Geographic Insights: East Asia

After you read this chapter, you will be able to discuss the following geographic insights as they relate to the nine thematic concepts:

1. Climate Change and Water: East Asia has long suffered from alternating droughts and devastating floods, and scientists fear that these hazards will only intensify with climate change. Meanwhile, the rivers of China, many of which originate in the Tibetan and neighboring plateaus, are dependent both on seasonal rainfall cycles and on glacial meltwater that are expected to diminish over the next few decades.

2. Food and Globalization: East Asian countries have enough economic development to be able to buy food on the global market, but they are less able to produce sufficient food domestically. Much agricultural land has been lost to urban and industrial expansion and to mismanagement; meanwhile the increase in the region’s affluence has led to a demand for more imported food.

3. Urbanization and Development: China’s move to join the global economy more than three decades ago has led to spectacular urban growth, a stronger emphasis on consumerism, and a massive rise in industrial and agricultural pollution of the air, water, and soil.

4. Power and Politics: As economic development has grown across East Asia, pressures for more political freedoms have also risen. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are now among the more politically free places in the world, and pressure for similar levels of freedom is intensifying in China and North Korea.

5. Population and Gender: China’s “one-child policy” has created a shortage of females. Long-standing cultural preferences for male children mean that if their one child will be female, many parents choose abortion or put the baby up for adoption. The shortage of females is accentuated by the fact that many women are deciding to have a career rather than to marry and have children.

GLOBAL PATTERNS, LOCAL LIVES

In 2000, at age 18, Li Xia (Li is her family name) left her farming village in China’s Sichuan Province (Figure 9.2A) for the city of Dongguan in the Guangdong Province of southern China. She was accompanied by two friends. A few months earlier, the government had taken their families’ farmland for an urban real estate project, paying compensation of only U.S.$2000 per family. The three young women accepted an offer to work in a Dongguan toy factory so they could send money back to their families, who now have to pay cash for food and housing (see Figure 9.2B).

FIGURE 9.2 Workers, development, and urbanization in the new Chinese economy. In 2009, more than 145 million workers—over one-third of whom were women—were “migrant workers” who had moved from rural areas to urban jobs, usually without the government’s permission and hence without the full rights of citizenship they would be entitled to had they stayed in their rural homes. By 2025, another 243 million rural migrants will join them, giving China an overall urban population of over 1 billion people. Geographer Kam Wing Chan observed that the number of workers moving long distances has steadily increased since the 1990s, with the majority moving to Guangdong Province, which some now call the “world’s factory,” and into the lower Chang Jiang region around Shanghai. 9.2a Courtesy Keren Su/China Span/Getty Images, 9.2b Courtesy Feng Li/Getty Images

When the young women arrived in the city, they joined 5 million other recent internal migrants. Sixty percent, like Li Xia, had migrated illegally, without government-approved residency rights, and thus were dependent on their employers for housing. As did many others, Li Xia and her friends soon found that the labor recruiters had lied about their wages. Per month they would be paid not U.S.$45, as promised, but U.S.$30. In addition, they would work 12-hour shifts in 100°F heat, receive no overtime pay, and have only 1 day off a month. But there was no point in protesting. Their families in Sichuan needed the money they would send home, and the recruiters purposely brought in thousands of extra workers to replace any complainers.

Xia felt better when she saw that the toy factory was a clean, modern building known locally as the “Palace of Girls” (nearly all 3500 employees were female). Within a day, she had completed her training, signed a 3-year contract, and mastered her task of putting eyes on stuffed animals destined for toddlers in the United States and Europe. Her enthusiasm faded, however, when she learned that she and her friends would be spending much of their money on the expensive but low-quality food provided by the company, and would be sharing one small room and a tiny bath with eight other women and a rat or two.

In less than 6 months, Xia broke her contract and returned home to her village in Sichuan. There, using ideas and assertiveness she had gained from her time in Dongguan, she opened a snack stand. In just 1 month, she made ten times her investment of U.S.$12. But Xia yearned to return to the southern coast to try again for a well-paid factory job. A few months later, she returned to Dongguan with her sister, leaving the stand to her sister’s husband (who also cared for the couple’s baby).

Since her first arrival, the city had grown by 20 percent and now had 1400 foreign companies trying to hire thousands of workers. Through connections, Xia and her sister found jobs requiring midlevel skills in a Taiwanese-owned fiber optics factory at twice the wages Xia had earned at the toy factory. One year after her first trip to Dongguan, Xia was making a bit more than U.S.$100 a month, enough to live relatively comfortably with only three roommates. She had prospects for a raise, and she was sending money home and once again saving, this time to open a bar in her home village. [Sources: Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Wall Street Journal. For detailed source information, see Text Credit pages.]

hukou system the system in China that ties people to their place of birth; each person’s permanent residence is registered and any person who wants to migrate must obtain permission from authorities to do so

floating population the Chinese term for people who live illegally in a place other than their required (hukou) household registration location; many are jobless or underemployed people who have left economically depressed rural areas for the cities

THINGS TO REMEMBER

• The migration of people from rural China to cities includes 160 million workers who have moved without legal papers and who now constitute half of China’s urban labor force.
• Most rural workers who have moved to China’s cities without official permission are in low-paying jobs with little or no access to social services or education.