Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (42 page)

peasant problem, but it is clear that we must push for a comprehensive reform project and create conditions for the agricultural economy to develop. It all boils down to the basic tenet that we must believe in and have confidence in the peasants and keep their interests at heart. We must have a realistic estimate of the affluence of the peasants and the extent of their burden. We must give peasants a chance to catch their breath. Otherwise the financial as well as psychological burden will be more than they can bear, and may push them over the edge.

Zhu Shouyin is a specialist in agricultural issues who completed a study called “Innovations in Agricultural Grassroots Organization and Problems in the Reform of the Taxation System.” He made special studies of two important reform measures undertaken by the Communist government: The first was the decision to disband the communes and set up townships in 1985. The state set up a huge bureaucracy of townships as the lowest level of government. Related to this was the “share power and concede profits” policy, and the financial sys-tem of “separate cooking, separate eating”—in essence, a sys-tem of “contracts” between the different levels of government. These reforms, according to Zhu, created independent entities with monopolistic power that tended strongly toward the pursuit of profits.

Second, the reform in taxation first introduced in 1994, when the central government and the local governments had separate sources of income, only created confusion among the different levels of government and each level tended to squeeze the lower levels, until in the end, all hands were stretched out toward the peasants for funds. Of course, said Zhu, these negative effects had not been foreseen by the designers of the reforms, but it is obvious that without changing the larger environment within which the system works, any innovation in the system may backfire.

The president of the Chinese Association of Sociology, Lu

the search for a way out

Xueyi,* also talked about the various problems that had surfaced after the reform. He cut through the tangle and pointed out that the answer lies in the relation of city to country—this bipolar city-country structure was the primary factor obstructing China’s economic development, and must be changed. Of course, Lu pointed out, changing this bipolar structure implies more than merely eliminating the urban residence-registration system. The latter system is linked to the structure of the division of interests between city and country. Changing the system, Lu pointed out, would mean changing in a fundamental way the balance of interests between city and country.

Li Changping, currently editor-in-chief of the magazine
China’s Reform
, attracted national attention in 2000 by writing directly to Premier Zhu Rongji regarding the plight of the peasants when he was a county Party secretary. He shared his thoughts with us regarding agricultural reform. The critical measure, he said, more important than tax reform or ownership issues, was the revolutionary reform of the county bureaucracy. By “revolutionary reform” he meant changing the way local bureaucracy is created and managed. The critical role of the Party is to ensure the interest of the people by restructuring the official system. The number of bureaucracies must be reduced by half, as must the number of officials who rely on salaries paid from tax revenues. People with official titles should just step down and become ordinary citizens. There could not be any genuine reform for agriculture without drastically changing the bureaucracy at the county level, Li Changping stated. The revolutionary nature of this reform lies in the fact that there will be an acute struggle between people who are trying to effect change, which means taking power and rights away from those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Without this reform, said Li, the Party’s directives cannot be imple-

*Lu Xueyi also heads a nongovernmental academic association.

will the boat sink the water
?

mented. He added that if this ballooning of the bureaucracy is not halted by democratic means, we will return to an age when the transfer of power can only be effected through revolutionary violence. One of Li Changping’s most famous sayings is “Let the peasants enjoy the status of a citizen; give the peasants their basic rights.”

Yu Jianrong, of the Agricultural Research Center at Central China Teachers’ College, did not agree with Li Changping. He argued that most of the people who enjoyed rights within the socialist economy have lost those rights as a result of the ongoing pace of reform. The only people who have expanded their privileges and increased their wealth are members of a clique of the elite. His contention is that in China today, a clearly defined citizenry with shared interests and goals in the real sense of the word does not exist. There is just a clique of the privileged and a vast number of lowly workers. There is no such thing as citizens’ rights, only the capital and power and privileges of a rul-ing clique. Yu’s conclusion: Giving peasants their rights as citizens means nothing.

Yu’s solution is to rally the peasants to form their own organization and replace the current local bureaucracy by peasants’ self-rule. Yu proposed that only a network of peasant organizations could truly represent the peasants’ interests and needs and communicate them in an orderly way and prevent or ameliorate confrontations and conflicts. Yu added that the peasants’ organizations should be formed from the bottom up and that members should be free to join or to quit.

The last person we met was the famous economics scholar Wu Jinglian. He said, “Reform can never be smooth sailing. When reform was first instituted, no one would have thought that a countercurrent against reform would surge in 1982, when the Twelfth Party Congress confirmed that the socialist planned economy would remain dominant. This was over-turned in 1984 when the Third Plenary Session of the Twelfth

the search for a way out

Party Congress passed the “Decision Regarding Reform of the Economic System.” We were elated, but a few months later, inflation set in and the reform had to wind down. Then in 1986 the State Council passed a comprehensive reform program; it was on track to being implemented and everybody thought that China was on the broad road to reform . . . But a few months later, the plan was put away. In a word, we always hope for some shattering event, but now I feel that if we can make progress step by step, we should consider ourselves lucky. We cannot afford to be overly optimistic. Within the space of the last few years, so many major reform projects have been shot down again and again. Experience tells us that China’s reform is going through a major upheaval.”

Lately, this famous scholar and promoter of reform, who was popularly known as “Market Wu,” has taken to quoting from the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
to convey his own reading of the enigma of China’s reform: “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.’” Wu Jinglian ended by saying, “In a complex age of transition, we must realize that positive and negative factors exist side by side. Two kinds of future are possible. We of course hope for a good one, but the future of China can only depend on our convictions and our efforts of today.”

about the authors and translator

The authors:
Wu Chuntao was born in Liling, Hunan Province, in 1963. Her husband, Chen Guidi, was born in 1943 in Bengbu, Anhui Province. Both authors come from peasant families and spent their formative years in the countryside before moving to the city—Wu at the age of nine and Chen at the age of eleven.

The two writer-journalists met in 1991 when both were studying at the Writing Center of the Chinese Writers’ Union in Beijing. Chen had already made his reputation as a playwright and novelist. In 2001, the couple began work on their monu-mental piece of literary reportage entitled
The Life of Chinese Peasants
(
Zhongguo Nongmin Diaocha
), published in English as
Will the Boat Sink the Water?

Wu and Chen are both members of the Hefei Writer’s Union
.
Chen, who is also a member of the Chinese Writer’s Union, has been a recipient of the Lu Xun Literature Achievement Award—one of the most prestigious literary prizes in China— for his reporting on environmental conditions in the Huai River area. Several of his stories have received nationwide attention for their author’s courage in investigating corruption. Both

about the authors and translator

authors have received awards from the American journal
Contemporary Age
for groundbreaking reporting, and in November 2004 they were awarded the prestigious international Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage, in Berlin, Germany, for their survey of the Chinese peasantry.

Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi live and write in Anhui Province. They are currently working on a new exposé titled
Fighting for the Peasants in Court.

The Translator:
Zhu Hong, formerly of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was a visiting professor at Boston University from 1992 to 2005. Now retired, she divides her time between China and the United States. Her previous works of translation include
A Higher Kind of Loyalty
(Pantheon),
The Chinese Western
and
The Serenity of Whiteness
(both for Ballantine Books),
The Stubborn Porridge and Other Stories of Wang Meng
(Braziller), and
Memoir of Misfortune
(Knopf). Her translations of short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including
Renditions
,
AGNI
,
The Iowa Review
,
The Chicago Riview
,
The Paris Review
, and others.