Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (40 page)

The atrocious living conditions and inhuman treatment suffered by the migrants working in the city have been copiously reported in the media, so much so that people’s feelings have become numbed and deadened under the bombardment of depressing information. Meanwhile peasants’ income has stead-ily declined as the country-city income gap has continued to widen. The deputy director of the Center for Development at the central government, Lu Zhiqiang, has pointed out that China is now listed among the countries where inequality of income is acute and where public resentment is running high, so much so that social stability is threatened.

In present-day China, no one wants to stay in the countryside. The peasants do all they can to leave: smart young people apply for college or get jobs through connections; at worst they flood into the city as migrants. During the eighties, township and village enterprise flourished, and one reason for this was that there was a pool of talent in the villages waiting to be tapped. The recent decline of such enterprises is largely due to the fact that those same talents have left the country for the city. The dwindling human resources soon usher in a decline in material resources, and the spirit of creativity is exhausted. This partly explains the decline of rural enterprises over the last several years. The outflow of human resources has resulted in a drying up of investment capital. According to our records, between 1985 and 1994 more than 300 billion yuan seeped away from the countryside into the city—an annual average of 30 million yuan.

It has been reported that as early as 1985, the Ministry of Public Security started drafting a new “law of residence registration” to redress the gaping hole of inequality between country and city. But that was twenty years ago, and the new law of residence registration has still not been drafted. The main rea-son for the inaction is the obstacles thrown up by various government ministries that are loath to give up the privileges they

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have acquired during the era of the state-planned economy. Their interests are threatened by shrinking the economic and civil gap between country and city. A further source of worry is the impact of ongoing economic reforms: the restructuring of state enterprises has led to swelling numbers of laid-off workers, and city authorities have created new measures to deal with the problem. They fire migrant workers to give their jobs to city residents who have been laid off, then go on to make regulations restricting or forbidding the hiring of migrants in certain trades and professions. This has caused a logjam among peasants who come to the city but can’t find work, or who have lost their jobs. Their numbers are much more significant than those of the laid-off workers from state enterprises in the city.

If nothing is done to help the peasants who stay in the villages, they will have no option but to rely on scraping a living from the limited arable land. If the majority of the rural population is forced to live in this way, the gap between rural and urban incomes will continue to widen. In the end, the products of the city will cease to find a market among the rural population, and a surplus of commodities and inflation will be the result. If those in the countryside are perennially excluded from the modernization process, the younger generation of peasants will become an active element in social unrest, eventually causing a rupture between city and country that could lead to confrontation. Any such confrontation will certainly be cata-strophic.

A Recurrent Affliction

By August 2002, the drive to convert taxes into fees and charges had entered its third year, and Anhui provincial leaders were very firm in implementing this policy designed to relieve the peasants’ tax burden. But indiscriminate taxation and extortion

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reappeared like the proverbial weeds that come back to life at the first whiff of spring after a prairie fire. Still, in the year 2002, the ferocity with which taxation and extortion came roaring back took people by surprise.

Within thirteen days, from August 20 to September 1 of 2002, the
New Anhui Evening News
received 369 letters from parents accusing schools of extorting fees. The letters came from all over the province—53 letters from parents in Linquan County, 36 from Funan County, 30 from Guzhen County, 14 from Taihe County, 21 from Si County, 46 from Dingyuan County, 16 from Wangjiang County, 16 from Taihu County, 15 from Tianchang County, 19 from Guichi, a district of the city of Chizhou . . .

At the same time, letters of complaints were pouring into the provincial Price Control Bureau and they were not limited to problems in educational institutions. The province conducted an inspection of fees and charges, and discovered that in certain areas, dozens or even hundreds of items were listed for taxation. In still other areas—land control, law enforcement, civil service, electricity supply, finance, trade and industry, health care and sanitation, public security, marriage, school attendance, sale of agricultural produce—almost everything between birth and death was listed for taxation. The peasants’ excessive burden was back with a vengeance. For instance, the fees and charges for building a house on one’s own land had been laid down clearly in black and white and should be no more than 5 yuan, but in reality fees and charges paid—for the certificate, for management fees, for use of the land, for changing ownership, for opening up the land, for using arable land, and for construction and the like—could easily run to 1,000 yuan and in some cases up to 5,000 yuan. When peasants left the land to find work in the city, they had to pay fees for a certificate of their status; when marrying they were sometimes forced to pay for counseling. Even for public projects such as the setting up

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of agricultural networks, peasants were made to pay for the work.

Party Secretary Wang Taihua was roused to action when he saw this. In Qianshang County the chief of the Price Control Bureau and the head of the Education Committee were both disciplined for working together to make new rules regarding fees and charges for primary school education. The former was fired and the latter had a demerit on his record. Other cadres who were disciplined—some fired, some demoted, some getting “internal warnings” or administrative demerits—included the head of construction for Dazhuang Township in Si County, the Party secretary and head of administration for Yangxian Township in Shou County, and other Party bosses and administrative chiefs in Mengcheng, Huaiyuan, and Funan counties. The provincial government and Party committees sent out cir-culars publicizing some of the most offensive cases of exorbitant fees and charges and also announced that in such cases the municipal authorities with which the offending county was affiliated would be held responsible. A special bureau was established at the provincial level, and all municipal and county Party committees were ordered to set up similar offices, so that a network would be formed with direct phone lines to check and limit all cases of excessive fees and charges. The provincial authorities also called a special meeting in which they urged all departments to rally and work together to implement these decisions.

During this period, we received a number of letters from peasants whom we had interviewed, telling us that barely had they had a chance to catch their breath before cadres from county, township, and village levels were back, stretching out their hands for this fee and that charge. Some of the excuses they relied on to extort money would have been laughable if they hadn’t made us cry.

In the Fengmiao Township of Lingbi County, notorious for

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the Gao Village incident, excessive taxation is running rampant. Local cadres threatened the peasants, telling them not to talk to inspectors, or else . . .

We were most shocked at what happened at Wang Village in Linquan county after our report of the villagers’ long and arduous road to justice. In a long letter of complaint the villagers began by saying:

We are in the twenty-first century, China has entered a rule of law, but in Wang Village, we the villagers have no democratic rights, no property rights, no basic human rights. Our rights have been rudely violated. Continue reading and see for yourself the brutal behaviors of the Baimiao Township Party secretary, Li Xia, the head of the Civil Township Affairs Office, Zhou Zhanming, and the village Party secretary, Wang Junbin.

Wang Junbin! Wasn’t he the man who took the lead in going to Beijing to seek justice, was expelled from the Party, got his name on the wanted list, and then under the supervision of the Central Committee had his Party membership restored and was elected to be village Party secretary? How could it be that the villagers were now going to Beijing again to make complaints against
him
, of all people?

The letter went on to say that apparently cadres in Wang

Village are again raiding homes, ransacking grain stores, and holding back relief funds provided by the central government. When villagers made inquiries, the cadres resorted to their old trick of arresting people on trumped-up charges. The letter said that the relief funds were a demonstration of the government’s concern for the peasants, and any monkeying with this fund was blocking the villagers from receiving the warmth of the Party’s and the government’s concern for them.

Wang Junbin’s change plunged us into long and painful

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