Alongside the attack on the old working class was a renewed upping of the level of exploitation of the rural workforce, who still made up two thirds of the total. One (banned) Chinese study told of a fall of 6 percent in peasants' per capita farming incomes after 1997, and "given the rising costs of health and education, their real purchasing power has probably fallen still further" .38 But the average does not tell the whole story. Class diferentiation within the peasantry involved local officials using their powers to grab money (in the form of local taxes) and land off other peasants with the aim of enriching themselves as petty agrarian capitalists-the cause of many local near-uprisings.
Enthusiasts for capitalism claimed the turn to the market had led to an unprecedented lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And the abandoning of the crude methods of primitive accumulation in the mid-1970s had permitted much of the industry built up through its methods to be used more productively, with the result that not only the new rural capitalists but also those from peasant families who moved to work in the cities could enjoy improved living standards. But for the great majority of the population, they were still low living standards. The World Bank admitted in the early 2000s that 204 million people, or one in six of the population, still lived on less than \$ 1 a day. Other estimates suggested that "the vast majority of the 800 million peasants" had incomes at this level. 39
The key to China's rapid growth rates was an unparalleled level of accumulation. The proportion of national output going into investment rose to 50 percent in 2006:40
The Years of Delusion
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