How Covid-19 has worsened China’s growing north-south economic divide

Name: Disbelief among Trump voters in Pennsylvania as Pence says US presidential election ‘ain’t over’
Uploaded: 2020-12-14T02:15:07.000Z
Duration: 2 min 1 s
Description: Disbelief among Trump voters in Pennsylvania as Pence says US presidential election ‘ain’t over’

China’s east-west divide remains a challenge, but an emerging divide – between north and south – is also worrying. The north is unlikely to be helped by the ‘dual circulation’ strategy, which is more likely to benefit the Greater Bay Area

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Workers at the Shuangyashan Mine in Heilongjiang province, northeastern China. China’s 15 northern provinces and regions account for 60 per cent of the land, 42 per cent of the population and 35 per cent of economic output. Photo: Reuters

David Dodwell

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades.

Published: 10:15am, 14 Dec 2020Updated: 10:15am, 14 Dec 2020

Norman Tebbit was Britain’s Rottweiler employment secretary during Margaret Thatcher’s turbulent and transformative 1980s, when her war with Britain’s unions swept unemployment up into the stratosphere.

He will always be remembered for one thing – his “get on your bike” speech at the Conservative Party conference in 1981. “I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father,” he said. “He didn’t riot; he got on his bike and looked for work and he kept looking ’til he found it.”

His comment attracted scorn and vilification from Britain’s unions. The darling of Britain’s left, Michael Foot, called Tebbit “a semi-house-trained polecat”. Others, harking back to Tebbit’s working-class childhood, called him the “Chingford skinhead”.

But his comment homed in on a truth as relevant today as ever: if an economy’s jobs are in one place, and the people needed to fill them are in another, then that economy has a major problem. If that was true of a modest-sized country like Britain, imagine how much truer it must be for a giant economy like China.

Think too of the deep and politically controversial divides in the United States during last month’s presidential election between the urban, affluent east and west coasts, and the rural, farm-dominated states that fill the country’s centre.

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Disbelief among Trump voters in Pennsylvania as Pence says US presidential election ‘ain’t over’

China’s leaders have for decades chewed their nails over the stressful mismatches across their 28 provinces. While I was working in Beijing in the early 1980s (coincidentally when Tebbit was in office), the mantra was “Go West”, aimed at reducing the inequality gap between the comparatively rich coastal provinces and China’s remote and impoverished Western provinces.