Description I
Evonne Jiawei Yuan
Feb 8th, 2016
The Cover as Façade and Its Signification to the Article as Interior: On the notion of “Inequality” in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs by the case study of François Bourguignon’s article “Inequality and Globalization: How the Rich Get Richer as the Poor Catch Up” and the Photograph “Shanghai Falling (Fuxing Road Demolition)” by Greg Girard applied as its cover image
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, an American journal of international relations and U.S. foreign policy, the former Chief Economist (2003–2007) of the World Bank François Bourguignon puts forward that inequality within individual countries has increased, though global inequality has come down.1 He also predicts that the latter downward trend will probably persist thanks to the growing domestic markets in China and India, as well as some smaller economies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, yet the former building situation is being underestimated by economists.2 By such a contrast, the mere purpose of the article “Inequality and Globalization: How the Rich Get Richer as the Poor Catch Up” is to point out the fact that “increased inequality within countries has offset the drop in inequality among countries,” which is largely caused by globalization and economic liberalization.3 In order to emphasize the situation of domestic poverty, the author employs words and phrases like “a disheartening trend”, “leaving many citizens behind”, “the poor poorer”, “unskilled workers”, “disenchanted citizens”, which suggests the appearance of poverty as an urban scene and a serious civic problem.
In this vein, the only photograph selected in company with the article is a press image by Agence France-Presse shooted in December 2012 under the title of “Scavenging in a Garbage dump in Hefei, China” (plate 1), aimed to illustrate the sharp contrast as mentioned above. In the foreground of the dramatic scene, a ragged grey-headed female migrant worker is dragging a wagon of construction trash out of a demolished site or a waste landfill. While in the blurred distant view, there stand a number of high-rises housing under construction. The photograph does not necessarily reveal the domestic poverty in China as a result of the conspicuous contradictions between urban and rural areas by juxtapositioning the different everyday spectacle in the rural or the urban. On the contrary, it rather seems as if the poverty should be attributed to the rapid urbanisation that the country is undergoing and the uneven distribution of migrant 1
François Bourguignon, “Inequality and Globalization,” Foreign Affairs, vol.95, no.1 (January/February, 2016): 11. 2 Ibid, 13–14. 3 Ibid, 14. 1