Chinese peasant anger

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, Sept. 17, 2000

Chinese Farmers Rebel Against Bureaucracy

By CRAIG S. SMITH

YUANDU, China ? More than 10,000 angry peasants converged on the two-story,
white-tiled town hall here in August, demanding relief from high taxes and
administrative fees that eat up any profit from farming.

"It wasn't political," said a young man at a bicycle repair shop here who
declined to give his name for fear of reprisals. "We're just farmers who
want to survive."

According to residents, terrified town officials barricaded themselves
inside the building on Aug. 17 before 30 truckloads of armed policemen
arrived to disperse the crowd. At least one farmer was severely beaten in
the melee, and more than a dozen others were carted away.

When word of the Yuandu protest spread, thousands more angry farmers
rampaged through neighboring towns in this impoverished region of
south-central China's Jiangxi Province, breaking windows and even attacking
the homes of some officials. Farmers say the police are still searching for
leaders of the protests.

Such disturbances are increasingly common across this vast agrarian
country, where as many as 900 million people still depend on the land for
their livelihood. The peasant class, whose dissatisfaction has driven
governments from power throughout China's history, is growing restive
again, swelling the ranks of the country's disaffected along with laid-off
workers, struggling pensioners and the millions of Chinese who have
migrated from the countryside to cities where they eke out a tenuous
existence.

Farmers in central Anhui Province complain that they cannot survive because
of high taxes, and farmers in Shandong Province in the east report that the
police beat those who refuse to pay their fees.

In northern Shaanxi Province, tens of thousands of farmers are lobbying for
relief, and their lawyer has been jailed for allegedly inciting the
peasantry to revolt.

Despite Marxism's promise of abolishing class distinctions, the old feudal
pattern is back in force, this time with local Communist Party bosses
playing the role of oppressor.

Beijing hopes to stop the scattered unrest before it spreads into something
more threatening by raising farm incomes, cutting local government
bureaucracies and reforming the tax system.

But the most fundamental cause of the problem cuts to the heart of the
country's sacred one-party rule: The farmers have no political power.

Despite publicity about village council elections, local party officials
wield the real power, and they are still appointed from above rather than
elected from below.

"It's the cadre system," said Yu Hong, a Shanghai-based sociologist who has
spent her career studying the plight of China's farmers. "They say the
cadres are selected by vote, but they are actually selected by higher
officials and are evaluated according to what they achieve."

And because the most important achievements are those their superiors can
see, local officials tend to build as much as possible with money raised
from the peasants.

Like imperial tax collectors of old, they charge fees for every building
standing, every pig slaughtered and every child who goes to school.

Much of that money ends up in the pockets of local officials' families and
friends, or is otherwise spent on supporting the cadres, or party
officials, whose power rests in part on being able to show off the
trappings that come with it.

A result is growing resentment among the peasants who were once the party's
strongest supporters.

This region gave its sons to the Communists 70 years ago, when Mao Zedong
founded the Aug. 1 Army in nearby Nanchang.

And promises to emancipate the peasants from high taxes and rents helped
sweep the Communists to power in 1949. Droves of former tax collectors and
landowners were executed after the Communist victory.

But the peasants were never given direct ownership of the land. And like
other rulers before them, the Communists depend for funds on increasingly
heavy levies exacted from people like Qiu Mingbao.

Mr. Qiu's ancestors have farmed here for centuries, but his family still
owns little more than a buffalo, a building and a few farm tools. The seat
of his pants is marked by patches, and his sandals are made from inner
tubes and twisted-straw twine.

A question about taxes erased 63- year-old Mr. Qiu's crooked smile,
lopsided because dentistry on his rung of the economic ladder is about
taking teeth out, not keeping them in.

"No one wants to work the land anymore," he shouted, gesticulating wildly
over an unplanted rice paddy not far from Yuandu. "We can't make any money
from the land," he complained, saying that what's left after various taxes
and fees is not enough to feed his family.

Mao abolished private property and grouped the peasants into communes. Deng
Xiaoping later converted the communes into townships and allowed the
peasants to sign long- term leases on plots of land.

But ownership of the land remained in the hands of the state. And without
the communes' collective income to pay for roads and schools, local
governments began levying fees directly on the farmers in the early 1980's.

It worked at first. City folk watched jealously while peasant incomes rose
as farmers sold excess produce on the country's new "free markets."
Two-story concrete houses sprouted in villages across the country,
replacing single-story mud-brick homes.

But as the peasants grew richer, so did the bureaucracy. In Qipan township,
a former commune in Hebei Province in central China, the number of
officials tripled over the last decade to 340, according to Li Changping,
the town's party secretary.

"When will the ranks of cadres stop swelling? How can the farmers stand
it?" he wrote in an emotional appeal to China's cabinet, the State Council.
His letter was published in Southern Weekend, a progressive
party-controlled newspaper.

Imported foreign produce will squeeze Chinese farmers yet further when
China joins the World Trade Organization. Even now, some subsidize their
family plots with money earned working in factories and on construction
sites. Mr. Li said about 80 percent of the farmers who remain in his town
were losing money.

With financial burdens growing and the price of grain and other
agricultural products falling, millions of farmers are abandoning their
fields. About 233,450 acres of land has been abandoned in Qipan alone this
year, or about 65 percent of the town's total, Mr. Li said. While the town
government is trying to subcontract the land to other farmers, he said that
at least 133,400 acres would remain unplanted this year.

Under the long-term contracts that farmers signed when the communes were
dismantled in the late 1970's, many of which were renewed in the last two
years, farmers remain liable for taxes even if they leave the land behind.
Many continue farming simply to defray the taxes due, even though their
crops fail to cover expenses.

In Feixi, a village in Anhui province, Liu Guangyue says the combined taxes
and fees on his farmland are about equal to the amount he can earn from
grain. The money for seed and fertilizer he earns in construction. And
though his rice crop failed this year because of a drought, local
government still insists he pay the levies.

Near his land, farmers line the road to Anhui's provincial capital, Hefei,
trying to hop onto passing trucks filled with sand. They race, some in bare
feet, to climb onto the trucks so they can earn 8 yuan, about 90 cents,
unloading the sand at a construction site in the city. If more than one man
clambers aboard, they share the pay.

Part of the problem is that China has far more farmers than it needs. More
than 400 million people actively work the land, but Ms. Yu, the
sociologist, estimates that China needs only about 250 million farmers to
feed the country. With the land divided among so many people, farmers lack
the economies of scale that would make them competitive by world standards.
Their production costs actually exceed those of farmers in industrialized
countries.

Adding to the farmers' woes, China's state granaries are already filled to
capacity from three years of bumper harvests. The state buys some grain at
subsidized prices, but cannot afford to buy all that farmers want to sell.

Farmers in remote areas often cannot sell their grain at all.

This year's harvest is expected to be much slimmer thanks to a severe
drought. And the central government is urging China's state grain bureaus
to raise their purchasing price by 10 percent, accordingly.

But with the country already sitting on huge surpluses, it is unlikely that
local grain bureaus will be willing to pay more for grain they don't need.

The government is also tinkering with tax reforms that would recentralize
tax collection and require local governments to live off subsidies from the
state, rather than levy taxes on farmers and local industry. A pilot
project in Anhui has replaced local government fees with a single
agricultural tax, for example. But local governments are resisting the
plan, which will deprive them of revenues free from the scrutiny of the
central government.

Prime Minister Zhu Rongji has vowed to cut the number of township officials
by 70 percent as part of an overall effort to shrink China's bloated
bureaucracy. But this would probably take years, if it happens at all.

So severe is the crisis that Deputy Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, the senior
government official responsible for agriculture, held a national
teleconference with provincial leaders to help placate the peasantry.

With his live image projected on screens in conference rooms across the
country, Mr. Wen told regional officials that the crisis is the biggest
challenge to face Chinese agriculture since the break up of the communes 20
years ago. He said money raised from farmers should not surpass the
officially budgeted levels of 1997 or exceed 5 percent of the total farm
incomes in any province.

But that is difficult to enforce in a place like Yuandu, where about 1,000
officials live off the fees collected from the town's 4,000 farmers. The
income gap between the two is evident from a lone Nissan S.U.V. parked on
the road where occasional horse-drawn carts pull loads of green and purple
beans to market past mounds of smoldering rice husks.

A handwritten poster on a public notice board only hints at the growing
tensions. "To Our Farmer Friends," the poster begins, urging restraint
among the rural population. The poster promises that "unreasonable" fees
will be abolished, and local farmers say this year's school fees have
already been cut to 70 yuan per student from the 260 yuan charged last year.

Another poster on the notice board calls for vigilance against agitators,
asking that people report to the police anyone who is planning further
demonstrations.


Louis Proyect
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