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The rice harvest in the province of Guizhou won’t cushion the coming blow of lower
market prices with China’s entry into the WTO.
China
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Key
figures, China
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Total population
:
1.2 billion (1999)
GNP per capita :
US$ 780 (1999)
Agricultural workers as share of total labour force:
67 % (2000)
74 % (1980)
Agriculture as share of GDP:
17 % (1999)
30 % (1980)
Sources:
UN Food and AgricultureOrganization, World Bank. |
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The
quarrels of the lords can be read on
the backs of the peasants.
Russian
proverb
|
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Punitive
tax rates and falling revenues have combined to drive around 100 million Chinese
peasants to the towns even as the spirit of protest sweeps through the countryside
The village of Yuandu,
70 kilometres from the provincial capital of Nanchang, seems a quiet enough place.
Elderly peasants in threadbare Mao tunics lead their oxen through the streets. Women
attend to the stalks of rice they have scattered over the road so the occasional
passage of a vehicle can help separate the grain from the chaff.
The harvest is over. Everyone is preparing for a quiet winter, or going off to work
for a few months in Nanchang, a nearby town, or for their wealthy neighbours in Fujian,
Zhejiang or Guangdong provinces. Just a few months ago on August 17, however, the
people of Yuandu, joined days later by the inhabitants of nearby villages, staged
violent demonstrations.
“There are 300 officials in this village and we only need 30,” shouts a woman in
her 50s as she does her laundry in a murky-looking pond. “We have to get rid of this
huge burden.” She tills five mu (a third of a hectare) of land—quite a big plot given
that the average population density in rural China is nearly 700 people per square
kilometre.
She eats most of what she grows. Chinese peasants only sell 20 to 30 per cent of
their yield. What she sells earns her about 3,000 yuan (less than $300). But she
has to pay more than $100 in land tax, a smaller amount for fertilizer and pesticide
and about $30 to a fund for irrigation. Her annual net income as a result comes to
a little over $40. Not enough to pay for her children’s schooling and certainly not
enough to buy meat, which she only eats three times a year. “I borrow money from
my sisters who are laundresses in a hotel in Nanchang,” she says.
The youngsters have already left the village. “A lot of people are trying to get
rid of their land,” says one old man. “But who’s going to want it?” The small rural
factories, which have a hard time competing with those in towns or abroad, are a
shadow of what they once were. “They can’t even pay their workers’ wages,” says a
driver in the next town, Fengcheng. “Mostly it’s just the managers who get paid.”
This over-taxing of the peasantry is seen as the direct result of pressure on the
local authorities to exceed, sometimes by a big margin, the tax ceiling of five percent
set by Beijing. In a letter in the newspaper Nanfang Zhumo, Li Changping, the party
secretary of Qipan village in Hubei, says 80 percent of peasants have gone into debt
to pay their taxes.
But the local authorities have no alternative if they are to make up the deficit
in their budgets, which are increasing by between 100,000 to 150,000 yuan (roughly
$15,243) a year. The local bureaucracy has nearly tripled from 120 to 340 people
in the past 10 years. The new leaders admit they cannot stand up to the pressure
of friends and family and have no choice but to give them jobs as officials.
Furthermore, the costs of economic development and running the village—including
the maintenance of infrastructure and irrigation, subsidies for schools, support
for local industry, upkeep of local militias, not to mention embezzlement by bureaucrats,
which is constantly being denounced by press and party leaders alike—have rocketed
since the early 1990s.
Though heavy taxation triggered the unrest, villagers’ discontent can be traced back
to the economic stagnation of the past decade, which followed on from the euphoria
that greeted the end of collective farming in the 1980s.
A
short-lasted burst of prosperity
Land
is still collectively owned, but leased to families for 30-year periods. In exchange,
the peasants must hand over a fixed part of their production to the state at set
prices before being able to sell the rest on the free market. Since this gives peasants
more of a stake in the system, per-hectare cereal production shot up by over 50 percent
between 1975 and 1985, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Meanwhile, the number of people working on the land has dropped sharply, boosting
production by nearly 20 percent a year at village factories set up in the wake of
decollectivization to employ surplus labour. Nearly 120 million people work in these
factories today. Estimates suggest that around 50 to 60 million peasants left the
land at the end of the 1980s to look for better paid work in the towns, mainly in
construction, restaurants and domestic service. Even in those jobs, an urban standard
of living is still higher than the hard life in the countryside and better reflects
the aspirations of modern Chinese youth. For the villagers who stayed behind, these
far-reaching changes led to quite unexpected profits and a sudden burst of prosperity.
But productivity gains also led to over-production, which set off a disastrous price
collapse at the very same instant that the cost of farm supplies, including fertilizers
and pesticides, was steadily rising (at nearly 15 percent a year between 1984 and
1996). Families were thus trapped between rising tax demands and stagnant incomes,
or even, according to some Chinese experts, incomes that have fallen over the past
three years. The exodus from the countryside is increasing and now totals between
80 and 100 million men and women. And there is no sign that this rural depopulation
is going to stop, even though moving to the towns has been made more difficult through
the introduction of the hukou or place of origin system, a kind of internal passport
that nails the Chinese to their place of birth.
The
oncoming shock of the World Trade Organization
Chinese
experts believe that the farm crisis stems from an incomplete liberalization, which
they note has been less sweeping than in the towns: this would account for very low
productivity rates caused by tiny plots of land, a labour force that is still too
big and a crippling lack of bank loans needed for capital investment. Cereal production
in China, for instance, is currently half what it is in France.
All of which adds up to a peasantry stripped of power over their land. “Some local
authorities often force the villagers to plant what produces the best tax revenues.
But since everybody does the same, the prices collapse within two years and the villager
is the loser,” explains Dang Guoying, a researcher at the Academy of Social Sciences.
China is about to sign up to the rules governing the global marketplace by joining
the World Trade Organization (WTO). Villagers are mostly unaware of this, but they
are almost certain to bear the brunt of the change. How are they going to cope with
probable imports of much cheaper farm produce given that some Chinese prices are
far above world market levels? In April 1999, for example, Chinese wheat was 44 percent
higher, maize 67 percent, rice 26 percent and cotton 17 percent higher, according
to official Chinese statistics from 1999. Some experts say China can use its comparative
advantage in the long-term by exporting labour-intensive items such as fruit, vegetables
and fish. But according to forecasting by the FAO, China’s farming population will
still have to fall by 60 million over the coming decade.
Will farmers have enough power to cushion the shock? Since 1988, villagers have been
able to elect their own committees outside the framework of the party and have thus
won the right to a greater say in economic management, whereas industrial workers
remain under tighter party control. “What we’re seeing are more discussion groups
at the village level,” says Jean-Louis Rocca, an expert on social trends. Another
specialist, Liu Yawei, emphasizes that “villagers have learned how to obstruct moves
by local officials and take matters up at a higher official level, even by inviting
journalists from the well-known national television programme Focus (Jiaodian Fangtan)
to come and investigate suspected corruption and blatant injustice.” And no one has
forgotten that over the course of China’s 3,000-year history, it was often the nongmin
qiyi—peasant uprisings—that toppled the great dynasties. |
