by Guy Sorman
The Communist regime has been consistent, if nothing else. When in 1958 Mao Zedong ordered industry’s Great Leap Forward, local Party cadres received the same instructions: 20 million had to be sent to the factories. Three years later, the Great Leap failed, as could have been predicted. Widespread famine resulted, and the 20 million were sent back to their villages. Mao marveled at this feat. What other party in the world could displace 20 million people by simply snapping its fingers? he asked.
It was from old Wang that I got stray bits of information about the school, life as a farmer, the suicides, and the people who left, never to return. He is the village chief, duly elected through universal suffrage. He also heads the strongest clan in the village, so powerful that he doesn’t need to buy votes. Who is the real leader: the village chief or the Party secretary? Old Wang’s primary task is to settle quarrels between feuding families. He is also hoping to pool together the village apples to set up a fruit-juice factory, but Lu opposes the idea. Who decides? Lu, admits old Wang. Everywhere in China—city, village, factory, and university—the power structure is the same, patterned on the central model. The Party decides, the administration executes, and the army and the police keep watch. Submitting to the Party dictates, old Wang, too, encourages the young to leave, advising the “girls to join the service sector and the boys to look for manual work.” His own daughter works as a waitress in a Xian restaurant. Does he have any news of her? Wang doesn’t answer. To speak of his sorrows with a foreigner would be to lose face. This inherent feature of Chinese civilization makes it difficult to probe. Censorship can be skirted but not social attitudes. One must not lose face.
The migrant, a second-zone citizen
The children of the Pagoda of the Phoenix are forever roaming, like characters in an epic, moving from site to site, factory to factory. Sometimes they get paid, sometimes they don’t. At the start of the Year of the Rooster, unpaid wages, according to official estimates, amounted to 360 billion yuan. The government has told employers to settle the workers’ dues before the end of the year. The migrants will suffer from cold and hunger. Other migrants will attack them, bandits will rob them, and the police will fine them heavily. Yet, in comparison to the brutality of the past, they are still better off.
During the last fifty years, peasants needed prior authorization to travel by train or in the city. Until 1984, they had to get a ration ticket for their food, valid only in the local market. They could not work in the city without a permit. These domestic passports were abolished only recently, and more in theory than in practice, at least for the moment. The kind of corruption they lead to is not difficult to imagine.
The free movement of peasants has allowed construction activity to proceed at a feverish pace. Peasants are working on sites, constructing factories, putting up buildings, making roads—in short, serving the town dwellers. The differences between a peasant and someone from the city stand out. Every detail tells them apart: their clothes, their behavior, their manners, the very language they speak. In the cities, people talk in Mandarin or one of the major provincial languages, or both. The peasants use a dialect. Racism against peasants is common in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, akin to the contempt in which Europeans hold African migrants. One reader wrote to the Shandong daily advocating separate transport systems for migrants, because they stink. Yet they are all Chinese, or supposedly so.
In addition to geographic and economic biases, legal discrimination exists as well, a legacy of the Communist revolution little known outside China. In the Fifties, Mao Zedong’s government decided to divide China into two categories: agricultural and nonagricultural, the official nomenclature used to this day. Each Chinese is issued at birth a family booklet, or hukou, which indicates the category to which one belongs and the family’s place of origin. Children inherit their mother’s place of origin, and there is little they can do to change it. One’s fate is determined to a large extent by one’s hukou, because individual rights vary according to one’s place of origin. The hukou sticks to an individual’s skin his entire life, as with the castes in India. The American Fei-Ling Wang—the only sociologist to have studied in depth this extremely delicate subject, shrouded in secrecy—was imprisoned during his research trip in 2004 and sent back to the United States. In November 2005, the Party announced the “phased” abolition of the hukou, but this attempt at national reunification is not likely to deter the municipal authorities from setting up fresh legal barriers against the integration of the rural population, as they are already doing.
Out-of-bounds for villagers
Farm migrants do not have access to most of the public services that city dwellers do. Rural workers are denied public housing, primary education, and health care, all subsidized by the city or the firm, on the grounds that they are not taxpayers or that they do not pay for such services. One had an inkling of their condition in 2005, when the mayor of Beijing announced the establishment of special schools for the children of the city’s 3 million migrants. All the existing schools had refused to take them in. The Shanghai municipality has its own way of ensuring that rural workers can’t integrate, as we shall see.
One-third of Shanghai’s 17 million inhabitants are migrants, yet it is virtually impossible for them to become citizens with their identity cards, which in principle give them access to public services. In Shanghai, as in all other Chinese cities, there is a sort of local nationality by blood. With the winds of reform blowing over the city in the Year of the Rooster, the municipality has decided to issue local identity cards on the basis of marriage, but the conditions are so restrictive that they appear ridiculous. A non-Shanghai woman married to a Shanghai man can get nationality after fifteen years of her marriage, which means the couple’s children will automatically become citizens of Shanghai, as nationality is handed down by the mother. The authors of this daring innovation told me, though, that a man from Shanghai would have to be very “poor or handicapped” to marry a “foreigner.” What happens if a non-Shanghai man marries a Shanghai woman? I asked. The new law has not provided for such an eventuality, they told me at the mayor’s office, because it was unthinkable that a Shanghai woman would marry an “outsider.”
Town-hall officials said that if all immigrants were granted citizenship, by marriage or otherwise, they would flood schools and hospitals and demand public housing. The city’s infrastructure wouldn’t be able to take the load. Were the news to spread to the countryside, millions would flock to Shanghai, creating huge ghettos around the city. The art of “good governance” is to attract just enough migrants to meet the city’s need for laborers, garbage collectors, and waiters without letting them integrate or proliferate. Even in distant villages, people are aware of the low wages and the shabby way that workers are treated; this puts a damper on their fascination for Shanghai. Yet there is always a way to circumvent a ban in China. Fake papers can be obtained, and phone numbers are scribbled all over the city’s walls, offering such services. But it entails a heavy expenditure that few migrant workers can afford.
So like all large cities, Shanghai and Beijing have their nonurban areas. One-third of the people live at the edges, citizens of the second zone, who can never integrate because they are constantly on the move. Educating one’s children or finding a decent place to live is impossible. Jobs are insecure. The weakest go elsewhere, only to be replaced by a fresh influx of bonded labor. Madam Han Qiui, one of the rare Beijing sociologists to take an interest in the subject, says that “migrants pay dearly for China’s development.” Her studies show that the few migrants who manage to urbanize legally are university-degree holders and wealthy traders. You can change your hukou if you have a doctorate or make a large investment. The rest must go back to their villages or move from city to city.
Few children have succeeded in changing their peasant status through education. Village schools, as we have seen, are substandard. Even if one passes the national examination, university education is very expensive. The limited
social mobility is limited further because urban elites are self-perpetuating. Their children monopolize the best schools and universities and often go abroad for higher studies. Children from a rural background account for no more than 20 percent of the total number of students in Beijing’s universities, whereas the peasantry constitutes 80 percent of the total population. Their proportion keeps declining, and other students treat them as second-class citizens. Essentially, China’s economic development is based on the urban population’s exploitation of the rural population, with the Party providing the legal framework for doing so.
Mao Zedong: the Great Helmsman still
How could a Communist government create two peoples, almost two races, within a single nation? Our incredulity stems from our ignorance of the Party’s true nature. Mao Zedong had proclaimed his was a peasant-led revolution but, as the historian Lucien Bianco pointed out, peasants merely constituted the “rank and file” of the Communist army. They fought without getting anything in return. Li Lulu, a Beijing sociologist, says, “It was like France of 1789. Peasants burned down the castles of French aristocrats, and lawyers came to power.” In China, pen pushers, army officers, and a worker avant-garde took control. Workers, not peasants, were the privileged ones. Mao himself did not dream of any bucolic utopia. He wanted to establish China as an industrial and military power. In 1959, at the height of the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, his government exported food grains to build nuclear weapons and distilled grain into alcohol to launch rockets. We would do well to remember this. The foreign-currency reserves accumulated in Mao’s time were intended to finance military spending. Can things be very different under his direct descendants?
Maoist development failed because it based itself on nationalized enterprises, a planned economy, and closed borders. But the industrial project Mao cherished was clear. Deng Xiaoping’s move to liberalize the economy was not so much a change in strategy as the abandoning of an inefficient technique for a time-tested method. During Mao’s rule and afterward, during the Revolution and after the 1949 liberation, however, the peasants were never more than the proletariat of the industrial project. They still are. No more than 200,000 villagers manage each year to escape from their plight and join the category of legal citizens.
In the Year of the Rooster, the peasants are no longer passive. The villages simmer with discontent.
The time of mutinies and repression
In May 2005, at Shengyou in Hebei Province, a militia squad of the local government expelled a hundred peasant families who had refused to give up their land without compensation for the construction of a power plant. Armed with pitchforks, the peasants resisted. Twelve were killed. Work on the power plant commenced.
It would have been just another peasant revolt had a Beijing journalist not been alerted by a distress text message from a villager. By the time the journalist reached the site, it was all over; the police had surrounded the village. No mention appeared in the press, and the journalist was arrested. But the rumors spread, the incident was discussed on the Internet, and the government in Beijing took notice. Local cadres, it emerged, had siphoned off most of the compensation money that the government had set aside, leaving only crumbs for the peasants. The villagers had filed petition after petition and demonstrated outside the Party headquarters, but to no avail. So they decided to squat on their land in a day-and-night vigil. It was then that the Party-hired goons moved in. The only extraordinary thing about this incident is that it came to light. Such revolts are an everyday occurrence all over the Chinese countryside. But there are usually no witnesses, and when there are, they are unwilling to talk.
In September 2005, at Dongyang in Zhejiang Province, 1,000 peasants clashed with the police for several hours. The authorities had tried to remove the barricade put up by the villagers to block access to five polluting chemical factories. The factories had been built on agricultural land without permission. Saturated with toxic effluents, the surrounding land had become uncultivable. The peasants contracted skin diseases, some of them cancerous. In June 2005, the local government had promised to close down these factories. In September, they were still running. The local officials had been bought off. Tensions reached a flashpoint, and the villagers revolted. A Hong Kong journalist who managed to reach Dongyang with the help of the rebel leaders filmed the clash and posted his film on the Internet. The press was told to ignore the story, but papers in Hong Kong, and eventually America, took it up. A similar skirmish took place in Dongzhou, close to the Hong Kong border, on December 6. The villagers whose land had been taken to build a power plant received hardly any compensation. During a clash with the police, a number of them—anywhere from three to thirty—were shot down. This was the first time since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 that the police had fired on a crowd. It was also the first time that the news spread outside China, thanks, once again, to the Hong Kong press, alerted by a villager. The Hong Kong press is relaying news of revolts in increasingly far-flung areas, but the news remains only a trickle. The regions are remote, witnesses’ accounts are rare, there are no photos, and Hong Kong is becoming vulnerable to pressure from the Beijing government.
Are these sporadic episodes, to be expected in so vast a country, or part of a general uprising of the rural population? The Party is not sure. During a secret government meeting in July 2005, the Minister of Security admitted that in 2004, China had witnessed 74,000 mass incidents, in which 3.76 million people had taken part, and that the number was fast increasing. The precise nature of the statistics leads one to believe that the actual figure is higher, with many incidents going unreported. Local information is selectively relayed to the central government. This “secret” information is leaked to the press so that it can turn it to good account. On the Party’s orders, the press exhorts peasants to “respect the law” and go through “proper channels” to get grievances redressed. In other words, peasants are told to direct their complaints to the petitions office. The editors did not, however, deny the legitimacy of the grievances. What the Party was saying was: the peasants had reason to protest. The Party was their ally. The real culprits were corrupt local cadres, real-estate speculators, and unscrupulous entrepreneurs.
For a long time, the Party sought to minimize the peasant revolts, describing them as the unavoidable fallout of urban and industrial development. Until the Year of the Rooster, the uprisings seemed dispersed and localized, with no apparent link. Yet they are part of a long historical tradition. From time immemorial, peasants have been prompt to take up their pitchforks to bring erring mandarins, tax inspectors—and now Party cadres—into line. Only during Mao’s time was the peasantry quiet. It was a period of terror. Since the Nineties, the repression has been less severe and information more easily available, explaining perhaps the increasing number of open rebellions. But will the Internet and mobile phones enable the peasants to organize themselves sufficiently so that they can start a full-fledged revolution?
Peasant leaders do arise from time to time in the prosperous eastern countryside. They are often migrants who have returned from the city or ex-army men. They have the capacity to organize and coordinate. The Party is not afraid of stray rebellions, but it does fear coordinated action. When the number of protests was acknowledged officially in 2005, the Party devised a new strategy to contain peasant discontent. Not surprisingly, its premises were based on ideological considerations rather than realities on the ground. It issued directives aimed at strengthening the Party’s hold. There was no attempt to give the peasants a voice.
The Party is always right
I meet Dang Guoying, director of the Institute for Rural Development in Beijing. He is also an advisor to the central government. His job is to inculcate new right-thinking in Party cadres. He says there are “five reasons for the peasant protests.” The Communist Party has abandoned its revolutionaries and taken on experts, whose job it is to find the middle path. Analysis and quantification are their way of resolving conflicts.
Taxes are the first reason. In addition to the national tax, fixed at 8.48 percent of income, local cadres impose a further burden on the peasants, levying multiple taxes to finance village infrastructure. A few villagers, however, outraged at Party cadres buying cars and building houses with tax proceeds, took the law into their own hands and settled scores with the tax collectors, sometimes even murdering them. The central government, believing that the peasant anger had some justification, announced the abolition of all taxes on peasants at the beginning of the Year of the Rooster. The main cause of discontent has thus been removed, concludes Dang, thanks to the alliance between the Communist Party and the peasantry. Whom is he trying to fool? Or has the government gotten carried away by its own rhetoric? Taxes may well have been abolished officially, but the local cadres continue to bleed the peasants, making them pay an endless number of fees and fines. This is the real cause of anger.
The second reason for the peasant protests, Dang says, is birth control. The peasants hate family-planning inspectors even more than tax inspectors: their inspection visits often culminate in skirmishes. But the birth-control program has been an unqualified success, says Dang. So the anger will soon subside. What is one to believe? The Chinese population is growing at double the rate of the one-child-per-family goal. Has the Party given up on its plan? Or in the absence of any reliable data on population, has it assumed that reality and discourse are one and the same?
