With a growing population, for several decades labour had been cheap, but this trend reversed around 2010, as the working population began to decline thanks to the one-child policy. A shrinking workforce required greater growth in productivity, but this, too, was falling steadily.23 For decades, the countryside had been neglected, used as a reservoir for cheap, unskilled labour. Local governments had invested vast amounts of money in urban infrastructure, but put very little into their own people, least of all those in rural areas. Across the country as a whole, a mere one in three children
...more
