Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise

“Rural China is really far behind urban China and behind most of the developing world. It has the educational attainment of Algeria, for example, and a whole lot of health problems that are not prevalent elsewhere and could easily have been fixed. For example, a big portion of Chinese rural youth are myopic. This could be fixed by just getting eyeglasses to them, which are really not very expensive and yet that hasn’t been done. So there are kids out there who just can’t see the blackboards (or the whiteboards) and so can’t complete school. There are also problems with worms and vitamin deficiencies. These can be easily fixed by giving a supplement every day to children, or by giving them a de-worming medicine, but these things are not done. So you have a rural population in China—about 60% of the total population—which is very, very significantly behind the rest of the country and behind other developing nations.” Read more...

Books to Change the Way You Think About China

Anne Stevenson-Yang, Entrepreneurs & Business People