A suicide in China

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, August 1, 2004
THE GREAT DIVIDE
Amid China's Boom, No Helping Hand for Young Qingming
By JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY

PUJIA, China — His dying debt was $80. Had he been among China's urban 
elite, Zheng Qingming would have spent more on a trendy cellphone. But 
he was one of the hundreds of millions of peasants far removed from the 
country's new wealth. His public high school tuition alone consumed most 
of his family's income for a year.

He wanted to attend college. But to do so meant taking the annual 
college entrance examination. On the humid morning of June 4, three days 
before the exam, Qingming's teacher repeated a common refrain: he had to 
pay his last $80 in fees or he would not be allowed to take the test. 
Qingming stood before his classmates, his shame overtaken by anger.

"I do not have the money," he said slowly, according to several teachers 
who described the events that morning. But his teacher — and the system 
— would not budge.

A few hours later, Qingming, 18 years old, stepped in front of an 
approaching locomotive. The train, like China's roaring economy, was an 
express.

If his gruesome death was shocking, the life of this peasant boy in the 
rolling hills of northern Sichuan Province is repeated a millionfold 
across the Chinese countryside. Peasants like Qingming were once the 
core constituency of the Communist Party. Now, they are being left 
behind in the money-centered, cutthroat society that has replaced 
socialist China.

China has the world's fastest-growing economy but is one of its most 
unequal societies. The benefits of growth have been bestowed mainly on 
urban residents and government and party officials. In the past five 
years, the income divide between the urban rich and the rural poor has 
widened so sharply that some studies now compare China's social cleavage 
unfavorably with Africa's poorest nations.

For the Communist leaders whose main claim to legitimacy is creating 
prosperity, the skewed distribution of wealth has already begun to 
alienate the country's 750 million peasants, historically a bellwether 
of stability.

The countryside simmers with unrest. Farmers flock to the cities to find 
work. The poor demand social, economic and political benefits that the 
Communist Party has been reluctant to deliver.

To its credit, the Chinese government invigorated the economy and lifted 
hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty over the past 
quarter century. Few would argue that Chinese lived better when 
officials still adhered to a rigid idea of socialist equality.

But in recent years, officials have devoted the nation's wealth to 
building urban manufacturing and financial centers, often ignoring 
peasants. Farmers cannot own the land they work and are often left with 
nothing when the government seizes their fields for factories or malls. 
Many cannot afford basic services, like high school.

This year, the number of destitute poor, which China classifies as those 
earning less than $75 a year, increased for the first time in 25 years. 
The government estimates that the number of people in this lowest 
stratum grew by 800,000, to 85 million people, even as the economy grew 
by a robust 9 percent.

No modern country has become prosperous without allowing some people to 
get rich first. The problem for China is not just that the urban elite 
now drive BMW's, while many farmers are lucky to eat meat once a week. 
The problem is that the gap has widened partly because the government 
enforces a two-class system, denying peasants the medical, pension and 
welfare benefits that many urban residents have, while often even 
denying them the right to become urban residents.

Even in a country that ruthlessly punishes dissent, some three million 
people took part in protests last year, police data show. Most were 
farmers, laid-off workers and victims of official corruption, who 
blocked roads, swarmed government offices, even immolated themselves in 
Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand social justice.

India, the world's other developing giant, has a less pronounced gap 
between urban and rural living standards, and an open political system. 
In May, India's governing party lost an election largely because the 
strong economic growth did not trickle down fast enough to the rural masses.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/01CHIN.html

--
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org