Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (34 page)

will the boat sink the water
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Party secretary of Lankao County, Jiao Yulu,* relied on a bike for his personal transportation until the day of his death in 1985.

According to figures released by the agricultural economics office of Anhui Province, Handing Township had a population of eighty thousand, but had over a thousand cadres on its payroll. If teachers were included, the figure would be doubled. Yet the township’s annual income was barely 6 million yuan, not even enough to cover basic salaries. There was a township that kept thirty-five people on the payroll of its financial office— more staff than the financial bureau of a county. Another township was paying sixty-five people to work in its birth-control office.

The peasants say mockingly: “Dozens of official hats crushing one poor battered straw hat!”

In 1987, the China Finance and Economy Publishing House in Beijing published a study of the third national census. The study gave figures for the ratio of officials to commoners (peasants mostly) in Chinese history, from ancient times down to the present. The study gave these ratios of officials to commoners:

Western Han Period (206
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.–
A
.
D
. 8): 1 to 7,945

Eastern Han Period (
A
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D
. 25–220): 1 to 7,464

Tang Dynasty (618–907): 1 to 2,927

Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368): 1 to 2,613

Ming Dynasty (1368–1644): 1 to 2,299

Qin Dynasty (1644–1911): 1 to 299

Modern era (1911 - present): 1 to 67

Eleven years later, in 1998, a senior assistant to the minister of finance said, “In the Han Dynasty, eight thousand people

* Jiao Yulu was a Party secretary of Lankao County, Henan Province, who was cited for his selfless dedication to working for the peasants and for his own Spartan lifestyle.

a vicious circle

supported one official; in the Tang Dynasty three thousand peo-ple supported one official; in the Qin Dynasty one thousand people supported one official; right now we have forty people supporting one public servant.”

This official’s analysis was close to the figures published in 1987, the only exception being the figures for our own times: sixty-seven for the year 1987 and forty for the year 1998. This is an indication of how fast the bureaucracy has expanded in the space of eleven years. Moreover, the study was limited to “officials,” and did not include teachers in rural areas. The reality is that education in rural areas is also supported by local taxes.

It is impossible to tell how many people are living off the backs of the peasants of China, but the available figures tell enough of the story to spotlight the crying need for reform of government institutions. The untenable situation of peasants forced to support a gargantuan bureaucracy and a massive army of officials will ultimately endanger the stability of Chinese society as a whole.

One Country, Two “Nations”

One spring morning in 2001, we went to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing to interview Lu Xueyi, a research fellow at the Social Science Institute who was noted for his work on rural China. “To deal with the problem of the peasants’ excessive burden,” he began by saying, “you must look beyond the countryside.”

Lu pointed out that the two parallel systems for country and city, formulated during the years of the socialist planned economy, has prevailed to the present day, and the Chinese have taken for granted the disparity between urban and rural workers—“worker” being a general term for all who draw a

will the boat sink the water
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government salary—and peasant. The government has used two different kinds of residence permits, one for city another for country, to chain the peasant to the countryside. It has also set up two systems of grain distribution: “consumer grain” for urban distribution through the market, and “agricultural grain” for the peasants’ direct consumption. This system ensures that the peasants stay in the countryside and grow grain to feed the city population.* The government had also separated the population by giving a salary and social services to city workers but not to peasants. Lu said that the result of this “one country, two nations” system denies the peasants access to education, health care, health and disability insurance, retirement pensions,** and all social services, and their right to physical and social mobility. Further negatives affected are the peasants’ right to engage in normal economy activities and economic rights such as exchange, distribution, employment, and fair taxation. Lu summed up the situation: “In a word, the peasant is a second-class citizen from the day of his birth. This is not a simple problem of the unfair economic burden; it is social discrimination.” Lu explained to us in detail how the government had system-atically instituted policies and rules to chain the peasant to the soil: In 1953 it introduced a system of coupons and quotas for grain and oil; the peasants didn’t receive any government-issued grain coupons, and so they could not survive in the city. In 1957 the government crafted a rule forbidding all work units to hire staff from the countryside. Then, in 1958, the government introduced urban residence permits. The permits were issued only to those already living in cities, so it became impossible for

peasants to settle in the city with full legal rights.

* Tied down by residential rules, the peasants are obliged to stay in the countryside and grow grain to feed the city population.

** In principle, pension money is deducted from Chinese workers’ pay-checks and they are given a pension when they retire, the retirement age vary-ing by trade, locality, and era.

a vicious circle

These actions and others opened up a chasm between the worker in the city and the peasant in the country. The city worker was provided for from birth to death, down to crema-tion, while the peasant was given nothing. And, Lu added, the agricultural reform of the early eighties not only did not ameliorate the disparity, it actually widened the chasm and exacerbated the inequality. He pointed out that the current rise in urban crime could be traced to the country-city split because dissatisfied youths from the country who could not get permits to live and work in the city were the primary perpetrators of petty crime in the city. Thus, this problem could be seen as the revenge of the country against the city, the revenge of the backward areas against the developed ones. Lu deplored the fact that city people only resented the rising crime rate and rarely thought of the deeper causes behind it, refusing to face up to the inhuman and brutal system separating rural and urban, a sys-tem that has prevailed for forty years and is still in effect. He deplored the fact that so few politicians or scholars spoke up for the peasants. The peasants truly are the silent majority with no voice of their own, and they are always the first to pay the price whenever there is any social, political, or economic turmoil in the country.

The inequality in the sharing of economic resources was further reflected in inequality of representation in the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislative body. Professor Hu Angang of Tsinhua University in Beijing has pointed out that the distribution of seats in the National People’s Congress is discriminatory of the peasant population and leaves them underrepresented: just one delegate represents 900,000 peasants in the National People’s Congress, whereas in urban areas, there is one delegate for every 250,000 citizens. Not surprisingly, Beijing, Shanghai, and the other big urban centers return more delegates than the mainly rural provinces such as Anhui, Henan, Jiangxi or Heibi.

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Lu Xueyi himself, as a delegate to the National People’s Congress, had submitted a bill regarding the peasants’ plight that contained the following rationale: “Right now the problem is not about implementing this or that policy for the peasant. It is about putting the Constitution into action. It is about giving peasants their basic rights as citizens of the state.”

Who Is Being Put on a Pedestal?

The ancient waterworks at Anfeng, modestly called Anfeng Pond, in Anfeng Pond Township, were built during the so-called Spring and Autumn Period (770–476
B
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.) by Sun Shu-ao, a minister of the Shu Kingdom, now Shou County, in Anhui Province. As we stood before the lake of placid water stretching out into the distance and merging with the skyline, we were intrigued that it is called a pond. This ancient legacy of waterworks is still functioning and benefiting the area. In the township of Anfeng Pond, however, we were told of recent projects—short-lived “standard projects” supposedly the “key attractions” of the township—that were far less able to with-stand the test of time than the ancient waterworks. These projects, launched during the “eliminate blind spots” campaign in the 1990s, were ordered from above.

Sun Jianjun, deputy township chief in charge of finances, winced when he recalled the campaign. It reminded people of the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties, when every village had to light a furnace to make steel. The term “eliminate,” he explained, was meant to convey the absolute determination of the leadership to “eliminate” townships that did not boast of certain enterprises. At the time, the villagers had no concept of what an “enterprise” was, but orders were orders and set one up they must. Isn’t this asking for the impossible, like ordering men to bear babies, the peasants wondered; isn’t this like