Here are some more reading notes from "China Along the Yellow River". This section covers the introductory material to Book Two of Shanghai sociologist Cao Jingqing's travels in rural Henan from September 6 to November 21, 1966.
The 770 pages of Cai's "China Along the Yellow River" ( Huanghe Biande Zhongguo from Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe) are full of insights on society, economics, politics and society in rural China. The book is worth reading and studying. I finished my Long March through this book several weeks ago. The quality is maintained throughout the book. These notes cover pp. 253 ? 254. In Beijing the book is available on the 3rd or 4th floor of the Beijing Bookbuilding (Beijing Tushu Dasha) near the literature section. A second printing in January 2001 has brought up the total press run to 10,000 copies.
Reading notes for Book One are at China Along the Yellow River -- A Scholar's Observations and Medications on Chinese Rural Society Reading Notes, Book One http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/china-along-yellow-river.htm
Cai Jinqing in fall 1996 began his second survey in rural Henan
after a summer of reading in history. Cai's summer studies focues
on rural society and rural government in late Qing China and the relationship
between the two. Cai writes that an examination of history shows
that although over the past half century rural China has seen large changes
in its political arrangements, there remains nonetheless a large continuity
in the old methods of production, and in social and political
relationships. There certainly has been change, but not really
qualitative change. Now has appeared that greatest shift in Chinese
history. One again liberated Chinese peasants are moving into non-agricultural
occupations in the countryside. Will this finally break the great
continuity and so overcome the inertia of history? It is still hard to
tell. Cai has been trying for some years to create a theoretical
framework for understanding rural China. Can it emerge from survey
work, or can the theories of western sociology and cultural studies be
employed to create such a framework?
A tradition vs. modernization framework can be employed of course, but
what does modernization mean? Is it a change in the form of agricultural
production? Maximizing yield in a situation where there is one person
per mu (1/15th of a hectare) blocks the consolidation of farmland.
Does modernization mean per capita income? Without industrialization, rural
China can be adequately fed and clothed but no more. Does it mean
a change in the political consciousness of China's peasants? Without a
change in the current means of production, there is no way in which peasants
can be elevated to the status of citizens. The modernization
of rural China seems to depends on rapid commercial and industrial
growth and thus on the modernization of the cities. Only if China's
commercial and industrial sector can absorb the majority of China's agricultural
population will the modernization of rural Chinese society be possible.
This will be a long historical process, especially in western China.
Many of the habits of Chinese society and politics are rooted in China's
rural past. Many of the new concepts that China will
need to be interpreted in the light of China?s national experiences.
(pp. 243 - 245)
Commonly the experience of modernization in third world countries is
modernization imposed from the exterior and from the top towards the bottom.
This is quite different from the bottom-up modernization process that occurred
in the original modern countries. In the developing countries, intellectuals
have been the missionaries of modernization who entered the political process
and then modernization political and legal systems. They used political
power and education to
reform social structures and to modernize the economy.
Yet if China approaches modernization from the inner towards the outer
and from the bottom up, we find that there is a tremendous amount of inertia
in rural society. There are obstacles in old methods of production
and in old social and political relationships that would be difficult to
overcome, even across the span of several generations.
The Central Plains (zhongyuan) gave birth to the Chinese people.
Once it had a mild and moist climate. Visiting the farmers of Henan,
their burden and the difficulty of modernization become apparent.
The people lack farmland and the farmland lacks water these are the two
guardian tigers block the way to modernization. Farmers along the
coast of Jiangsu Province can switch into other sectors and use agriculture
to supplement their incomes. Yet in the center and west of China,
agriculture will remain the principal sector for a long time to come.
According to reports, of the 80 million Chinese who live in abject poverty,
water shortages are the direct cause of poverty for 60 million of them.
Chinese has over the past five decades made great progress in agriculture.
China's population more than doubled but per mu (1/15 of a hectare) productivity
increased from three to five times with the wide application of modern
agricultural technologies. (p. 247)
Technological has brought important changes. However even today
the foundation of agriculture is still built on the old small-scale, intensive
family based method of production. This household organization of
production and with it the customary way of relying on a web of personal
relationships to obtain resources and the
ever-increasing bureaucratic nature of local government organization
are still central. This traditional household organization based
means of production has strengthened steadily since opening and reform
made once again the household the basic unit of agricultural production.
These facts cast a shadow on rural China?s prospects for modernization.
Some say that the May 4th New Culture Movement marked a decisive break
with traditional China. This was certainly true for the intellectuals who
took the West as their tutors. For the Chinese peasantry however,
the old system that "takes the household as its basic unit and a mode of
behavior that relies on a web of personal relationships to obtain resources"
has remained just as in the past a central fact of their lives. Just
as Marx said, the past has a hold on the present as the
dead a hold on the living. Pessimism is not helpful but
the kind of optimism that brings with it rash actions are even worse.
The purpose of this second survey period is to expand the areas of Henan Province covered to the northern, western and southern parts of the province and to shift the focus from the farmer household to the country district (xiang) and county level government. The network of students and teachers of the Kaifeng Party School along with the relatives of the acquaintances of author Cai Jingqing helped arrange access to these areas.
A difficult question is the place of China?s traditional pattern of
human relationships in the modern age. As a human being I love and
cherish this way of living even as my rational mind has its doubts. As
an observer and researcher of modern Chinese rural society, I find that
it is just there "personal relationships" that block the development
and maturation of politics, the economy and ethics in China and that inhibit
the development of the "individual in society" and of the "awareness
that one is a citizen". Yet as a person, I want to live amidst these
direct and sincere personal relationships. (p. 250)
A professor Hu of the Kaifeng Party School said, "Reforms must
be paid for. Who is paying for them? Reform also creates profits.
Who gets the profits" Hu continued, "It is first the farmers and
secondly the workers of the state-owned enterprises who are paying for
reform. According to what I have seen in eastern Henan Province, since
1985 many farmers have not seen improvements in their living standards.
What they have experienced is with the steady rise in their tax burden
a decline in their actual standard of living. Among the workers of
the state owned enterprises in Kaifeng City and Kaifeng County, two-thirds
are
either laid off or looking for work (xia gang, dai gang). For
people who have lost their rice bowl, life has become difficult and uncertain.
Who has profited from reform?"
" First of all are local government officials at all levels, and especially those government and Party officials who have some real power. Second of all are directors and managers of factories that have contracts. Third are the owners of private industry and merchants. This is a very serious and complex problem. If the burden of reform is borne by the workers of the state-owned enterprises and the peasants and the profits are reaped by government and party officials and the owners of private business, then the reforms are not China away from socialism but not to western-style capitalism but to a uniquely Chinese style of bureaucratism. China may very well be heading that way. This betrays the intention of the planners of reform and also the wishes of the people who are determined that China should become a liberal society. Observing what is really going on in China's interior, the actual process of reform seems to be bringing China along this third pathway. "
China's reforms started in the countryside. The household contract responsibility system gave peasants the right to manage their own land and their personal freedom. The result was a great increase in agricultural production and made possible great developments in the industrial and commercial sectors. Thus I could say that the peasants are the direct beneficiaries of this reform. The ever-increasing burden on farmers is directly related to the tendency for the size of local government organizations at every level to expand and the increase of bureaucratism. This is in turn related to the problem of political reform of local government. The increase in the farmer's burden since 1985 has meant that there has been no real increase in their standard of living since then. .. The picture is more mixed for workers, since some have been able to greatly increase their incomes by changing jobs.
Some local level government and Party officials use their power to reap
benefits for themselves. Thus, this local level is just where the
Party and government has paid the highest price for reform. The price has
been paid in the corruption spread by these corrupt local officials who
have corrupted markets, beliefs, loyalties, public morality, and principles.
Corruption in the Party and government is the key problem. Eliminating
corrupt morals and illegal profits among Party and government officials
and factory chiefs who have special contracts is the absolute precondition
to ensure that the reforms of socialism go in the proper
direction. (pp. 251 - 252)
Hu maintains that most of the peasants in the Chinese interior have
been the price but not reaping the benefits of reform. The poorest peasants
suffer from three kinds of disasters -- natural disasters, disasters from
local government, and the disaster of fluctuating market prices.
Local officials run campaigns to encourage all the peasants to plant one
or another crop in the hope of improving their incomes. Very often the
result is that everyone plants the crop, prices plunge and farmers end
up not being able even to cover their operating costs.
In 1995, the market price of cotton was higher than the official purchase
price so many country and district government sent police to the countryside
to force farmers to sell as the lower, official price. This year
the market price for cotton is lower than the official price so many local
government purchasing offices are refusing to accept cotton. Administrative
orders from local governments that farmers plant this or
that are one of the principal causes of wide fluctuations in prices.
According to a State Council order, the farmer's burden may not exceed
5 percent. In fact, it is very often 30 - 40 percent.
Hu continued, therefore, whenever you travel around the countryside you
notice the very strong bad feelings of the peasants and local officials
for each other. During one trip, a peasant told me, "One day
the peasants will revolt. When that day comes, I'll be the first to go
to the county and district government and kill all those corrupt officials."
Naturally,
that is the talk of a hothead.
There is a peasant saying that goes: "Law isn't as important as policy, policy isn't as important as a document coming down from on high, and that document isn't as important as the words of a leader."
[Faluu meiyou zhence da, zhengce meiyou hongtou da, hongtou meiyou tsuiba da]
County government is the most important of the four levels of local
government (provincial, city or regional, county, and rural district
[sheng, shi (qu), xian, xiang]. Qing Emperor Yongzheng wrote that
the county magistrate is the official closest to the people and the foundation
of government. … If the county magistrate is honest, the people benefit
most of all, if the magistrate is corrupt, the people suffer the most.”
Although in today’s China now extends even lower to the townships and rural
districts (xiang), these levels are largely outposts of the county rather
than semi-autonomous levels of government in themselves.
Government and Party leaders are especially important. Moreover from the perspective of rural sociological and cultural studies, the county is a complete social and cultural unit. Studies of households, villages and groups of villages depend upon an understanding of the county, but the county is largely a distinct unit for the purposes of study. Counties can even have their own languages, cultural traditions, and histories. (p. 254)
Wuyang County in central Henan covers 777 square kilometers and has a population of 510,000. Ninety-seven percent of the people are involved in agriculture. The proportion of local government income from tobacco tax has grown from 30 percent in the 1950s to 42 percent in the 1960s to about 80 percent during the 1980s. During the five decades of the PRC, the number of local government offices grew from 10 in 1949 to 23 in 1957, 27 in 1966, decreasing to 13 in 1971 but rising again to 29 in 1978 and 36 in 1985. In addition to Party and government offices, the offices of the county people’s congress and other organization have also added many employees. Although the number and organization of county offices have been constantly changing since the late Qing dynasty, the trend is clear. More and more offices and employees that result in an ever-increasing burden on the local people. The contract responsibility system and the market economy seem to be major factors in accelerating the trend breaking down large families into nuclear families. Most of Wuyang County’s people live just above the line of abject poverty… they are just barely adequately fed and clothed (wenbao). (pp. 258 – 259)
County and district (xiang) finance is very difficult. In 1993, eleven of the fourteen townships in the county were not able to meet their payrolls on time. Growth in rural incomes has been slow even as production has steadily increased. People don’t have enough money to buy more. In 1993 per capita peasant income was 705 RMB (USD 100). Taking inflation into account, there was only a very small increase over the previous year. This per capita figure is 216 RMB below the national average. The peasants of Wuyang County have no other resources than the one mu (1/15 of a hectare) that they farm. They can draw no resources from the seacoast, they can’t get income from the city, and there are no natural resources below the ground. Their situation is typical for counties in central and western China.
Nonetheless, the one mu per person of land keeps people out of abject poverty. People are building better housing for themselves although most people don’t have much in the way of interior furnishings. The county for all its problems, like most counties in central and western China, are in better shape today than it has been in one to two hundred years. (p. 260)
Handicapped by the lack of capital , local officials promoted many schemes to promote commerce in industry. Nearly all failed. In recent years over 6000 township and village enterprises were started up but as of late 1996 only 300 were still operating. Where TVEs have succeeded seems to be more along the coastal China. These successes seem to have been based on successful enterprises that grew out of the People’s Communes but more importantly the business experience from the port cities involved in China trade and the growth of commerce their going back to the late Ming Dynasty. The mental accumulation of ideas seems in the end to have been and even more important kind of accumulation than capital accumulation. This kind of “primitive accumulation” of ideas has just begun in rural central and western China.
Where the nearly all the people depend upon farming to make a living, increasing productivity through mechanization and large farms is just not possible. In Wuyang County, as in central and western China, mechanization would make it possible for one family to farm 80 mu in an area that has one mu per person land. To do that would require finding jobs for the 95 percent of the population that would be displaced.
Wuyang County has 128,000 peasant households and so a workforce of about 300,000 in the villages. The slogan there is “Put 100,000 people to work on various projects and to send a labor army of 100,000 strong down south of the Yangtze to find work”. People can’t find work at home, so many look for jobs outside their area. Wuyang County organized the export of its labor.
Most of the peasants in the Chinese interior still live the traditional agricultural life that has been typical of the area for thousands of years. The western thinking that has penetrated China for the past hundred years hasn’t affected them much. Although the peasants are sometimes very angry at the heavy burden local officials impose on them and how those officials eat and drink away their earnings, this anger is as old as that practice that itself goes back to ancient times. (p. 263) According to official reports, the government project that organized labor exports increased farmer income by 50 percent and official revenues by 25 percent. The two biggest effects of this organized labor export is to change the traditional culture of the area as well as to change for the better the relationship between the people and officials. Now a study would be needed to see if these claims are true. (p. 264) The percapita farmland available in Wuyang County is just one-tenth of a hectare (1.5 mu) .
In Henan Province there are two poles typical of life. Either
the peasants continue dozing in the same passivity typical of the
agriculture based culture they have lived in for millennia. Or else
appear many county and township officials who make big plans but their
interventions in economic life are typically ineffective. Here’s
hoping that Wuyang County can escape being caught in a vicious cycle that
alternates between these two poles.