TT- Your picture of historical rural China is quite farcical.
You and I may be speaking of different histories, or different generations. I was speaking of families that I know that have ties to Mainland China and the last century.
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/mar/07/world/fg-land7http://www.china.org.cn/english/2006/Jul/175674.htmhttp://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/03/us-china-urbanisation-protest-idUSTRE6721DW20100803The governments decisions to take the land for either public or industrial use has compromised both the independent farmer and the countries ability to feed itself regardless of the industrial revolution.
About 35 percent of China's labor force is in agriculture (compared to 2.5 percent in the U.S.). There are 425 million agricultural workers (200 million farming households) in China. A little over a decade ago China was home to 700 million farmers. They made up about 60 percent of the population.
"Farmers find it hard to survive in an industrialized society. Farmers want to work in the factories, but transition is difficult and few of them adjust. They have no skills. They lack education. They lack the attitude one needs to learn. They have no sense of time, of living by the clock." The small-scale farmer is largely seen as a dying breed in China, made up mostly of the elderly left behind in the mass exodus of migrant workers to much higher-paying jobs in industrial cities.
Improved farming policies and technologies have given China a high level of self-sufficiency and growth. But the country's top economic planning body warned that this would be hard to maintain. The lack of farm subsidies and expropriation of farmland for urban construction has crippled agriculture. As more farmers move to the cities, lured by better housing, education and other incentives, maintaining the food supply becomes more tenuous.
The owners of the land were not the farmers, the farmers were serfs, peasants or even slaves and were legally bound to work long hard lives for their exploitative landlords from the ruling classes.
Obviously a different generation..possibly a different century altogether.
It is not a paradise, but as Bill says now the peasants have jobs and some degree of independence as to their future.
Independence from their previous lifestyles, with no compensation for their losses in education and training to enter the new and completely different lifestyle.
China has a complicated history to western eyes, and we feel it is taking a long time to decide on their future--- but think how long it took us in the west--- Hundreds and hundreds of years. This phase of Chinese development is only decades old and at the moment they are probably doing better than most of their critics.
Your gonna have to make up your mind as to whether we are speaking of decades or centuries in your descriptions of serfdom and slavery.
Slavery was legally abolished in 1909.(not saying it wasn't and isn't still a part of the current government)
