However rural China has still a lot of poor people and growth hasn't come to them.
Indeed, that is the problem we are facing right now. The policies gaps between urban areas and rural areas are being criticized on a daily basis. for example, we are now having the so called "Spring Festival travel season" where you see two billion passengers (not people) hitting the railway and expressway systems. this is indeed caused by the fact that large number of people moved to cities for work but just don't call the cities which they built home.
I fully acknowledge the problems, however, a bold however, I understand the context of the problem. We had about 1 billion farmers in rural areas and we just couldn't say "we will get you rich all together. " that is communism and communism doesnt work. We had to say "we let a part of the population get rich first, if you want to be rich, go to urban areas and work hard. "
I also agree that it is unfair, but believe it or not, that policies at least made 400 million to 500 million urban population rich. that is the total population of the US and Japan combined.
For this reason, I support the polices but also expect more improvments to bring more fairness for the people in rural areas.
Unfortunately unlike Indian poor who have the vote, these people are resigned to their fate. Things are changing though, and Ive seen many progress (albeit slower) in China interior in the last 7 years
if you check our history, we didn't have the cast sytem and we Chinese in general believe that you can be born as a dead poor loser but make yourself damn rich by working hard. the idea of your fate in on your own hand is in our blood.
you can check the background of the richest men and women in China and india. most of our rich business men and women started their business from a few hundreds dollars. very different from the patten in india where you enjoy the cast system....
you can also check the status of our women in business, politics, engineering. as I have already said in another thread, the number of female engineers working on our space program is more than the number of male engineers
and most of them are from the rural areas as 70% of the population live there.
again, this is not defending the problems of the economic gaps, I acknowledge the problem and you will see us fixing it.