Yo this is in reply to that one post weeks back that asked for resources on homelessness in China?
I can't seem to find that post anymore, but hopefully whoever posted it can find this!
Skip to 23:06 for the land reforms, and why homelessness is less of a thing in China. (Tbf the whole thing is worth a watch, it's very informative.)
TLDR? Essentially this: the CPC has come into power, and they have to do something about the massive wealth inequality in China. I'm sure you've seen that tweet of "Muhh egg monopolies". One way they decided to go about it was via land reform. This land is the key to income for many, as chinese society then was not very developed. Farming was the way to make a living, but if most of the land was owned by landlords, what little the farmers earned had to go to the landlords. The land reform was a way for the means of production, the farming land, to go back into the hands of the proletariat.
This is not to say this went perfectly of course. China is massive, and the government was fresh faced, and the oppressed had been very, very angry for a long time. Needless to say, this land reform caused some deaths of the landlords, and overall, the upheaval of the lives of the rich and powerful. It was bloody, but then again, you can't deny that its motivations were in the right places.
All of this leads to the situation where everyone has a piece of their own land in China. Ofc, there isn't "private ownership" but it essentially is their land, forever. This includes the chinese who fled the country, those who were unfairly chased out by the japanese/KMT/even the CPC, etc etc. And so, this means that everyone has a "lao jia", or "old home", where they can return if there ventures outside don't work out. This has some negative connotation ofc, because when you have to return to your "old home", clearly you didn't succeed out there. But the fact is that the poor have places to call their own, and so usually don't have the sleep out in the streets.
I hope this was informative! And again, I'm not saying there is absolutely zero homelessness in China, I'm sure there is. But I can say from first hand experience that it is far less than western countries, especially US and the UK. I'm sure someone can dig out an objective report of this as well.
Needless to say, this land reform caused some deaths of the landlords, and overall, the upheaval of the lives of the rich and powerful. It was bloody, but then again, you can’t deny that its motivations were in the right places.
the execution was also good
pun intended
Funnily enough, that lao jia (老家?) was a key thing for surviving 2008. When the economy shat the bed, a lot of the internal migrant workers relocated back home. Not ideal, by any means, but it was a place they could go.
Nowadays I think much of that old area is being acquired by the state or farming conglomerates (or both), with residents relocated to cities in an anti-poverty drive.
Yep, 老家.
The 2008 crisis forcing internal immigrants to move back home isn't ideal, but it is much better than being relegated to the streets, with nowhere to go.
Some of the old area is being re-acquired by the state, because many of these villages/places are still very poor, and not great for farming in solitary units either. Even those these poor families do have a home, it's still poverty. It's soul destroying, and its effects are generational. So the anti-poverty drive targets the unproductive land, and relocates the residents to pretty nice apartments. There is still a lot of to improve in this process ofc, and some are finding it difficult to adjust to life in the city.
We'll see if this was a good move in the long term, but I have hope.
