“I LIKE it here,” says Zhang Xiaojie, as she surveys the crowds scurrying below her spick-and-span apartment. Migrant workers bend under sacks of flour or lug around huge circular saws for use on the building sites where they work. Young professionals crowd into a local restaurant. Ms Zhang, a young information-technology officer, is one of millions of people from the countryside who have flocked for work to Chongqing, a province-sized “municipality” in south-western China (its core city has the same name). She looks around at a forest of 30-storey tower blocks, all built and run by the local government, and smiles: “It’s a good place to live. The government has done a pretty good job.”
Chongqing is the setting for China’s most ambitious social reforms. They are aimed at keeping economic expansion going while ensuring that the huge social changes unleashed by growth do not perpetuate inequalities, or foment unrest. Some 250m people have moved from the countryside to cities, the greatest migration in history. Millions live in dormitories or doss down where they can. Most have no formal contracts with their employers, and are denied access to...Continue reading
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