China got communism despite having a tiny urban proletariat that Marx thought was poor material for a communist revolution. The Chinese communists adapted Lenin's vanguard of the proletariat concept that avoided waiting for the urban workers to revolt by revolting in their name. The Chinese communists adapted it by being the vanguard of the peasants who one day would be urban workers who would be the natural constituency of Marxism.
So now that China's economy isn't growing fast enough to justify Communist Party rule, the Chinese are ambitiously trying to create urban workers to keep the inputs going into their economy:
China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come.
The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city dwellers will approach the total urban population of the United States — in a country already bursting with megacities.
This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers.
Of course, the input that worked in the past may no longer be the key to growth.
And if those new urban citizens have no future in the factories that no longer need them, is China creating the idle urban material for a more truly Marxist revolution? Set the Irony dial to 11 ...
