Mortality figures, which fell in the 1970s and '80s, began to rise again in the '90s and China is now near the bottom in its region. "China," Huang says, "is ranked by the World Health Organisation as one of the most inequitable countries in the world in terms of the distribution of and access to health care." As immunisation fees increase, parents vaccinate fewer girls than boys, and the mortality rates for peasant girls have risen. Hospitals began to charge fees and in the countryside, notes Huang, "65 per cent of those who should have been hospitalised were not because they couldn't afford it".

Inequality is widening. In 1989, during Tiananmen, the government feared that peasants would join the nationwide protests. They didn't, because they were content with their improving incomes, based as much on entrepreneurial businesses as on farming. Even during the Cultural Revolution, peasants often managed tiny private plots or small businesses, while urban dwellers were persecuted for any sign of profit-seeking. After Deng Xiaoping guaranteed individual property rights in 1979-80 and encouraged commerce, rural enterprise flourished. In one of his many felicitous phrases, Hang says: "One should never underestimate the incentive effect of not getting arrested."

Rural enterprises were encouraged by party general secretary Hu Yaobang and premier Zhao Ziyang (both now dead), men with rural administrative experience, who issued documents inaugurating polices such as "peasants in their private capacity can engage in trade. They can go into cities and leave their counties and provinces." They did, and even founded an airline and a great pharmaceutical business. The number of Chinese poor - defined at a very low standard - fell by 154 million between 1978 and 1988, but only by 62 million during the next decade. Zhao and Hu, whose reformist politics enraged Deng, were gone by the end of Tiananmen, in June 1989, and their places taken by heavy-hitting urban planners with engineering backgrounds. Having made their careers in Shanghai, these men, including the new party general secretary Jiang Zemin, began curtailing credits to rural

enterprises. Since the 1990s, as rural businesses languished and inequality widened, China has been riven by hundreds of protests of those left behind by the urban reforms. Poor, badly-educated rural migrants swarmed to the urban factories which are now collapsing, as the worldwide crunch hits China.

Now, they are returning to the countryside they fled, where another crisis is sparking riots and demonstrations that the security forces have been called out to suppress. It could be argued that during the past 50 years, China has weathered worse crises. But South China has been the driver of the urban economic miracle. If its collapse accelerates, following those manufacturers of shoes, toys, toothpaste, pet food and powdered milk, "security", the communist party's over-arching watchword, could crack. Furious country people will be joined by their disillusioned daughters, whose factory jobs in the Pearl River delta have disappeared. It is part of China's rural folklore to recall that every dynasty for more than 2,000 years, no matter how mighty, has been brought down by angry peasants.