Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants

"Where Pei, Yang and Tsai all take note, in passing, of the long, uphill struggle of China’s underclasses to share in the material benefits of economic reform, Chen Guide and Wu Chundao focus exclusively on the travails of the rural poor. As a counterweight to Yang’s generally upbeat assessment of recent administrative improvements in peasant welfare, Chen and Wu, a pair of veteran Chinese investigative reporters, present a rather grim view of contemporary rural reality. This book was officially banned in China shortly after its publication in 2003, but subsequently sold almost ten million copies in an underground Chinese language edition. It’s recently been translated into English, and the book presents a series of investigative reports documenting how ruthless village officials and their local entrepreneurial allies use their power and resources to coerce, intimidate and ride roughshod over the peasantry. The authors argue that much of China’s impressive economic growth has been achieved on the backs of peasants who are routinely victimised by the highly skewed, pro-urban distribution of wealth and power in post-reform China. Indeed, China is one of the most income-polarised societies on earth, much more so even than unofficial Gini coefficient statistics would seem to indicate. [The Gini coefficient measures the degree of polarisation of wealth and income in any given society.] According to some recent estimates, if you add the personal gains from corruption by upper-income Chinese officials and their entrepreneurial clients to the standard calculations of legal income, China’s Gini coefficient would rank right up with the most corrupt African and Latin American countries in terms of the gap between rich and poor. In this respect, Chen and Wu’s book is a chilling reminder that as successful as China’s economic reforms have been in generating unprecedented overall GDP growth, much of that growth has come at the expense of the toiling masses in the countryside. That is why I picked Chen and Wu’s book – as a corrective to those observers who paint too rosy a picture of China’s urban economic miracle, neglecting its rural underside. Although they paint a bleak picture of continuing rural poverty, corruption and exploitation, they do not specifically point to potential political consequences of such dysfunctionality. They are reporters, not political commentators. Still, implicit in their investigative reportage is an awareness that mounting rural discontent is a source of major anxiety to China’s ruling elites. Ironically, it is this anxiety that has led the regime in recent years to take a series of measures to relieve the suffering of the rural poor, as noted by Dali Yang – including abolition of predatory agricultural taxes and fees, provision of tuition-free primary schooling, labour protection for rural migrant workers and affordable rural health care. From time to time party leaders have gone public with their worries about rural unrest. In 2004, for example, President Hu Jintao openly acknowledged the existence of a serious crisis in the party’s ‘ruling capacity’. And he warned that ‘if we don’t take this crisis seriously we may find ourselves cast out by history’. Since that time, protest demonstrations and ‘mass incidents’ in China have actually increased at a rate of around 20 per cent a year. In 2008, the last year for which statistics were made public, there were 127,000 such incidents throughout the country – an average of almost 350 per day. They are mostly localised protests against unregulated local commercial-bureaucratic power. One of the major problems posed by the unholy alliance between money and political power is that the state looks the other way on questions of just how, exactly, entrepreneurs make their money, and at what cost to ordinary people. For example, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of March 2008 in Sichuan province, many observers noted that hundreds of schools in the quake zone collapsed, while nearby government offices survived intact. When some residents began asking questions about shoddy schoolhouse construction, suggesting that payoffs may have been made by contractors to local officials to overlook the use of shoddy building materials, the central government ordered newspaper reporters not to write about such allegations and ordered all outside journalists to leave the area. Thereafter, the local government began to harass citizens who raised complaints against construction companies and corrupt local officials, and began to intimidate and even arrest lawyers who agreed to represent these citizens in lawsuits. To a considerable extent, it can’t. The state appears to be a victim of its own success – it has created such a web of alliances and coalitions and mutual dependencies that if it ever really attacked the roots of corruption, and the roots of clientilistic favouritism, it would very likely pull the thread that would ultimately unravel the entire system. It is in this sense that I agree with Minxin Pei’s diagnosis of a ‘trapped transition’ – the party-state is damned if it does reform, and damned if it doesn’t. Yes, but the campaigns are neither sustained nor systematic. They are aimed at specific bad guys, for limited periods of time, with the intent to publicise individual acts of egregious immorality and greed, rather than to acknowledge the systemic, institutionalised sources of corruption. And that, incidentally, helps to explain why the CCP is promoting a campaign to resurrect Confucianism in China today. By embracing the paternalistic model of ‘benevolent authoritarianism’ promoted by the Great Sage, the party-state is able to preach the virtues of ethical behaviour and a ‘harmonious society’ without requiring fundamental political reforms. For if individuals, rather than institutions, are the source of immoral acts, then there’s no need to reform the institutions. No, they really don’t have either the information, or the language, or the organisational capacity to demand political change. One interesting thing is that the regime has consciously played upon its knowledge that most people’s grievances are against local agents of political authority, ie, venal local officials. That’s the only part of government that most people ever see in their lifetime. So that when there is a corrupt police chief, or when a well-heeled industrial polluter pays a bribe to local officials to look the other way while the village’s drinking water is poisoned, the blame is focused exclusively on the local government, rather than on the institutions that permit – indeed encourage – such behaviour to flourish. The central government thus self-consciously cultivates the notion of ‘don’t blame us, blame them’. So there’s very limited awareness among peasants of broader, systematic structural flaws in the system. They may know they’re being screwed, but they don’t know where the responsibility lies, where the buck stops. And of course there is no horizontal organisation or vertical integration permitted among kindred occupational or interest groups across China that might bring such grievances to the attention of a larger audience, that might clarify the linkages between what is happening to peasants in one place and what’s happening elsewhere. The party-state has very carefully prevented any kind of mobilisation across geographic boundaries, making such trans-local organisation illegal and unauthorised. All interest groups and NGOs in China must have local state sponsorship in order to exist, and they must confine their activities locally. When mass incidents break out and groups of people begin to express legitimate, deep-seated grievances against local authorities, the central government will step in to troubleshoot – often bringing suitcases full of money to pay off the aggrieved masses. Then, once they’ve disarmed the mass base of the protest, they will often quietly arrest its leaders, who are generally labelled ‘troublemakers’. That’s the way it works: because there is no trans-local organisation that can amplify discontent or focus broad national attention on it, it is readily contained at the local level. That’s right. And I see some evidence of that happening in China – though I do not foresee a violent mass uprising against the Communist Party. Rather, I see an embryonic ‘civil society’ beginning to emerge, one that that is challenging the traditional ‘forbidden zones’ and authoritarian prerogatives of the party-state. I see the rise of civil society in China taking place hand-in-hand with the emergence of the so-called new electronic media – cell phones, text messaging, and the internet. These new media are facilitating the free flow of uncensored information in a way that was never possible before. Recently we had the remarkable example of the famous ‘nail house’ in Chongqing. In essence it was the old, familiar story of a local government colluding with real estate developers to buy up plots of urban land on the cheap, to develop profitable high-rise residential and commercial complexes. In cahoots with the local government, developers offered to pay the displaced residents pennies on the dollar to get them to move off the land. For the past two decades, local governments throughout the country have used the implied right of ‘eminent domain’ to evict residential dwellers and then lease the land to commercial developers at a very high profit. But it’s only in the last few years that there’s been a public backlash growing against such practices. The Chongqing nail house is a prime example. One family, whose house was located squarely in the middle of the proposed new commercial development in downtown Chongqing, refused to accept the paltry settlement that the developers offered them for their little parcel of land. The family held out for more equitable compensation. And before the developers could bring in local toughs to physically evict the family – which is what often happens if you resist an ‘approved’ compensation offer – local residents started taking pictures of the development site with their cell phones. The construction company had already dug a deep excavation pit all around this single house, which was called the nail house because it protruded upwards from the base of the excavation on a very narrow spit of land. The developers put a big fence around the excavation so no one could see what was going on inside. But people could see over the top and through the cracks with their cell-phone cameras. Playing to swelling crowds of gawkers, the holdout family posted large banners outside their besieged home calling attention to their plight. Pretty soon it became a real ‘social networking’ sensation. People began to send the pictures along with text messages to their friends, and they began posting accounts of the nail-house incident on internet chat rooms. Very quickly the story went viral across China. Unable to suppress the news, the official media in China began to pick up the story. At that point the central government sent its troubleshooters to Chongqing, who told the local government, ‘Look – settle with these people. This is causing trouble and we don’t want trouble.’ So they ordered the municipal government to pay the nail house holdouts an amount that was several times larger than the original compensation package. Immediately afterward, a few bold tabloid newspapers in China began heralding the ‘nail house saga’ as the ‘birth of citizen journalism in China’. Citizens armed only with cell phones and computers had forced the government to back down. That kind of thing is starting to happen more frequently now, and it is clearly worrying the government."