Word: urban
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What they won’t see is the stagnation outside the urban wonderland, particularly the ever-widening urban-rural gap that threatens the core of China’s social structure. Despite the country’s progress in the last two decades, it cannot reach its full economic potential until it bridges this disparity...
China’s current urban-rural situation is indeed in dire straits. Official data show that the average rural resident makes only 32 percent of the income of his urban counterparts—a statistic that is at its worst level since data first became available in 1952. And it may even underestimate the problem. According to a 2004 report to the United Nations Poverty Reduction Taskforce, if non-monetary benefits are considered, the real difference between a Chinese city-dweller and his fellow countryman may not be merely three times, but six, the biggest such disparity...
While the reasons for this difference are many and complex, an important part of the matter can be explained by China’s hukou system, which registers all households, dividing the population very specifically into urban and rural. Each local jurisdiction provides only holders of its hukou with access to social services like healthcare and education. Given the immense difficulty of switching hukous, the system results in a relatively immobile population...
Hukous also raise a social wall between rural and urban residents, as the identification booklets very clearly separate the two classes of people. While the situation has improved dramatically in recent years, there is still a sort of condescending societal snobbery that regards the rural class as inferior...
...urban areas, middle schools often became the antithesis of what reformers had intended. Instead of warm incubators of independence and judgment, they became impersonal, oppressive institutions. "In many urban schools," says Juvonen, "you can't help but notice that there are security guards around. There's someone expecting you to misbehave." That's especially destructive, she says, because young adolescents need their independence to be guided and nurtured, not squashed. "This is when kids start challenging social conventions. They say things like 'Why do I have to make my bed?' It's proof of their cognitive maturity...