Treatmeant of workers in Socialist States

[mindseye]

To be fair to DuncanK, about 2/3rd to 3/4th of the people live in rural areas.

His original comment was about the cities: ("Industrialization takes place in cities. They want people to move to cities") as was my original response. Get those bifocals back on, DanS!

Besides, you have to remember that the number of urban Chinese is about the same as the entire population of the USA, so we're not talking about a trivially small group of people. The ongoing modernization of China's cities has been an accomplishment of staggering proportions.

As far as I can tell, most farming is non-industrialized and uses technology that seems right out of the 1870s in the US.

Very much of it is. However, things like small tractors are becoming more and more common sight in the countryside. China is so vast and so varied that it's really hard to generalize about anything. The cities and the rural areas (expecially in the west) are like two different worlds. It's so weird to be on the subway and see computer programmers sitting next to full-on peasants.

You don't need at least 24/25th the people that China has in agriculture

So true, and thus the paradox: modernizing agricultural techniques will only make rural labor more redundant. Hopefully increasing rural incomes will create all sorts of other types of work associated with higher standards of living (e.g. home appliance sales and repair, transportation, etc).