Road to riches ends for 20 million Chinese poor (as US economy tanks)

[Liberal_in_LA]

Road to riches ends for 20 million Chinese poor

JING SHI, China (CNN) -- Tang Hui and his family prospered as migrant workers during China's economic boom, earning $10,000 a year: enough to build a house, send a cousin to school and pay for his grandmother's medical bills.

But those good days are over. The family's cash earnings have evaporated, snatched away by a manufacturing crash cascading across China caused by falling global demand for its goods.

The nine people in the Tang family are facing an income of zero; their best hope to survive is to grow rice and raise pigs at home in the Sichuan Mountains.

"Farming is really hard. It needs a lot of hard labor," says 22-year-old Tang Hui, who lost his manufacturing job four months ago. "None of the young people want to farm nowadays. The income is extremely low." See photos of the hard-scrabble life of Tang Hui »

A Chinese proverb says: "Going on the road to Sichuan is as hard as going to heaven." Isolated and mountainous, Sichuan is China's third most populous province; 60 percent of its 87 million residents are poor and live in the countryside, authorities say.

It became the nation's biggest source of the 130 million farmers who migrated into Chinese cities, especially in the south, to provide cheap labor for factories that churned out products, mainly for export to the United States. The province was also rocked last May by a massive earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02/20/china.economy.family/index.html

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

1. And ironically they're expected to grow by 8% this year.

I'm curious as to how Bejing will respond.

[sufrommich]

2. I expect we'll see massive unrest in China.

Rising expectations dashed in this economy will cause them some problems.

[Mr. Hyde]

4. One small silver lining in all of this.

[thereismore]

5. That's why China has been propping up the dollar for so long. We're their market. Were. nt

[n2doc]

3. Free ride's over, folks

Time to make stuff YOU need, China.

[OhioChick]

7. Damn straight. n/t

[Mari333]

6. well lets see

you hand huge corporations tax breaks in the 80s and promise the public that they will build more factories in the united states...then, when the corporations get the tax breaks, they take the monies and build huge factories in china, mexico, and other countries and move the whole manufacturing base out of the united states so they can hire slave labour..in the meantime, millions of people in the united states lose jobs and have no source of income..
as a corporation, you are thinking of short term profits with your slave labour..but you never ask yourself..who will buy my shit down the road?
and this is the result..no one in the united states has any decent wages, or wages at all,and they cannot buy your shit...so the corporations , in their short term greed, fucked themselves, and fucked everyone else too.
i saw this in the 80s and nafta terms put the nail in the coffin.
que sera sera