Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (29 page)

During a break, the provincial Party secretary, who was

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chairing the meeting, came up to Lu Zixiu and said to him privately, “Well done, well done—”

“Well done my ass,” Lu retorted. “Why don’t you say that openly? I am your hit man, I do it with my eyes open, and that’s that!”

Thus Lu Zixiu’s graphic description of that meeting not only created a sketch of the prevailing problems in rural China but at the same time revealed his own temperament.

A story about Lu Zixiu that we heard from other sources serves as a good illustration of the man and his style. At one point in his career, Lu had been Party secretary for Chuzhou Prefecture. One day the director of the General Office of the Central Committee, Wen Jiabao, arrived on an inspection tour. Lu Zixiu greeted his superior with the question “What do you want to see, director, the true or the false? The situation as it really is, or the flashy stuff?” Director Wen smiled and said, “Let’s take a look at both!” Years later, in 1996, at a national conference on rural poverty relief, Wen Jiabao,* who was chairing the meeting, spotted Lu Zixiu among the delegates and beckoned to him. “Tell me, what is the critical issue in agriculture?” Lu Zixiu went right to the point: “Cadres. It’s fine to have a policy, but who will carry it out?”

Our interview with Lu Zixiu went very well. When we mentioned that we were doing a comprehensive study of the peasant problem, he opened up further. “In the past,” he said, “Mao Zedong said that ‘a serious problem is educating the peasants.’ I would rather say that the serious problem today is ensuring

*The current (2005) premier of China.

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the interests of the peasants. If the peasants’ interests are overlooked, agricultural growth, social development, and political stability are just empty words.” He went on to quote Lenin: “Lenin warned that ‘capitalism is cropping up among us every moment, every day.’ But what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it better than feudalism cropping up among us every moment, every day?”

Lu summed up his views by quoting Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty. “Over a thousand years ago, Emperor Taizong said, ‘Water holds up the boat; water can also sink the boat.’ Water here refers to the peasants. Emperor Taizong realized the importance of the peasantry. Each and every dynasty understood full well the importance of the peasantry, but once they are in power, they turn around and exploit the peasantry, even suppress the peasantry. Using history as a mirror, the Chinese Communist Party is faced with the same problem.”

Brief History of the Chinese Peasants’ Burden

China is a vast agricultural country with over three thousand years of recorded history, and peasants make up the overwhelming majority of the population. Thus it is inevitable that the problem of the peasants’ burden surfaces again and again in every dynasty, and will not go away.

In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the central government was preoccupied with dealing with inflation and unemployment and preparing for the country’s industrialization. It could not concern itself with budgetary problems in the vast rural areas, and did not interfere when local governments took things into their own hands and imposed supplementary taxes over the regular agricultural taxes. There was a limit imposed on these supplementary taxes, of course, but when the local administration was short of cash, there was

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nothing to stop them from inventing new excuses to squeeze the peasants.

The Korean War in 1951 followed the tension of the early period, with economic sanctions imposed on China by Western countries. In face of the situation at home and abroad, the Party and central government had no choice but to prioritize industrialization and accumulate capital at the cost of agricultural development.

Over a period of thirty long years, the peasants of China carried this heavy burden. But the burden was hidden, because the state ceased to deal directly with individual peasants. The 130 million peasant households soon metamorphosed into 7 million mutual-help groups, and then into 790,000 agricultural cooperatives. The whirlwind of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 took barely three months to convert these cooperatives into 52,781 people’s communes, to the fanfare of drum beating and cymbal banging; not a single peasant eluded the net.

It is impossible to do justice to the magnitude of the sacrifice that the peasants made toward the accumulation of capital for China’s industrialization. It is safe to say that the edifice of China’s industry is built from the flesh and blood of toiling peasants, and urban development was achieved through their pain and sacrifice.

Beginning in the early 1950s, collectivization was forcibly promoted through political and administrative measures in the absence of consultation regarding the wishes of the peasants. From then on, agriculture—what to plant and what to grow— was done according to orders from above. In 1956, the year of collectivization, agriculture visibly declined; this was obvious even before the harvest was taken in. Many peasants simply wanted out. Resistance was widespread, sometimes ending up in mass protests or petitions to Beijing. In some cases, peasants

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went so far as to break up the cooperatives on their own initia-tive and distribute the collectively owned land and grain. The resistance to collectivization and its re-enforcement entailed violence on both sides. Peasants besieged leading officials in county centers, or ransacked security offices. Local cadres for their part labeled the peasants’ actions attacks on the Party and on socialism, labels which would legitimize the use of force against the peasants. Beatings and struggle sessions led to death for some, forced suicide for others. By 1957, the terror of the “antirightist” movement—in which half a million people who had answered Mao’s call to “bloom and contend” by expressing their opinions were then labeled “rightists” and mercilessly persecuted—effectively wiped out the last remnants of the peasants’ resistance to collectivization.

The Great Leap Forward in 1958 swept through the countryside like a whirlwind, plucking the peasants from the cooperatives, still shaky from the recent turmoil, and marshaling them into even bigger collective units, called people’s communes. Now, any property that the peasants owned or had acquired through land reform—land, animals, implements, grain, even personal belongings—were taken away without compensation. The formation of more than fifty thousand people’s communes was tantamount to the state’s opening fifty thousand new accounts in rural areas on which it could draw at will: all the finances and labor power and other resources of the communes were at the disposal of the state.

The peasants of China had truly become the proletariat, owning nothing but their chains!

Following on the heels of the people’s communes was the “instant entry into communism” experiment, which was tried out in many designated rural areas. In order to abolish private property so as to enter “communism,” peasants had to give up

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household property such as cupboards or trunks for clothes to the commune. Cooking utensils were smashed and hurled into furnaces for making steel, to fulfill the steel production target of the Great Leap Forward. The peasants were hit hard; understandably, they lost all incentive to work. Work slowdowns spread through rural China like a plague, and agricultural production declined sharply.

Records show that in the year after the creation of the communes in 1958, agricultural production dropped by 13.4 percent, but the state’s conscription of grain increased by 14.7 percent for the same period. Agricultural production dropped a further 15.6 percent in 1960; nationwide only 287 billion
jin
(1
jin
is slightly over a pound) of grain were produced. But the state’s conscription of grain for that year was still increased. In some cases, seeds and the family’s food grain had to be given up to the cities or for export, to fill the state’s demands. In order for production figures to “leap forward,” local cadres had no choice but to resort to inflating their figures for the eyes of their superiors. Take for instance the case of Feixi County. Feixi was a middle-sized agricultural county, but it reported a harvest of 400 million
jin
of grain production, more than double the true figure. How are the peasants to survive if conscription of grain is based on inflated figures like these? The answer was obvious— by now, the peasants’ problem was not excessive taxes but death by starvation. It is impossible to imagine how many peasants’ lives were sacrificed on the altar of the commune. It is said that in Fengyang County alone the death toll was 60,245—17.7 percent of the county’s population. Two hundred and forty complete households starved to death. Twenty-seven villages disappeared altogether from the county map, wiped out by death and migration. In Xia Huang Village of Damiao Commune, one of the worst-hit communes in the county, the death toll was 68.6 percent of the population.

It is not surprising that years later, during the Cultural