Book review of Invisible China: How the urban-rural divide threatens China’s rise

• Main Author: ZHANG, Qian Forrest
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Sociology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3650; https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2022.2132709
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In Invisible China, Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell argue that a human capital crisis in China’s rural population threatens the continued development of the Chinese economy and is likely to cause China to stumble into the ‘middle-income trap’. The key theoretical insight underlying this argument is the ‘time inconsistency’ that middle-income countries face: the human capital requirements for their further advance must be built up decades in advance when there is no need for that in a low- to middle-income economy. This inconsistency is particularly heightened in China’s case. China’s rapid advance to middle-income status has left it no time to accumulate the broad-based human capital indispensable for the transition to a high-end service economy.