Rural Employment manpower problems in China by Curtis Ullerich

Author:Curtis Ullerich [Ullerich, Curtis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781351714952
Google: RJwuDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 35866798
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Mass labour schemes for capital construction

The third, but by no means the least important, prong in the Chinese rural manpower strategy is the utilization of manpower in massive concentrations to build agricultural infrastructure and to provide the rural milieu with the physical equipment of a modern economy at the lowest possible cost to the State budget (52). From their own experience in the years of struggle, the Chinese leaders knew that this was an area where underdevelopment made itself felt in the most typical, direct way. For it was axiomatic that developed countries were developed because they had what the underdeveloped lacked: the widely differentiated network of infrastructural facilities that constituted an indispensable precondition to socio-economic take-off. The Chinese therefore critically observed how other underdeveloped nations refrained from making any but the absolutely necessary investments in infrastructure as the latter are enormously money-consuming, slow in financial amortization, if amortizable at all, and, if created in technologically orthodox ways, often attainable only with foreign expert assistance. To the Chinese, on the contrary, the creation of a dense and capable infrastructural network appeared an essential ingredient to their progress to modernity, that had to rank at least equally in importance with such quick-maturing and highly profitable investments as in light industry (53). One crucial question was how to finance it in such a way that other investment programmes would not be dangerously retarded. Here the Chinese seem to have opted for two original principles:

- Not the State but the local users are principally responsible for the creation of rural infrastructure. It is for them to raise the necessary investment, the State intervening only by subsidy and on objects clearly beyond the reach of individual communities; hence relative emphasis must be placed on small and local objectives in preference to large-scale and nation-wide ones;

- Whenever monetary and fiscal capital can be replaced by manpower, if necessary in combination with local savings, this approach takes preference, so that funds can be saved for objectives for which manpower, non-monetized savings, etc., cannot replace financial capital.

(The Chinese benefit here from the fact that their collective ownership and collective management system in the villages is better suited to the tasks and problems of accelerated accumulation and manpower utilization. For it soon became obvious that their form of the collective system had most of the instruments and facilities needed to make maximal use of labour-intensive projects and to give strong incentives to their use as a substitute for financial and technical means. Since the commune and its leadership have a statutory obligation to provide food, income and employment to all members, the collective organs are under strong pressure to put all members to work, even at the lowest productive level, provided only that this work contributes to collective output and income. Contrary to what happens in private enterprise, the commune organs cannot lay off or discharge members when excessive labour use leads to declining revenues and marginal profits. They are obliged to carry their labour force for the better or the worse, as a constant factor in all their calculations.

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