> But Dennis, consider the kinds of labour reproduction systems that, in a
> conference we hosted earlier this year, had David Whitehouse comparing
> Chinese rural/urban migrancy control to that of apartheid, surely one of
> the most profitable modes of prim-accumulation in its hey day:
> http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/Whitehouse%20China.pdf
Those labor systems are very different. Maoist China was an autarkic peasant state, a true periphery, trying to industrialize as rapidly as possible, while facing a US trade embargo and massive US wars on its flanks in Korea and Vietnam. That's very different from a semi-peripheral state like South Africa, extracting surplus-rents from black miners and peasant producers to subsidize a white neocolonial elite tightly connected to the financial machinery of Anglo-American imperialism.
Also, I'm not sure where Whitehouse is getting his data. China's per capita peasant incomes grew slowly from 1950 to 1970, then took off like a rocket after 1978, and continued to rise (albeit more slowly) after 1985. Mandatory birth control policies were obnoxious, but urbanization, education for women and access to birth control caused a huge drop in China's fertility rate in the early 1970s, even before the one child policy.
-- DRR