China - Social Issues and Income Inequalities Call for Political Reform

As China is experiencing the rise of the Fourth Generation, is emerging as a global commercial power, and has had an extraordinary average annual growth in GDP as a result of globalization, it is easy to believe that the changes in China after communism have dramatically improved the livelihood of the Chinese people overall. However, this perspective may be deceiving; although poverty levels have undoubtedly decreased after China opened to marketization as a whole, there are a vast number of social problems in the country that the government is failing to address, thus there is still a great need for political reform.
In The Elephant and the Dragon, the life story of a man who was a child when Mao was in power, Tony Ma, illustrates how there is still a great lack of opportunity for people in the countryside to succeed through hard work and ambition. Mr. Ma had worked in a steel mill for two dollars a month and lived with the fear that he would have to work in this mill for the rest of his life. He was one of the only 3 workers, out of 2000 workers in the mill, who was admitted to college, and later received a scholarship to study in the United States. In this sense, Mao’s legacy of a lack of opportunity for people to rise above working in a factory for low wages is still present.
The World Bank suggests that there are still 300 million poor in China. Although marketization and globalization has highly decreased the amount of people living below the poverty line, there has been dramatically increasing inequalities in income, health and education as a result. China’s social problems span to include child labor, very few labor rights, fragile banks, deteriorating environment, shortages in drinkable water, among many others.
These facts demonstrate that we cannot be fooled by China’s rise as a political and economic power in the international scene; it is still very much a developing country and the government needs to provide a safety net for the poor in rural regions. And if the political atmosphere actually has improved to protect the poor, there is still room for improvement, because when there are children making fireworks 15 hours a day for 12 cents an hour instead of attending school, a lot of change needs to be made.