Hidden country

Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise
Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell
University of Chicago Press: 2020
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The world has been swept up in China’s narrative of gravity-defying economic growth. This story, shaped directly and indirectly, domestically and globally, by Chinese propaganda efforts, has bred a cottage industry of books, films, speeches and news coverage expressing both dread and fascination with the Frankenstein’s monster that the United States, chiefly, created. Most writers have approached China for decades now with gape-mouthed wonder, at Mao Zedong’s agricultural ‘miracle’, at how Deng Xiaoping ‘lifted a billion people out of poverty’, at how the diligent Chinese created an export juggernaut, at how China deftly avoided the Global Financial Crisis, at how its Belt and Road Initiative is priming buoyant growth in the developing world. It is no coincidence that these narratives float on the heady perfume of ready cash wafting from China. Money has hypnotised much of academia, business and foreign governments into a suspension of common sense: whatever happened in Brazil/Indonesia/Japan/ Mexico/other fast up-and down economies will not happen in China. In China, economic growth will never end. This unrelenting narrative of triumph has taken on a more menacing cast in the United States of late. But the idea that China is ‘winning’ both commercially and morally is just another flavour of the general stunned envy China.

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