Book cover photo and
publication data (in Chinese)
Page numbers refer to the first edition. These reading notes are from
Book One (to page 239) of this 772 page book. The notes cover the section
on Cao's first trip through rural Henan during May and June 1996.
The author of "China Along the Yellow River", Professor Cao Jinqing of the Shanghai Social Development Research Institute also wrote or edited
"The Road to the Restoration of Confucianism -- A Collection of Essays by Liang Shuming" [Èåѧ¸´ÐË֮· -- ÁºÊþäéÎÄÑ¡] (Shanghai, 1996, Yuandong Publishers) , "Escaping from the Ivory Towers of Idealism: Research on the Work Unit Phenomenon" [×ß³öÀíÏëµÄ¡°³Ç±¤¡± -- Öйú¡°µ¥Î»ÏÖÏóµÄÑо¿] which focuses on the question can the work unit system, developed for the planned economy adapt to the market economy? with Zheng Letian, "Social and Cultural Changes in Contemporary North Zhejiang Rural Villages", [µ±´úÕã±±Ïç´åµÄÉç»áÎÄ»¯±äǨ] [Shanghai, Yuangdong Publishers] and the related essay by co-author Zhang Letian .
Social scientist Prof. Cao Jinqing was able to do the rural
survey that resulted in "China Along the Yellow River" [Huanghe Bian de
Zhongguo] took advantage of his network of friends and relatives
in rural Henan to talk with farmers throughout the province during the
Spring and Fall of 1996. Cao remarks that the village is the unit
of study for those who want to understand the modern fate of Chinese culture
(p. 170). Cao alternated conversations in the field with extensive
background research on rural China during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
This historical background gives his analyses and descriptions a rich texture
and great clarity and a good sense of what is traditional and what are
recent changes. For Cao, reading the history and literature
books from the Ming and the Qing dynasties and talking with country people
are two complementary approaches to traditional China.
Chinese tradition can be approached through texts or through getting out and talking with a lot of people, says Cao. What is apparent is that all social organizations are modeled after the family. One of the central questions of Cao's book is that now that Mao is gone, (and despite Mao's most strenuous efforts) is rural China snapping back to its traditional sources or is it, disrupted by the biggest rural - urban migrations and economic reform changing into something completely different? One of the big diffrences Cao finds between villages is the amount of non-agricultural income the farmers get. As non-agricultural income increases, urban culture (and the cash economy) penetrate. Villages with little non-agricultural income tend to have the highest number of children born above the family planning quota [hei haizi]. [See the online essay by Prof. Huang Ping of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences "A Sociological Study of Non-Agricultural Activities of Rural Chinese" in Chinese on the UNESCO web site at Selection of Articles in Chinese ]
The TV sets and the movie star pinups of the young married couples symbolize the arrival of urban culture in rural China.Cao remarks repeatedly on the growing influence of urban culture in the countryside seen in pinups, home appliances, TV and the many farmers who work in the city (or even in far off Xinjiang) during the idle season.
Chinese villagers, remarks Cao, hate and fear local officials but have an almost superstitious respect for high ranking officials. (p. 199) Cao noted that Henan rural people have great respect for Mao Zedong despite the famine that killed 10 percent of the population in southern Henan after the Great Leap Forward. (p. 172)
Henan is Geographically Closed Compared to Yangtze Region and Socially Closed: Local Officials Don't Want Outsiders Be They Journalists or High Government Officials Talking to Local People
Henan is different from southern China in just as the Yellow River is different from the Yangtze. The Yellow River carries more a higher concentration of silt than any other river. So much so that the Yellow River from the Henan provincial capital of Zhengzhou eastwards has its riverbed well above the level of the surrounding countryside. And forty meters above ground level at Kaifeng. The river keeps getting higher and higher and higher. The silting and raising of the bottom of the riverbed means that no rivers flow into the downstream stretch of the Yellow River and that navigation along it is not possible. Thus Henan is closed while the provinces along the Yangtze are opened up by that river that makes navigation possible deep into the Chinese interior. (p. 85) People who live along the Yellow River get their water mostly from wells while people who live along the Yangtze get their water from the river.
Cao avoided going with officials so that village people would speak more freely about their incomes, village politics, relationships between the villagers and officials, family planning, corruption and family. Many times local officials from the township or county discovered him and sternly questioned what he was doing there. Cao remarks that China's villages are often kept closed by local officials. Even Chinese scholars cannot go there freely to do survey work. Cao notes time after time that when officials heard that he was doing survey work, they accused him of breaking some kind of rule. Officials feared that he was a journalist or an investigator from the central government. (54 - 55) . This is a sign of very tense relations between officials and villagers. Some villagers, Cao said, were prepared to give him a full run down on local problems and official corruption in the hope that someone from the center would fix things. (p. 57) .
Villagers sometimes feared that he was there to ferret out information about unregistered over the birth quota children. The parents of the child and sometimes neighbors and relatives as well could be penalized if an extra child were discovered. Cao with the help of the Kaifeng Party School mostly to counties where high county officials who would bail him out of trouble served but the officials as a precaution, but those officials were only told of Cao's presence if a problem arose. The usual way social research is done, said Cao, was for the county to be contacted, the county contacts the xiang (district) and the xiang contacts the village. And officials from each level not only accompany the researcher but shower the researcher with hospitality. The problem with this, say Cao, is that with an official around, the villagers will not speak frankly.
After Productivity Gains, Most Are Well Fed But Developing Industry is Difficult
Cao discusses the considerable gains in unit productivity since the 1970s owing to improved seed varieties, fertilizer and pesticides. Mud and straw dwellings have often been completely replaced by brick. In some villages people will hire builders instead of following the old custom that disappeared in the 1970s of gathering the relatives together and of course feeding them during construction work. Land is generally allocated fairly evenly among the inhabitants of villages (typically one Chinese mu (1/15th of a hectare) per person, with some people getting a bit more sometimes if they belong to an influential clan, and sometimes they do not get extra land for a child who is over the birth quota. Cao says that in rural Henan agricultural productivity has increased between three to five times since the 1950s owing to more fertilizer, improved seeds, and water conservation projects.Cao suggests that Chinese agriculture would be much more productive if farms could be larger, but the even allocation of land that is the guarantor of social stability blocks this line of advance (p. 36).
Villagers often say that over the past two decades, with the contract land system and improvements in irrigation and fertilizer the basic problems of food and clothing have been solved. The problem today however is no spending money. Cao comments on the great number of village enterprise projects that have risen and failed driven by political pressure from above, handicapped by lack of experience and poor management below. Village enterprises often collapse, Cao noticed, when local people are taken in by swindlers from the big city. (p. 60 - 61)
Cao lets the farmers speak, adding in his analysis, but that analysis really emerges from a very through contextualization of what the local people are saying. Cao, never resorts to jargon. Indeed at the conclusion of the first half of the book (the book is divided into the Spring 1996 and the Fall 1996 trips to the Henan countryside) Cao remarks on how the social theories imported into China from the West have messed up China something awful. A swipe at Marxist-Leninism? China needs to learn from Western social theory but rethink it so as to develop a theory that can be applied fluently to Chinese society. Cao asks, "If we hold to a dogma that we don't even believe in ourselves anymore, and don't go study how social life and social psychology is changing, how can we ever hope to solve the great many ideological problems before us?" (p. 30)
One theme running through Cao's book is the central importance of extended family and clan power in village politics. Mao Zedong tried to root it out of the traditional village, observed Cao, but the extended family/clan is still the basic fact of life. Mutual aid among villagers, for example, almost never went beyond extended clan groups. Cao made the fascinating observation that villages with a strong, effective leader who did go things for the village were nearly always to be found only in villages in which one surname dominated the village. [pp. 116 - 124 "Able Leader or Village Tyrant"]
When the Farmers Can Stand Up for Their Own Interests, China Can Become A Democratic Country
Cao writes that "the central task of modernizing Chinese villages is leading the village people, unable to stand up for their own interests and organize themselves to the point where they can stand up for themselves and organize themselves." (p. 175) Cao sees the election of village officers and the selection by village party members of the village branch party secretary as important advances in democracy. One village leader said village democracy can work since people know each other, but how will it work in larger units such as the district? Cao argues that the farmer's conception of personal interest doesn't go much beyond the village and do not think about representing their own interests but look to someone else to represent their interests. In practice, village party committee are permitted to operate as long as they get the job done and there is not too much factionalism. If that happens, the district party committee will intervene and change the village committee. The corruption of village officials teaches villagers the importance of democracy, which is a weapon against corruption, remarks Cao. (p. 63)
Cao observed time and time again as he asked villagers the name of the local branch party secretary or village officials, that the dominant surname always dominated village politics well above its proportion in the village. The branch party secretary nearly always belongs to the dominant family/clan or at least to a large family (pp. 37 and 207) . In his discussion of the importance of the family/clan he stresses a feature of rural Chinese society that Chinese economist He Qinglian pointed to in the last chapters of her 1998 book "China and The Pitfalls of Modernization' [ full text in Chinese at Zhonggguo Xiandaihu de Xianjing ]
Mao was unable to eradicate many of the customs and thinking of the old society, despite his most strenuous efforts. Now the question is will the old society return or is something else emerging? The return of at least long-term land tenure with the responsibility system in agriculture seems to have restored many traditional relationships. Especially these four tradional relationships:
From Exchanges Based Upon Sentiment and Partiality to the MarketTo land -- exchanges with nature; Non market exchanges based on human sentimental connections with relatives and others; Market exchanges; and Relationships/exchanges between the family and the state -- that is the people are taxed and the state rules on the people's behalf.
Large numbers of human exchanges based on personal feelings intrude
upon modern political processes. Cao sees the same phenomenon operating
in China that Max Weber saw in Europe:
.
"The human feelings in relationships that are such a deep source of
pleasure are just what has prevented our people from cooperating in groups
rationally on an equal basis with others. Max Weber wrote that to develop
a modern rationalized organization, human sentimental relationships have
to be eliminated from the process. This process greatly improved
organizational efficiency and became a powerful force for the modernization
of the economy. Some people say that an organization without human
feeling (renqing) has become dehumanized. This is the very big price that
humanity paid in order to create modern bureaucratic organizations. I suddenly
understood what Weber meant." (p. 196)
What are the results? There are laws but they are not followed. Laws are not strictly enforced. There is corruption in the Party and the government. (p. 31). Farmers are only operating in their local market -- they will need a new way of organization to participate in national and international markets. Farmers now enjoy freedom and the market, but few people understand that freedom and responsibility are interlinked. Local officials charge all kinds of excess illegal arbitrary fees -- they are not then ruling in the people's behalf -- are among China's big problems.
Cao sees family planning and the tax burden on farmers as the two big flashpoints in the relationship between rural villagers and officials. When Cao visits a village, he talks to a range of people from different income groups to get an idea of the tax burden (he calculated it at 24 percent in one village) and the proportion of children born over the family planning quota (he figured about half in another village). In one village an accounting table showed 4.7 percent tax rate (just under the five percent set by the State Council) but the village accountant explained that the tax rate was really 10.7 percent. Villagers where nearly everyone depended exclusively on farming for their living were much more likely to have many "black children". (pp. 45 - 54)
Money Making Units Collecting Family Planning Fines and Taxes Swell in Size and Need to Collect Even More Taxes and Fines
In many areas, the district government would have ten or twenty divisions employing a total of over 100 people, but the family planning section would by itself employ thirty or forty people. Farmers understand that there is not enough land to support more people, but in their own case they want more children to help in farm work and for an heir. The family planning office in one village, during the two years prior to a 1996 visit, to suppress excess births required all women of child bearing age to report to the district government office on odd numbered months. Failure to report brought on a fine of 50 - 100 RMB. One villager talked about some methods family planning official use when a fine is not paid such as taking away grain, livestock or even tearing down a house. Sometimes neighbors and relatives would share in the fine or even in the destruction of their homes. Family planning as an important source of revenue in many areas. Here is a passage from a talk given at the Kaifeng Party School on family planning practices in some Henan counties:
"To accomplish their family planning mission, village cadres are doing whatever they think it takes -- from fining people to corporal punishment, from taking away livestock to destroying houses, from holding close relatives responsible to holding neighbors responsible too. But many villages in the interior still have 25 percent more births than they should. "Many village, township and county governments have become dependent upon family planning fines as a source of "off-budget" income. Some county family planning committees assess a ten RMB (USD 1) per capita family planning fine quota on villages and townships, payable in advance. The township or rural district keeps half of the family planning fine, twenty percent is sent to the county and thirty percent is remitted to the village committee. If the county gets 20 RMB per capita, then the township gets another 50 RMB per capita. Some districts have lower excess births that others. In these districts, enforcement is often relaxed so that there will be more families to fine. The fines changed from a means to an end and the objective switched from reducing births to increasing births." (p. 16)
On Village Democracy
There are three main conceptions of what a village is. There is the Marxist view that farmers are like potatoes -- they are tied intimately to the soil, get their living from it but don't have much to do with each other. A second theory divides people into social classes -- that was theory was the basis of land reform (landlords vs. poor farmers) of the 1950s. A third theory (of pre-'49 scholar Liang Shuming) sees a Chinese village as a family/clan organization. Cao said that there is some truth to all of them and most Chinese villages are a mix of all three. Villages on the north China plain tend to be larger (several hundred to a thousand or more households) than in the south, which is more mountainous. Relations and exchanges between people and households are based on mutual courtesy and sentiment rather than on a market. Owing to this mentality, argues Cao, people don't think of themselves as a group with group business. This mentality needs to be considered when analyzing village democracy and village committees.
Village organization descends most recently from the production brigade system. In rural Henan, sometimes the head of the production brigade was appointed or elected but was usually the result of an effort to balance several clans or the branches of the predominant clan. People see issues from the perspective of the immediate family to extended family to clan and only then to the village. Everywhere village people who are not able to represent their own interests see local officials systematically violating those interests.
What is the heritage of the collectivist thinking championed by Mao Zedong? This kind of collectivist philosophy and style of popular mobilization aimed at changing the Chinese village from what Sun Yat-sen called "a pile of sand" to a "piece of iron". Can the work brigades (equivalent to a village) fashioned by Mao become the source of democratic organization to handle public affairs? Cao says after he can't answer this question, but notes the village committees mostly function as arms of the district that collects taxes, and sees to it that abortions and sterilizations are done. Cao points out that the democratically elected village councils are the Chinese manifestation of an attempt at modernization.
Developing countries try to impose modernization from above by changing a system but the social-psychological-cultural change need to achieve this is much harder and takes much longer than changing a system. Cao sees democratically elected councils as floating atop a mass of traditional culture and traditional behaviors. In most villages, people aren't used to acting on their own behalf and if they want to, the village does not permit them to do so. Cao prefers, when considering this question not to thing about what should be, but what is, and even more what is possible.
Why Are Officials So Corrupt?
Why are village officials so corrupt? asks Cao at one point. Part of his answer is that in the mid 1980s some villagers started to get rich through sideline industries and by the late 1980s through some of the township and village enterprises. Although it should be said that in village after village introduced in the book the local TVEs that collapsed quickly or died at birth. The outside swindler and faking results for TVEs by local officials who want to rise are two typical TVE stories in his Henan villages. Village officials saw some fellow villagers getting rich and wanted it for themselves. Cao observes that village people don't like corrupt officials, yet their custom of giving presents for favors is a corrupting influence. So another part of the problem is the gift-giver. Cao finds much in the Chinese villages of today that reminds him of his readings about China in ages past. His discussion of corruption includes a discussion of the famed clean official of Song Dynasty Kaifeng, Bao Gong, and the wide appeal that story has even today.
Village committee core officials (party secretary, village chief, village accountant) work 200 days a year on village business are lowly paid. They draw just 100 RMB per month in salary. The village budget might be 50 - 60,000 RMB annually spent on village roads, bridges, and schools. [pp. 66 - 67]
Mao's solution to corruption, remarks Cao, was to mobilize the people against the officials, but that approach disrupted administration and proved to be very expensive. Democracy depends upon a true democratic election system and press freedoms and individual freedom of expression -- but real democracy based on people aware of and determined to use their rights -- to seize power. Not a country like India, remarks Cao, with vast numbers of passive people who receive these political rights as a gift. (p. 237)
Corruption Will End Only When Villagers Stand Up for Their Rights and Organize Themselves
Yet at the root of corruption Cao sees the inability of the villagers to create democratic institutions to represent them. The villagers says Cao, are always looking for someone to be the boss on their behalf (ti min zuo zhu) rather than organizing themselves and choosing someone to be accountable to them (min zhu). This is another theme Cao returns to regularly. Can democratic centralism be a kind of halfway house?, he asks. Cao observes that democratic centralism is centralism without the democracy as it is practiced in rural China. Democracy only goes as far as the expectation that officials will "listen to the people". But democratic socialism lacks built-in institutional guarantees to assure its functioning. The central question for China, Cao writes, is to determine how to teach rural people to have a democratic consciousness through village and xiang-level elections. "A modern political party with no interest of its own other than the well-being of the people, should make thorough studies of how to accomplish the political modernization of China. This is an even bigger and more difficult task than economic modernization." (pp. 237 - 238)
No Limit to Payrolls So No Limit to Fines and Taxes, Either
Another thread running through this books is the tax burden on farmer. In village after village farmers say that the tax burden is high and getting heavier. Cao traces this to the role of the village, the rural district/township and county as the employer of last resort. Payrolls keep getting bigger and taxes increase accordingly. In one xiang, Cao notes how during the last twenty years government and party payrolls tripled and quadrupled with many superfluous workers. The sections that increased fastest were those that brought in income such as family planning, public security and finance from fines and taxes. (pp. 91 - 93) . When the xiang was organized as a People's Commune, party and government staff totaled 20. Now there are 150. When local leader were asked how many workers were needed, they said 30 would do instead of 150.
In discussions with a village leader, party secretary and accountant, Cao heard four main reasons for this:
In the more prosperous areas officials would look to taxing township and village enterprises, but in the poorer areas where there weren't any companies, so the officials would count on bringing in money from family planning fines in addition to taxes assessed on farmers.After the commune was dissolved, responsibilities of government and party sharply decreased, but the people who held the old jobs were still around. Moreover, as a new function was created, new jobs and new sections keep payrolls growing. The county kept sending retired soldiers and school graduates to the xiang. Jobs were created for them. And payrolls got bigger year by year. Higher-level government and party officials saw to it that positions were created for their children, relatives and friends.
What is the population of the a certain rural district (xiang)? The agricultural and economics section says 23, 192; public security 25000; family planning says 26,000. Of course population is a moving target, says Cao. The many "black children" (hei haizi) making an accurate count difficult.
Many government and party organizations in the xiang are responsible to their own higher-level organizations and are not under the xiang party and government. This is the so-called tiao/stovepipe problem that makes coordination difficult. In general if there is money to be made, the superior organizes jealously guards it against the local government; but if there is no money to be made or if it is a money loser, they don't mind if the local government takes over.
The xiang government and party finds itself caught between the local policies of the county and the interests of the locals. If they implement a policy too zealously, they may be kicked out by the county as a scapegoat if the farmers protest. The county sometimes imposed tasks -- unfunded mandates -- such as setting up facilities in the villages all the while demanding that the burden on farmers be reduced. The village committee is supposed to represent the local people but is actually an implementer of the orders of the xiang. One xiang party secretary said that a village party secretary needs to have a strong clan behind him when he tries to carry out unpopular orders. The xiang looks for a strong, able person to be village branch secretary or village head. People who want the job often have corrupt motives. So corruption and the power of clans keeps growing in the villages. (95 - 96)
Communist Disneyland??
One of the more startling chapters in the book was Cao's discussion of a visit to Nanjie Cun (805 households, population 3000) near Luohe City in south central Henan. The village decided in the 1980s to recollectivize, hew to a Maoist line and set up prosperous enterprises. It is run a charismatic leader Wang Hongbin. The leader is idolized in the Maoist manner. There is a Mao statue guarded day and night and Maoist slogans are everywhere. The village got nationwide attention for its prosperity and Maoism. Political achievements also helped economic ones as the village became a favored place of pilgrimage for the communist faithful. See the :Industry and Commerce Times (Taiwan) report on the Nanjie Village controversy .
Cao found that Nanjie Cun is a perfect type of the one-family name highly clan-conscious village run by a benevolent leader. The top leaders, all named Wang, belonged to the same clan. The village made a strong distinctions between the inner and the outer. The very many visitors were kept to a tourist track and museums and had almost no contact with villagers. Cao introduced him as a social scientist who wanted to interview some officials and villagers, but was refused and told, read these books and come back if you have questions. [p. 131 - 153] Cao concluded that from a sociological perspective the village is an ethical collectivity (lunli gongtongtai) and not a contractual collective community [qiyuhua de jiti zuzhi]. Wang Hongbin is a ruler on behalf of the people and not an official chosen by the people.
Nanjie Cun has three basic policies:
Cao concludes that Nanjie Cun is a true collectivity and they are achieving collective prosperity. Cao concludes that its success depends upon the existence of a particular personality that can drawn on elements in the culture, but it is a personal success and the disappearance of the leader will mean the end of the organization. Cao also mentions that the Nanjie Cun enterprises employ 12,000 people only 2000 of who are villagers. The 10,000 others work for wages and do not share in benefits. Thus Cao remarks, some have criticized Nanjie Cun as "collective capitalism". [pp. 131 - 153]Low salary, high welfare benefits. This policy aims also at eliminating selfishness Contracts are let out not to individuals as in the responsibility contract system but to collectives Criticism meetings aimed at combating the selfishness of individuals.
Cao visited Zhulin, another collectivized village, and one much poorer than Nanjie Cun, which relies on industry. There too is a charismatic leader and the dominance of one family name: eighty percent of the people are named Li. Here too, success depends upon the leader, and so it is not actually a model for other villages. [pp. 157 - 165]
Not Just the Political System But Social Psychology and Customs Must Change If More Than Superficial Changes Are to Occur
Cao concludes that the weakness of Chinese farmers is that they do not
work together well and cannot see things. This Cao said is very evident
in water and waterworks disputes between and within villages. Thus
collective interests objectively exist but do not subjectively exist.
Cao criticized some Chinese intellectuals who see democracy and dictatorship
as just a matter of political systems. Cao says the difference is much
deeper than that. Those intellectuals are blinded by political theory
and do not understand that the effectiveness of a political system depends
upon social psychology and customs. Cao says until Chinese villagers
learn to stand up and represent themselves instead of just needed other
people to represent them, any laws and democratic system will be merely
like a little oil slick floating on the water. [p. 167]