The report that young men angered by lack of job opportunities in urban centres have rioted in Shanghai must come as a great surprise to most of us if only because we have not had adequate access to accurate information regarding developments in that country. For, more often than not, China has either been idolised or condemned with little concern for the reality on the ground. And the fact that The Liberation Daily, a Shanghai newspaper, itself should be providing the details of the disturbances, too, must come as a surprise to those of us who are not sufficiently sensitive to the fact that at least a section of the present leadership headed by Mr. Deng Xiao-ping wants to expose the weaknesses of the Maoist system so that its decision to pursue more pragmatic economic and social policies acquires the necessary legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people who have been victims of the greatest experiment in brain-washing in human history. Both these points regarding the inadequacy of our information regarding China apart, the development raises certain issues which should be of interest to us, especially under the present Janata dispensation which has been talking day in and day out of the need to reorder the country’s economic priorities to the advantage of agriculture and the so-called rural industry and at the cost of what is quite erroneously called big industry.
In the mid-’sixties the Chinese government sent millions of educated young men into the countryside. It represented this to be a great experiment in what Stalin used to call social engineering. The literate must learn from the people who, according to Chairman Mao Tse-tung, were the fount of all knowledge and wisdom. But the authorities had also thought of this forcible mass exodus to the countryside because they wanted to disperse the Red Guards who had become inconvenient and because they were unable to provide jobs to educated youth in urban areas. But it is now fully established that these young men made little positive contribution to rural economy, that the people in the countryside distrusted them and disliked them, that thousands of these young men found the means to drift back into towns and to live there without the ration cards and the identity papers without which they could not get jobs, and that their parents were disaffected on that account. Since the death of the “Great Helmsman” and the consequent change of personnel and policy at the top, six million of the young men and women have returned to the cities. Ten million still remain in the countryside waiting to come back to towns from which they were banished years ago. But there are not enough jobs even for those who are already back. That is why the riots and disturbances. But more importantly, this compulsion to find jobs for educated young men and women is one important factor behind the drive towards modernisation. India, too, faces the same problem but its present leaders think that industrialisation does not offer a solution. They want to try the approach which the Chinese are drastically modifying, if not abandoning. We do not need to wait to be able to anticipate the result in our case.
The Times of India, 17 February 1979