The Myth of Chinese Capitalism Quotes

“Without a free press, an opposition party, or meaningful elections, the people have few outlets other than taking to the streets.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“We don’t want to go back to the traditional [model], labor-intensive, simple and boring.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“Chinese women of childbearing age on average were having 1.6 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a population, and down from a high of six in the 1960s, before the one-child policy and other birth restrictions were instituted.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“the country’s next big labor downsizing and the biggest change ever to come to its manufacturing sector: the end of its reliance on a migrant workforce and its replacement with robots.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“While local governments were seen as corrupt and in cahoots with factories, both aligned in their mutual desire to abuse laborers in their pursuit of money, the officials in far-off Beijing were certainly on the side of the workers and would stop any mistreatment, if only they knew about it; didn’t the laws they wrote make that clear? It always made me feel sad, no matter how often this mantra of faith was repeated. The reality, of course, was that Beijing was much more concerned about preserving stability, and would never accept workers taking matters”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“In 2012, for the first time in history, more Chinese resided in cities than in the countryside; policymakers were eager to encourage this trend to continue.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“Given the central role that nationalizing land and eliminating private ownership in the countryside played in its revolution and ideology, the party is loath to reverse course. The leaders maintain that through “the collective,” land in the countryside in effect belongs to all the people, an argument made much earlier by Mao.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“Despite huge progress in wiping out poverty, the countryside still has large numbers of poor people and incomes continue to fall behind the rest of the country. This unfortunate fact is in part because of the hukou system, which restricts rural people’s ability to fully integrate into the cities.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“Guizhou is one of the very cloudiest; its capital, Guiyang, is overcast for nine months”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World

“As Deng himself had reportedly said, in his version of trickle-down economics, “Some must get rich first.”
― Dexter Tiff Roberts, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World