilemmas of Twenty-First Century Globalization: Reasons and Solutions, With a Critique of Piketty’s Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” also available on our site, will already be familiar with the arguments Qin develops in the text translated here. The “China Model,” which has brought countless millions out of poverty, is not in Qin’s opinion the long sought-after “third path”—an alternative to capitalism and socialism. Instead, the basic components of the China model are: China’s “low human rights advantage,” which allows capital, with the consistent help of the state, to exploit Chinese labor through low wages, docile unions, land expropriation and urban-rural status barriers; and the logic of globalization, which opens China to outside investment and at the same time makes available the markets of the world to China’s formidable productive capacity.

As Qin argues in “Dilemmas,” China’s success has nothing to do with “socialism with Chinese characteristics” unless we understand the most basic of those characteristics to be brutal exploitation of its own people, especially of its rural population. To drive that point home, Qin, in “Dilemmas” and elsewhere, notes the many parallels between China and South Africa, all based on the construction of systems of status barriers that create groups of people without rights or political power.

The present text is a much longer elaboration of this theme (some sixty pages of Chinese text when downloaded from the web), rendered with Qin’s characteristic intellectual energy and mordant wit (for example, he describes the South African apartheid system as one in which “blacks work according to their abilities; whites earn according to their needs”). The basic argument is not particularly complex: South Africa discriminated against blacks; China discriminates against peasants. But the evidence presented, on both South Africa and China, is richly detailed and to my mind irrefutable. His target audience is clearly fellow Chinese intellectuals who hesitate to accept comparisons between China and a regime universally condemned as racist and retrograde; anyone who might have dismissed Qin’s previous discussions of the issue as too clever by half should have a hard time disregarding the weight of the evidence presented here.[2] Nor does Qin sugarcoat his conclusions, among which are the observation that South Africa abandoned apartheid, while China’s hukou system continues to deprive China’s peasants of basic rights and equality. And while the basic data Qin presents are from the 2000s, recent accounts, like this one by the journalist lan Johnson, or this one, by the scholar Luigi Tomba, suggest that little fundamental change has occurred since Qin first published his piece. (Click here for an update on the situation in Soweto; Qin's conclusions remain relevant for today's South Africa as well).

The result is a stunning piece of scholarship. A bit long and unwieldy, yes, with some tangents that might have fallen victim to an impatient editor’s red pen, but the length and the breadth of the piece, as well as its explorations across space, time, and scholarly disciplines drive home Qin’s point: China’s and South Africa’s economic miracles were built on rank status discrimination—South Africa against blacks, China against peasants. If we condemn South Africa, we must also condemn China, both for reasons of morality and universal values, but also because China’s economy is big enough to undermine the gains of democracy and socialism throughout the world.

Qin's text is very long: 42,000 words, some 80 pages single-spaced. For those who prefer a pdf file for ease of reading, click here.

Translation

“Economic Miracles” under Conditions of “Low Human Rights Advantage,” Part One: My Country, My People: Comparing Backgrounds

Latin-Americanization or South-Africanization?
　　
As critics inside and outside of China have reflected on the Chinese developmental model in recent years, negative comparisons have generally been to India or Latin America. Generally speaking, pre-reform China often pointed to backwards India as an example of the “unfortunate consequences of following the capitalist road.” At the time (the 1960s and 1970s), Latin America was in a period of economic growth (the “Brazilian miracle,” the “Mexican miracle”) so Chinese did not talk too much about them. After the reforms, and especially in the 1990s, when the new round of reforms aimed at marketization through an authoritarian “iron fist” [as opposed to the “invisible hand” of the market], India was still often cited as a negative example, but now because the unfortunate consequences of “Nehru socialism” or “Soviet-style planning,” which was used by China’s right wing as a negative example of the dangers of “populism.” China’s left wing increasingly used Latin America, whose “miracles” had expired and whose societies had fallen into crisis, as a “lesson,” demonstrating the evils of “neoliberalism,” which led to discussion of hot topics like “guarding against the emergence of Latin-Americanization in China” or “China has fallen into the Latin American trap.”

But some Chinese specialists on Latin America did not approve of this Latin Americanization theory. Even more interesting is that when many Chinese enterprises 中资企业 (especially large-scale state-owned enterprises 大型国企) arrived in Latin American, they discovered a situation that was the opposite of the neoliberal portrait of capital dominating labor. In Latin America, workers and peasants brazenly “cheated 欺负” capital. The largest Chinese enterprise in Latin America, Shougang Peru 首钢秘铁, resisted local labor laws, fired striking union workers, and created the “Peruvian worker hero” Juan Gonzales 胡安·坎查理 [?]. Gonzales, viewed by Shougang as a “trouble-maker,” first ran for office with the support of the workers and later served as the Peruvian Minister of Labor, while his daughter was democratically elected to serve as the Mayor of Marcona, where the headquarters of Shougang Peru are located. The labor movement wound up giving Shougang Peru no end of trouble, to the point that media in China warned that “those who invest abroad must guard against the union trap!” The bosses of our state-owned enterprises surely know the meaning of the phrase “our workers have strength!” I should add that the rise in the power of the left in Latin America in recent years means that this sort of incident is not rare. But the Shougang Peru affair occurred in the 1990s under the Fujimori government, which was widely understood to be rightist.

Outside of Latin America, there are even more vivid examples. In the past, when our state-owned enterprises built factories or opened mines in rural areas, no one ever talked about “land seizures and demolition 圈地拆迁” [terms used by protesting peasants today]. If tens of thousands of peasants were kicked out, well, they left. Who negotiated? However in recent years, when “Chinese capital” seized land in countries like Gabon, they poked around in protected nature areas and in state parks, and ran into protests from environmental and indigenous-rights NGOs “fomented by the West.”

Chinese capital is used to calling on the government to “settle” such matters, but in these cases, government officials didn’t lift a finger, and the companies were left to their own resources to deal with the “unruly people 刁民,” which, as in Dingzhou 定州 and Shanwei 汕尾[3] in China proper, proved to be extremely difficult. Of course, in countries governed by the rule of law, Chinese capital has also learned to “play by the rules 循规蹈矩.” An example is CHALCO’s (Aluminum Corporation of China) exploitation of the Aurukun bauxite mine in Australia. Despite a previous agreement with the Australian government, and its firm backing, CHALCO still had to spend a year and a half negotiating with an indigenous tribe of little more than one thousand people over the question of land use, because the Australian government had returned land rights to the aborigines. CHALCO’s “equal treatment” policy was well received in Australia, but this kind of “good example” cannot be championed in China: the foreign “union trap” is already enough of a headache for Chinese capital. If the “Aurukun experience” were known in China, and Chinese peasants with their “five thousand years of civilization” learned how to negotiate with a government-backed “alligator” [like CHALCO] in the way that little Australian “primitive tribe” did, well, we couldn’t have that, now could we?

So now we discover that the secret behind the “China miracle” is that no one can negotiate with an iron fist, which reduces what Chinese economists call “transaction costs,” and avoids “democratic problems” such as “the difficulty of dividing property in democracies, the many burdens of welfare allocation, the unions who scare off investors, and the peasant unions who run off property speculators.”

Clearly, talking about a “Latin Americanization” of China in this context makes no sense. But a Filipino international NGO activist who has been to South Africa many times in the past twenty years discovered that the big cities in South Africa at the time were like Beijing today, while today's big cities in South Africa are very similar to Manila! This is quite interesting.

By South Africa “at that time,” he meant the 1990s, prior to democratization [which began in 1994], when the apartheid system was still in place. That South Africa surely wasn’t like Latin America. Was it like China?

Today’s left wing in China likes to denounce neoliberalism, while the right wing denounces the welfare state. But while international liberals and socialists both condemned South Africa at the time, the socialists never said that South Africa’s problem was “neoliberalism.” On the contrary, it was after the abolition of apartheid that some extreme leftists criticized the democratically elected ANC government for practicing “neoliberalism.” And liberals certainly never saw South Africa as a “welfare state.” Although the white majority in South Africa did enjoy high benefits, everyone knows that the majority black population did not enjoy the “freedom to compete,” to say nothing of “welfare benefits.” The treatment of the black population was worse than [that of the poor] in any “neoliberal” country!

Comparison of a Few “Technical Terms”

How should we describe the South African system at the time? Let’s look at a few technical terms used by scholars and the South African government:

Dualism. Scholars often use this term to describe the different treatment of blacks and whites under apartheid. In China, the term “dual structure” is used to describe the different treatment of urbanites and peasants. We can trace the origin of the term to W. A. Lewis’s[4] model in developmental economics and J. H. Boeke’s[5] model in the sociology of underdevelopment, and the term is widely used in the context of many developing countries. However, the "duality" as discussed by Lewis and others only refers to the difference between urban and rural development and social structure, and the term does not refer institutional discrimination resulting in differences in identity status. Ten years ago, I pointed out that the difference between city and countryside created by China’s institutional discrimination was completely different from what Lewis and Boeke had discussed. A few insightful people pointed out that calling institutional “barriers between city and countryside” “urban-rural dualism” ran the risk of confusing institutional discrimination with ordinary differences between town and countryside. Mainstream scholars in South Africa also used this concept to conflate racial barriers (apartheid) with the differences between rich and poor that are often seen in developing countries, which again prompted people to point out that the dualism created by racial barriers is not the concept elaborated by Lewis, but is a kind of institutional discrimination. What is interesting is that, during the period of rapid economic growth, the division of the population in South Africa’s “white-black dualism” and in China’s “urban-rural dualism” was roughly the same, at about 1: 4.

Migrant laborers. During the takeoff period, the South African economy relied chiefly on black industrial labor. The authorities wanted black laborers to work but not live in the cities, so their official residence remained in the “black homelands,” which meant that they were referred to as “migrant labor” in official documents. Not calling them “black laborers” had the effect of camouflaging racial discrimination. The Chinese economy during the takeoff period relied chiefly on “peasant laborers.” Recently, Professor Yao Yang 姚洋 (b. 1964) of Beijing University declared that this title was unpleasant, and formally proposed that it be changed to “migrant laborers.” I pointed out that this was very similar to the case of the South African blacks, which made him very angry. Of course, I didn’t think that he was consciously imitating South Africa (he had no idea that the term existed there), but the fact that he came up with precisely this expression…Is this a case of great minds thinking alike? Or are the two situations in fact very similar? “Migrant” can mean “an immigrant” or a “migratory bird 候鸟,” “an animal that goes back and forth.” South African officials used precisely this second meaning, “those working in the cities without migrating there,” or “migrant workers.” According to the explanation of W. W. Eiselen, [6] the theorist of South African apartheid: their entry into urban areas was only temporary, and only for economic reasons. In other words, they were only workers looking for money, and not immigrants with permission to enter. Isn’t this the case as well with “our” “peasant workers?” Don’t we call them “migrant birds”? Or “amphibious people 两栖人?”

Orderly urbanization. At the outset, this term was proposed by medical personnel in South Africa as migration control recommendations addressing the problems of infectious or sexual diseases that black migrant workers might bring to the cities. Later, however, the term was widely used, as all urban problems, such as slums, urban squalor, security problems, etc., were blamed on blacks’ entering the city, and exercising control over the black population became an important “national policy” during the apartheid era. To this end, South Africa implemented a series of “key control measures,” such as the “Prohibition of Illegal Squatting Act (PISA),” adopted in 1951, according to which black slums were seen as sites of “illegal squatting,” and authorities often “routed the enemy” 犁庭扫穴 in the name of tidying up the city and punishing “squatters.” South African officials saw the black slums that formed in the cities of the United States and other democratic countries that allowed blacks to enter the cities as examples of “failed, disorderly urbanization.” Under the name of “order,” blacks could enter the cities as coolies when times were good, but when times were bad they were seen as “surplus people” and kicked out, which meant that blacks were “sacrificed to the needs of orderly urbanization.”

In China, a similar concept was called “orderly migration.” South Africa called the huts in which the workers lived “illegal squats,” while in China we called them “illegal construction.” Yao Yang argues that slums “violate property rights,” which is the same meaning as South Africa’s “illegal squatting.” The idea of “orderly migration” is to prohibit “blind migration,” for which Zhao Shukai 赵树凯[7] offers a sharp rebuke: “Even if it is ‘blind migration,’ don’t the peasants have the right to be ‘blind?’ Migration is a basic human right…as long as they are not breaking the law or committing a crime, what’s wrong with ‘blind migration’?” Progressive people in South Africa offered similar criticisms of “orderly urbanization.” The only difference was: when South Africa rejected “disorderly urbanization”, they took America’s slums as their example, while when China criticized its “slums” it pointed at India and Latin America. Those in American slums were black, and South Africa wanted to exclude blacks. China didn’t have a “black and white problem,” and admired America’s wealth, so they attacked a poorer India.

What does the comparison of these “technical terms” tell us?
　　
Two “Economic Miracles”

As everyone knows, China’s economic growth following reform and opening was very rapid, creating an “economic miracle.” At the same time, there are many different explanations of this “miracle.” For this reason, it is interesting to take a look at another.

Chinese impressions of South Africa are largely limited to gold mines and Boer goats, but in fact, South Africa has long had an economy based in manufacturing. Today many people refer to China as the “world’s factory,” but the much smaller South Africa has long been called “Africa’s factory.” Manufacturing started its takeoff in South Africa after WWI, and during WWII surpassed mining to become the economy’s most important sector. By 1965, the value produced by manufacturing surpassed that of mining and agriculture combined. This made South Africa into Africa's only truly industrial country; it occupied only 6% of African population and yet produced more than 33% of its economic output. South African railroads and telephones made up more than half of the African total and their capacity to produce electricity 57%. People's average use of electricity and water was roughly the same as that in England. In 1991, it appears that the average income in South Africa was on the level with that of Hungary or Denmark. In terms of overall GDP, the total for South Africa in 1932 was only 4.66 billion Rand, which grew to 9.87 billion in 1940, 20.05 billion in 1948, 41.23 billion in 1956, 68.72 billion in 1964, and 150.52 billion in 1972, finally arriving at 592 billion in 1980.

In other words, South Africa's domestic production in the several decades between 1932 and 1972 can be said to have maintained continuous high growth, doubling on the average of every 7.3 years. It begin to slow down in the latter part of the 1970s and in 1982 for the first time experienced negative growth. In sum, over a relatively long period, “economic growth in South Africa was comparable to that of Japan, the highest in the world.” It entered into the ranks of the newly industrialized countries and was called “Africa's economic Giant.”

The South African economic “miracle” also has two features that are very similar to China: one was its outward orientation, which stemmed from the fact that much of their population (blacks in South Africa, peasants in China) were weak consumers, meaning that “internal demand” was insufficient in South Africa and China for a long time, and both used foreign capital to exploit “external demand,” a common feature of both countries’ “miracles.” During its extended period of economic growth, South Africa’s “double surplus” in its current account and its capital account often pushed the GDP into “super high speed” growth: the trade surplus was 1.43 billion USD in 1950 and grew greatly to 74.30 billion USD in 1980, and only began to decline with the crisis in the “South African model,” declining to 53.48 billion USD in 1992. Capital surplus was 2.15 billion USD in 1965 and reached 23.66 billion USD in 1982, an annual average rate of growth of 15.2% over 17 years, but this fell rapidly following the crisis in the apartheid system. Capital accounts were negative after 1985 (meaning that capital was flowing out of the country). But prior to this point, South Africa had relied on “economic globalization plus a comparative advantage in low human rights” to become one of the foremost countries in the world in terms of return on foreign investment. In 1979, the average return on American investment in South Africa was 18%, while it was only 13% in developed countries and 14% in developing countries. Between 1957 and 1972, 40% of South Africa’s economic growth was the result of foreign investment.

China is the same, the best example being that General Motors loses money everywhere in the world, making minor profits even in its factories in India, while in China profit margins remain high. In addition, McDonald’s is much less profitable in the United States than in China. As a result, in 1996 one-third of all foreign investment in Asia, Africa and Latin America went to China, and in 1997, only 5% of global FDI entered the transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe, while more than 80% the total amount of FDI entering developing and transitional countries in the 1990s was concentrated in 20 countries, the main one being China.

The second shared feature is that South Africa's infrastructure construction outpaced economic growth. Because of its low human rights advantage, the South African state could easily occupy a black land, something that most democratic countries cannot do. For this reason, South Africa has been able to build a large amount of infrastructure by repossessing land. For example, South Africa's per capita car ownership is not high compared with that of developed countries, but its highway construction is ahead of most of those countries.   In the 1980s, its mileage was second only to the United States and Germany and ranked third in the world. This is similar to the current situation in China. The percentage of Chinese who own cars is not high, but China's highway network is the second in the world. Many Chinese scholars arrogantly ridicule India, saying that because the Indian state his too weak in terms of “land acquisition and demolition,” it will be impossible for India to build a highway network like that of China.

What is the reason for the rapid growth of the South African economy? At a seminar at the Unirule Economic Research Institute 天则经济研究所 in Beijing, Yang Lihua 杨立华 (b. 1971), a Chinese expert on South Africa, criticized my view that the secret rapid primitive accumulation and economic growth in South Africa was “globalization and low human rights.” Professor Yang insisted that low human rights had always been an obstacle to economic growth. Yet other Chinese Scholars of South Africa seem not to look at it this way. For example, some argue that:

“The racial system has provided favorable conditions for the sustained and rapid growth of the South African economy over a long period. The clearest indications of this are that the apartheid system provided a compulsory and cheap labor force for South Africa's economic development and guaranteed the vast land resources that white farmers and business owners needed for economic development.” In turn, the “rapid development of the economy and the economic power obtained thereby facilitated the maintenance of the apartheid system.”

“Over a long historical period, the favorable conditions guaranteed by the apartheid system attracted large amounts of foreign capital, technology and migrants, and promoted the development and prosperity of foreign trade, thus contributing considerably to the South African economy.”

The apartheid system was the “critical factor” among “the many reasons explaining the rapid growth South Africa’s economic power.” However, the continuing development of the economy entered into contradiction with the apartheid system: the quality of migrant labor is not easy to improve, and the majority of people are poor, resulting in a small domestic market and insufficient domestic demand. More importantly, "foreign economic activities to some extent became a means for spreading Western human rights ideas, subtly affecting South Africans’ racial views and threatening to burst the dykes of the apartheid system."

Isn't the Chinese situation somewhat similar? The creation of the Chinese miracle similarly is due to many factors, but in the absence the “two critical factors“of migrant labor (discriminatory cheap labor) and enclosure movements (coercive means to obtain land resources needed to develop the economy) could our miracle have existed? Of course, what we said about the problems and eventual outcomes of the South African model could only fuel the dreams of the Chinese people!

It's true that the “South African miracle” basically enriched white people, but the white rulers often defended themselves by saying that “the standard of living of South African blacks is higher than that of other black people anywhere on the continent.” Such a statement of course obscured the startling difference in income and the economic inequality between blacks and whites, to say nothing of the deprivation of black political rights and other basic civil rights by the authorities outside the economy.   But the statement is true in its way.

Maintaining economic growth meant that standards of living were improving even for the blacks who were cheated by the system. In terms of time, things were getting better, and in terms of space, they were twice as well off as the citizens of any of the neighboring black-led countries. The simple fact is that South Africa has for many years been a place of employment for a large number of black workers in the surrounding countries, especially Mozambique, Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, etc., in numbers that account for a large percentage of the labor force in these countries. Even more distant Tanzania and Zambia also have migrant workers in South Africa. The situation is just like the “migrant workers’ tide” in the poor areas from China’s central and western regions that stream into the wealthy coastal areas. Even if the wages these foreign workers receive are less than those of South African blacks, they clearly earn more in South Africa than in their home countries, otherwise they would not come. And it is obvious that South African black workers earn more than black workers in neighboring countries. The situation is the same for China’s migrant laborers: they are better off than in the past, and their standard of living is twice that of those that stayed in the villages, but this does not hide the unfair treatment they receive in the cities.

During apartheid, black South Africans made up three-fourths of the population, but their individual income was one fourth that of whites. In terms of wages in the mining industry, whites earned 10.7 times more than blacks in 1936, 17.5 times more in 1960, 20.3 times more in 1970, and 12 times more in 1974. In terms of a comparison at one point in time, in the 1980s whites earned 10 to 15 times more than blacks in gold mining, 10 to 12 times more in processing, and 4 times more in extraction. In 1982, the average monthly wage for whites throughout South Africa was 1073 Rand, compared to 278 for black, a ratio of 3.9 to 1. In 1987 the numbers were 1959 and 593, meaning that the ratio had decreased to 3.3 to 1, or in other words that black wages had grown by 113.31% and white wages by 82.57%, but the absolute gap between them grew from 795 Rand in 1982 to 1366 Rand in 1987. Another set of data shows that between 1980 and 1988, the average annual wage of black workers in South Africa increased from 2,688 rand to 9,430 rand, while the average annual wage of white workers increased from 11,472 rand to 32,906 rand. In other words, black wages increased by 250.82%, and white wages increased by 186.84%. In relative terms, black wages grew faster than those of whites, and in nine years, white wages narrowed from 4.27 times that of blacks to 3.50 times. However, in absolute terms, the gap between whites’ and blacks‘ annual salaries of nine years earlier was 8784 rand, and nine years later, it was 23,476. So the gap had actually grown.

In China, whether we compare urban and rural incomes or those of migrant workers and “municipal workers [i.e., those legally permitted to work in the cities]” the gap has also expanded significantly in the past decade, and while in South Africa the gap between black in white shrunk in relative terms but grew in absolute terms, in China the gap grew in both. This is similar to the situation in South Africa prior to the 1970s, and worse than the situation in the final years of the apartheid system.

“Blacks Work according to their Abilities; Whites Earn according to their Needs:” “Socialism” with Status Barriers
　　
Another feature of the South African economy is the notable presence of the state-owned economy. Although South African politics was extremely anti-communist prior to democratization, the economy was nonetheless quite “socialist.” Even at the end of the apartheid era, when the state-owned economy was already in bad straits, the public sector still accounted for 58% of national fixed assets, 26% of output value, more than 50% of exports and 25% of imports in 1986. For that reason, South Africa at that time might be described an economy where “blacks work according to their abilities, and whites earn according to their needs.” As the well-known leftist scholar Shamir Amin[8] put it: even if South Africa was part of the “capitalist world system, what was funny was that the ‘central government command economy’ of the former white rulers consistently placed South Africa in the ‘second world’ generally associated with socialist countries.” Is this not a lot like China?

This situation was created by the descendants of the original Dutch settlers (who now call themselves Afrikaners, and who used to call themselves Boers) who constitute the majority of the white population. The colonial history of South Africa can be summed up as follows: whites conquered the majority black population [beginning with the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century], and in military terms, the British defeated the Dutch in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), after which the two arrived at a political compromise that allowed the Dutch to rule South Africa. In South Africa after the Anglo-Boer War, the English-speaking whites with their urban traditions readily adapted to industrial and commercial competition, and most of them became entrepreneurs or white-collar workers, the driving force of the marketization and globalization of South Africa’s economy. By contrast, the Afrikans-speaking whites, more numerous than the English-speakers and politically advantaged, were traditionally farmers and herders (Boer means “farmer” in Dutch). They did not engage in commerce, and when they moved to the cities, they worked for wages, many becoming “poor whites.” They saw themselves as less competent managers than the English-speaking whites, and less willing to work than the long-suffering blacks, which explained their need for the protection of racial privileges. The discriminatory attitudes of these Afrikaners toward blacks was even stronger, and is similar to the rejection of migrant workers by many urban workers in state-owned enterprises in China.

The Boer “poor whites” not only supported policies of racial oppression for a long time, but also became the social basis for the white “extreme right” that stubbornly resisted black rights during the period of transition to democracy. In order to maintain racial privileges, safeguard vested interests, and maintain the tradition of "Boer unity," South Africa to a considerable degree implemented a collectivist system 大锅饭制度 for the Afrikaners, and established many state-owned enterprises to provide "iron rice bowls" to Afrikaner workers, providing high social welfare and guaranteeing lifelong employment. “Organized white workers” “took aggressive action” to maintain apartheid, and the “political alliance between capitalists and white workers” on ethnic issues lasted through the end of the 1970s. In 1922, white workers even "combined racial chauvinism with military action and opposed capital under the banner of socialism, launching an armed uprising protesting the possibility of allowing black labor to ‘invade’ the industry and proposing the establishment of a ‘white workers' republic.’" The South African Communist Party actively participated in this at the time. The rebellion was suppressed, but South Africa’s “racial socialism” traces its foundation to this incident.

As a result, scholars have remarked that, in comparison to the cases of Taiwan and South Korea, which very successfully managed the transformation of rural migrants into urban citizens, South Africa maintained a system of “accumulated exclusion” of blacks hoping to enter the cities.

Of course, the precondition of this “racial socialism” was a cruel oppression and enslavement of black people. But this oppression and enslavement clearly had nothing to do with “neoliberalism” or with any “market-competition winner-take-all” under conditions of laissez-faire. In fact, “class differentiation” within the black and white worlds hardly existed. From the perspective of whites, South Africa was a “welfare state” almost as developed as Northern Europe. And black entrepreneurs only emerged after apartheid was discarded; prior to this all blacks were poor. Yet there remains a huge gap in between “white equality” and “black equality.”

This system is much like China’s. The only difference is that in South Africa it was the black-white difference that mattered, while in China it is the urban-rural difference. I should note that, after the 1950s, "peasants" in China cannot be defined by the type of settlement in which they lived (many peasants actually live in cities and towns, especially in the county towns of China, where before reform and opening, most of the residents were "peasants" of the "communes just outside the city gates"). Nor could they be defined by profession (many “peasants” do not farm, whence the concept of “migrant workers” and “farmer entrepreneurs”), or by class (because not only are there “migrant workers” and “peasant entrepreneurs,” there is also the distinction between the cadres and the masses). The “peasants” are defined by their “residence papers” and in the absence of special permission to modify these, they are condemned to be a hereditary low-status caste.

Before reform and opening, China had no classes but many hierarchies, in a complex mixture that resembles a caste system, and the so-called equalities that existed within particular realms of the hierarchy coexisted with immense gaps between those realms. In 1978, China's Gini coefficient, calculated in terms of income, was only 0.164 in urban areas and 0.227 in rural areas. However, if the urban-rural difference is included, the national Gini coefficient was 0.331, which is not much lower than that of developed market economies. In the era of the planned economy, China’s development displayed the characteristics of the so-called Preobrazhensky[9] model of “exploiting” peasants to achieve “primitive socialist accumulation,” which led to the tragedy of tens of millions of peasants starving to death.

Over the past thirty years of reform, there has occurred a clear class division between China’s cities and villages, but we should note that in comparison with the treatment reserved for those entering the city to work, the Chinese system has treated the poor holding “urban papers” (especially those of special municipalities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen) quite well, just as South Africa has favorably treated “poor whites.” Still, strictly speaking, the level of welfare enjoyed by South African “poor whites” is higher than that of the poor in Chinese cities. This is because at the time, whites in South Africa had a democratic system, and white workers had powerful independent unions that could effectively protect workers’ privileges, and the labor vote also had a great impact on the government.

China lacks these conditions, which means that the position of China’s urban workers is somewhat better than that of migrant workers and South African blacks prior to democratization, but is lower than that of white South African workers in the past. Similarly, the exclusion of migrant workers practiced by China’s urban planning was not as pronounced as that of South African whites toward blacks. Migrant workers mainly suffered discrimination at the hands of power-holders in the cities.

In the age of the market economy and globalization, “socialism with special privileges” also bestowed “special characteristics” on “competition.” As I already mentioned, the Afrikaner-speaking Boers were less adept than the English-speaking whites in industry and commerce, but given the support of the state, there were many Boers that made quick fortunes in finance and real estate. Thus after the 1970s, South Africa evolved into a society in which English-speaking whites made up most of the class of managers of private industry, commerce and foreign capital, while Afrikaner-speaking whites, in addition to serving as officials in the state security apparatus (military, police, etc.), basically relied on the state in economic terms, with some people establishing nation-wide monopolies, and the more numerous “poor whites” becoming “privileged workers” in state-owned monopoly sectors providing high wages and benefits. Young blacks mostly worked for private enterprises in the cities, or in state-owned enterprises, doing the kind of dirty, tiring or dangerous jobs that the whites did not want to do, while many of their relatives remained confined to their “black homelands” as prescribed by their residence papers.

China after reform and opening was also like this: in competitive fields, private industrial and commercial firms grew rapidly; in the fields of finance and real estate there appeared a swarm of oligopolistic “carpet-baggers” with official backgrounds; and the monopolistic state enterprise sector relied on the “state’s extractive capacity” and the power of monopoly, so that not only did its managerial class come into sudden wealth, but there also appeared a class of aristocratic workers like those of an electric company where the “meter readers earned wages and bonuses of 10,000 RMB.”[10] (And even if the phenomenon of non-monopolistic middle-sized and small state-owned enterprises disintegrating, “reorganizing” and shedding workers whose status declined precipitously was rarely seen under apartheid in South Africa, after democratization, the privatization by the new government of the state enterprises that had served as a collective economy for the Boers created a similar phenomenon of Boers’ losing their jobs). And 200 million "migrant workers" became the mainstay of China's manufacturing industry and the main body of the blue-collar workers. Their families became left-behind children, left-behind women and left-behind elderly in the "new socialist villages."

As I argued above, there can be no “neoliberalism” under conditions of “racial socialism,” any more than there can be a “welfare state,” even if the ample state treasuries of South Africa and China provided similar social guarantees to Chinese city dwellers and South African whites (these two groups occupied more or less the same ratio of the population at the outset, a minority of one out of four). However, the vast majority of the population was excluded from welfare, while enjoying little “freedom.” These two groups “without freedom or benefits” were very similar. The difference was that because there was democracy for white South Africans, welfare was provided as well. And in China, where city-dwellers had no democracy, the welfare system came with many “special privileges,” what I have called “negative benefits.” In addition, the movement for black rights in South Africa understood things clearly, and as already noted, fought for both freedom and welfare for black people. Yet in China, many intellectuals who are “deliberating about the reforms” remain confused, the New Left denouncing neoliberalism and the right wing decrying the welfare state, which suggests that they think the people have too much freedom and too many benefits!

Are “Low Human Rights” Meant to Protect “Sovereignty”? "Deformed “Nationalism” and the Theory of “Cultural Self-Respect”
　　
Over the course of the history of South Africa, both English-speaking whites and the Afrikaner-speaking Boers oppressed blacks. But because the English-speakers excelled in industry and commerce, and relied less on special privileges while respecting freedom of competition, they were somewhat more enlightened on racial issues, and finally responded to human rights concerns expressed by an international society dominated by English-speaking countries.

All peoples have a history that evolves from barbarism to civilization. British and America have not always respected human rights. Both have disgraceful pasts on human rights issues, both internally and externally, including human rights violations in their colonies. Nonetheless, we should admit that the progress of modern human rights truly first appeared in these countries, initially in terms of domestic human rights, and then in the international arena. The two Human Rights Declarations of the United Nations reflect the efforts of the international community to promote the protection of human rights in all countries, and the English-speaking countries are clearly the most important promoters of such efforts, as was the case with South Africa. Of course, Britain and America have always practiced both “interest diplomacy” and “moral diplomacy.”

From the perspective of interests, because capital in these market economies was unwilling to sacrifice moneymaking opportunities in South Africa, they were reluctant to fully endorse sanctions, which meant that sanctions were often formal rather than real, and objectively speaking South Africa was let off the hook. But from the perspective of “human rights diplomacy,” even the most formalistic sanctions still constituted a kind of moral pressure, the impact of which on South Africa should not be underestimated, especially given the reaction of English-speaking whites in South Africa.

On the other hand, the British historically mistreated the Boers, and through violence destroyed two Boer Republics and imposed a British colony, creating a sense of anti-British nationalism among the original Dutch settlers. There were massacres of the Boers during the war, and many Boers died in concentration camps, leaving lasting wounds in the Boer psyche. There are monuments, museums, and historical sites from the British-Boer War everywhere in South Africa, reminding the Boers—now the Afrikaners--not to forget the past. Boer resistance, even during the period of British colonization after the war, meant that Afrikaners, including the “poor whites,” continued to dominate South African politics, a trend even more pronounced after independence. Hence they paid little attention to the advice, criticism, and sanctions of the English-speaking world, dominated by Great Britain and the United States, on the subject of their oppression of black people, feeling that they, the Afrikaners, had been maltreated in the past by the British, so why should they listen to them on questions of human rights?

The South African President Botha once arrogantly proclaimed: “My people’s struggle against colonialism is the earliest in Africa’s history, and the descendants of these colonialists are meddling in our internal politics, forcing us to understand the racial apartheid system from the point of view of our enemies. We will never give in and will instead create a new system. We will never engage in the one-person one-vote system they propose.”
Hence the Afrikaner oppression of the blacks and their insistence on their own racial superiority took on a veneer of “justice” based in “anti-colonialism,” “independence and autonomy,” and “a refusal to allow others to interfere in our internal affairs.” It is not hard to understand why South Africa clung so stubbornly to racial oppression, or why their arguments were so passionate. In order to maintain their racial privileges, they were willing to abandon the Commonwealth, belittle the United Nations, sever the relationship between the South African Dutch Reformed Church and the original church in the Netherlands, and challenge the international community.

As early as 1834, when the British colonial authorities announced the abolition of slavery in South Africa, the Boers viewed it as a “shameful insult” and angrily denounced the move, which would undermine the “propriety” of the relations between whites and blacks. The tensions this change created between the British and the Boers would lead to the eruption of the Boer-British War some decades later. In 1910, the formerly British Cape Colony and Natal merged with the colonies of the two Boer republics, Transvaal and the Orange Free State, to form the Boer-led South African Union. The constitution established by the Boers at this point abolished certain black rights that had formerly been accorded by the British (they had been permitted to buy and possess land, to elect their own representatives in black areas, to set up assemblies with limited powers, etc. After independence the Boers said that these were all parts of “British colonialism” and scrapped them). Blacks responded by organizing a delegation to go to London, pleading that the British block this process, for which they were condemned as “traitors to South Africa,” and “British accomplices” who were helping the British to interfere in South African internal politics. When Boer theorists presented their arguments about “orderly urbanization” and the like, they often denounced both England and the United States, as in the case in 1930 when John Holloway (1890-1979), who was in charge of the Native Economic Commission in the South African Federation in the 1930s, claimed that the US policy of black-and-white integration was a failure and could not be imposed on South Africa.

Religion in South Africa had the same problems. The Anglican Church established by South African English-speaking whites was quite opposed to apartheid, and even elected a black archbishop, Desmond Tutu. But the South African Dutch Reformed Church stubbornly supported apartheid, and, unwilling to accept the anti-racist attitude of the mother church in Holland, established its own independent branch.

Later, in the process of the Afrikaners’ throwing off British rule in pursuit of independence, the discourse of employing “anti-colonialism” to resist the universal values of human rights and equality became ever more strident. In February of 1960, the British Prime Minister Harold McMillan (1894-1986) visited South Africa and gave a famous speech before parliament entitled “The Winds of Change are Blowing in Africa,” encouraging the South African government to reform apartheid. The speech instead provoked a wave of indignation among Afrikaners, who saw this as British meddling in their internal politics, and in October, South African whites, the majority of whom were Afrikaners, voted to leave the Commonwealth, abolish the symbolic status of the Queen of England and establish the Republic of South Africa. The same year, another example of “foreigners meddling in internal affairs” was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Albert Luthuli (1898-1967), President of the African National Congress. South African authorities were once again outraged, seeing this as an example of the “prejudice of Western liberals toward Afrikaners.”

In contrast, the black liberation movement at the time had a positive impression of the English-speaking world. Nelson Mandela once called himself “pro-British”, saying that “For Afrikaners, English is a foreign language, while for us, it is a language of liberation.” In 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill, the two great leaders of the English-speaking world, published the “Atlantic Charter,” which defended the principle of universal human rights. Afrikaners turned up their nose at this, but the ANC was greatly encouraged, and published its own “African Charter” based on the Atlantic Charter, demanding that blacks receive universal human rights. The South African Anglican Church became a foundation for the struggle of resistance of black Christians, creating an elite, like Archbishop Tutu, who supported black liberation.

Another reason white South African “nationalists” stubbornly supported the apartheid system was the “theory of cultural difference,” which led them to oppose universal human rights, arguing that white standards for human rights could not be applied to blacks. If blacks demanded the same freedoms as whites, it was only because they had been poisoned by “British colonialism” and thus “Westernized.” The only way they could be loyal to their own “glorious tradition” was to be content with slavery. As a scholar associated with South African authorities put it: “Just as in the case of racial-biological characteristics, the right to maintain national and cultural identity is a basic and primary human right.” According to this theory, whites like freedom, and blacks like to be enslaved. These are their respective “cultural characteristics,” and the most important human right is that of preserving the “cultural characteristics” of each race. And since blacks also value preserving and protecting their own cultural characteristics, racial apartheid serves to maintain black culture.

Separating blacks and whites so that “each can develop” allows them to avoid outside influence and realize their own cultural “revival.” For this reason, all races in South Africa should have their own homeland where they can develop their own culture, and the black homeland was “Bantustan.” The “tribal self-rule” practiced in Bantustan would work to maintain and develop the “natural character” of the black races as well as their cultural traditions, “developing their own racial pride.” Thus after the Boers took power, they abolished the indigenous parliaments permitted during the period of British rule and forced the “restoration” of the autocratic “Bantu system” of the traditional chieftains.
Black leaders in South Africa rejected these arguments out of hand. As Nelson Mandela pointed out: “Human rights are essential to all peoples and nations. People want democracy, and the Bantu management system is a reversal of democracy.”

Does China not have something like this? Facing criticism from the outside world, some Chinese, like the Boers of South Africa, make claim to a sense of “justice” on the basis of having been mistreated historically by outsiders, and argue that foreigners who have mistreated us are not qualified to criticize us. Yet the process of democratization in South Africa proves that this logic cannot stand up to the tide of history.

“Economic Miracles” under Conditions of “Low Human Rights Advantage,” Part Two : Other People, Other Places: Comparing Systems
　　
The Past and Present of the “Migrant Labor” System: Corvée Labor, Certified “Mobility,” Free Employment and Residence

China and South Africa have many intriguing points of comparison, including for example mine disasters (China and South Africa are “world leaders” in mine disasters, which also have a status component: the main victims of these disasters are migrant workers in China and blacks in South Africa). But the most basic comparison should be that of systems, especially the labor and land systems as discussed by Xia Jisheng.[11]

In economic terms, racial oppression in South Africa was concentrated in the migrant labor system. I should note that in and of itself, migrant labor is not necessarily linked to oppression. Today’s South Africa, democratic for more than a decade, still has migrant labor (mostly composed of foreign workers from neighboring countries), But what was called migrant labor under apartheid was an exclusionary institutional arrangement; as already explained, at that time South African authorities imposed an “orderly” mobility on black labor, dictating that when they entered the cities “it was merely temporary…they were just people working for money, and not migrants permitted to reside in the cities.” This is of a piece with China’s regulations that migrant workers have rights only to “temporary residence.” Such systems produce large numbers of “amphibious people” whose resident permits are in the village (in China these are called “new villages,” in South Africa “black homelands”) while they are working elsewhere. The youth leave while the elderly, the women and the children are “left behind;” migrant workers spend most of their time in the cities but come home in groves at New Years for a few days like “migrant birds”.

This system creates a very famous scene: the “migrant wave” of workers flocking home for the holidays and then back to the cities once the holidays are over. The spectacle of this migrant wave around Chinese New Year’s is something everyone knows about. And South Africa has something very similar. Soweto, where most of black labor in South Africa is concentrated, has what is said to be South Africa’s largest long-distance bus terminal, and just before Christmas, South Africa’s “wave of migrant workers returning home” occurs. But South African friends have told me that most of these workers returning home now are foreign workers. Since democratization, most South African black workers reside in the cities (although in the ghettos), and thus are no longer “migratory birds.” But the migrant wave during the apartheid era was like China’s today, made up of native migrant workers.

Yet from a historical perspective, the ancestors of migrant workers were the even less fortunate “corvée labor.” China and South Africa have followed similar paths on that front, from corvée labor to certified “migration” to freedom of employment and residence. The difference is that with democratization, South Africa put an end to the second phase, when blacks received the right to freedom of employment and city residence, while China remains mired in the apartheid stage of “certified migration.”

Prior to reform and opening, China confined peasants to the villages through strict status barriers and household registration systems. For a relatively long period, South Africa also practiced a policy of “white urbanization” that excluded blacks, implemented through a similar system of discriminatory passes and permits. In 1921, South African blacks, who made up more than 70% of the population, constituted only 13% of the urban population. The idea that blacks should be “rural” was deeply embedded in the minds of South African authorities.

In the era of the command economy prior to China’s reform and opening, there were very few opportunities for peasants to be “recruited” via special qualifications that could alter their status. At the time, the concept of "migrant workers" did not mean working to earn money, but referred instead to requisitioned labor that went basically unpaid. This was very similar to the corvée labor owed to the imperial court in ancient times. Under the command economy, almost all young peasants were called upon to “furnish labor” during the agricultural slack season, and sometimes even during harvest time, and a certain number of “peasant workers” were required to continue to work for the state. I myself participated in such projects, personally experiencing the burden and witnessing the many ways the peasants sought to avoid labor service. At the time, it was impossible for peasants to go “work for money” on their own. And for peasant labor to become “urban citizens” was even more impossible. Those who did leave the villages and seek to work for money were called “blind migrants 盲流” (during the Cultural Revolution, in some places they were called “criminals on the lam 流窜犯”), and it was normal to arrest them. The Sun Zhigang 孙志刚 affair, discussed below, that caused such a public outburst in the reform and opening period would have been seen at the time as completely normal and ordinary. At the time, peasants had no right to work, to say nothing of living in the cities, so there was no “temporary residence permit.” If peasants needed to enter the city, they needed a one-time permit related to a specific purpose, otherwise they risked being arrested as “blind migrants.”

After the abolition of slavery in South Africa in 1834, the authorities reserved the right to requisition black labor for their purposes, as in the case of the 1894 Glen Gray Act[12], which stipulated that all adult black were required to work outside of their place of residence for three months out of each year, or otherwise pay a labor tax of ten shillings. In this situation, where whites sought out blacks to make them work and blacks sought to avoid such work, whites had no intention of keeping blacks “apart.” The term “racial apartheid” did not appear until 1947. But this clearly does not mean that blacks were treated better before 1947.

Thus China’s “status socialism” prior to reform and opening was quite similar to South Africa’s “racial socialism.” Since neither Chinese peasants nor South African blacks could easily work for money, they could not become the core of an urban manufacturing work force. In China at the time, the work force in manufacturing was made up of city dwellers, and the peasant migrant workers whose labor was requisitioned were mainly engaged in infrastructure construction, such as transportation, reservoirs, power stations, mines, etc., and most of their construction sites were not in the city. Aside from dangerous and heavy work in mining or on state farms during harvest season, where peasants were occasionally hired as “contract labor,” “temporary labor,” or “shift workers,” prior to reform and opening, peasants were rarely hired in other areas. In South Africa, before 1911, corvée black labor mainly worked on Boer farms or in gold mines, and the work force in urban manufacturing was basically made up of whites. In its early period, even the Communist Party of South Africa based itself on whites, excluding blacks in the interests of “poor whites.”

In the absence of globalization and economic reform, there could be no economic miracle in contexts of “status socialism” or “racial socialism.” The low economic efficiency and widespread poverty of pre-reform China are well known. Even if the aggregate growth rates for the pre-reform period are not too low, in fact this is largely due to the “peace benefit” that followed the end of 21 years of large-scale warfare prior to the success of the 1949 revolution (the hostilities between the Nationalists and the Communists beginning in 1927, the anti-Japanese War beginning in 1937, and the full-scale civil war that followed the defeat of Japan in 1945), but in terms of institutional performance, pre-reform China has nothing to brag about when compared with peace-time pre-revolutionary China, with India, or with the Soviet Union. In South Africa, the ruling Boers were more closed-minded and conservative than the English-speaking whites, with less interest in industry and commerce. They long relied on the “three treasures—cattle cars, rifles, and the Bible” and the “cattle-car mentality” (stubbornness, conservativism, and xenophobia) to resist world trends. For this reason, although they became wealthy through the discovery of gold, South African manufacturing remained undeveloped through the period of the First World War, and was not an economic leader even in Africa.

This situation changed greatly with the opening to the outside world and participation in globalization. China launched its policy of reform and opening in 1978, and 1992 marked yet another wave of opening up, leading to China’s successful entry into the WTO in 2001. South Africa opened up even earlier. Despite the peculiar situation in which, following the Boer War, the British colonial government reached a compromise with the Afrikaners allowing the defeated Boers to retain political authority under British domination, South Africa remained a British dependency (and was part of the Commonwealth after independence), and was incorporated into the world market system of the time. Despite Boer political leadership, the economy, and especially industry and commerce, dominated by descendants of the British, grew very quickly. For this reason, South Africa was successfully integrated into the world market system.

Subsequently, the “low human rights advantage” of Chinese peasants and South African blacks quite dramatically become a favorable condition accelerating the primitive accumulation of capital in the global market system. Under the “stable” conditions achieved by iron-fisted control, China’s and South Africa’s “migrant labor”—cheap labor without unions, lacking bargaining power 博弈能力, hard-working yet docile and obedient, poorly paid and without the “cost” of welfare benefits—together with other cost-saving features, came to offer the “best investment environment.” In an era where the major industrialized countries had long since passed through the period of primitive accumulation, and in which high factor-costs associated with high taxes, high benefits and strong unions led to a wave of industrial displacement to cheaper parts of the world, South Africa and China relied on their “low human rights advantage” to attract vast amounts of capital to produce vast amounts of manufactured goods. South Africa became “Africa’s factory” and China became the “factory for the world.”

Both countries maintained high levels of economic growth for a relatively long period of time: in the 30 years following the beginning of reform and opening, China’s development was the fastest in Asia, and South Africa’s was the fastest in Africa (again for 30 years).

In the “economic miracle” of the two countries, China’s migrant peasants and South Africa’s migrant blacks made enormous contributions. The development of the market economy and of industry universalized the hiring system, as the requisitioning of peasant labor declined. A mobilizing force unfazed by human will led the cities to absorb more and more Chinese peasants and South African blacks as workers: in South Africa, the 1911 practice of corvée labor gave way to migrant labor, and the practice was no longer that of “white people trying to put blacks to work and blacks trying to escape” but instead that of blacks moving to the cities on their own initiative and whites imposing limits. “Apartheid” in its strict sense (as opposed to ordinary racial oppression) really only became the chief means of discrimination during this period. By the 1970s, blacks made up more than half of South Africa’s urban population, and by the 1990s more than 70%. And the conflicts between these black migrant workers and the white city-dwellers intensified. In China, after 30 years of reform and opening, migrant workers are no longer unwilling objects of corvée labor and have become an unstoppable flow of workers moving toward the cities, 200 million migrant workers pursuing city-dwellers with residence papers.

At the same time, another similarity between the two countries was: due to various professional access restrictions and other conditions, the doors to many “top level” professions remained closed to these poor recent migrants; peasants in Chinese cities and blacks in South African cities mostly did low-paying, physically dangerous jobs that their “betters” did not want to do. In South Africa, black labor moved from the farms and the mines to cities, and by the 1970s made up most of industrial work force, accounting for 68.9% of the total labor force in the industry and mining. In China, the “laws” of the market economy increasingly drove enterprises to hire migrant labor that was harder-working, less well paid, and, because of institutional discrimination, less able to protect their rights, as their blue-collar work force. Many city-dwellers, particularly those with “status privileges” in the capital or in other large cities, many of whom were younger urbanites and products of the one-child policy, increasingly moved away from blue-collar professions, preferring unemployment to working with migrant labor. This led to the phenomenon of the premature “white-collarization” of city dwellers with residence permits, even in cases where the level of economic development was not particularly high. The question of blue-collar work in China is increasingly one of migrant workers and not one of city workers. Talking about labor rights in China without including migrant workers makes less and less sense, and the same is true of black labor in South Africa.

A Chinese expert on South Africa once pointed out that “whites were the masters of the cities, while blacks were migrants, working for money on a temporary basis, their real homes being in the ‘black homelands.’” When he made these remarks in 1996, South Africa had already experienced a basic change, but his observation still captures the situation in today’s China!

“Temporary Residence Permits” and “Travel Passes:” The Pain of Sun Zhigang and Sharpeville
　　
In many countries, like India and the countries of Latin America, the distinguishing feature of poor people is poverty. This is different from the cases of South African migrant blacks or China’s migrant peasants, where a more serious issue is their lack of civil rights. They are not only poor people, but also “inferior people 贱人.” Of course, the Indian caste system also has “untouchables,” but this discrimination comes from traditional culture and is illegal. What China’s and South Africa’s inferior people suffer is state-imposed “legal” discrimination.

The first characteristic of inferior people is that must always carry a special permit on their person, and the police (not only the police, but any special coercive organization established by the government—in China we have the “urban management officers 城管”, or in the past there were the people’s militia 民兵, public security defense units 治安联防队, etc.) can demand that they produce these permits at any time, and can detain or fine them for any irregularity. Systems like this originally did not target mobile or peasant labor; prior to industrialization, these systems sought to shackle “inferior people” as a means of ensuring “social stability.” In South Africa, as early as 1760 during the slavery period, the Boer authorities stipulated that any black slave not in his authorized place required a “travel pass,” and in 1809, the English authorities in the Cape Colony imposed a similar regulation. At that time, however, blacks were most often requisitioned by whites to work for them, and migrant labor entering the city of its own volition did not exist. Since it was easy to distinguish blacks from whites by their appearance, and since any black person found in a city in the absence of organized requisition was clearly illegal, arrest and return of wayward blacks was easy and the system of “travel passes” was not particularly important.

As migrant labor increased, there were more and more unrequisitioned blacks in the cities, and the “travel pass” became more important, serving as the most important symbol of the apartheid system until after WWII. The Afrikaans word for this kind of travel pass is DomPas, which is the same as “pass” in English; it came from the verb to “pass through,” and once it became a noun we came to call it a “travel pass.” But “pass” also appears in passports, admissions passes and all sorts of documents. The passes used by blacks at the time were in fact proofs of a work permit issued by white authorities. As already explained, since in the eyes of officialdom, the specially approved black migrant was “only temporarily” permitted to reside in the city, and since the pass contained the words “temporary sojourner,” it would be more accurate to translate it into Chinese as “temporary resident permit.” I will continue to refer to it as a “travel pass” because that is how existing studies in China refer to it.

The most important function of a travel pass is what is called “influx control 流入控制,” which allowed the white authorities to regulate the areas and occupations that black labor could enter. South African authorities considered that the status of “temporary resident” was suitable for black labor, and the jobs they were permitted to do were those that were deemed as indispensable to the national economy, in the absence of which the economy would collapse. Yet blacks could not be seen as city dwellers. “Some extreme Boer groups demanded that travel passes only be issued to young blacks, and that black women and children be returned to the black homelands. Only black men can reside in white areas for the period that we need them.” Even if the “travel pass law” was not as explicit as this, such was the goal it intended to achieve.

In China, residence restrictions were strictly enforced after the establishment of People’s Communes in 1958 as an important part of the mechanism of “socialist primitive accumulation.” In the great famine which followed shortly thereafter, this system became the nemesis of those “slanderers of socialism” who were fleeing for their lives. Ever since, this “confinement 收容 [in the village]” has served as a routine “stability” measure. As already explained, peasant labor at the time was all corvée labor, and there was no question of free mobility. During the Cultural Revolution, peasants wanting to enter the city needed the “revolutionary committee” of their commune to issue a document, without which hotels would not let them register. Because peasants and city dwellers in China were not as easy to tell apart as blacks and whites in South Africa, “document checks” were very important. But at the time peasants made only single trips to the city, and a new pass was required for each trip. So there was no “temporary resident permit.”

As the market economy grew with reform and opening, the number of peasants entering the city to work greatly increased, and China then created the “temporary work permit” system similar to South Africa’s “travel pass.” This document also served as an influx control. The “blindly mobile” without this document could be detained and returned to the village on detection. And those who were detained had to pay the associated fees and penalties. In the craze to cash in on the market economy, many people discovered that detention was a good way to make a fast buck. As a result, the authorities occasionally used detention to issue bonuses or to build spacious new dormitories, and there were even “detentions on commission” involving quotas and kickbacks. Later on, corruption worsened, and some people discovered that detention not only served the interests of “social stability,” but even more served the interests of the stability of their official position, and people who dared to “illegally” sue officials or to “jumped the queue” to submit petitions against official behavior became frequent objects of forced “detention.”

Things got worse and worse. There was Su Ping 苏萍, Cheng Shuliang 程树良, Huang Qiuxiang 黄秋香, Zhang Zhenghai 张正海, Pu Yonggen 朴永根…one sad case after another, as well as unknown souls like the “woman migrant worker who fell to her death while attempting to jump off of the 604 train,” or the “outsiders who died or were injured when falling like dumplings [into the water] from the Baoan prison vehicle.” The web of detention grew ever larger, capturing wandering beggars, prostitutes or the “three withouts” (i.e., people without livelihood, labor power, and people responsible for them), from peasants to college students, from “blind migrants” to “illegal petitioners.” Until 2003, when Su Zhigang 孙志刚, a college graduate with all necessary permits and a job died in the disaster that is “detention,” which led to mass indignation.

In the 1950s, a South African scholar noted that: “The legal status of Africans today is that the police can arrest an African walking on Johannesburg Street at any time of the day or night.” China’s non-resident workers are in a similar situation. A Chinese scholar observed: “The Pass Law makes black people’s freedom of movement impossible, and they are constantly monitored. They can only work in prescribed areas, which is essentially forced labor.” But Chinese scholars remain silent about the similar situation of the migrant workers who are their fellow countrymen and who share their skin color. Of course, in terms of Chinese standards, calling this “forced labor” is something of an exaggeration. Migrant workers suffer discrimination, but it’s not the same as “labor education,” “labor reform,” or the gulag, and compared to corvée peasant labor from the pre-reform period, the situation of China’s migrant workers is different as well, just as South African migrant labor is not the same as earlier corvée labor.

South Africa had a unified regulation that any 16 year-old black in a white area had to carry his travel pass on his person. China allows each local administration to decide what documents a “peasant entering the city” must possess, but in the early twenty-first century, most municipal administrations demand three documents: temporary residence permit, work permit and family planning certificate. The most ridiculous thing is that the Beijing temporary resident permit has long existed in three forms, A, B, and C. Ordinary migrant workers get a yearlong C pass that must be renewed every year, while the prestigious “migrant entrepreneur” can obtain an A permit, granting “temporary residence” of five years. This is commonly known as a “green card,” and means that migrant workers entering the city are seen as foreign workers. Even more interesting is that the residence permits in certain cities are only valid for certain areas, as noted by a migrant worker in Guangzhou in 2006: “I got a temporary residence permit from a village in Baiyun 白云 district, but authorities from another village refuse to honor it, and I have to reapply. Every place has its own policy, and the fees are out of control.”

Blacks in South Africa generally don’t have to pay for these discriminatory permits, but for a long time, in many cities in China, migrant workers not only had to pay, but had to pay every year. In Beijing, for example, every person has to pay at least 450 RMB every year to obtain the three permits. In 2001 in Guangzhou, migrant workers had to pay four fees of 30 to 40 RMB per month to obtain the three permits, which comes to 360 to 480 RMB a year. In many cases, the fees required to obtain a temporary residence permit equal a month’s wages for a migrant worker. In the past few years, some places have announced changes regarding the temporary residence permit or the associated fees, but in fact, it remains normal to pay fees. For example, in the winter of 2007, Foshan in Guangdong imposed an annual fee of 112 RMB, and Dongguan 53 RMB.

In both countries, many “inferior people” are detained each year as a result of document controls. For example, in 1984 in South Africa, 1,630,000 blacks were detained in the context of the Pass Law. And in China, in Guangdong province alone 580,000 people were forcibly detained in 2000. In the same year, Beijing detained 180,000 in the first half of the year. The population of Guangdong is almost twice that of South Africa, but it detained 3.6 times as many people. The population of Beijing city is one fourth that of South Africa, but Beijing authorities detained more than twice as many people as in all of South Africa! And awful things often happen in detention, such as: On July 26, 1999, Su Ping, a young woman from Hunan who had in her possession a marriage certificate, a migrant work permit and a temporary residence permit, was forcibly detained by security personnel at the Guangzhou train station and subsequently taken to a mental institution, where she was raped by violent inmates. Later, her husband came to claim her, and was asked to pay a fee of 2000 RMB. He gave someone working there a bribe of 200 RMB, and the fee was reduced to 500 RMB.

On October 27, 1999, a 27 year-old woman on the 604 train who had not bought a ticket and who did not have her identity card was tied up by train security personnel, after which the young woman jumped from the train and killed herself. The direct cause of this terrible event is that the train security personnel had an arrangement with a detention center to the effect that people without tickets or identity cards would be brought to the center, and the train security personnel would receive 200 RMB in “work fees” for every person delivered. Clearly, the detention center did not offer the 200 RMB for nothing, but was hoping to make a profit. Nothing is for free, after all 羊毛还要出在羊身上.

The retention center in Pingshi, Shaoguan, Guangdong 广东韶关坪石收容站 has a budget of only 200,000 RMB per year, but it has built a very spacious dormitory. A local leader revealed that they were making money through detentions.

A member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference once said: Migrant workers have two fears: one is not getting paid, and the other is being detained. “Someone who has broken no law can be arrested while walking on the street and taken to a detention center where the conditions are awful. And although the "Regulations concerning Punishments by the Public Security Administration" stipulate that no one can be detained longer than 15 days, in fact every place does as it sees fit, and the “longest period of detention” can extend to six months or can even be without limits. Those detained must also pay the expenses of their detention (room and board) as well as transport fees.” A migrant worker remembers: “I graduated in 2001 and went to Guangzhou. It was terrible. You could be walking down the street minding your own business and someone would come over and grab you and ask for your ‘three permits.’ If you didn’t have them on you, you were screwed, they would take you back to a room in the neighborhood committee 居委会关 and tell you to call home. They already took your cell, so you had to call on theirs, and they charged your four RMB a minute, the same rates as an overseas call. At night, people would bang on your door asking for your ‘three permits,’ and if you didn’t open right away there went your door, they were not polite about it. What do you expect as an outsider? The fees for a temporary residence permit came to a month’s wages. And if your three permits weren’t in order, forget about it. These assholes would ruin your life. They call it detention, but you could wind up working like a slave in a stone quarry, and might not get home for three or five years.”

When authorities in South Africa checked black people’s travel passes, this was a bad law, but it was still a “law.” A black who produced his pass was usually not detained. South Africa has no tradition of “striking hard 严打”[13] or of political movements. But China does this all the time. During the holidays, or when there are important meetings and major events, authorities will launch a cleanup of "outsiders." Even if the three certificates are in order, they will still be "detained." For instance on National Day in 1999, Beijing police saw a group of migrant workers and detained them. “One of them produced his three permits and said ‘I have a temporary residence permit,’ after which the policeman took it and tore it up, throwing it into a ditch. ‘Do you still have it now?’ He asked casually.”

For a certain period, women were not subject to the pass law in South Africa; it was in 1957 that authorities decided to apply the law to women, which prompted considerable resistance, even among whites. By contrast, China’s temporary residence permit system has emphasized “equality between men and women” from the outset. Su Ping, Huang Qunxiang, and the “female migrant worker who jumped to her death from train 604” are all famous examples of sacrifices to this system.

Such treatment of inferior people is heartbreaking. In South Africa, the Pass Act has been the focus of black protests, as in the case of the famous Sharpeville tragedy. In March 1960, in the town of Sharpeville, 35 miles south of Johannesburg, police fired at the blacks protesting against the law, killing 69 people.

This incident awakened the world to the tragic price that that black people were paying to oppose this evil law. The ANC was branded as illegal for having launched the Pass Law protest, and was forced to go underground and take up armed struggle. And Robert Sobukwe (1924-1978), the leader of the even more extreme Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, was arrested in the context of these protests and died in prison.

Given the strict policies on migrant workers in China, there was no way to launch a resistance movement. But since urban and rural Chinese are harder to distinguish than blacks and whites in South Africa, detention inevitably “expanded” to include people who were not migrants, which finally provoked a public outrage. In 2003, there occurred the sensational Sun Zhigang affair. Sun Zhigang was not a migrant worker, but instead a proper college graduate (according to Chinese regulations, he had already obtained his “non-rural” residency) and he had a proper job in Guangzhou, yet because he was dressed like an “outsider” and did not have his papers on his person, he was arrested and detained by the police and beaten to death in the detention center. Such terrible things had happened to real migrant workers in the past, and many had been reported in the press. But no one cared about the plight of migrant workers. This time city people were angry, and the detention system faced a major crisis.

In response to the resistance of blacks in South Africa and Chinese city dweller’s empathy for migrant workers, a certain amount of improvement and reform occurred in both countries.

In 1978, the pass system was “relaxed” for blacks in South Africa, and blacks were no longer required to produce their documents on demand as long as they were available at a distance of no greater than five kilometers. Over the next few years, the number of blacks detained in the context of the pass law declined by a half. In many cases, fines came to replace detention for those unable to produce passes. In 1986, South African authorities “formally ended the population influx control system,” and abolished travel passes, but continued to control blacks through housing restrictions, which meant expelling blacks whose residences were in “violation of ordinances.” The final abolition of the pass law would occur only after South Africa’s democratization.

In China, the wave of resistance provoked by the Sun Zhigang case finally put an end to the infamous “detention law.” But the “three permits” were not abolished. What is different is that outside of movement-like “focused management 专项治理” activities, those without papers are now fined instead of being detained or made to do forced labor (which strangely resembles the “improved” methods toward the end of the South African pass system). Today, the “three permits” system amounts to economic discrimination. The following is the 2007 complaint of a migrant worker whom we might consider lucky (migrant workers who can buy commercial property today are exceedingly rare):

“I have been in Foshan for three years and don’t know how many document checks I’ve seen. It’s shameless. If you rent an apartment you are suspect, and it is a common occurrence for them to come in the middle of the night and bang on your door. But the most hateful thing they do is to check at the entrance to the industrial zone when people are going to work, directly targeting people who are walking or riding a bike, and fining those without papers. This is incredibly shameless. Because I take a bus to the industrial zone I have managed to avoid this, but recently they sent a directive to my company saying that they were going to check documents at the door to the company, and that everyone who is not local would have to have a permit. I have bought a house here, but have not yet transferred my residency permit, so I called to ask whether I needed a permit, and they said that the fact that I had a house didn’t matter, that if I didn’t have a pass then I was part of the migrant population…I was so mad! The only word for these people is gangsters.”

The Miracle of Cities without Slums (1): Soweto

Once you have a “temporary residence permit,” the next question is where to “temporarily reside.” Generally speaking, the large number of urban poor that appear during industrialization and urbanization are rarely what people think, which is that there is a “polarization” of the original population, and some people “fall into” the slums. In fact, the “ghettos” that form as countries urbanize are often made up of new migrants coming from outside the cities.

Logically speaking, these new migrants would have the following options in terms of housing: if they have the means, they could buy or rent private housing; if they are poor and unable to do this, then in “welfare countries,” they can apply to the government for cheap public housing. But in “laissez-faire” countries, poor people without housing benefits have the “freedom” to build their own shacks, or rent “low-rent private houses,” both of which are often called slums. One characteristic of “Latin Americanization” is that their cities have expansive ghettos, something that has been roundly criticized.

Westerners generally criticize the phenomenon of slums because they sympathize with the poor and hope that the state will provide housing benefits to improve their living conditions, and they are certainly do note advocate the removal of the poor. They often cannot imagine that there is any place to which the poor could be removed. Hence when they see a city without ghettos, they think there are no “poor people” and are full of praise.

Of course, South Africa never earned this kind of praise, because blacks and whites both know that if there are no slums in South Africa’s “white cities,” it is because the blacks (the poor) had been forcibly “cleaned up.” But in China it’s not that “black and white,” and there are people who say: over 200 million migrant workers have entered China’s cities over the past few years, which constitutes urbanization on an unprecedented scale, yet there are no slums, an “unparalleled miracle in world history!” But these people stop before asking the next question: where are the migrant workers that entered China’s cities? Before answering this question, let’s first look at where South Africa’s migrant labor lived.

According to the wishes of South African authorities, migrant workers should keep their homes in the black homelands, and come alone to the cities to work. When they were no longer young, say in their late thirties, they should return to their homelands to live out the rest of their days. Because South Africa enforced tribal ownership of black land, prohibiting blacks from privately, buying, selling, and disposing of the “allocations” that tribes assign to families (see below), the officials assumed that they had a “place of return” in the homelands, and the city did not have to worry about what happened to them once their youth was spent. This meant that as long as they could ban them from illegitimate squatting, then everything would be fine. So the authorities built “dormitory towns” or “dormitory compounds” at the edges of the “white cities,” and set up commuter traffic between the dormitory areas and the work zones.

Western journalists found the living environment of these single young workers was like “something between a jail and a British boarding school.” The white cities kept their reputation of being “without slums.” Everywhere were skyscrapers, parks and gardens, beautiful architecture, everything planned and orderly, stately and secure, with nothing like New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. Cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town were known as "the most beautiful cities in the southern hemisphere." Apologists for apartheid trumpeted their pride in this “orderly urbanization,” and often sneered at those countries who urged them to end apartheid (especially the United States, with its large black population), arguing that Detroit and Chicago were full of dangerous slums because blacks had been allowed to pour into the cities, proving that America’s “disorderly urbanization” was a failure.

Although Western journalists condemned the black dormitory areas on the margins of the white cities, if truth be told, the conditions in many of these dormitories were no worse than what we find in the “sheds” where migrant workers live together in Chinese cities, and in purely architectural terms they are better than many of the shantytowns built by South African black workers. In addition, commuting from the shantytowns was often inconvenient, and not as developed as in the dormitory areas. Yet South African blacks all felt that it was better to live together with other family members in a black shantytown than to live as single male migrant workers in concentrated dormitories.

At the end of the apartheid period, the two even became important social divisions. At the time, most of the Xhosa laborers, who made up a large percentage of black labor and had been in the cities for some time, were settled in the slums, while the Zulu workers, who had a shorter history in the cities, were mostly single workers living in collective dormitories. During the period of political transition in South Africa, cities such as Johannesburg experienced many bloody conflicts between black workers, especially between Xhosa and Zulu laborers. At the time, they were generally referred to as “tribal conflicts,” but other factors, including white provocations and party disputes, also played a role. At the same time, many researchers found that the main issue was differences in social status. The single Zulu single workers felt that the Xhosa families looked down on them.  The primary difference between collective dormitories and the slum communities was that those living in the former could not construct family lives.

During protests by South African blacks, slogans condemned this system for having “destroyed the family” and “destroyed the children,” and an ANC publication pointed out that almost all migrants are “separated from the family for a long time,” and that “for young and sexually active couples, long-term separation will lead to family breakdown.” Many migrant workers for this reason “have never formed a family.” This system created a serious ethical crisis: “It leads to illegitimate children, bigamy, prostitution, homosexuality and alcoholism; it undermines the protection of parents (of their children), and leads to malnutrition, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.” In economic terms, family separation and the frequent back and forth of “migration” increased the cost of living and reduced the quality of life.

At the same time, military-style collective dormitory areas discouraged commerce, and there were few informal employment opportunities such as street vending. Apart from working in white enterprises, there was no way to make a living, and nowhere to live. This further reduced the possibility of bargaining between labor and enterprises, and reduced the wages of those living in the dormitories when compared to those living in the shantytowns.

All of this made people feel that collective dormitories were worse than slums. Hence migrant workers continually struggled for a place to set up their families. South African authorities were not about to provide them with cheap public housing, and even less allow them to erect shantytowns in the white cities, which would disturb their peace and destroy their aesthetics. So after a long-term debate over whether to “clean up” the slums, South African authorities finally decided on the option of a “city outside the city” where blacks could establish their families. The model for this was Soweto, the “black township” close to Johannesburg.

Beginning around 1910, the shanties and cheap rental housing occupied by blacks in the Johannesburg region began to increase gradually, which created conflicts with the authorities’ “city management” measures. In order to maintain the “image” of the “most beautiful city in the Southern hemisphere,” the authorities, even as they condemned black family shantytowns in Johannesburg as “illegal constructions” and ordered their forced removal, in 1930 carved out the Western Areas where blacks were allowed to rebuild their huts, in what was then the Western suburbs of Johannesburg.

At the outset, the Western Areas were completely the product of the will of the authorities, and at any moment, whites could use the PISA (Prohibition of Illegal Squatting Act) to “remove illegal construction,” “abolish the slums” and kick the blacks out. Following the rapid expansion of the city of Johannesburg, the Western Areas as originally allocated became an obstacle to the growth of the white city some ten years later. In order to expand the city and develop the real estate market in the Western Areas, the blacks would have to be removed to a more distant suburb. Hence, in 1945, the authorities abolished the Western Areas and set up the “Southwestern Township” in the southwestern suburbs for black workers. This was some twenty kilometers from the center of Johannesburg; in Beijing terms, this would be like moving the blacks from beyond the second ring road to beyond the fourth ring road.

“Soweto” is the abbreviation for “South Western Township.” Many blacks had another explanation for the abbreviation, which was that Soweto meant “so where to?” because whites wouldn’t let blacks go anywhere else. This is the origin of the typically South African “apartheid slum” that was universally condemned. Clearly, the reason that this arrangement was universally condemned is not because blacks were allowed to settle there, but because they were not allowed to settle anywhere else. Some people in China argue that South Africa’s greatest crime is allowing Soweto to exist, meaning that China has done something great in preventing the emergence of such sites. This is seeing things upside down.

In fact, at the outset Soweto was created by the authorities as a “collective dormitory area,” but since blacks insisted on “building their own,” whites decided to no longer “clean up” this area in which they did not live. Later on, people built simple homes to rent to blacks, and Soweto grew to be a sprawling slum with three types of residences: collective dormitories, self-built huts, and simple rental units. Each of these three served in turn as the main form of residence in Soweto as apartheid evolved from the early period to the end. Collective dormitories were most important at the outset, followed by self-built huts, and finally cheap rental units.

The terrible conditions of Soweto under apartheid were known throughout the world. Run-down housing as far as the eye could see, a population of more than two million by 1980, much greater than the rest of Johannesburg, rudimentary public services, poor public safety, social unrest…The crime rate was extremely high, and all of the events that sparked the black resistance struggle began here, the “cradle of the revolution” of the black liberation movement. Yet the neighboring white city of Johannesburg was prettier than European and American cities because it “didn’t have slums,” and the contrast between “the paradise of Johannesburg and the hell of Soweto” was painfully obvious.

After the abolition of apartheid, the South African workers of the democratic South Africa earned the right of free abode, and the collective dormitories are now mostly occupied by foreign workers. The self-built huts and the cheap rental units have gradually been replaced by the cheap public housing of the new South African welfare state. At the same time, the new government subsidizes and encourages blacks to buy and build houses, which means that more and more blacks have their own proper homes.

As market competition has been extended to blacks in the period following democratization, economic divisions have begun to appear among blacks, who were once universally poor. A black bourgeoisie has arisen, and luxury housing for bourgeois and rich blacks has appeared in Soweto. At the same time, basic city services such as electricity, water, communications and medical care have clearly improved, and there are many stadiums and schools. A painting on a city wall proclaims “Soweto Uplifting!” Today’s Soweto has already evolved from what was once a pure slum to a normal city where rich and poor live together. So Soweto now means “so where to?” as in “so where to? Soweto, of course!”

But from another perspective, after the abolition of apartheid, Johannesburg is no longer a “white people’s paradise.” After large numbers of blacks moved into Johannesburg with the end of the strict “city management policies” that had targeted them, the problems of slums, homelessness, and squalor have increased considerably. Even more serious is that the security situation in Johannesburg has steadily declined since democratization. Some people call this the “Detroit phenomenon:” as public security declines and the inner city loses its luster, the rich and the big companies hasten to move to the suburbs, where there appear all sorts of luxury areas…

Compared with the apartheid era, today’s Johannesburg looks a lot more like “Latin America” (it is often said that a characteristic of Latin American cities is that they have a lot of slums), but this is not Latin Americanization in our sense, because Latin America did not emerge from a background of apartheid. South Africa’s problems should be discussed in the context of a comparison with developed, democratic welfare states.

No matter how bad Latin Americanization gets, no one envies the “orderly urbanization” of the old South Africa. South America’s current problems should be seen as the “labor pains” of the abolition of apartheid. During apartheid, South America’s cities were very clean, and public safety was excellent, but all of this is against a backdrop of apartheid. I propose that we call this “pre-Latin Americanization,” in the sense that Johannesburg was a privileged, “beautiful city” built on a foundation of the lack of freedom of movement.

So behind this beauty was the deprivation of the human rights of the blacks, which means that it was even more backward than Latin America. And while there was a time during the democratic period after the abolition of apartheid when there were problems with city management—let’s call this Latin Americanization—compared with the “pre-Latin Americanized” “beautiful city,” this was a sign of progress. The consensus in South Africa today is that problems of urban management are problems encountered in the course of progress. These problems must be resolved, but there is no question of returning to the “pre-Latin America” situation, and even if South African cities at the time were clean and “orderly,” for the black majority these were not their cities, and there was nothing to be proud of.

In fact, even before democratization, following the rise and fall of apartheid, the attitude of the authorities toward “slums” evolved. Soweto’s appearance in the “Southern Areas” was also the result of apartheid’s depriving blacks of freedom of movement and residence, and was condemned as such throughout the world. But with the rise of the black rights movement, the authorities could no longer do as they had done fifty years earlier and move blacks from beyond the second ring road to beyond the fourth ring road; they could not ask them to move further away. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Johannesburg had expanded yet again, and almost all of its satellite white communities were surrounded by Soweto, but blacks’ residence rights in Soweto could not be taken away, and the authorities could not move them to beyond the fifth ring road.

In fact, setting aside questions of “real estate development” and “beautiful cities,” Soweto had already become the center of black resistance organization and activities. So why did the white government not think about abolishing Soweto just as they had abolished the Southern Areas, solely for political reasons? Because they couldn’t do it.

But China can still do it! This what I’ll discuss below, and I’ll start by answering the question “where do China’s migrant workers live?”
　　
The Miracle” of Cities without Ghettos” (2): China's "Dormitory Labor System”
　　
Poor people cannot afford to buy (or rent) regular private housing. This is true the world over. Like South Africa, China’s city governments will not provide temporary residents with cheap public housing or with housing benefits (subsidies). In the past few years, some cities hoping to resolve the problem of “those with middle and low income” forcibly took land from the peasants and built acres of “cheap mansions 廉价豪宅,” also called “affordable housing,” that poor people can’t afford and that rich people take advantage of.

Some people even went so far as brag about the luck they had in ripping off poor people, saying “It was pure luck that Tiantongyuan 天通苑[14] didn’t become a huge slum.” “If Tiantongyuan had really been built the way poor people wanted, then the whole thing would have been tiny units of less than 80 square meters, all of which would have been sold to low-income poor households, which would have been a huge slum of 100,000 people,” which would have created all sorts of problems. Some people even oppose lowering the standard or the price of any private dwelling, saying, “be careful or you’ll turn middle and low-cost housing into a slum!”

So it turns out to be “right” to cheat the poor, and if we must be vigilant when housing prices fall to the point that poor folks can afford them, then how can we talk about public housing? We should immediately point out that these “poor households” that are being cheated are not migrant workers, because the policy clearly states that these “middle and low income” buyers must have a Beijing residence permit. In other words, migrant workers don’t yet have the right to be cheated, or the authorities can’t be bothered to cheat them, because they should never dream of receiving the slightest welfare benefits.

And for the “temporary residents” that have to slap together their own cheap housing, there are many fewer possibilities than in the majority of democratic countries. Professor Yao Yang recently repeated the idea that when poor people come to the cities and build slums, it is an infringement on property rights. Yet “slums” are frequently identified as a “crime of capitalism,” a sin of which my country should be innocent. So, following Yao Yang, if “capitalism” allows poor people to “infringe on property rights,” then “socialist” China, which finally produced a completely muddled “property law”[15] after endless hemming and hawing, is much better at keeping poor people from “infringing on property” than capitalism!

We should admit that what Yao Yang says is not totally false in many democratic countries: although these countries protect property rights, they also pay attention to poor people’s votes, and do not elevate “absolute property rights” above the right to existence of poor people, and hence they often turn a blind eye to poor people who build their own shacks on “empty land.” The practice is formally banned, but they don’t employ the iron fist of “city management” like we do in China.

In the words of one scholar, “In those countries, local governments are quite accommodating to migrant groups and illegal land occupation.” China and pre-democratic South Africa did not see such people as “voters,” and hence were not “accommodating” to migrant workers. Hence both countries have “beautiful city” policies which “welcome ‘luxury’ and prohibit ‘slums.’” But if we compare the two, South Africa after all had a place like Soweto where the huts were permitted to exist, while China doesn’t even have this “loophole.” “China’s cities do not permit the mobile population to congregate or to build their own sheds,” and for this reason “informal housing (such as sheds) is unavailable to the mobile population, a situation which is different from that of many developing countries,” and somewhat different from South Africa as well.

If neither cheap public housing nor do-it-yourself sheds are a possibility, the remaining options are: cheap private rentals or abandoning the idea of family living, and residing in a collective dormitory “public hut.” In South Africa, places like Soweto had many cheap private apartments, which the authorities basically left alone. In the “white cities” there was also a small number of cheap apartments that could be rented to blacks, but this was unstable, because the authorities often intervened to “clean up.” But taken together, the two came to be the most common options for South African black workers. And with the addition of self-built shacks, most black workers were able to build a family life in the city.

Even if in the imagination of the authorities, these were meant to be “migrants,” in fact, by the end of the apartheid period, in the greater Johannesburg area, only 21% of blacks were living in collective dormitories (as already mentioned, most of these were Zulus who had not been in the city for very long). One might say that black progress in gaining a residential foothold in the cities was attained as part of the black struggle for rights.

In China, because building your own simple dwelling is impossible, and because a place like Soweto (where authorities finally allowed workers to live in community, even if was a place of exclusion) does not exist, migrant workers have two unstable options in terms of private rentals, which includes sheds: one is in former villages that have been urbanized, and the other is on what is called the “urban-rural fringe 城乡结合部” in the suburbs. Yet neither of these has earned the “legitimacy” that Soweto did, and Chinese migrant workers face the same dangers as those of blacks living in the “white cities” of being periodically “cleaned up” by the authorities. For this reason, the number of Chinese migrant workers who can live in private rental spaces is necessarily fewer than in South Africa, and those living as “tenants in public huts” many more.

According to statistics compiled by one scholar, in 2000, 57% of the migrant population in China lived in collective housing. According to another scholar, in the same year, 45.34% of the “outside population” in Beijing “lived in collective dormitories, on the work site or in sheds, while 11.38% lived in ‘other’’ (including being homeless, living with friends or relatives, working as an au pair and living in the family home, or in a “detention center”); only 39.59% were renting, and a meager 0.69% had purchased housing (clearly, home-buyers were mostly “peasant entrepreneurs” and “Shanxi coal mine owners” and the like); and 3.1% had built their own homes (most of these were simple structures on rented land in the suburbs, which we might think of as scattered, illegal “little Sowetos”).

In Shanghai, China’s biggest city, 53.5% of outside workers lived in collective dormitories or shacks in 2003, and most of the remaining 46.5% rented, mostly in private rural housing in the suburbs. What is intriguing is that Shanghai regulations stipulated that for a private rental to be “legal” it had to contain at least 7 square meters, and “having a legally fixed place of residence in the city” is the necessary condition for applying for the Shanghai Temporary Residence Permit. Yet 46.8% of the spaces rented by Shanghai’s migrant workers did not meet the “legal” standard. This meant that while only a small percentage of the workers were able to find rental housing, almost half of those who could were living in “illegal” spaces. In other words, in theory they could be expelled for the quality of their living spaces, instead of obtaining aid for the same problem!

In other countries, poor housing conditions can elicit sympathy (if benefits are unavailable, you might at least be allowed to move, or even to a certain extent to “infringe on property rights”), but in China and South Africa, your poor housing conditions might lead people to despise you. In South Africa your family might be required to move to Soweto, while in China even Soweto is “illegal.” Other than giving up family life and living in a “collective dorm,” where do you go？ (sowhereto?！--but no Soweto.）This is where the “miracle” of “China has no slums” came from. No wonder people are screaming that "The control of slums should not come at the expense of social justice!"

So there you have it: South African cities “have no slums,” but there is Soweto in the suburbs, and China’s cities “have no slums,” only collective dormitories. In June of 2007, an Indian journalist with a great deal of sympathy for the slums of his own country asked the vice-mayor of Chongqing: Does Chongqing have slums? He answered: “We will never have slums.” And the most important reason that he gave was: China’s peasants are used to “being amphibious,” and like to come into the cities alone while leaving the family in the village. They are not like Indian peasants who want to bring their families into the cities and live with them there! As already noted, this is how South African authorities thought at the beginning. But the blacks were disobedient, and by the end, with the exception of a small number of Zulu workers whose situation was desperate, all the blacks had moved their families to the cities. Most of China’s migrant workers, however, are like the Zulu workers at the end of the apartheid period (or like foreign workers after democratization) and are still living in dormitories.

Of course, there are differences between the “dormitory labor” in China and in South Africa, the largest of which is: most of the collective dorms in South Africa were built in the same style by the government or by companies bidding on government contracts, and became “dormitory towns” or “dormitory compounds” whose standards were fairly uniform. They were fairly distant from work places and had specially planned transport linking home to work. Collective dormitories in China are all built by the renter, and are in no way unified. Some are not so bad, but there are sheds with awful conditions everywhere. Because they are built by the enterprises, they are close to the work place, and no transport is necessary.

Some Chinese workers face a particularly awful condition, that of having no dormitory at all, and sleeping on the work site. Many small enterprises, and especially retail shops or restaurants, have the workers sleep in the work spaces, and those involved in construction or renovation have the workers sleep in the homes they are working on. In South Africa this was impossible, not of course out of humanitarian considerations, but because according to the regulations of South African apartheid, blacks could only work in “white areas,” and not live there, so black labor had to have another place to live.

But in China, aside from a few rural towns that built dormitories and rented them to enterprises in order to “attract investment,” among large cities, only Shenzhen, which had a particularly large number of migrant workers, hired contractors in the 1990s to build a large, multi-enterprise “residential area for outside workers.” The Shenzhen area looked a lot like the “dormitory towns” in South Africa. And when the Shenzhen complex was replaced in the new century, the move was resisted by the residents (see below), indicating that their other options were not as attractive.

The Chinese scholars Ren Yan 任焰 and Pun Ngai 潘毅 (b. 1970) once called this phenomenon the “dormitory labor system.” What is funny is that when their study was published in English, the term used, “dormitory labor,” was the same as that originally used in South Africa, but the system is much more common in China today than in South Africa. In South Africa, the inferior conditions in the slums were often reported in the media, but journalists were not allowed in the collective dorms, so no one knew about the inferior conditions there. China is of course the same on this front. In Pun Ngai’s description, the “dormitory labor system” places workers within a system of control like that of a military camp, so that control of the worker extends from labor through all of daily life, and the strict discipline of “dormitory management” places the workers under a “Foucault-ist panopticon,” leaving no personal space. The collective sheds are guarded, and outsiders are not allowed to enter; it goes without saying that residents work during the day, and at night must return before a specific time, and they have few occasions to go out.

We should note that the “collective sheds” in China’s large cities have made progress; in the 1990s, in Shenzhen and other places, “locked-down collective sheds 拘禁式工棚” were popular, but when there were fires and people could not get out because the doors were locked, many women burned to death in the tragedies. Today, with the exception of news stories about “kiln slaves 窑奴” in mountain mines and rural industries, this kind of collective shed should no longer exist in the big cities with well-developed systems of information. Of course, Pun Ngai also noted another feature of the “dormitory labor system:” the fact that the workers live together is a condition encouraging the development of collective resistance. This was true in South Africa as well. This is surely one reason explaining why the authorities did not oppose the trend toward family living toward the end of the apartheid system. But because China’s restrictions on autonomous labor unions are much worse than in South Africa, the authorities do not seem terribly concerned.

The suffering that the “collective shed phenomenon 工棚现象” has brought to China’s migrant workers is no less than that of South Africa’s “dormitory labor.” In Chongqing, where the vice-mayor declared that China’s migrant workers like to be “amphibious,” a 2007 study found that 5% of male migrant workers admitted to having sought out prostitutes 小姐. In a different survey of workers away from home for long periods, 21% of men said they searched out prostitutes, 18% said they suffered from insomnia, 18% said they drank to numb the pain, and 25% said they watched pornographic videos or told dirty jokes; 19% of women migrant workers said they worked hard to relieve the tension and 5% said they simply “took it.” The survey also revealed that for married couples living apart for long periods, 25% of the men and 33% of the women said they could not sleep, and 39% of the men and 55% of the women said that they called home to get through the night. The survey noted that “sexual repression has become a major pain in the emotional life of migrant workers,” and that many crimes are related to this.

Even more serious is that the phenomenon of “amphibious people” has created the disaster and the ethical crisis of the “left-over” people in the countryside. In April of 2008, the media reported that a drifter in a village in Zhengxiong 镇雄 county, Yunnan, “took possession of” 轻易霸占 ten left-behind women in the village, and as a result was beaten to death by the migrant workers who rushed back to the village. The man was ugly, poor and powerless, but he still managed to pull off the stunt, which is why it was news. Would anyone notice if someone “better” did this? In addition, in recent years there have been endless reports about the rapid “aging” of rural villages, about the strangely high suicide rates of rural women and about the family crisis. Even more worrisome is that the Beijing Genomics Judicial Evidence Investigation Center 北京基因组司法物证鉴定中心 of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005 carried out some 3000 paternity investigations, and discovered that 22.6% of the children were not the result of the union of the legal parents. In the rural areas, non-parental cases were almost 50%, which was “somewhat alarming.” This is not a general sample, and neither the urban nor the rural percentages necessarily reflect social realities, but the difference between the urban and rural findings, especially in the context of more general reports about the crisis in rural families, suggests the seriousness of the problem.

In economic terms, the problems of China’s “dormitory labor” are also more serious than in South Africa. Both China and South Africa regard migrant laborers as “having something to fall back on,” and do not acknowledge that they might have problems of unemployment; they see them as regulators that optimize the city's economy and pressure relief valves that circumvent economic crises. When the economy is booming they bring them in to work, but in times of crisis they send them back to the countryside; the young and strong can sell their labor in town, but when they are old and frail they can return to the land for their declining years.

The state avoids the “burden” of social insurance, and since when the migrants are in the city they live in carefully managed “military camps,” they don’t “trouble” elite society. Many people think of this as China’s unique "advantage." But this "advantage" can only be achieved by keeping the "dormitory labor" system. Since most of black labor in South Africa now lives in a family situation, this “advantage” now exists in its purist form only in China.

Sure enough, after the economic crisis of 2008, there occurred a great wave of migrant workers returning to the villages in China. Since it was assumed that workers could fall back on working the land, arrangements for their dismissal were sloppy: no advance notice, no buffer period, no severance pay, sometimes wages were not paid. The “social security” of the migrant workers was also invalidated. If they did not “surrender” these sums, they would lose the wages that had been withheld. Under normal circumstances, China’s “dormitory workers” are also in a worse position than other migrant workers who rent. Not only can they not have a normal family life, they also sacrifice their bargaining power on the labor market. Since once they leave the company they have nowhere to live, they cannot “wait for the highest bidder” or “choose among various offers,” and instead can only choose between remaining in the enterprise on any condition and leaving the city to return to the village.

Of course, in both South Africa and China, the trend toward family living among migrant labor is irresistible. This is especially because this trend is self-reinforcing: as long as the first families produce a new generation, they will never accept their status as “inferiors” in the city and will fight even harder for their rights. On this front, China is simply a few steps behind South Africa. Because places like Soweto where large black communities could live together were accepted by South African authorities, the national education system eventually spread to such areas. Even if the financial investment could not be compared to that in white education, and to a great degree what was taught was “slave education” that served the needs of the white ruling class, it nonetheless cultivated the minds of those who dug the grave of the apartheid system. As the leftist South African scholar Hein Marais (b. 1962) pointed out: "Soweto's children" are generally more educated and less able to accept apartheid than the elderly.” This is an important reason why the system could not be maintained.

However, not only is there a universally acknowledged urban-rural inequality in China’s public investment in education, but because the state does not acknowledge the communities of temporary residents in the cities, “the children of migrant workers” has long been a neglected question in the national education system. Although there have been changes on this front over the past few years, “discrimination against migrant workers” continues to translate into educational discrimination. Because the long implemented one-child policy has brought about changes in the demographic structure of those with urban residence permits, the middle and elementary schools that serve this population have excess capacity, and current policy trends are to transfer this surplus to the children of migrant workers. However, these schools are far away from the “scattered Sowetos” where these children live, and if migrant workers are not allowed to move closer, or the schools moved to the scattered Sowetos, then the children of migrant workers will have a hard time going to school.

Moreover, residence permits play an important role in the examinations that are at the heart of the Chinese educational system. For this reason, the problem of education for the children of migrant workers in China is far more serious than for South African blacks in Soweto, and is similar to that of the children of foreign workers in South Africa. In any event, the children of migrant workers in China continue to grow up, just as did the “children of Soweto,” and will become important factors contributing to the destruction of the system of status barriers.

How South Africa and China ‘Got Rid of Ghettos:’ The Sophiatown Incident and Shenzhen’s Great “Clean-Up’”　

As early as the nineteenth century, Proudhon’s theory that slums were the “sin of capitalism” was rejected by Engels, who pointed out that the poor “generally live in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings.” This “is not something peculiar to the present [i.e., capitalism]; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it.”[16] Clearly, Engels believed that “slums” were not unique to “capitalism.”

If that is the case, then what would be the housing problem that is truly unique to “modernity,” or to capitalism? The fact that “slums” are destroyed to fulfill the needs of the social elite, so that even the “already terrible living conditions” of the urban poor are also taken away from them! This is how Engels put it: “The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and often colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value, instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers’ houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected… But the spirit of Haussmann has also been abroad in London, Manchester and Liverpool, and seems to feel itself just as much at home in Berlin and Vienna. The result is that the workers are forced out of the centre of the towns towards the outskirts; that workers’ dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable, for under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive houses, builds workers’ dwellings only by way of exception.”[17]

Engels used the contemporary example of Baron Haussmann’s “great destruction” of the slums to build the “beautiful Paris,” and plaintively noted that: “Through its Haussmann in Paris, Bonapartism exploited this tendency tremendously for swindling and private enrichment.”[18] Engels insisted that this phenomenon was not confined to Paris, and instead was commonly practiced in all “modern” countries.

This conclusion is slightly mistaken; in fact, in market economies under democratic politics, the classical “Haussmann phenomenon” rarely occurs. And this is why, in many such countries, poor areas have continued to exist in the central cities (this is what white South Africans ridiculed as “disorderly urbanization”). The Haussmann phenomenon in France was instead the result of the destruction, by Bonapartism’s Second Republic, of the norms of republican democracy. In fact, it was exceptional even for France. After the collapse of the Second Republic, France continued to carry out urban reform through agreed upon demolition, but never again used the iron fist of “great destruction” against the poor.

Clearly, this kind of “slum removal” is not a general rule of capitalism, but rather a general rule of “primitive accumulation” under the politics of dictatorship. China and pre-democratic South Africa are classic examples of countries who can carry out such practices in the present day.

As already discussed, the struggle for residence rights among the “mobile population” is an irresistible wave in both South Africa and China. But in circumstances where there is no public housing and where private housing is not affordable, housing for the poor, whether they build it themselves or rent, will not be “elegant.” The shanties they build themselves and the cheap rentals they inhabit are both generally seen as “slums.” In recent years, some commentators in China have recognized the inhumanity of slum removal in a situation where the state does not guarantee housing, and argue as well that “slum” is an unpleasant word; they have proposed that they be called “popular areas 平民区,” “harmonious areas 和谐社区,” or even “areas awaiting prosperity 待富区.”

It is true that “slum” is an unpleasant word, but it has no sense of “violating property rights.” I have already pointed out that the original meaning of slum was “small alleys facing away from the streets,” and later on when the meaning evolved to that of slums, it usually meant legal residences of poor families. The United Nations Human Settlements Program defines slums as family housing of great density, without running water, and without toilets. According to this standard, in 2000, as much as 39% of China’s urban population [i.e., those with residence permits for cities and townships] was living in “slums.”

Because the percentage of the mobile population with “family residence permits” is lower (dormitories have historically not been seen as slums), the percentage of migrant workers living is slums is lower than that of the urban population as a whole. In most countries, the very idea of slums leads people to sympathize with the poor and to demand that the government do its utmost to lend assistance. To say that slums are “detrimental to the state’s (really, the officials’)” reputation makes some sense, but to say that slums are detrimental to the poor makes none. Surely “routing the enemy 犁庭扫穴” by destroying the homes and chasing out the people out of the ghettos will not help the poor!

Conditions are the opposite in South Africa and China, where both states deny the existence of “slums.” But there are terms like “illegal occupant 违法擅占” (South Africa) or “illegal building 违章建筑” (China), which recall Yao Yang’s having chastised the poor for “violating property rights.” But the word “slum,” as already mentioned, means neither “illegal occupant” nor “illegal construction.” English usually uses another word, “squatter,” to refer to those who “illegally occupy land or build without permission.” Yao Yang, like the authorities in China and South Africa, clearly demeans the poor he wants to kick out by calling them squatters, which gives permission to use the iron fist of the “city management officers 城管” to deal with them.

As I’ve argued above, while the idea of a “squatter” makes some sense in democratic countries that are somewhat “lenient” toward poor people who build their own homes, in countries like China and South Africa, phenomena linked to the problems of “Latin Americanization,” like the “poor people’s enclosure movement 穷人的圈地运动,” or “developers must make way for the poor 开发商为穷人让路” simply cannot exist. In fact, the poor urban areas of either of the two countries could well be called “slums” (the residences of individual households 个别户 are another matter), but there is no way that there are squatters.

In South Africa, the blacks who live in Soweto have of course been acknowledged by the authorities, as one of the few black communities within “white cities” to have been “cleaned up.” Sophiatown, the township in Johannesburg, as well as the Number Six area in Capetown, were also built by white developers. Sophiatown, located four kilometers from the center of Johannesburg, was originally built by a real estate company that erected a number of low-standard homes there for “poor whites.” The municipal authorities subsequently decided they were “sub-standard,” and inappropriate for whites, so they refused to provide municipal services. For this reason, the poor whites were lodged elsewhere. Trying to avoid a loss, the real estate company sold (or rented) the houses to black temporary workers, and the area wound up being a black slum with a population of 50,000. This was clearly the result of a genuine transaction, and had nothing to do with “squatting.”

But China doesn’t even have a Soweto, and it’s all the more impossible that “migrant workers” “illegally occupy” an area. If they don’t live in a dormitory and seek out their own homes, then they usually rent, whether in Beijing’s “Zhejiang (or Anhui) Village,” or Shenzhen’s “relocation area,” or the “city villages” found all over China, they all rent. There are in fact shantytowns in China’s big cities, and in architectural terms they are clearly “slums.” But usually these huts are built by people with urban residence permits, and the workers only rent them. Sometimes the urban residence holders go ahead and rent the land to the outsiders, and let them build while they take the money, but they are still renting and not “illegally occupying.” Sometimes the unexpected happens in India or Latin America, when poor people occupy “empty land” and later on are recognized as “owners,” but could such a thing ever occur to a “disadvantaged group” in South Africa or China?

But if a powerful person says that you are “illegally occupying” something then you are. So in China and in the past version of South Africa, we can find plenty of cases of “property violations,” but it was never the case that “slums violated property rights,” but precisely the opposite—the violation was of the property rights of the poor slum-dwellers. Let’s look at two examples.

In the case of Sophiatown, mentioned above, blacks had lived there peacefully and without incident for years when in 1950, the South African authorities decided they wanted to develop the property, and announced that they were going to “clean up the slums.” Due to the opposition of the African Congress, the demolition plan was delayed until 1953, when the black people were to be newly “relocated” to a location 13 miles from the city. Because of black resistance, opposition to the demolition was strong, and things dragged on for two more years.

On February 9, 1955, the government finally sent in several thousand police to carry out the demolition, and the African Congress mobilized the resistance around the slogan “over my dead body,” but after a few more weeks of struggle, the government won.    At the time, this incident aroused international public opinion, and everyone rushed to condemn the violence. There also appeared literary works based on the subject, such as the well-known progressive South African film “Drum.”

The justification South African authorities gave for their actions was that Sophiatown was a problematic slum. But in the eyes of public opinion, this did not justify the government’s behavior. As the American writer Huddleston[19] put it: “Sophiatown in the past was definitely a slum, something that no one who lived there would deny. But slum reform does not mean confiscating the entire property of an area.” Following the authorities’ self-satisfied declaration of “victory,” the New York Times published an editorial that pointed out that the official reports “read like those of a police state, and leave the reader greatly disturbed.” On the ruins of Sophiatown was built a new white city, named Triomp (Victory), which, in the angry words of Bishop Desmund Tutu, “rubbed salt in our wounds.”

In addition to the Sofiatown incident, there were several other instances of “slum removal,” such as in 1960, when the Botha government used strong-arm tactics to destroy the District Six area in Capetown where black temporary workers lived. This type of behavior left behind long-lasting historical scars. There is a mural on the former site of Sophiatown called “Expulsion,” and District Six in Capetown has a memorial whose inscription reads: “To all respected visitors: Please remember the thousands of people who lived in District Six over the generations, and who were chased from their homes solely because of [the color of] their skin; please remember St. Mark’s church and this community, who resisted the destruction of District Six!”

China’s slum removal is all the more cold-blooded, and its scope incomparably larger than in South Africa. Beijing’s clean-up of “Zhejiang village” and “Henan village” in the 1990s, the more recent clean-up of the “Petitioners’ Village,” as well as many cities’ recent removal of “city villages” where many migrant workers rent, are all examples of complete annihilation. The Shenzhen region, to take but one example, has in recent years carried out several “unprecedented clean-ups of illegal building behavior,” such as one instance in 2004, called “farewell to a million shanties,” which “according to official news was the equivalent of evicting a mid-sized city of one million.”

At its most impressive, the “removal proceeded at the frightening pace of more than 50,000 square meters per day. Throughout the area of the clean-up, the temporary shacks were razed to the ground, and the migrants who had lived there fled in all directions.” The city leadership announced: “We are using not only a comb, but a fine-toothed comb, to bring order to every corner of this city.” The clean-up affected areas “inside the pass” and outside, and they set fire to the remains of the removal for good measure, a practice they called “administrative burning!” In addition to destroying the shanties, the heartless “municipal management officers” took the carts and scales the migrants used to make a living, and destroyed the “private schools” attended by their children.

Despite all of this, there remained “slums” that slipped through the cracks. In 2007, I saw a number of dilapidated shacks in Shenzhen hidden among the longan trees on the slope of a hill outside a walled community of handsome rental houses. One of the occupants told me that he was from Lianjiang 廉江 County in Guangxi, and had been working in Shenzhen for twenty years. His family had moved back and forth and finally wound up here, a place not only without water and electricity, but which lacked even an address, so that when people back home wanted to get in touch, they called his relatives in the city, and they contacted him. When I tried to take a photograph of his shack he looked a little frightened. I said that if his situation were known, he might get some help. He said that if the situation were known, they might have to move again and they had nowhere else to go…

The local government justified their actions as follows. First, they argued that “city villages” are slums, and in the case of slum removal, compensation should be provided, but shanties in the suburbs are occupied by squatters, and the buildings are to be destroyed without compensation. In fact, neither claim makes much sense. First, in international terms, “illegal occupation” generally refers to the absence of a permit, and referring to anything that falls outside of municipal regulations as “illegal occupation” is too broad. In fact, most outside workers who rent or build shanties have the approval of base-level government, have signed a contract and pay rent. If something is against the law, then local governments are against the law, so why are they not punished instead of the renters?

As one scholar pointed out: the “illegal behavior” of the shanty dwellers has been ongoing sometimes for as much as twenty years. If the shacks were not razed in the past (because someone wanted the labor of the shanty-dweller), then this was a failure to act on the part of the administration. Is it reasonable that the consequences of this failure be borne by the renter? Moreover, while the rentals in the “urban villages” do not conform to city regulations, and while the quality of the housing differs from the suburban shanties and the rent is different, the process of renting is similar in both cases, so why is one a slum and the other a squatter? In fact, the compensation granted in the case of the “reform of urban villages” goes to the owner of the property, and the migrant renter is simply expulsed in both cases, so what’s the difference in terms of their treatment?

Their second argument is that while this was once permitted, there are new laws and regulations providing justification for their removal. Setting aside the question of whether it is justifiable to expel people based on “special executive orders 红头文件,” such measures in any event should be applied to future cases, and not made retroactive.

The third argument is that this kind of “clean-up” targets the landlords who are renting illegally.   The renters merely have to move. But this is even more contrived: The majority of expelled black residents of Sophiatown were renters. Does this mean that forcing them to move did not constitute expulsion?

The fourth argument is that “cleaning-up outsiders” has the support of the local population, which echoes the argument of the South African authorities: when “white cities” expel blacks it is surely with the support of the white urban residents.

Among all the reasons given, only one was worthy of sympathy: officials said that Shenzhen is the most accommodating city to migrant labor, which is why so many people flocked to Shenzhen. But little Shenzhen cannot absorb the poor people of the entire country. And it’s true. If we ask that Shenzhen accept shanty-dwellers while the rest of the country drives out its poor people, this lacks fairness. Is the conclusion that we should draw from this is that other places should be more accepting, so that Shenzhen could ratchet down the pressure? Or should Shenzhen, the only “safe haven,” be eliminated, so that the entire country expels the poor?

In fact, not only did they “clean up” the shantytown, they also carried out a “transformation of the urban village” which kicked out large numbers of migrant workers, and even in the “resettlement zone” specifically built for migrant workers, expulsion was carried out at the drop of a hat. When Shenzhen was growing rapidly, they employed vast amounts of migrant labor, and to avoid the emergence of slums in the city they build a resettlement zone on the outskirts of town, which in fact was Shenzhen’s Soweto. This was not only perfectly legal, but widely publicized. The Donggualing resettlement area 冬瓜岭安置区, for example, was established in the Donggualing area of Lianhua Mountain 莲花山 in Futian District 福田区 in 1992, with the approval of the Futian District Construction Bureau and the National Land and Resources Bureau, as a new temporary resettlement area.

Officials reported that the “Donggualing model” had successfully solved the problem of living arrangements for migrant workers, calling it a “cozy nest” or a “paradise” for migrant workers. People came from all over the country to observe and study the experiment. But once the city was built, the government suddenly changed its mind, and the migrant workers were viewed as surplus population. The government decided to build “welfare housing 福利房” for officials on the site (kicking out the poor to build “welfare housing” for officials is surely a classic example of “negative welfare 负福利”). Thus on May 27, 1998, the Shenzhen government issued document number 101, proclaiming that the “Fuzhou District Donggualing Resettlement Area is reallocated to the Municipal Housing Bureau as a welfare housing construction site.” Subsequently, on August 18 of the same year, “five functional departments carried out joint enforcement actions in the Donggualing resettlement area,” and having subdued those who resisted, destroyed 15,000 square feet of “illegal” housing and expelled 40,000 people. On September 11, the headline of the Shenzhen Commercial Journal 深圳商报 proclaimed, “There are no ‘nails’ that cannot be pulled out!”[20]

Compared to South Africa, China’s practices in expelling migrant labor include the following special characteristics. First, the scale is larger, and the measures more cruel. The Sophiatown incident, which expelled tens of thousands, shocked the world, but it is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands that were “cleaned up” in Shenzhen. It took several years to carry out the expulsion in Sophiatown, while Shenzhen took care of things in only four months. South Africa mobilized the police to move people out; Shenzhen invented “administrative burning.” The protests of those who were expelled from Sophiatown caught the world’s attention, resulting in movies and memorial plaques, while as the commentators noted, in the case of Shenzhen, the hundreds of thousands who were expelled had no organizational resources and were “reduced to silence.”

Second, in China there are no limits to the scale of the expulsion. In South Africa, after the abolition of the Western district and the construction of Soweto, or in other words, after the blacks were moved from the second ring road to the fourth ring road, they were not forced to move further away. The later cases of Sophiatown and District Six basically took place within the cities. The “resettlement zone” of Soweto was more or less left alone. But in Shenzhen the migrant workers were moved from the "village in the city" to the "resettlement area", and then to the "outer" village in Baoan County 宝安县. As soon as real estate developers cast their eye on a piece of land, the government trotted out its practice of "selling land to finance the government 卖地财政" and the migrant workers were “cleaned up” without negotiation.

Third, after destroying Sophiatown, South African authorities resettled the poor who had been evicted, building new homes for them in Meadowland, “outside the fourth ring road.” And some say that rents here were lower than they had been in Sophiatown. Of course, this in no way diminishes the damage done by the expulsion: when you move from the “second ring road” to the “fourth ring road” rents naturally go down. And transport costs and cost of living for the black population rose, while the quality of life surely suffered.

But in comparison, China’s “clean-up” as described above basically offered no new resettlement. Some people publically stated that the clean-up procedure was designed to get rid of 淘汰 “people unsuited to live in Shenzhen.” According to statistics, two-thirds of those who were expelled were forced to leave Shenzhen, and the remaining third was forced into a “guerilla war” posture. “Some people retreated to the valleys next to the gardens of Moon Bay, living among the lychee trees, while others built primitive shanties on the remains of the destruction.” These people were much worse off than those removed from Sophiatown!

Fourth, China is much more capricious. South African laws were bad laws, but they rarely changed overnight. The pass law was bad, but if you had a pass, they didn’t arrest you. In China, by contrast, just as those who possess the “three passes” remain subject to detention during “sensitive periods,” on the question of “cleaning up illegal construction” the authorities do whatever they please. Today they set up a “resettlement zone,” and tomorrow they call it illegal. They are always right no matter what.

No one has ever envied those who live in a slum. Nelson Mandela once described Alexandra, a black slum in Johannesburg, as follows: “The roads there are unpaved, and dirty, hungry, malnourished children run around half naked. The air is thick with smoke. Several households share a water faucet, and the stagnant water alongside the road emits a pungent stench. Because there is no electricity, Alexander is seen as a ‘black town'. It’s very dangerous to walk home at night....Terrible violence occurs constantly. Life is cheap here. There are frequent armed robberies and violent incidents in the night.”

No one could be satisfied with such a situation. But isn’t it even crueler to expel people from such poor areas instead of letting them be? For this reason, faced with the white authorities’ decision to “clean up the slums,” the black elite in South Africa always insisted on blacks’ rights to residence, and led the struggle to maintain those rights. As Mandela pointed out: “Although life in Alexandra is hell, it is also a place to get rich. It is one of very few places in South Africa where Africans can amass private property and manage their own wealth. Here, Africans do not have to bow their heads to white municipal authorities. Alexandra is fertile soil for hope, testimony to our people’s having broken through barriers so as to remain permanently in the city. To keep black people in the villages or in the mines, the white government argued that blacks are by nature village people, not suited to urban life. While there are many problems in Alexandra, it has debunked this shameless lie. Alexandra’s residents come from all African tribes, and have the political consciousness necessary for urban life. Urban life helps to break down the conflicts between tribes and peoples.”

It is time for us to hear these words!

“The People Cannot Sell Their Land, but the Officials Can ‘Enclose’ It: South Africa’s and China’s ‘Binary Land Systems’”
　　
Two components for rapid economic growth are manpower and land, and constraints on people and constraints on land are often similar. I do not believe that land, as a special kind of resource, can truly be “one hundred percent privatized,” and it is normal that constitutional democracies infringe occasionally on questions of land rights for the sake of public welfare. At the same time, the “boundary between public and private authority” is in this instance clear, and democratic systems ensure that “public authority” not be “privately used,” and that the “private rights” existing in free political systems (which of course includes the right to form or withdraw from a "collective" on the basis of freedom of association) not be confiscated. Only countries with “low human rights” manage land as a tool of “primitive accumulation,” imposing a coercive “collectivization” on the people in the form of an “enclosure movement,” achieving the goals of “selling land to finance the government” through “financial manipulation 空手套白狼.”

In the context of the South African land system, there was always a conflict between the British tradition and the Boer tradition. The system originally employed by the Boers in the seventeenth century combined state authority and rental concessions; in other words, after the state arbitrarily requisitioned native land, it “rented” these lands to the Boers on the basis of their distinct racial rights. This system completely ignored the land rights of the blacks, and was extremely helpful to the whites in their efforts to occupy black land. Together with the black slave system, it became the Boers’ main tool of primitive accumulation. Yet at the same time, it also muddled the question of property rights, and obstructed the development of capitalism.

After the British occupied the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century, they attempted to carry out land reform at the same time that they abolished slavery. In 1813, they announced the abolition of the absurd system of arbitrary land expropriation and ordered that state land no longer be rented out according to racial category, but instead sold at auction to the highest bidder in a public market. Once the land was auctioned off, it became private property, to be freely exchanged. This privatization in which “commerce replaced expropriation” mainly benefited British with capital, but if the privatizing logic that recognized money rather than status were to be extended downward, then blacks should be able to buy land, and the white government should no longer engage in expropriation.

For this reason, the Boers fiercely resisted the reform, which made it difficult to implement. In 1828, British colonial authorities further promulgated Decree number 50, “On the Improvement of the Conditions of the Hottentots and other Free Peoples of the Cape,” which stipulated that blacks could move freely and had the right to buy and possess land. This measure further enraged the Boers, many of whom decided to leave the Cape area and move to the north, where they established two Boer republics that threw off British rule, eventually sparking the Boer Wars.

Yet following the British victory in the wars, they abandoned land reform efforts in an effort to appease the Boers, and as a result, land policy in South Africa remained that of the pre-war Boer system. For example, the Glen Gray Act of 1894, drafted at a point when most of the good land had already been expropriated by the white government, hypocritically stipulated that under the regime of tribal allocation of black land, blacks would be subject to an “equal land rights system” that required each tribe to guarantee that each black family have its share of land, a share not exceeding ten acres, with no family possessing more than one share. Whites were not allowed to rent land to blacks.

After the establishment of the Federation of South Africa in 1910, the conflict between the British land system and the Boer land system persisted, and through the debate surrounding the land laws of 1913 and 1936, ultimately became a “binary land system:” within the framework of the “final realization of state ownership by South African whites,” the white community basically set up a system of privately owned land, in accord with the British tradition, which was adapted to the development of the market economy, while the system of family “allocation” imposed on the blacks by the tribal collectives, not only abolished blacks’ rights to purchase and possess land, which had formerly been granted to them by the British land reforms of 1813 and 1828, but also strictly prohibited exchange of land and rent tenancy between blacks and whites.

White farm owners could hire black labor, but could not rent land to blacks. The large number of whites who, through the processes of industrialization and urbanization, abandoned agriculture and moved to the cities could transfer their land to other whites, or they could transfer it to the state for development projects, but they could not sell the land to blacks. For the blacks, the authorities only acknowledged tribal land ownership, did not recognize private ownership by black families, and used the law to “limit individual land rights and the amount of land that an individual could possess.”

In addition, even as it guaranteed black tribal land, the state also allowed itself to expropriate these lands for development purposes. Whether it was black families without personal ownership rights in the lands they had been allocated, or black people living in autonomous homelands set up by the white state, neither could say “no” to the will of the white state.

The “binary structure” of this kind of land system brought the following advantages to the white authorities of South Africa. The authorities were able to tie the blacks to their tribal identities, in the sense that even those blacks who had worked in the cities for a long time were unable to obtain rights as urban dwellers, and at the same time because blacks had been allocated lands by their tribes, the authorities shifted all responsibility for black welfare to these groups. In the name of so-called “orderly urbanization,” when the economy was flourishing, blacks were allowed to come into the cities to sell their labor, while in times of downturn, blacks became “surplus” people in the cities, and authorities did their utmost to send them home to live on their tribal allocations, which meant transferring the cost of the economic crisis onto the blacks.

In addition, the white government, on the pretext of avoiding a situation where “blacks had no land,” hypocritically maintained the black tribal collective ownership system, yet the state did not hesitate to advance its own interests above those of the “collective,” and take advantage of the lack of recognition of privately owned black land to arbitrarily expropriate their land at cheap prices, evicting the blacks from one parcel of land after another. For this reason, while South Africa never had the problem of “land annexation” within the black population caused by the “free commerce in private property,” the problem of the white state’s “annexation” of black land was far more serious than in any country where “private holdings of land” existed. In 1936, when land relations in South Africa were finally established, blacks, who made up 78% of the population, had only 13% of the land, while the whites, who constituted 18% of the population (this includes the white-ruled “state") owned 87%.

In the absence of the globalized economy, this kind of land system would resemble that of the middle ages, and could not perform better than a liberalized land system. But the context of modern capitalism, the mobility of capital and technology turned South Africa into the model region of “enclosure movements” for the entire world. With the exception of reform-era China, there was probably no other place in the world where, as soon as an investment project won the approval of the government, land for the project could be obtained overnight, expropriation and demolition carried out at a low cost, and the original inhabitants expelled. Land, that could be taken at will and developed at cost, and black labor, which could be expelled on a whim, became South Africa’s two great “advantages” in the globalized race to “attract investment.”

Since there were no “nail houses” and because “transaction costs” were low, South Africa could be much more generous than democratic countries in terms of urbanization and infrastructure development. South African cities are magnificent, and infrastructure works impressive, even “ahead of the times.” As mentioned above, while all white South Africans own cars, most blacks are poor, which means that overall rates of car ownership are not high when compared with those of developed countries. However, highway construction in South Africa developed rapidly beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1980s, the scale of the highway system was second only to the United States and Germany, and superior to developed countries such as Britain, France, and Japan.

In today’s world, the country most similar to pre-democratic South Africa in terms of a binary land system is probably the China of the “miracle economy” period. Prior to the reforms, China relied on “collectivized people’s communes” to carry out “socialist primitive accumulation,” and after the reforms, although peasants could withdraw from the collectives, they could not withdraw from the system of “collectivized land rights,” and hence made an even greater contribution to “primitive capitalist accumulation.” The most salient characteristic of China’s land system at present is that “the people cannot sell their land, but the officials can ‘enclose’ it.” The government can, at a whim, expropriate the land, while the peasants cannot dispose of land that has been “allocated” to them. This is especially true when it comes to changing the use of the land.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, this situation produces what I call the “inchworm effect 尺蠖效应:”[21] if “protecting agricultural land” is the priority, then authorities will be unwilling to allow farmers to dispose of their land, but if they decide to expropriate they will continue to expropriate; and if “land protection is not necessary” becomes the priority, then government expropriations will be all the more out of hand, while the peasants will still not be allowed to sell their land. The most basic features of South Africa’s land system were also like this. Their blacks were China’s peasants, and their “tribal ownership system” is our coercive “collective ownership system.”

Of course, some people will say that when white South Africans decreed that blacks must maintain the “tribal ownership system” and prohibit the privatization of land, then this was merely a sinister move to steal black land. By contrast, when China’s government decrees that the peasants must maintain the “collective ownership system” and prohibits the privatization of land, their intentions are good, because they fear that the peasants will not know how to cherish their land and that an uncontrolled land market will produce “landless peasants.”

I’ve offered my best critique of this interpretation elsewhere: if you really believe that your concern for the peasants is greater than their concern for themselves, if you really believe that peasants are so short-sighted that they will shoot themselves in the foot, and if my argument that the peasants are not as stupid as you think does not convince you, then go ahead and control the ability of the peasants to sell their land on the premise that it might not be a good idea. But then might you not restore half of the peasants’ land rights and agree that if they don’t want to sell, then they don’t have to? If you can’t do this, which would put an end to the “enclosure movement,” then how can you keep worrying about “landless peasants?” And if you truly hope that peasants can increase their “collective bargaining power” in land matters, and worry that they will be cheated if they act individually, then the answer is even simpler: why not let them organize peasant associations? In fact, the logic of the system is far more important than any hidden “intention” on the part of authorities. In a system where there are no controls on the power of the government while the rights of the people are not acknowledged, even the best of intentions will lead to foreseeable outcomes.

This was made clear by the failure of the Tomlinson Reform (1955) in the process of establishing “black homelands” in South Africa. In fact, while South African authorities were masterful at carrying out the “enclosure movement,” in order to maintain the “mobile worker” system and prevent blacks from moving to the city in a “disorderly” manner, they nonetheless also hoped to tie blacks to small plots of allocated land so that they would not cut ties with the black homelands. To this end, the Tomlinson Commission, which was responsible for planning the construction of black homelands, carried out further reforms to strengthen land management in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition to diverting a certain number of blacks into local industrial projects in the homelands (meaning that blacks left the land but not the rural areas), the reforms also reallocated black agricultural land and specified land use. Agricultural land could not be used for grazing, grazing land could not be used to grow grain, and there was no question of changing the use designation of the land.

Wasn’t this all under the banner of preventing the blacks from “losing their land?” However, the blacks did not appreciate the initiative. Their freedom to use their land as they wished was further constrained and they were conscious of being cheated, so they resisted, and at one point, South Africa was on the verge of a “peasant uprising.” The final result was that the “reform” miscarried.

I should point out that the fact that blacks own only 13% of the land means that white expropriation of black land is a more serious problem in South Africa than in China. This is surely one result of three hundred years of racial oppression. Even after democratization, the problem remained serious in South Africa, and the democratic government of South Africa has had a difficult time resolving the land issue. In China, reform has been underway for only thirty years, but the frenzy of land expropriation began after 1992, or in other words has been underway for only slightly more than a decade, but there are already some 700,000,000 “peasants who have lost their land.” According to authoritative statistics, this number will reach 1,000,000,000 by 2020.

Obviously, the speed with which this has happened has been much greater than in South Africa. South Africa stole much land from blacks in the early period, mainly because in this agricultural era the Boers were developing their farms. China has no “urban agriculture 市民农场,” and state farms are not the mainstay of the agricultural sector, which meant that appropriation of farmland was limited in the past, and the “enclosure movement” was basically fueled by construction projects. But in recent years, forced enclosures in the name of “scale management” and “modern agriculture” have become very common, and thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of hectares have been given over to Chinese-style “Boer farms,” often making the news in surprising ways. For example, in Jiangxi’s “Jiangxiang Incident 蒋巷事件” in 2001, more than 50,000 mu were appropriated in one fell blow. And in 1998, Zhanhua’s “China-Australia Joint Fund Farming and Animal Husbandry Company 沾化“中澳合资金角农牧公司” appropriated an area of 150,000 mu in Shandong. Although the peasants protested and the media reported the protests, the projects were backed by powerful interests and the protests came to nothing.[22]

After industrialization, expropriation of agricultural land gradually stopped in South Africa, because there remained enough state-owned agricultural land expropriated in the past to meet the needs of construction projects. In addition, the authorities sought to avoid antagonizing the tribes further while implementing the so-called “Bantu Self-Government” program (1959).[23] Today, China’s expropriation of land for construction purposes is much greater than in South Africa, and many nasty events, like the Dingzhou incident or the Shanwei incident, occurred because of this.

In China, the notion of “peasants who have lost their land” has become harder to grasp, and many recent “enclosures” have been carried out through changes to the residence permit system in which “a township becomes a neighborhood, a village becomes a residence committee, peasants become city dwellers, and the land reverts to the state.” Once peasants become city dwellers, they are no longer peasants who have lost their land, but in fact, we have no idea if they find other jobs. So the scale of peasants who have lost their land may be larger than we think.

According to research performed outside of China, taking into account the inequality of land use between peasants who have lost their land and those who have not, as well as the development of “scale management” in the form of the “two field system 二田制” and the “companies incorporating rural families 公司加农户,”[24] by the 1990s, the GINI coefficient for peasants having lost their land reached 0.41, which was clearly higher than in Japan and South Korea. Some people even argue that prior to the agricultural adjustments of 1988, the GINI coefficient was 0.50, and after the adjustment was 0.47, which is the level noted in Taiwan, Egypt, and Algeria. The situation is surely worse now.

From another perspective, when we say that white South Africans expropriated “87% of the national total,” this includes state-owned land. Although much black land has been stolen, and the black share of the national total land area is low, still the amount of the land allocated to each black family (roughly 8 acres, or 49 mu) is much greater than the holdings of China’s peasants. Under the tribal allocation system, there are not many “landless blacks” working in agriculture, and the problems faced by blacks in the South African villages and peasants in China are basically the lack of land and the low efficiency of small-scale agriculture, which makes it hard to produce enough food to eat.

Some people argue that the reason for the emergence of urban slums in third-world countries like India, Latin America and the Philippines is because agriculture is privatized, and the free market in land creates “polarization,” pushing many “landless peasants” into the cities. Theorists from apartheid era South Africa, like the already mentioned Tomlinson, cited the same reason for forbidding the privatization of black-owned land. But the histories and practices of South Africa, China and the other countries discussed above don’t bear out this reading.

India and Latin America do indeed have problems of land concentration and landless peasants, among others. But these problems were created by historical seizures of land, and are not the result of “the privatization of the small peasant economy, the buying and selling of land, and polarization.” Moreover, in recent decades, land concentration in these countries has been diminishing, even in the absence of progressive reforms. The numbers of landless peasants in these countries was much greater in the past, yet city slums were far smaller than they are now. Clearly, as long as agriculture is relatively inefficient, peasants may develop the urge to move to the cities, regardless of the “ownership system” in place. And if the cities do not exclude them, the barriers to their entry are even lower, and those entering the cities will increase. The problems faced by India and Latin America are the following. If the speed of present economic growth cannot keep up, life in the cities will be no worse than it was in the countryside. If employment and salaries cannot rise quickly, and the state is unable to assure adequate welfare guarantees, then slums will become a lasting, and perhaps intensifying, “urban blight.” The fact that peasants who move to the city cannot immediately catch up with city dwellers, and for this reason have to dwell in slums, is a universal fact of urban life.

The reason there were no slums in the “white cities” of apartheid-era South Africa was not because they were successful in imposing “collective land ownership” on the blacks, but because they only allowed blacks to live in places like Soweto. And if China’s cities have no slums because of “collective land ownership,” then how should we view measures like “detention,” “urban management,” “temporary residence permits,” and “clean-ups,” which are no less cruel than measures employed by South Africa?

Will China’s “New Villages” Repeat the Mistakes of South Africa’s “Black Homelands?”

China and South Africa have similar migrant labor systems, orderly urbanization policies, and binary land systems with forced enclosures and expulsions, and these similar policies have resulted in similar unhappy outcomes: even as both countries have relied on a combination of “globalization and low human rights advantages” to achieve rapid economic growth, the crises in the villages have become increasingly dire. In addition, in both countries, attempts by migrant labor to settle in the cities has threatened the future of “orderly urbanization.” As a result, China, attempting to reject the so-called “Western model of urbanization,” and South Africa, refusing “disorderly urbanization,” both carried out plans to revive rural villages with the help of state investment, in the hopes that the peasants (or the blacks) would stay in the villages, or at least preserve the model which allows them to work temporarily in the cities while maintaining their homes in the country.

With this in mind, in 1956 South Africa launched its “Bantustan” development plan, which later became the policy of building “black homesteads,” which continued through the early 1990s. The architect of this policy, F. R. Tomlinson, was a well-known South African agronomist, and a professor of agricultural economics at Pretoria University. In the 1950s, the D. F. Malan government in South Africa appointed Tomlinson to organize a study group, which, after some years of research, published some 17 volumes of research materials. These materials in turn served as the basis for the 1956 report on the Bantustan development plan, otherwise known as the Tomlinson Report, which subsequently served as one of the most important theoretical bases for the apartheid system.

Tomlinson pointed out that the state of black villages was utterly deplorable, which meant that blacks flocked to the cities to work: “If no measures are taken to keep blacks from pouring into the cities, before the end of this century, the black urban population will reach 15,000,000.” This would produce an outcome like that in America, where blacks and whites live together, as well as “frightening ghettos.” At the same time, Tomlinson argued that simple prohibition of migration to the cities would not work, and talked a great deal about black development. Mandela’s later verdict was that Tomlinson “advocated the independent development of blacks and whites, and hence in his report proposed the industrialization of areas where Africans lived, proclaiming that a Bantu management system that did not provide Africans with development opportunities in their place of residence was doomed to failure.” Yet even if Mandela acknowledged that the Tomlinson Report’s ideas on developing the black economy and improving black living conditions were not without merit, his overall evaluation of a plan whose goal was to prevent blacks from moving permanently to the cities was scathing. He bitterly noted that “while more and more Africans are moving from the villages to the cities, government policy still aims to keep Africans within their ethnic tribes.”

Tomlinson’s basic proposal was first, to strengthen control, and second to increase investment, envisioning a series of measures that would “allow Bantustans to be independent,” and thus no longer linked to the white cities. From an economic perspective, he first stressed that there must be a reform of the land system. He noted that there were drawbacks to requiring blacks to implement the tribal ownership system. His reforms he did not grant land rights to the villagers, but instead asked that the state manage black tribal lands more tightly. The Tomlinson Report further acknowledged that the agricultural lands in the Bantu areas could only support 20% of the normal life needs of the black people, and that blacks would have to find non-agricultural solutions for the rest. Yet to prevent the disorderly migration of blacks to the cities and the subsequent disruption of white peace and security, it would be necessary to open a path whereby the blacks could achieve “independent development.”   His proposal was, on the one hand, to encourage investment to develop non-agricultural industries in the homelands, allowing part of the black population to leave the fields without leaving the villages, encouraging the development of “local industries” in small townships in the Bantu areas; and on the other to guarantee, through strict management of the land system, that those blacks who remained on the land would have “economic plots” consisting of roughly eight acres. The use of these lands would be regulated, and each farm family would have only one plot. Movement was to be forbidden, meaning that the blacks were tied to the land and that there would be no “free differentiation” producing landless migrants.

Outside of agriculture, Tomlinson proposed a large-scale plan for “decentralized industrialization.” Later on, in practice, this came to include two items known as “peripheral industrialization” and “focus points.” “Peripheral industrialization” was to occur next to the black homelands, so that black workers could go back and forth every day, or at most once a week. After the 1960s, this program developed at a speed meant to add seven to eight thousand job opportunities annually. Beginning in the 1970s, South Africa also began to develop industrial “focus points” within black homelands, using financial resources and other advantages to encourage domestic and international entrepreneurs to invest and build factories in the black homelands, taking advantage of the black labor that would “leave the land but not the village.” Under the slogan of “Funding Bantustan and Developing the Economy,” South Africa established the “Bantu Investment Company” and the “Kosa Development Company” solely to attract investment for black homelands. By June 1974, 116 South African companies and eleven foreign investors had set up factories in the black homelands. These black laborers were very poorly paid (64% less that blacks working in white areas, according to one source), because regulations had been established for a legal minimum wage for blacks in white areas. In “autonomous” black homelands, however, such regulations were ineffective.

At the same time, the report also recommended that the state make important investments to improve public services such as transportation, water and electricity, education and hygiene in the black homelands, in the hopes of retaining blacks. Tomlinson noted that while these expenses were considerable, the money spent would be worth it to avoid the challenge of disorderly black urbanization to white society.

Politically, the South African government proclaimed that the black homelands should preserve their “excellent traditions” and maintain their rule by native chieftains rather than implementing democracy as whites had done. With this in mind, South Africa not only preserved tribal kings in the areas originally conquered by the Boers, but also did away with the assemblies and revived tribal rule in regions like Capetown, which had originally been ruled by the British. This “fetishization of the Bantu management system, with its emphasis on the importance and vitality of the tribal system and traditional leadership” received the support of a good number of traditional chieftains, but was firmly resisted by the black democratic opposition, represented by Mandela. Mandela pointed out: “The people want democracy, and political leadership should be based on merit, not on birth. The Bantu management system leads to the retreat of democracy.”

On the cultural front, under the banner of “respect for native language, tradition, history and the tribes that had developed with them,” South Africa practiced a policy of cultural apartheid toward the black homelands, hoping to prevent blacks from accepting ideas about human rights and democracy that whites said were part of the “propaganda of the British colonizers.” They also vigorously fostered tribalist “traditional revivals” such as the “Xhosa people’s movement” or the “Zulu cultural revival movement” so that such organizations would become the “ruling parties” of the black homelands. In general, these “parties” called for the maintenance of tribal particularities, and actively blocked the infusion of “white values” into the black tribes. In addition, they cooperated with the white government, to the point that the dictatorial black townships and the “white internal democracy” worked together to shore up ethnic apartheid.

The ultimate goal of the South African authorities was to make the black homelands “independent.” Since South Africa had nothing like China’s “village hukou,” the goal of having blacks work temporarily for whites in the cities without giving them residence rights would be best achieved by turning them into “foreign workers.” With this in mind, South Africa not only concocted the four black homelands of Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, and Venda in the 1970s, but also demanded that blacks who came to the cities to work maintain links to their homeland, and political authorities in the homelands even set up offices in the big cities to take care of the affairs relating to black workers from their tribe. The white state divided up the blacks working in white areas, who made up more than half of the black township population, among ten black homelands, and once these homelands became “independent,” the black workers became foreign workers. In 1970, the total population of the black homelands came to 15,030,000, of which 8,003,000 were blacks working in white areas and their family members, which constituted 53.6% of the legally defined total black homeland population. Black labor constituted 79% of the labor employed by the “white economy.” The black homeland system and the migrant labor system were two sides of the same coin. The “homeland” became a source of cheap labor, as well as the final resting place for black workers who had exhausted their youth.

However, the Tomlinson Plan encountered all sorts of problems in implementation. The first was black resistance. As already noted, the “land reform” required by Tomlinson to strengthen land management was met with strong opposition, and the “redistribution” which took the form of “building new villages through land confiscation and home demolition” was seen as forced expulsion, and led to many instances of black mass struggle. As for the industrial projects, despite the concessions which meant that entrepreneurs could pollute more easily and have access to even cheaper labor, overall, “industrial decentralization” had little effect on the plan to industrialize the black homelands. The dictatorial chieftain system implanted by South Africa in the black homelands was corrupt and inefficient, and most of the financial support the chiefs received went to pay their own wages or to build flashy, impractical government buildings, public projects, symbolic projects or political payoffs like “roadside villages,” all of which represented a low return on investment. In addition, black workers were uninterested in employment opportunities which left them tied to the land, working for low wages and poorly treated.   Especially in the latter period of apartheid, when the struggles of blacks in the cities began to bear fruit and they could organize unions and obtain guarantees like the minimum wage, it was clear to blacks remaining in the homelands that they did not have these even though they were ruled by their “own chieftains.” For this reason, not only did blacks in the homelands continue to want to move to the cities, they also continued to want to take their family members with them. They strongly opposed being relegated to any black homeland, and opposed any plan by the authorities to consign them to one.

The expenses incurred by South Africa to construct black homelands were huge, and increased very rapidly. In the 1988-89 fiscal year, subsidies from the South African government to ten black homelands exceeded 6.9 billion rand, and the following year increased to 8.51 billion rand, the equivalent at the time of 3.4 billion US dollars (or 5.9 billion US dollars in 2006). This came to 356 US dollars for each resident of the black homelands. By way of comparison, in 2006 China invested 339.7 billion RMB in the “three rural issues 三农问题.”[25] Investment in the “three rural issues” exceeds that of “new village construction 新农村建设,” but if we take the two together, this comes to 41.6 billion US dollars, or 46 US dollars per rural resident. Clearly, South Africa invested much more in the black homelands than did China in its “new villages.”

Yet the thinking behind the construction of black homelands was: “we prefer to provide subsidies and will never confer rights;” and “while the homelands are ‘independent,’ the blacks lose their rights.” The point was not to improve the rights and conditions of the blacks and arrive at racial equality, but rather to take advantage of the power of black “traditions” to tie blacks to their villages, and to turn black migrant workers in the cities into “foreign workers” who would lose their rights to live in the cities. The plan forced those younger than 35 to live as bachelors in shanties and those older than 35 to return to the villages to live out their lives, or forced migrant black labor in the cities to migrate back to the countryside. Consequently, such goals could not possibly be welcomed by the blacks. And while the government was the “director” of the homeland policy, blacks could never be the “subjects.” The black homeland project lasted some 30 years, and even if it built more than a few factories, as well as basic infrastructure like roads, airports, reservoirs, government offices, hospitals, schools and even universities, the economy of the black homelands never achieved independence, but instead increasingly became failed areas designed to “retain the population,” and blacks continued to pour into the cities , bringing their families with them, while the “independence” of the “black states” was all the more ignored because of international opposition.

These “model projects” that ate up money and produced little came to be seen by many white taxpayers as corrupt, and eventually became one of the reasons that they changed their minds and came to support the abolition of apartheid.

China’s idea of “building new villages” has a long history, including a slogan from before the reform and opening period during the “learn from Dazhai 学大寨”[26] campaign, but in 2005 when the project was championed once again, there were two principle motivations. The first grew out of what had been revealed about the crisis in village education and public health (particularly during the SARS affair), which evoked an outcry from society asking that the state assume its responsibilities and build an inclusive public service system for the peasants. This idea of “building a new village” aimed to change the past practice of treating villages like objects of primitive accumulation, of draining the pond to kill the fish. The new principles were to be “give much and take little,” and the idea was more to make up for the debt already incurred than to build a truly “new village.” The hope was to provide universally recognized social guarantees and not to develop any sort of “developmental model with Chinese characteristics,” and plans focused on education and public health as the basic objects of public service and social guarantees. This kind of “new village construction” is truly necessary, and I have always supported it. In recent years, certain achievements have been made on this front, and these must be acknowledged.

But at the same time there was also another idea, which was to see “new village construction” as part of a “Chinese path” distinct from “Western” urbanization, marketization, and privatization. Some specialists working on the “three rural problems” went to far as to emphasize how frightening were the “ghettos” and the other problems produced by the “Western model of urbanization,” proclaiming that this was a path that we Chinese would not take, all the while wringing their hands about the problem of large numbers of migrant workers pouring into China’s cities. Their fears were very similar to those of Tomlinson concerning black migration to the cities, fears that prompted Tomlinson to propose the creation of black homelands. China’s specialists proposed the creation of new villages for the same reason, and both insisted that they were creating a unique developmental model. Some even went so far as to express doubts about the rights peasants had received under the reforms to “withdraw” from collectives, and championed slogans like “Xiaogang village should learn from Nanjie village,”[27] or “recollectivization.”

In the face of the problems resulting from the abuse of public power in the “enclose the land, seek out investors, build big cities 圈地、招商、建大城” phenomenon, they did not emphasize protecting the powerless farmers from harm, but instead, like Tomlinson, proposed to increase even further the power of state management, employing state power to “confiscate the land, destroy the houses, and build new villages 收地、拆房、盖新村.” Again, like Tomlinson, their idea was to “provide subsidies but never confer rights,” hoping that the investment of state funds could substitute for the improvement of human rights. As they carried out “industrial decentralization,” the peasants would be absorbed into the land,[28] change careers without entering the city, and leave the land without leaving the village. They would develop “tradition” and resist “Westernization.” The process would stop the flow of peasants away from the villages, prohibit the privatization of land, encourage the “return to the villages to create employment 回乡创业” and the project of “migrant labor returning to the villages.” In all of this, their thinking was much like that of Tomlinson. Moreover, these measures are of a piece with “clean-up efforts 梳理行动” in the cities, and aim to preserve the same exclusionary system.

The only important difference is that the Chinese Tomlinsons did not seek the “independence of the black homelands.” Of course they could not and did not need to demand the “independence of the new villages,” because the exclusionist policies, which had been eroded in South Africa but remained effective in China, the policies that kept China’s migrant workers from receiving “citizen treatment,” meant that there was no need for a formal designation as “foreign labor.”

Following this line of thought, China’s “new village construction,” with the government as director but with the peasants never achieving the status of subject, could only become glaring examples of model projects or political payoffs. Of course, if enough money is invested in the “model,” useful things can happen as well; this happened in the case of South Africa’s black homelands. But as already noted, even if South Africa invested vastly more than we did on this front, the overall plan for black homelands was a resounding failure. Should not China’s “new village construction” learn the lesson from South Africa? Whether government spending on black homelands accorded with black needs or not, it was after all the government’s money. But our “Potemkin villages” are selected by the state and paid for by the farmers, with a state subsidy of 10% or less. So the officials build “models” with the farmers’ money, pretty houses which often remain empty while the peasants continue to look for work in the cities. The result is the same as in South Africa. Can we continue in this way?

Obviously, the question is not whether rural villages should be revived or whether we can surpass the “Western model of urbanization”—because what is “Western urbanization?” Do all Western countries share a single model of “urbanization?” And even within a single country, have New York and Las Vegas “urbanized” in the same way? The crucial point is: who decides the fate of the peasants (or the blacks)? If peasants choose to enter the cities and work, then they should be respected; they should not be kicked out because the “elite” doesn’t like the look of them. And if peasants choose to remain in the villages, then their land rights should be protected; their land should not be confiscated simply because the “elite” has taken a liking to it. No matter if the goal is to “enclose the land, find the investors and build big cities” or “confiscate the land, demolish the houses and build new villages,” it all should be done of the basis of respect for the rights of the peasants. Surely these rights don’t exist merely in the “West?” Nor can we conclude that everyone who seeks to decide the fate of the peasants is evil. Mandela even acknowledged that at a certain level Tomlinson did indeed want to see “black development,” and that he understood that simply driving the blacks away wouldn’t do. But Tomlinson still spoke with the tone of a master: “I’ll give you a little more money and send you back to your villages to live. Now leave me alone!” Can anyone with self-respect knuckle under like this?

Where Are We Going and Where Have We Come From? Comparison of Future Prospects

The Comparability of the “Low Human Rights Advantage:” What China and South Africa are both “Not”
　　
The fact that China and pre-democratic South Africa share many similarities is not because one made a conscious decision to learn from the other. The government of pre-democratic South Africa was very anti-communist, and never established relations with China. China knows little about South Africa. And of course, no one in 1940s South Africa could have known anything about China’s “temporary residence pass,” which only appeared in the post-reform era.
　　
However, the two not only share a superficial resemblance, but certain specific trends (such as the tendency of migrant labor to form households, or the evolution from labor requisition, to “pass” labor mobility, to the free search for employment and housing) seem to be cast from the same mold. This is surely the result of the logic of the two systems. In the context of globalization, both countries relied on a low human rights advantage to develop their competitive strength and create the “miracle” of rapid economic growth. They both artificially suppressed or diminished the bargaining power of certain groups through institutionally created status barriers, hence diminishing what some Chinese economists have called “transaction costs” (not the same “transaction costs” as discussed by Western economists which assume the protection of the interests of those involved), particularly the costs of labor (not limited to wages), land, and the maintenance of stability and order, all of which resulted in a rapid process of “primitive accumulation.” Neither China nor South Africa practiced a system of “free competition” which limits the power of the rulers, nor were they a model of the “welfare state” which invests the rulers with responsibility for the people, and as such they are difficult to discuss in the context of “left and right” which is the norm in constitutional democracies.

I should point out that the “advantages” I have attributed to the two countries are not the same as “primitive accumulation” as generally discussed in the context of the seventeenth century, because at the time, the modern concept of human rights did not exist, and the whatever advantages “pirate nations” possessed were not in comparison with those of “high human rights countries.” From a historical (and not a purely moral) perspective, what is most worthy of study is not why or how these “pirates” were so uncivilized (although this should be criticized), but rather why other groups who lived in worlds just as savage, or even more savage, than the jungle world of the modern and contemporary era—such as the ancient Assyrians, or the Mongols, or, setting aside “Western prejudices,” the Spanish, or even their ancestors, the Viking pirates of Northern Europe—why were they unable to create a new world in the way the pirate nations did?[29] If we reject the modern standard of human rights because “they used to be wild too,” then what’s the difference between this and the previously mentioned South African excuse that “their ancestors cheated us, so what right to do have to talk to me about human rights?”

What I call a “low human rights advantage” is also different from what we find in normal authoritarian or “undemocratic” countries. The basic meaning of authoritarianism is that its politics are essentially undemocratic; this does not necessarily mean that the economy is unfree. Some authoritarian regimes, like Taiwan and South Korea in East Asia, did not democratize during their periods of rapid growth, but their economies remained open, nor did they carry out institutional discrimination, as did China and South Africa. They used the iron fist to ensure political stability, but not to create social division (such as artificially creating status distinctions, artificially limiting types of permissible housing, expulsing the poor, building “cities for aristocrats,” etc.). In terms of investment strategies, they also used state guidance in macroeconomic policies, but rarely “sought out investors” in a way that prohibited stakeholder groups from bargaining, artificially reducing so-called “transaction costs” and accelerating capital accumulation. From another angle, authoritarian countries cannot become genuine welfare countries, but they can, through “imperial grace,” carry out certain welfare policies. For example, welfare measures were developed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, even if the autocrat could dispense with such measures at a whim. But in countries like South Africa or China that have practiced “negative welfare” for many years, such practices are rare.

In sum, “low human rights” countries are countries will low freedom and low welfare. Politically authoritarian countries are not necessarily all like this. More totalitarian countries, like North Korea, are also “low human rights” countries, but they are not part of globalization and have no particular “advantage.” If a country wants to participate in globalization then it must follow certain rules of the market economy, which include freedom for a part of the people or a part of the territory (i.e., allowing migrant labor), even if the rest of the people and the rest of the territory remain in a state of “super-economic coercion.” This leads to the emergence of the “binary” system (as already noted, this is not Lewis’s “dualism”). This is not the case in North Korea, nor is it the case in the Central and Eastern European countries that have changed under democratic conditions.

A “low human rights advantage” is also not the same as a “low wage advantage.” Even if wages will never be high in an economy with a low human rights advantage, low human rights and low wages remain two separate things. In simple terms, if workers cannot strike, this means that human rights are low, while whether workers who are permitted to strike can achieve higher wages is a different question. Workers with low wages may well live in a ghetto, but workers in conditions of low human rights often are deprived even have the right to live in a ghetto. In the context of low wages, India’s are lower than China’s and many countries in the south of Africa pay wages that are less than those in South Africa, but South Africa has an easier time “attracting investment” than its neighbors, and the same is true with China and India. Why is this?

To put it even more clearly, this “advantage” is not the same as the “free competition handicap” of the “pre-welfare” era. Nineteenth-century Europe was no longer the era of primitive accumulation, but “freely hired laborers” lacked wage and welfare guarantees, and living conditions in the slums were terrible, to the point that today’s critics call the system “savage capitalism.” We cannot say that such criticisms are without reason, but what was backward about the system was especially the lack of social protections, and there was nothing illegal about the poor living in “shanties,” which eventually prompted Mandela’s cry for the “right to not have our ghettos destroyed.”

In sum, both China and pre-democratic South Africa engaged in “primitive accumulation,” but not the same primitive accumulation as in the seventeenth century. Neither China nor the former South Africa is democratic, but their status systems are different from those of other authoritarian countries. Wages in China and in South Africa (in the case of blacks) are low, but what is more important is that bargaining is not allowed, and unlike the situation in most low-wage countries, wages are still not rising. China and South Africa are both low-welfare or negative-welfare countries, but this welfare situation has nothing to do with laissez-faire or “savage capitalism.” China and South Africa both engaged in the “planned economy” and “state ownership,” yet they are unlike the former Eastern Europe, which had no status system, and unlike North Korea, which is closed off to the world. China and South Africa are both known for their status barriers, but these barriers are part of the state system and are unlike India’s illegal caste system based in “popular customs.” In other words, there are not many countries that can be grouped together with China and South Africa on these questions, which suggests that the comparability of the two is unquestionable.

I should further point out that “advantage” chiefly refers to its logic in relation to rapid economic growth, and is not a value judgement. And this link exists in the context of globalization. An “economy of low human rights” lacks the spirit of innovation, and in the absence of the innovations of “high human rights economies” obtained via exchange, would not achieve high growth rates. Yet “high human rights economies” cannot use the iron fist of low human rights economies to achieve primitive accumulation, so in the globalized system, if the market is globalized while human rights standards are not, this truly creates the phenomenon in which low rights economies can create the “miracle” of rapid growth. Of course, whether this high growth means that the citizens of those countries reap the benefits and advance together with the economy is another question that needs to be examined before the system can be affirmed. If you close off the country to globalization, as in the case of the low human rights economy of North Korea, then there will be no miracle. And if you engage in globalization without a “low human rights advantage,” then you have countries like those of Central and Eastern Europe, which have achieved high growth rates, but no “miracle” (although we should still compare the benefits the citizens have obtained with the situation in China).

Moreover, the “low human rights advantage” assumes an orderly environment; war-torn low human rights countries like Somalia obviously cannot expect any economic growth. Nor is this “advantage” in contradiction with the improvement of human rights over time. In the course of China’s thirty years of reform and opening, and especially in the twenty years since 1989, China has made a certain amount of progress in terms of freedom and welfare. As is clear from what I said above, pre-reform era China was much worse in terms of human rights than today’s China, and this is why I affirm the progressive nature of China’s reforms, and reject the New Left argument that pre-reform China is superior to reform-era China. But this does not affect my critique of the present level of human rights in China.

Isn’t the same true for South Africa? In terms of human rights progress, the apartheid system was better than the earlier system of black slavery, and the later apartheid system was better than the earlier apartheid system. This is clearest in the events of the years following the election of the Botha government in 1978, when South Africa loosened many apartheid measures in public spaces, abandoned the law prohibiting interracial marriages, revised the pass law, allowed blacks residing in the cities to rent long-term or even to buy, accepted part of black migrant workers as permanent city dwellers, relaxed restrictions on blacks’ access to technical positions and on black promotions, raised black wages, acknowledged blacks’ rights to unionize through the amended industrial adjustment act, and in 1985 even offered to restore South African citizenship to those in black homelands and abolished hiring discrimination, among other measures. If we go further back, we can find the same pattern: we have criticized the system of “migrant labor,” but we also know that labor requisition during the era of the Glen Gray Act was much worse. We have criticized the system of “dormitories for migrant labor,” yet we acknowledge that by the end of the apartheid era the percentage of workers living together with their families was already quite high, or at least in comparison with the situation in China. In terms of rapid economic growth, even as we pointed out the naked inequalities of the system, we also must admit that blacks obtained something from rapid growth. Black wages in South Africa increased over time, and in comparative terms, were higher than those of surrounding countries in southern Africa. In fact, South Africa’s democratization in 1994 was not a sudden event, but instead a process of quantitative and qualitative changes, the result of earlier black human rights movements and international pressure gradually moving things forward. Yet none of this means that we should alter our overall critical attitude to the human rights situation in South Africa during this entire period.

Changes in the “Low Human Rights Advantage” Due to Globalization: The “Fogel Impact” and the “Sullivan Impact”

Comparing the “low human rights advantage” in horizontal (spacial) terms is not to deny the positive function of the improvement in human rights on economic growth in a chronological sense (there is almost no debate concerning its positive effect on the quality of growth or how growth is shared, so I will not discuss these here). Improvements in human rights in reform-era China, compared to China prior to the reforms, naturally had this positive effect, in the same way that migrant workers, a low human rights form of labor, contributed to economic growth in South Africa, in the sense that migrant labor is a form of progress when compared to the black slave system or the requisition of black labor.

The problem is, this theory does not explain why, in horizontal or spacial terms, countries that are clearly more advanced in terms of human rights have (or had, during a certain period) economic growth rates that were lower. For example, why are growth rates in Central and Eastern Europe lower than in China (even if people may live better in Central and Eastern Europe)? Why are the growth rates of certain democratic African countries lower that the growth rate of South Africa? Why is it China, and not Central or Eastern Europe, that floods the world with cheap goods? In fact, in the context of globalization, this is not really a deep mystery: if we understand the fundamental importance of “the strength of competition” to “attract investment” to the economic growth rate under conditions of globalization, then is it not abundantly clear that a country without unions, and that can confiscate land at will, be much better at “attracting investment” than a country with developed unions and respect for property rights (like the countries of Central and Eastern Europe)?

This kind of “low human rights advantage” truly demonstrates the logic that “bad money drives out good.” I have previously cited the work of Robert Fogel (1926-2013), the American economist and Nobel Prize winner, on the “efficiency” of the Southern slave economy prior to the American Civil War. Fogel proved that in the context of a unified economy, the southern slave economy was more efficient than the northern, non-slave, economy, but his point was not to praise the slave economy. Quite the contrary, he argued that if the South had been independent (and not part of the continental economy), then it would not have been efficient. But as long as the two economies remained integrated, the North feared that it would not be able to rely on “economic efficiency” to transform the South (this was Fogel’s true insight and the source of much debate). If we push this counterfactual inference even farther, it might be true that the South could have transformed the North: if northern capital had moved south in large amounts (slaves in the South were tied to the land and could not move to the North in large numbers), then the South could have flooded the North with cheap commodities produced by slave labor, creating unemployment and chaos in the North, and perhaps the North would have been the first to collapse (or to avoid collapse, the North might have adopted the South’s “low human rights” system, without which they could not have won this “competition”).

Of course, had the North truly collapsed, then Southern “efficiency” would have disappeared as well, because the true strength of a free economy lies in innovation. Without innovation, there is no economic progress, including the “efficiency” that would have come from the importation, by the Southern slave industrial economy, of northern technology. So this kind of “competition” looks to be lose-lose. Clearly, Fogel argues that it was justice, and not efficiency, which finally transformed the South. This is his argument for the necessity of the Civil War: when the North transformed the South through war, this removed the danger that the Southern “low human rights advantage,” in the context of the unified American economy, would be a case of “bad money driving out good.” Northern technological innovation was extended throughout America, and Southern efficiency (as well as justice, of course) increased.

At the time, Fogel’s research was unconcerned with globalization (his focus was on a “unified America”). But borrowing his logic, if the “low human rights regions” in today’s globalized world are unable to transform themselves, then this perhaps will ultimately lead to a globalized “civil war 南北战争.”[30]

At the same time, if capital and other elements from the “high human rights regions” of the globalized world flow into the low human rights areas, this can also bring about positive changes in the low human rights countries. As Xia Jisheng, whom I cited earlier, pointed out: “To a certain extent, foreign economic activities are a means to export Western ideas of human rights, which subtly influenced the racial viewpoints of South Africans, eventually bursting the dikes of the apartheid system.” On one level, the influence of international sanctions on South Africa was very important. This was especially true in 1985 when South Africa declared a state of emergency in some regions and suppressed the blacks, provoking universal condemnation. The “moral diplomacy” of the Western countries triumphed over their “interest diplomacy,” resulting in severe sanctions, which clearly played an important role in South Africa’s subsequent transformation. Prior to this, the “weakness” of Western sanctions had been consistently criticized.

From another angle, whether an earlier use of severe sanctions to limit South Africa’s ties with the world economy would have helped to change South Africa is difficult to determine. Historically, outside pressure had always led the Boers to circle the wagons. This was awkward for the comparatively more open English speakers, and on occasion increased suffering for the blacks. At the same time, even during periods when international sanctions were weak, it is clear that economic openness subtly increased human rights consciousness in South Africa. The human rights views of many foreign companies in South Africa were more enlightened than those of South African companies, particular those of Afrikaners. In 1977, Leon Sullivan (1922-2001), member of the board of General Motors and an African-American minster, put forth six principles that American companies in South Africa should follow, which subsequently came to be known as the “Sullivan principles.” These included: no apartheid in company public spaces; support for blacks to organize unions; equal pay for equal work for all employees and higher wages than the local minimum living standard; training for blacks for managerial and technical positions; promotion of blacks to management positions; improvements in housing, transportation, medical treatment, education, and other welfare items for employees. By 1980, 137 American businesses had pledged to implement the Sullivan principles. The European Union also mandated that their businesses in South Africa follow similar principles, and especially emphasized the rights of blacks to join unions. These measures by foreign firms exercised considerable pressure on South African companies, and played an important role in creating the conditions in which, by the 1980s, the apartheid system was harder and harder to sustain.
　
In fact, even if foreign companies do not consciously spread the “Sullivan principles,” the entry of large amounts of foreign capital can still change the nature of relations between labor and capital in the host country: when capital trends toward surplus (or moves away from scarcity), the bargaining power of labor declines, while when labor trends toward scarcity (or moves away from surplus), the bargaining power of labor increases. Although the artificial political pressure of autocratic regimes can delay these effects, they will eventually appear as the trends dictate.

At the same time, we see the opposite effect in high human rights regions that export capital. This capital, in their own countries, flees from unions that they cannot afford to antagonize, and when the cheap commodities flood back in from the low human rights regions in which capital has taken flight, this leads to capital shortage and surplus labor in the high human rights regions. Unions decline, welfare is threatened, the balance of power between labor and capital is destroyed. The disaster of the return of “savage capitalism” is hard to avoid.

So it’s natural for the left wing in developed countries be opposed to globalization. This is the upshot of the “Fogel impact.” But it is strange that the low human rights regions into which investment is flowing also oppose globalization. The rising strength of the ANC, and even of the South African Communist Party, benefited from the conscious or unconscious application of the Sullivan effect. Their mission was not to oppose market globalization, but to promote the “globalization of human rights.”

What should be pointed out is that if there is not a “globalization of human rights” accompanying market globalization, meaning that at least the most basic of human rights will be commonly respected, then the “reverse impact” mentioned above will be hard to avoid. In fact, transnational economic exchange contains possibilities other than the “Sullivan effect.” When foreign capital enters a low human rights region it may well follow local customs, learning unspoken rules on how to “handle” officials, how to use the power of government to oppress workers, how to confiscate land, how to run off troublesome environmentalists and NGOs…South Africa had all this. Does China? Enough said. And some foreign companies acculturate all too well, to the point that they don’t fit in any more when they go back home and bring this adverse impact to their native lands.

In sum, globalization produces a clear increase in the mutual influence between countries, and even a purely economic relationship can produce effects outside the sphere of the economy. In the past, people seem to have paid attention only to the positive side of these influences, meaning the way in which high human rights countries influence low human rights countries by spreading ideas of human rights. But some people appreciate this influence and others fear it (like some South African Boers who talk about “English colonial conspiracies”).

In fact, influence always cuts both ways. When high human rights regions influence low human rights regions by raising the profile of human rights, we can call this the “Sullivan effect,” based on the example of the Sullivan principles discussed above. And when a low human rights advantage influences a region with high human rights, producing a diminution in rights, then we can call this the “Fogel effect,” building on Fogel’s scholarship discussed above (not that he would have approved of it, even if he certainly demonstrated it). I certainly hope that the Sullivan effect wins out over the Fogel effect, but in fact, it is still too early to tell.   On this point, I should note an important difference between South Africa and China: there is no way that South Africa can compare with the size of China’s economy. And it will be much harder for the international society to change China than it was to change South Africa. Quite the contrary: little South Africa can hardly “change the world,” but the probability that China will change the world is surely much greater.

“Naturally Occurring” or “Political” Super-Economic Coercion: Similarities in the Chinese and South African Situations
　　
All of this has to do with differences between China and South Africa. Last year, when I was giving talks on China and South Africa, it generated a lot of feedback, and, setting aside those that agreed with me, the interesting thing about those who disagreed was that while at the outset, they vehemently criticized the comparison as unconscionable, and emphasized this or that difference between China and South Africa, after awhile they eventually fell in line in spite of themselves, sympathizing with the white position on apartheid, and roundly criticizing me for adopting the “black standpoint.” “Qin Hui, this talk is too ridiculous! It’s hopelessly biased, because once the blacks took over the government, everything fell apart, including the economy and public order.” “Black Africans are part of an ignorant tribal society, and have no ability to manage a modern country. Giving them the vote is tantamount to creating a disaster for society. The right thing to do is to let the black elite govern together with the whites, not universal suffrage.” There were even those who repeated the cries of the whites of the extreme right at the time of the 1994 elections in South Africa, advocating that the whites implement a form of “self-apartheid,” and build a kind of “white paradise” to get rid of the blacks! As another set of friends on the web put it, this illustrated that China is very much like the old South Africa.

I don’t want to simply condemn this public expression of support for racial apartheid as “wrong.” Because it is true that after becoming democratic, South Africa truly has encountered serious problems of governance. Even if these remarks were not, as my internet friends put it, “complete nonsense,” I still agree with the opinion of Yang Lihua 杨立华[31] (b. 1971): Trends since 1994 in South Africa have been moving in a positive direction, and many parts of their experience can be instructive for us [in China]. But South Africa since 1994 has clearly witnessed the spread of black populism (or chauvinism 民粹主义), and this is especially true since the election of President Zuma. Not only whites, but many knowledgeable blacks, including the former president and the ANC leader Mbeki, have expressed concern about this, as it has in fact already led to divisions within the ANC. It seems at present that the danger of South Africa’s becoming a “second Zimbabwe” is not great, but things are hard to predict, and no one can rule out the possibility.

To see all these problems as the “after-effects of apartheid” is surely a bit too simplistic. And even if they are after-effects, sometimes when something bad turns into what economists call “path dependency,” efforts to correct things may wind up producing even worse outcomes. I mentioned above that, after democratization in South Africa, the city of Johannesburg went through the transition from the apartheid-era “pre-Latin American” “beautiful city,” to a “Latin-like” crisis of governance. Many Chinese business people have very strong feelings about this. After South Africa democratized and established relations with China, many Chinese went there to trade and invest, and what they saw was a democratic city where “public security was not good,” like in Latin America—or, more accurately, where public security was worse than in Latin America. For them, the past, “pre-Latinized” city was more like Beijing, which explains the negative reaction to my research mentioned above. These people had no experience of being black in the “pre-Latin period,” just as they had no experience of being a migrant peddler in Beijing under the rule of the “urban management practices.”

But researchers cannot simply cling to “correct viewpoints.” If it is true that previous institutions had already given rise to an unbreakable “path dependency” so that seeking to change things only produced greater difficulties, then is all we can do simply accept the current reality, refraining from criticism that is “useless” or which “makes things worse?”

Of course not.

The situation in South Africa is not that grim. But we’ll set aside for a later discussion an overall consideration of the economic reform lessons we can draw from the democratization of South Africa in 1994.

As for China, the commenters I mentioned above actually raised two questions: 1. Are South Africa’s and China’s problems of the same nature? Can they be compared? 2. If they are comparable, then if China democratizes in the future, will China also slide into the predicament in which post-1994 South Africa finds itself? Or are there differences between China and South Africa?

I’ll first respond to question one here: the problems of South Africa and China are clearly of the same nature. One of most obvious proofs is that both countries clearly prescribed a low legal status to “inferior people.” Law in South Africa under apartheid clearly stipulated that only white people had the right to vote, while black people did not. In the “Election Law of the People’s Republic of China” passed in 2004, article 16 clearly states that: “The number of deputies to the National People’s Congress is determined ‘according to the principle that the population represented by each representative in the countryside is four times the population represented by each representative of the city,’” or what is known as the “one quarter voting rights principle.” In other words, every villager is one quarter of a person! Some people, when discussing this law, point out that in the pre-Civil War United States, the rule was that black slaves counted as “three-fifths of a person.” Of course, we cannot use this to argue that the position of the black slaves in America was better than that of China’s villagers, but it is obvious that the status of both is very low.

Because the biological characteristics of South African blacks and whites are clearly different, while the biological differences between legal residents and migrant workers in China’s cities are not obvious, South Africa’s oppression of the blacks is thus naked racial prejudice, easily observed by all, a prejudice to which the modern civilized world is quite sensitive. At the same time, China’s “villager” prejudice is often seen as merely a normal “inequality,” and hence a question of “class,” of “rich and poor,” or mentioned above, part of the “binary structure” in Lewis’s model. Many people feel that this problem exists everywhere; I have leftist friends who think that this is the result of “the polarization of market reforms.” Yet in the case of the “black and white” question in South Africa, regardless of the “left-right” split in international society, no one will say that the condition of South African blacks was the result of “free competition” between blacks and whites in the market economy. Even less would they attribute the black-white question to “neoliberalism” or the “ills of the welfare state.”

But the two types of prejudice are clearly of the same nature. We can look at it from the perspective of Henry Maine’s (1822-1888)[32] theory of “from status to contract,” from which it is obvious that both of these are clearly cases of “status” prejudice. Of course, there have been many types of status systems over the course of history, such as the caste system, which we find in India and among other peoples. The difference between the Chinese situation and the Indian caste system is that, to a great extent, the Chinese status system is the result of state policy regulations put in place since the 1950s. Even today, the hukou prejudice is clearly marked on all kinds of official documents. At the same time, once the government issues a “pardon,” the characteristics associated with the original status disappear. For instance, once someone with a peasant hukou becomes a high official, the respect he receives from ordinary people, including urban residents, is no different from a high official with urban origins. By contrast, the Indian cast system is a set of traditions and customs accumulated over thousands of years, and although today’s Indian government has passed laws and policies opposing the caste system (Indian law, for example, would never stipulate that the “untouchables” have “one fourth the voting rights” of the “Brahmins”), yet caste prejudice continues to exist among the people despite this lack of “legitimacy.” In this sense, the Chinese status system resembles that of South Africa, because South Africa’s system was also the product of formal state legislation.

The explanation that helps us most clearly understand the common nature of the two systems is precisely that of Marx, worshipped by China as the master of theory. As everyone knows, Marx placed great emphasis on the difference between “true inequality masked by formal equality” in the market economy, and inequality caused by "super-economic coercion" under non-capitalist conditions. In Marx’s view, super-economic coercion means status-defined “relations of control and subservience (naturally occurring or imposed by politics).” By “naturally occurring control and subservience”, he meant any kind of hierarchy having to do with the body, such as racial oppression, while “political control and subservience” meant a man-made, institutional arrangement, which obviously includes a prejudice toward “peasants.” Marx felt that these two were of the same nature, as well as being alien to the "private exchange" society (that is, what we call capitalism today), and to the "free association" society (Marx’s ideal future society).

Intellectuals in the white Afrikaner world of South Africa naturally had a set of theories they used to defend the system of racial apartheid and discrimination against blacks, which included a theological explanation from their Reformed Church that they were “God’s chosen people,” a historical viewpoint that “whites had arrived in South Africa before the Bantus,” and even an argument based in cultural relativism that insisted that “white standards of human rights were inappropriate for black people,” which meant that blacks and whites could only “develop their own particular forms of democracy.” China’s system, which made peasants into an underclass, developed initially out of Lenin’s notion that peasants were a “half reactionary class,” and his decision that “sixty peasants must necessarily submit to ten workers.” It was also supported by Preobrazhinsky's theory that villages had been “colonized,” and that socialist primitive accumulation could be accomplished through “exploiting” the peasants. Of course, in the new China built on “peasant revolution,” Mao Zedong’s view of the peasants at first glance looked much more positive that that of the Soviet. But from the outset, Mao’s idea of a “good peasant,” was one who had “abandoned any idea of getting rich;” he was thinking of marginal types and drifters.   Mao always hated progressive peasants who “are devout worshippers of Marshal Zhao [i.e., hungry for money].”[33] Out of this grew notions of class discrimination like “the serious question is that of educating the peasants,” or that the peasants were “backward,” “selfish,” or “conservative,” as well as the idea that the “self-developed power” of the peasants was to be despised. “Poor and middle peasants” were seen as the most “leftist” in theoretical terms during the Cultural Revolution, when their image was at its height, yet when they chose to come to the city and make money instead of tamely “cultivating the fields in the name of revolution,” they were no longer seen as “poor and middle peasants” but as “blind migrants.” They were already discriminated against at that point, and the prejudice against “migrant workers” in the reform era in fact comes from this.

The discrimination suffered by Chinese peasants today and that suffered by South African blacks in the past is the same in that both are institutional, coercive and status-based, “not the result of competition,” and both are completely different from the “class polarization” produced by free competition, belonging to a more backward and basic inequality in human rights. I have already provided numerous examples that illustrate that the force of this discrimination is stronger in China than it was in South Africa. For example, Chinese migrant workers are forced to pay large sums of money to purchase temporary residence permits, which was not the case for the passes that black South Africans were required to procure; if South African blacks produced their passes they were in no danger of being arrested, while Chinese migrant workers can be arrested during particular periods; the “rate of baseless arrest” is higher in China than it was in South Africa; China’s “control of entry into the cities” is harsher than South Africa’s; the percentage of China’s migrant workers who live together with their families is lower than in South Africa, and the percentage of those maintaining two residences is higher; China’s “clean-ups” of migrant workers’ residences are more heavy-handed than in South Africa, and South Africa sometimes attempted to “settle” displaced blacks in other areas, while China often engages in pure expulsion; both countries practice(d) rural construction with an eye toward forcing temporary urban residents to return to their villages, but China invested vastly less money in such projects than did South Africa. At the same time, on some points South Africa treated blacks worse than China treats the peasants, for example on the land issue mentioned above: the confiscation of black land by white South Africans was more serious than what we see in China, in terms of scale if not speed.

Of course, in world terms both countries are making progress. China’s progress since the beginning of the reforms is obvious, and there were important changes underway in South Africa even before democratization. In terms of diminishing prejudice and elevating human rights, China’s overall situation is similar to that of South Africa, even if China drags behind by many years. For example, China moved from a system of confiscation of labor to one of “migrant labor” in the 1980s, while this occurred in South Africa in the 1910s. At present, South Africa has abandoned the migrant labor system in favor of free employment and residency, which remains a distant possibility in China. South Africa made the move toward “soft discrimination,” in which those without passes were fined instead of arrested in the 1980s, while this did not occur in China until after 2003. South Africa’s pass system was abolished in 1986, while China’s remains in place, even if certain cities recently have experimented with changing the “temporary residence pass” to a “residence pass,” which may be the beginning of the end for the temporary pass system even if at present it only applies to those with designated as having “special abilities.” And of course, we should point out that even if these changes took time to occur, on some fronts progress has been rapid.

In sum, we find in both China and in the former South Africa the phenomena of grave institutional status discrimination and “low human rights,” which meant that both require(d) reforms leading to basic equality in human rights (what Marx called “formal equality”). The need in China is even greater.

What’s Different about China and South Africa? Can China Avoid the Crisis of “Latin-Americanization” after Democratization?

Now I will answer the second question: if China and South Africa are comparable, then might “tomorrow’s China” be “today’s South Africa?” Of course, everyone celebrates the good things about today’s South Africa, such as status equality and political democracy, Mandela and De Klerk’s advocacy of conciliation, the resolution of historical questions sought by Reverend Tutu’s “truth and reconciliation” committees. But the new South Africa’s “Latin American” governing dilemma is truly quite serious. Chinese business people in South Africa are important victims of poor public security, and perhaps feel that they suffer more than local blacks, but public opinion in South Africa is also quite dissatisfied. Every country has gone through a period of “transitional chaos” after achieving democracy, not just South Africa; many countries in the Central and Eastern Europe have experienced similar things. But aside from a very small number of Central and Eastern European countries who fell into war after the changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the majority have already worked through their “labor pains” to move toward revival and prosperity, and some have passed the “test” to join the EU as “developing countries.” South Africa’s democratization came only a bit later, but South Africa today remains in its period of adjustment. We might say that South Africa has paid a higher “price for democracy” than the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Still, in today’s South Africa, very few people, even whites, argue that democratization was a mistake. In part, this surely is because democracy and human rights reflect world trends and the desires of the people, but at the same time, there are people in China who always like to point to examples of “chaos” in democratic Central and Eastern Europe to prove that democratization is not worth it. Since South Africa is even “more chaotic,” they ought to point to South Africa as proof. But the “politically correct” condemnation of apartheid is stronger than that of the condemnation of the “Soviet system,” and has become a “shared bottom line” embraced by liberals as well as the South African Communist Party. So the remarks made by commenters mentioned above will remain online, and will not make their way into the mainstream media.

Even if people do think this way, we should still ask: if China eventually promotes democracy, is there a risk that she will wind up in the same predicament as South Africa after 1994?

Serious scholars should not present themselves as fortune-tellers, but I will venture to say that should China promote constitutional democracy, it is almost impossible that China would find itself in South Africa’s predicament, even if it is possible that there would be problems like those during the transitional period in Central and Eastern Europe.

South Africa’s contemporary problems are not all created by “path dependency,” and there are a few lessons we can learn from South Africa’s post-1994 experience, although I won’t go into that here. What I want to emphasize here, is that in addition to the commonalities between China and South Africa, there are also important differences. Among these are two:

First, South Africa’s “black-white divide” is more rigid than China’s “city-village divide.” By rigid, I mean the immutability of the difference between those who discriminate and those who are discriminated against. As I’ve already said, the weight of China’s institutional discrimination is greater than in South Africa, and China’s “low human rights” problem is more serious. But the fact that the weight of discrimination is greater does not mean that the “unchangeability” of the difference between those who discriminate and those who are discriminated against is also greater. Because of the way skin color is viewed in South Africa, “changing from black to white” is impossible. Yet even during periods when Chinese peasants faced the most serious status barriers, some people still managed to make the transition from “peasant to non-peasant.” No matter how well the conservative tribal chiefs that sucked up to South African white power might have been treated, the best they could do was to rule “black homelands” with the support of the white political regime. They could not enter into the ranks of power-holders in the white state. China’s peasants are different. Although there are status barriers in the recruitment of civil servants, “high civil servants” also practice a system of “special privilege” [allowing them to ignore such barriers]. Even during the period of the “three-year man-made disaster” [i.e., the Great Leap Forward] when the countryside was hungry and the farmers were in a much worse situation than the blacks in South Africa, there were many Chinese officials who were born in the countryside (the ratio was higher then than now). Also, in China’s typically official-heavy system, once a peasant-born person becomes a big official, all the "people," including the city born, have to bow and scrape before him.   Clearly, the weakness of the peasant has nothing to do with the fact that he tills the soil, but is rather because he finds himself on the bottom rung of the ladder of power. What we call China’s “binary urban-rural structure” is instead the difference between those who have power and influence and those who don’t.

This is not only true now. In the past China had “commoner ministers 布衣卿相,” which some people take as evidence of “equality.” In fact, this simply meant that the “rigidity” of the difference between those with power and those without was less pronounced, and not that when those with power abused those without, they were kinder about it. Nor did it mean that the “contradiction between the officials and the people” was less pronounced. The principle here is simple: the “commoner minister” is not “the minister who represents the commoners.” Instead the “common minister” elevated through the grace of the emperor is only a political upstart, and his rise does not mean that the “commoner” class has a “representative.” Quite the contrary—he may well mistreat the “commoners” more than the nobility mistreats other nobles, because “the favorite slave is crueler than the master to the slaves who are not favored.” It is not at all surprising that in Chinese history, the incidents of “people rising up due to official oppression” are more numerous than incidents of the servile people rising up against aristocrats in aristocratic societies. By contrast, “peasant uprisings” throughout history have mostly been led by non-peasants, some even by aristocrats.

To promote democratic reform today is of course not the same as historical “peasant uprisings,” but this feature of the system may well lead people to see this reform as a struggle within the system, rather than a struggle of one group of people (for example, black people) against another group of people (for example, white people). Peasant-born officials serving in the present system in China may well not speak for the peasants, yet the fact that peasants can become officials (unlike black South Africans, who could not serve as officials in the white government) may absorb the small number of elites among the peasants with political ability, meaning that it is hard for Chinese peasants to produce someone like Mandela. From this angle, China’s peasant question looks to be harder to resolve that the black question in South Africa.

In addition, this kind of person [i.e., a Mandela] can quite easily appear among “non-peasants,” just as in history when many peasant revolts were launched by non-peasants. Even the most enlightened white South African could hardly become a black leader, but this is clearly not the case in China. From this perspective, China’s peasant problem looks to be “easier” to resolve than South Africa’s black problem.

And this is related to the second important difference: even if blacks in South Africa possessed “low human rights,” whites had long since implemented constitutional democracy. By contrast, even Chinese city-dwellers, even those urbanites with the highest “quality 素质”[34] such as academics and intellectuals, enjoy no democracy to speak of.

For this reason, Chinese urban residents are not an interest group in the way South African whites were. As noted above, institutional discrimination in China is in many instances worse than in South Africa, even if China’s “urban-rural divide” is less deep than the “black-white divide” in South Africa. Why? To an important degree, it is not became the level of human rights possessed by Chinese peasants is higher than that of South African blacks, but rather because the level of rights possessed by China’s city-dwellers is lower than that of South African whites, which is especially obvious when we compare China’s “poor city-dwellers” with South Africa’s “poor whites.” In South Africa, “low human rights” applies only to blacks, while in China, many urbanites are affected as well.

I mentioned above that in the past, white South Africans had the right to vote while black South Africans did not, and Chinese peasants had “one fourth” of the right to vote of China’s city-dwellers. At first glance, this “one fourth” would put Chinese peasants ahead of black South Africans, who had nothing. But everyone knows what Chinese elections are, so when talking about voting rights, instead of saying Chinese peasants are ahead of South African blacks, it makes more sense to say that Chinese urbanites are behind South African whites. The legal status of the peasants is a clear statement of discrimination, but everyone knows that the main reason for peasant weakness is not any “difference in voting rights.” In South Africa’s democratization in 1994, it was only blacks who obtained democratic rights; whites already had these rights, so they obtained nothing. But if China eventually democratizes, both city-dwellers and peasants will profit. Protection of the rights of South African poor whites was achieved as early as the 1920s, even if at the time there really was no question of “rights protection” beyond preserving their special privileges as whites over blacks. By contrast, in China, the infringement of the rights of the powerless in the cities is a very serious problem, and it is not only the peasants whose rights must be protected. Even if there are conflicts of interests between city-dwellers and peasants, this is not the main issue in the protection of the rights of the weak in the cities. The prejudice felt by poor South African whites toward the blacks may have been deeper than that felt by rich South African whites. In China’s cities there are laid-off workers who complain that migrant laborers “have stolen my job,” but this is not a particularly strong refrain, and more people complain about “collusion between officials and businessmen.” Most of the exclusion experienced by migrant laborers does not come from laid-off urban blue-collar workers.

White South Africa set up a European-style welfare system, which guaranteed high standards of living to poor whites. Yet even China’s city-dwellers live in a “negative welfare” system, with polarization in the cities having become all the more obvious after market reforms. In many ways, one might say that social benefits available to the urban poor in today’s China are fewer than those available to poor South African whites under apartheid, and that white South African society was more “socialist” at the time than urban Chinese society now. This has meant that many South African whites, and particularly poor Afrikaners, have found it difficult to adapt to the post-apartheid situation, while the black populism that has reached a certain number of blacks is tinged with animosity toward the whites, a sort of “reverse racism” that targets all “non-blacks.”

For these reasons, China’s urban society is more complex than white South African society. In China, during the period of the planned economy, the gap between the rich and the poor was hidden, the conflict between the government and the people could not be expressed, and urban-rural differences were most obvious. At present, the conflict between the government and the people is obvious, and has surpassed the gap between the rich and poor, as well as the difference between the cities and the countryside. China’s urban intellectuals express sympathies for the plight of the peasants, and their cries to increase the welfare of the peasants are louder than the cries of the peasants themselves, while officials born as peasants hardly speak out for peasant interests. This stands in clear contrast to a figure like Mandela, a black elite speaking for black interests.

The reason no “special grace” was available in within South Africa’s system of discrimination against blacks—outside of the fact that skin color cannot change—is because the white South African democratic system could not allow “the emperor” to take (white) special privileges and bestow them on a (black) person that struck his fancy, nor could he take away the citizenship rights of someone he didn’t like (such as whites that opposed him), citizenship rights under a racist system being the same as white privilege. By contrast, in China, city-dwellers have no democratic rights, and “the emperor” can at any time choose to see urbanites as “peasants” (as in the “up to the mountains, down to the villages” movement of the 1950s and 1960s,[35] or when municipal authorities revoke the urban hukou of the underclass), and he can also elevate his favorite “slave” to a position of power and nobility. This is the reason why South Africa came up with the plan to create “independent” black homelands; in a democratic system, citizenship rights cannot be taken away, so the only way to maintain a system that discriminates against blacks is to see them as foreign “stowaways.” In China, there is simply no need for this, since it is no big deal for officials to arrest or expulse the people. Of course if they treated “foreigners” like this it would be a problem because “foreign guests” have special privileges in China!

And this is why, even if the seriousness of China’s institutional discrimination is no worse than that of South Africa, its “capriciousness” is much more obvious. The “problems with China’s hukou system” are not with the idea of the hukou, and will not be solved simply by abolishing the “agricultural hukou.” In fact, in the wake of the huge “land enclosure movement” pushed by official and business collusion over the past few years, many places have seen the emergence of “reverse” hukou policies, in which peasants are forced to become “non-peasants,” (administrative) villages becomes city neighborhoods, and townships become suburbs. Once a village becomes a neighborhood, the land of the peasants can be confiscated, because according to official regulations, the peasants are no longer peasants, and the rule is that “non-peasant” land belongs to the state! Clearly, in a situation without democracy and without checks and balances on the use of power, either abolishing or establishing an “agricultural hukou” can result in discrimination.

Yet viewed from another perspective, this can also increase the flexibility of reform. In fact, if land rights are returned to the peasants, this places limits on the powers of the government, meaning that it can no longer confiscate the land it wants, cities will no longer be able to engage in “clean-ups,” “migrant workers” can set up their own unions, migrant workers who lose their jobs will no longer be seen as “having a village to return to,” social guarantees will be extended to the villages, educational testing will put an end to regional discrimination…In a word, if we see peasants as citizens, if we see peasant land as the property of the citizens, if we see migrant workers as workers (and not “mobile workers”), if we see “migrant workers returning to the villages” as unemployed workers (in need of welfare benefits), then the “antagonism between city and countryside” will disappear. Of course all of this is difficult, and the process is full of conflicts and risks, but there is almost no risk of things evolving in the direction of South Africa’s clear ethnic divide between black and white.

For this reason, the chief push to end status barriers in China will be domestic, while in South Africa most of the pressure came from abroad; in China, the process will mostly rely on the insistence of urban residents on universal values, and not as in South Africa on black resistance. On this front, reform-era China has truly made a fair bit of progress. From the “confiscation of peasant labor” to setting limits on “active migrant workers,” from checking passes and arresting people to checking passes and fining people, from abolishing a coercive system of incarceration to simplifying the process of obtaining a temporary residence permit, from softening restrictions on work to beginning to soften restrictions on education and residency as well…China’s low human rights advantage is truly weakening, and the low human rights economy is slowing down. Of course, the extent of this weakening is not ideal, when compared to the weakening of the apartheid system in South Africa toward the end. But then again, more than in the case of South Africa, China’s problem of institutional discrimination is purely a question of democracy (or to put it more precisely it is a “republican” question—how to set up a mechanism to provide a rational adjudication between interest groups established through a constitutional system). While the striking changes in South Africa are also called “democratization,” it looks as if democracy is far from being adequate to immediately heal the racial divide. The progress of democracy in China has also been accompanied by conflicts of interest, and involves many sorts of risk, including the risk of populism,[36] but Chinese populism is different from the racially charged “black populism” and should not produce ethnic division or a crisis in national identity.

In sum, at least under present conditions, the path dependency of the Chinese system seems less weighted than in the case of South Africa. Should China democratize and abandon its “low human rights advantage,” this might well slow down the “miraculous speed” of China’s economic growth (in fact it will slow whether we abandon it or not), but the quality of economic growth and the links between economic growth and the people’s welfare will improve. There are real risks in this transition, as we saw in the experiences of people in Central and Eastern Europe. But the possibility of a serious crisis in governance is at least more remote than in the case of South Africa. Today’s China is a lot like South Africa before democratization, but because of the differences I have enumerated, and together with the lessons we might learn from South Africa’s earlier experience with democratization, tomorrow’s democratic China might well avoid some of the problems faced by today’s democratic South Africa. In any event, when someone like Song Luzheng 宋鲁郑[37] (b. 1969) uses the example of “chaos” in South Africa to argue against the progress of Chinese democracy, this is even less relevant than when the extreme right wing in South Africa used the example of “chaos” in Central and Eastern Europe to warn against democracy at home.

Nonetheless, all of this requires that the Chinese people keep a clear head in the course of their “economic miracle,” on the one hand avoiding an infatuation with the “miracle” that might lead them to discount the accumulating social crises created by our “low human rights advantage,” avoiding situations in which social injustices intensify from a situation where “the powerful always win” to one where “the winners take all;” and on the other hand taking advantage of this moment when the material conditions provided by rapid growth mean that interests are relatively easy to adjudicate, to promote political reform, democracy, human rights, freedom, and welfare, and transform our model of economic growth. The errors committed by South Africa prove that the miracle produced by the “low human rights advantage” will not always work, and that rethinking things is difficult because old habits die hard. China should be able to avoid South African-style black populism, but for reasons I have already noted, the possibility of the development of a widespread populism, including city and countryside, is greater than in South Africa (South Africa at present is unlikely to see an upsurge in white populism). If China slips into a vicious cycle of oligarchy and populism, this would be extremely problematic. Should China move toward democracy during her “miracle,” she will not find herself in South Africa’s present circumstances, but if China waits until the miracle is over, as in the case of Indonesia in 1997, when despite the economic decline there was “no choice but to democratize,” then the problem might not be that of the South African predicament, but something more serious, like the “Russian predicament” in 1917.

Translator’s Notes

[1] 秦晖：”从南非看中国,’” available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/33585.html , published on on May 12, 2010.

[2] In fact, Qin’s work is roundly condemned by those who embrace more conventional ideas of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” See for example Cao Jiuqiang 曹久强, “中国经济奇迹的误解——低人权优势,” published on February 12, 2012, and available online at http://www.caogen.com/blog/Infor_detail/33651.html .

[3] The references are to places—Dingzhou in Hebei, Dongzhou 东洲 (Shanwei) in Guangdong—where there were clashes between peasants and authorities over inadequate government compensation for confiscated land in 2005.

[4] W. A, Lewis (1915-1991) was an economist, originally from the Caribbean, who taught in England, the West Indies, and the United States. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences in 1979.

[5] J. H. Boeke (1884-1956) was a Dutch scholar of economics, whose work focused particularly on colonial economies.

[6] Werner Willi Max Eiselen (1899–1977) was a South African scholar and one of the architects of the apartheid system.

[7] Zhao Shukai (b. 1959) is a leading scholar of questions related to China’s villages.

[8] Shamir Amin (1931-2018) was an Egyptian-French political scientist and world-systems theorist.

[9] Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky (1886-1937) was a Russian revolutionary and economist, best known as a proponent of the industrialization of Russian villages.

[10] See http://talk.163.com/06/0627/09/2KK6VKNK00301IJI.html .

[11] The reference is to Xia Jisheng 夏吉生 ed., 南非种族关系探析 (Shanghai: Southeast Normal University, 1996).

[12] The Glen Gray Act, passed in 1895, was a stepping-stone in the eventual construction of the apartheid system. See https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-legislation-1850s-1970s.

[13] “Striking hard,” a practice initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1983, refers to campaign-like law enforcement activities focused on particular problems.

[14] A new city constructed in the Beijing suburbs.

[15] See https://www.cecc.gov/resources/legal-provisions/property-law-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china-chinese-text .

[16] English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htm .

[17] English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htm .

[18] English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htm .

[19] Qin Hui surely means the British priest Trevor Huddleston (1913-1998) who was an anti-apartheid activist personally involved in the events in Sophiatown, and who wrote a well-known book on his experiences entitled Naught for your Comfort.

[20] “Nail houses 钉子户” is the Chinese term for houses that refuse to sell to developers, and hence stick out “like nails” as the construction proceeds around them. See images here:  https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development .

[21] For more on the “inchworm effect,” see Qin Hui, “我看全球经济危机：两种尺蠖效应的互动,” 领导者, 2009.2, available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/27203.html. The basic notion is that the opposition between those arguing for “greater welfare” and those arguing for “freer markets” in contemporary politics allows little room for progress.

[22] On the Shandong incident, see http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6a0259120100k7rc.html.

[23] The Bantu Self-Government Act was part of the initiative to establish “autonomous” black townships. See https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/black-homeland-citizenship-act-1970.

[24] All of these measures refer to efforts by the Chinese state to “industrialize” agriculture. For specifics on such policies carried out in the context of the Chongqing model, see Gao Yuan, “Rural Development in Chongqing: The ‘Every Peasant Household’s Income to Grow by 10,000 Yuan’ Project,” Modern China 37.6 (November 2011): 623-645.

[25] The “three rural issues” are “agriculture, villages, and peasants.”

[26] A village in Shanxi province that was a model during the Cultural Revolution period.

[27] Xiaogang village in Anhui was one of the first to argue for the “family responsibility system,” while Nanjie village in Henan is often called the “last Maoist village in China” because of its resistance to decollectivization. See https://www.kunlunce.com/ssjj/guojipinglun/2016-04-29/88598.html.

[28] 就地消化, a term used to describe infiltration of Guomindang-held areas by underground CCP units during the anti-Japanese War. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/62365111.

[29] Qin’s point appears to be that the “pirate nations,” i.e., the colonial powers of the seventeenth century, played a major role in the primitive accumulation that made capitalism possible, and thus were a force for progress, while China and South Africa are parasitic free riders. See J. L. Anderson, "Piracy and World History: An Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation," Journal of World History, 6. 2 (Fall, 1995): 175-199, available online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/20078637 .

[30] This is a play on words. The Chinese term for the American Civil War is “the war between the South and the North,” which Qin transfers to the divisions between “north and south,” developed and non-developed, on a global scale.

[31] Yang is professor of philosophy at Beijing University.

[32] Sir Henry James Sumner Maine was a British jurist and historian, best know for his arguments that law and society developed from “status to contract.”

[33] This is taken from Mao Zedong’s 1926 essay on “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” see https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm. Marshal Zhao is another name for the god of wealth.

[34] “Quality” 素质, or the lack thereof, is a characteristic often evoked by Chinese elites to explain the dire circumstances of Chinese peasants or migrant laborers. See for example Rachel Murphy, “Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: "Population Quality" Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education,” The China Quarterly 177 (March 2004): 1-20. Qin is using the term ironically.

[35] In which urban youth were sent to the countryside to “learn from the peasants.” See Michel Bonin, La génération perdue: Le mouvement d’envoi des jeunes instruits à la campagne en Chine, 1968-1980 (EHESS : Paris, 2004).

[36] By “populism,” Qin means arguments based in China’s uniqueness or superiority, above all vis-à-vis the West.

[37] Song is a critic and writer based in Fudan University in Shanghai, clearly one of Qin Hui’s detractors.

Qin Hui, "Looking at China from South Africa"

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