China: How to Build a Rebellion (fwd)

[Stephen E Philion <philion@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Far Eastern Economic Review

Issue cover-dated November 29, 2001

AGRICULTURE

HOW TO BUILD A REBELLION

A BOMB THAT NOW NEEDS TO BE DEFUSED

By Bruce Gilley

For 100 years, China has chased one "great leap forward" after another,
says Shanghai-based scholar Cao Jinqing. Mao Zedong's steel furnaces were
replaced by Deng Xiaoping's market reforms. These days, he says, the great
leap is global integration, symbolized by China's entry into the World
Trade Organization.

But each time, it is China's farmers who felt the brunt of the campaigns.
And each time, they have rebelled, Cao says. This time will be no different.

"As long as farmers are facing the same difficulties and feeling the same
anger, then it only takes a few villages and you already have a rebellion
of several thousand people on your hands," he says. "Today this situation
is already happening on a small scale. One day, a bigger crisis will happen."

Cao is well placed to comment, having spent years researching rural China.
Unlike most academics or officials, he always travels undercover in order
to learn the truth of the farmers' plight. His recent book China Along the
Yellow River, based on four months of sojourning in central Henan province
in 1996, is one of the richest portraits of the Chinese countryside
published in the reform era.

What Cao learned then, and has continued to uncover, is a vast swath of the
interior living in stagnation as coastal farmers prosper. "The coastal
areas are converging on modernity while the inland areas are converging on
tradition," he says.

The old problems of excessive taxation, small-holder farming and clan-based
societies persist or have returned to inland areas since collective farms
were disbanded in the late 1970s, he notes. That means the wheat, corn, and
cotton-growing areas expected to be hit hardest by WTO entry are the most
fragile. "In many places, the hope is just to maintain subsistence incomes.
Forget development," he says.

While historical and social factors play a role, Cao pinpoints the state's
policy of under-investing in agriculture and taxing farmers heaviest as the
biggest problem. The central government simply does not provide the funding
needed for public services in rural China, he says. The result is local
officials resort to an array of special taxes.

In Hubei province, which Cao visited in August, farmers are being asked to
pay taxes equivalent to 50% of their net income. In the year to September,
he says, citing official figures, 26 peasants around China took their own
lives because they couldn't pay taxes required by local cadres. "The
Communist Party came to power to overthrow the landlords. Now it has become
the new landlord," he says.

The solution, he says, is a thorough shake-up of the country's development
strategy to give rural China a fair deal. This means investment, pricing
and social policies to build prosperity. "There is a basic contradiction in
a state policy which wants to exploit the farmers but also to keep them
from rebelling," says Cao. "The national strategy has to be adjusted to
take them into account."