The terrified government has just poured $586 billion into what is vaguely called the infrastructure. Leaders know that as millions of peasants return to villages left behind since 1990 because of the communist party's concentration on urban development, the regime's newest slogan, "Build a Harmonious Society", may be losing whatever lustre it may have had. From almost 12 per cent per year, the figure that dazzled experts into predicting that this would be the Chinese century, this year's economic growth has sunk to 9 per cent. The World Bank estimates it will fall to 7.5 next year. "If economic growth fell below 8 per cent there would be social tension, complaints and job losses," warned Chen Xingdong, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Beijing. Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics, a Beijing-based economic research and advisory firm, predicted: "Next year we might see export growth in the country as a whole go down to 0 per cent."

But those fleeing to their rural families will find scant relief. In
addition to the 15-year decline in rural prosperity, all over China corrupt officials have seized the small plots that the peasants were told in 1979-1980 they could farm on their own. According to the Ministry of Land and Resources, from 1999 to 2002 alone 300,000 acres were illegally confiscated from 1.5 million farmers. Rapacious local officials seized these holdings and sold them to entrepreneurs who will turn them into privately-run big farms or into factories.

As the villages fell on hard times, the children of newly-poor farmers, usually their daughters, headed for the Pearl River delta and cities like Dongguan. Factory life was exploitative and dangerous, but once the girls became used to the Chinese equivalent of the bright lights, they were alienated from the families to which they sent portions of their wages but visited only briefly each year.

The rural crisis need not have happened. Indeed, it is the result of the intentional undermining of the real Chinese economic miracle - the rural prosperity of the 1980s. This is the revelation of Huang Yasheng, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who was himself, until a few years ago, one of the many China experts convinced that the country's economic miracle was urban.