China's Ticking Time Bomb to Widespread Unrest

China has many serious problems threatening its future prosperity and strength. Among them are a virtual absence of social benefits for migrant workers, and dangerous exposure to toxic materials of all kinds for both workers and ordinary citizens. The article excerpted below discusses two of these many problems:

The root of the problem is China's hukou system of household registration. Migrant workers aren't considered residents of the cities where they live, which means they aren't entitled to health care, pensions, housing subsidies or education for their children. To educate their children, migrant workers either have to find the money to pay for schooling in the cities where they work or send their children back to the rural areas where they officially still live. With migrant workers earning so little -- the average is about $250 a month -- sending children back home is often the only option.

The hukou system is nothing new, so why the increase in protests now? Three reasons, I think. First, the contrast between the country's newly wealthy and this vast migrant underclass has fed anger at the unfairness of the system. Second, because China's growth has produced labor shortages in many parts of eastern, export-oriented China and because Beijing has pushed growth into lagging western provinces, migrant workers have more bargaining power. They can find work closer to home if they don't like the way they're treated in the traditional fast-growth provinces. Third, China's increasing inflation rate has come down particularly hard on the country's poorest residents. The annual overall inflation rate was 5.5% in May, but food inflation is running at well over 10% annually. If you make just $250 a month -- and remember that's the average, so some migrant workers make even less -- and spend 35% of your family budget on food, then 10% food inflation is pinning you to the wall....

...China is the world's largest consumer of lead. National data are sketchy, but a 2006 review of the existing data suggests that one-third of Chinese children suffer from elevated blood-lead levels. Part of the problem is enforcement -- officials are reluctant to clamp down on businesses that provide jobs. But national environmental standards are also woefully inadequate. Based on U.S. regulations, lead levels of 40 micrograms per deciliter of blood are poisonous for adults. Chinese rules call 400 micrograms per deciliter, a common reading for lead workers, "moderately elevated."

Tightening and enforcing national standards would require closing marginal factories, mandating expensive environmental upgrades for every company that works with lead -- including the country's increasingly large battery industry -- and providing compensation and treatment to affected workers. All that would disrupt local economies and be incredibly expensive. It's easier to treat each outbreak of the national problem as a local event and address it with force and limited payments. _money.msn

Chronic lead toxicity among workers, children, and ordinary citizens is destructive enough. But even worse poisons and poisonings afflict various parts of the Chinese population. And authorities appear extremely hesitant to do anything about them, for fear of upsetting the current run of prosperity in high places.

China's leaders are deluding themselves if they think they can keep China within a bubble of their own making and under their complete control. People and ideas cross freely over the Chinese border on a daily basis, and each person and idea represents a potential threat to the autocratic system of the CCP. But stopping the relative free flow of ideas and people would mean going back to the dismal age of Mao and the cultural revolution of death and fanatical ideology out of control.

The situation is intrinsically unstable. Sooner or later, something has to give.