I disagree with the analyses current among many scholars and specialists concerning the 'three rural questions'1. Both Cao Jinqing (曹锦清) in his China Along the Yellow River 《黄河边的中国》and Li Changping (李昌平) in his Some Home Truths for the President《我向总理说实话》 display the same underlying thinking, resting their hopes on powerful state and vested interests making concessions, ending the exploitation of farmers and instead acting for their benefit.
Cao calls for wise and far-sighted members of the political class to show courage and intelligence by 'allowing farmers to rest and relax' [by cutting their tax burden]. He hopes the intelligentsia will create social pressure strong enough to compel vested interests and the authorities to make concessions. Li has sacrificed his career to plead for the farmers, crying out to the authorities: 'Be a benevolent government! Be a virtuous government! Be a government that rules by law! Give priority to the rights of farmers! Treasure the lives of farmers!' and asks that they 'treat farmers as full citizens.'
These people deserve our respect because they have seen the problems that exist in rural China and have pleaded for farmers as intellectuals of conscience. But I believe that their thinking is still underpinned by that attitude of an intellectual elite prescribing for society. The proposals they make still exclude farmers as social actors in their own right.
The reality is that if we talk about rural issues without viewing them from the perspective of rural people it is not possible to arrive at conclusions with any real meaning. The starting point for our explanations of a number of current social phenomena has to be the reality of farmers' lives and their actions in response to that reality. In the current context that starting point has to be farmers' resistance. It is because of the resistance struggles waged by farmers that the authorities and intellectuals have realised the importance of the 'three rural questions'; and this resistance is the only reason we have seen the various policies to reduce the burden on farmers.
I will explore three aspects of this issue, firstly arguing that the emergence of a political crisis in the countryside lies at the core of the 'three rural questions', secondly analysing the main origins of that crisis, and lastly considering how to resolve it.
Political crisis in the countryside
Ever since China entered the transition era2 the problems of China's farmers have been the focus for social concern. Earlier, both the Rural Reconstruction Movement [of Nationalist era intellectuals in the 1920/30s] and the peasant revolution led by the Communist Party proceeded under the banner of resolving these problems. Yet for a long time after the Communist Party's seizure of power the problems of farmers were not a matter for general concern, even in the days of the so-called Three Years of Natural Disasters [the official euphemism for the famines following the Great Leap Forward] when great numbers of farmers starved to death. Farmers' problems did not attract attention until the 1980s, after land reforms implemented in response to the rural famines meant that farmers were at least able to fill their bellies. Why the delay? I believe the main reason is that a serious political crisis then emerged in rural areas. The most prominent manifestation of this has been actions of mass resistance by farmers.
Just as the peasants' movements led by the Communist Party in the early decades of the last century were mainly concentrated in Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi, the most significant rural unrest is again occurring in these same areas. My investigations and research are mainly on the situation in Hunan. My own studies and such documentation as I have seen show that over the last decade all parts of Hunan have seen incidents of farmers' mass resistance, including two activities that involved more than ten thousand people and a dozen or more where numbers were also large. My research shows that these incidents broadly share the following characteristics.
First, the themes of the unrest are quite focussed and clear. The specific causes of individual incidents differ. Some happen because of violence or even deaths occurring during tax collection. Some happen because farmers feel their [tax and fee] burden is too heavy and a few individuals organise a petition to higher authorities, which then sparks conflict with local government. Some happen when irregularities occur during village elections, leading to petitioning by farmers demanding their democratic rights. Some happen because farmers feel there are problems with village finances so they take collective action against corruption by local cadres; and so on.
In these incidents villagers adopt slogans like 'Reduce the burden on farmers, oppose corrupt officials!' and 'Open accounting and democratic control of finances!'. The Qidong incident (祁东, 1996), which caused great concern at central government level, saw farmers hold protests, beating drums and gongs, letting off fireworks and carrying banners reading 'Thoroughly implement Document 9 (1996) of the Provincial Party Committee. Genuinely reduce the burden on farmers' and 'The masses are of one mind against heavy taxation'. This developed into attacks on organs of township level Party and government.
Second, there is an increase in the level of organisation seen in such incidents. Small numbers of people enlightened on farmers' rights issues seek out like-minded people in their personal social circles. They spread the message by promoting Party and government documents on reducing farmer's burdens. Once they have a base of mass support and have established a degree of organisation, they go on to organise mass actions in response to some specific incident that serves as the spark.
These spontaneously established villagers' organisations have names like 'Burden Reduction Group', 'Committee for Reducing Burdens' or 'Burden Reduction Monitoring Group'. Such organisations are mostly quite secretive, with different versions of stories circulating about the same group. It is rare to see clear documentation of any organisation: most work by word of mouth alone and prohibit any written records. Nor do they assign any specific posts to members, and are especially careful to avoid appointing formal leaders. This is because they feel that 'hearsay alone is not evidence' and they wish to avoid the perception that they are engaged in illegal organising. In fact such organisations are all very tightly knit, and one gains a clear impression from their activities of the existence of a leadership.
Peng Songjun (彭荣俊), a farmer (and former soldier) in Hengyang County (?衡阳县 gained the support of his fellow villagers after he read aloud official notices from central and Hunan Provincial government about reducing the tax and fee burdens on farmers at a meeting of the Wende (文德) Village Committee. He also raised some specific demands, including a call for village affairs and accounts to be made public. Peng convened a meeting of 18 farmers from Zhajaing township (渣江镇) who were willing to participate in 'burden-reducing' activities - almost every village in the township sending at least one representative. This meeting decided not to set up an actual 'organisation', merely calling themselves 'representatives for burden reduction'. Nor did they choose any leaders: Peng assumed responsibility for arranging future gatherings. It was under the leadership of this group that the well-known 'Zhajiang incident' occurred3. It seems that numerous 'burden reduction organisations' of this kind exist in Hunan, and they are showing a tendency to unite with one another.
Informal leaders emerge
This has seen the emergence of a new set of farmers' leaders with a strong popular appeal. They tend to share the following characteristics: they are usually aged 30-45 and have middle school or better education; the majority are former soldiers or have worked away from home; some are Party members or village cadres; and they tend to be from better off families. Most have some understanding of national policies and laws on the reduction of farmers' burdens and a good grasp of the basic attitude of their local government to the handling of incidents of rural discontent. There is a definite gap in terms of educational level and eco-nomic circumstances between the leaders and other core activists in these groups.
Yang Yuejin (杨跃进), the leader of a farmers' organisation in Daolin, Ningxiang County (宁乡道林), was a former soldier. He had been a minban teacher at the village school but became dissatisfied with the dictatorial approach of the school leader-ship. He organised parents to set up a Parent's Management Association that (in 1995) occupied the school and conducted an audit of school accounts.
Another leader in this incident was Cui Luokun (崔罗坤), who was chosen by the villagers as their representative and made a total of fourteen complaints to the village committee and township govern-ment. Villagers demanded that something be done about the soil erosion caused by a local ore processing factory. Local officials hired thugs to assault Cui, damage his property and rob him.
But these spokespersons for farmers' interests are very influential in their hometowns and can garner strong support from local farmers, who will protect them. Many incidents of rural resistance are sparked off by farmers protecting their spokespeople. For example, when the police issued a warrant for the arrest of Zhang Xinfu (张新甫), a farmers' spokes-man from Zhangshu in Xiangyin County (湘阴樟树), hundreds of local farmers surrounded and attacked the township government, beating up many officials and taking the Party Secretary hostage, to be exchanged for Zhang. When police officers in Yizhang County (宜章) came to Suyuan town (粟源) to arrest local activist Zhou Binghui (周炳辉), they were spotted by local villagers who, by blowing whistles and beating gongs quickly assembled a crowd of over 2,000 who surrounded the hundred or so officers. Over a thousand people pursued them back to the govern-ment office compound then smashed up offices and the homes of officials. When officials in Taoyuan County (桃源) sent a 'task force' of over 30 police officers, tax officials and township cadres to arrest Mao Mingda (毛明达) of Guanyin Yan village (观音岩) in Luhuatan Township (芦花潭)for 'organising mass refusals to pay slaughter tax', they found themselves surrounded by a crowd of local farmers who'd got wind of their mission. Fifteen police officers and officials were injured in the subsequent assault, and another ten were stripped naked by the angry crowd. The standoff lasted until midday, with the task force only getting out when the police released Mao Mingda.
The intensity of resistance is steadily increasing, with a tendency to become more violent. In the early 1990s, the main form that farmer's protests took was jointly signed letters or delegations to complain to higher authorities. After 1995, some places began to see large-scale mass meetings, petitioning and demonstrations. Also, we began to see violent clashes with police or officials; indeed some incidents saw the state send in the army. The incident in Daolin in Ningxiang [mentioned above] was sparked off when the local 'burden reduction representatives' organ-ised farmers to take part in a widely publicised 'mass meeting for the reduction of burdens and against corruption' in the local government. office compound. The government mobilised a major police presence involving over 1,000 officers in an attempt to stop the meeting, setting up a roadblock on the main road leading to the government offices. This ended in violent clashes with the farmers, including deaths and injuries after the police used tear gas. By contrast, the incident at Zhajiang in Hengyang County happened after township officials called a mass meeting under the auspices of [an ongoing, national] 'comprehensive public order' [campaign] and brought out six anti-fee activists tied up in ropes with signs round their necks to show to the crowd. This provoked an angry response and led to large-scale armed clashes. The crowd smashed up government vehicles and there were many resulting injuries.
The unrest is infectious: incidents in one place can easily spread to others. After clashes between officials and farmers in Qidong, higher levels of government were forced to repay extra education fees collected from the farmers. The news of Qidong farmers' success spread rapidly to other townships, sparking violent incidents involving thousands of farmers. Five township Party and government offices were attacked. In all, 79 cadres were either personally attacked or had their homes assaulted.
Similarly, several thousand farmers from Sanjia Township 三甲) in Lianyuan Municipality(涟源) blocked off the main gate to Lianyuan City government offices in pursuit of their demands for a reduction in their tax burden. They also raided the home of the municipal Party Secretary, took over a local primary school and detained the officers on duty at the Sanjia police station and a deputy township leader. Influenced by these actions, a similar incident happened in the neighbouring town of Baima (白马). Signs were stolen from the offices of the Party Committee, the government, the NPC and the Discipline Committee, and the local Party Secretary was cornered, beaten and stripped naked. Cadres from the local town and the municipality who arrived in the hope of resolving the problem were taken prisoner.
Roots of the political crisis.
These large-scale incidents of farmer resistance that began happening in the 1990s are unprecedented in the history of the People's Republic. Even during the era of the Great Leap Forward and the People's Communes, no matter what hardship China's farmers suffered, such incidents of direct resistance were extremely rare. These incidents have now forced the authorities and academics to pay attention to rural problems; but although the Party and state have adopted numerous measures to address them, none has had any noticeable effect.
The reasons why such incidents occur are very complex. In the first place, there has been an intensification of conflicts of interest in rural China. The state, regional government, grassroots government in rural areas, the employees of the latter and farmers themselves have all become separate independent interest groups. Each group is very clear about where their own interests lie, and conflicts of interest are coming to the surface.
This is seen most clearly in the increase in the tax and fees burden on farmers. Since the 1990s, the whole of China has seen a general financial crisis for both county and township level govern-ment, which ultimately has been passed on to farmers in the shape of various taxes, fees and apportioned charges.
Also, we have seen an increase in the relative poverty of farmers. The agricultural economy is showing a pattern of expanding supply and falling earnings and a slowing rise in farmers' incomes.
'Local elites once mediated between the state and farmers; now the state has to mediate between farmers and local political elites'
According to reports from the National Bureau of Statistics, the Gini coefficient in rural China has grown from 0.2124 in 1978 to 0.3361. The gap has widened rapidly and it is much greater than the corresponding rise in the coefficient for urban income (0.16 - 0.295). Also, the overall gap between the rich and the poor is greater in the countryside than in the cities.
Conflicts of interest are structural and show signs of being irreconcilable. The state, in order to strengthen its control of rural society, has made great efforts to extend state administrative power down to rural areas, establishing an excessively large corps of township cadres. Yet the state does not take responsibility for paying their expenses. Thus the state wants on the one hand to have a strong grassroots government system to control farmers, but on the other hand wants to prevent this powerful agency engaging in unbridled expropriation.
Conflicts of interest in traditional society were mostly seen as problems between the state and farmers, with social elites acting in the role of mediators between the two. Now, it is the state that acts the mediator [between farmers and local elites].
Moreover, these conflicts of interest have now become externalised, going beyond the boundaries of just agricultural or 'rural' questions, as manifested in the conflict between migrant workers and urban society.
Another factor in the rural political crisis is the overall weakening of state power. The legitimacy of grassroots government and officials is being questioned, and the state's attempt to strengthen the machinery of political power is counterproductive, since an expanded apparatus of power will engage in new levels of plundering in order to obtain the resources it needs for operation.
Also relevant is the rise of criminal elements and their usurpation by various means of grassroots rural political power. Hooligan gangs organised by township governments are running amok in the countryside. I conducted a special study on the ways in which criminal forces are usurping rural political power. I found that this usually happened in one of four ways: first was township governments 'inviting the wolf into the house'; second were clans or criminal gangs controlling village elections; third was the economically powerful using blandishments; and fourth was the political elite 'turning from red to black' - becoming criminals. Once these criminal elements have usurped political power, they both use the legitimacy afforded them by it to oppress the farmers, becoming local tyrants, and they also resist legitimate authority in pursuit of their larger political and economic ends.
Recent years have also seen the formation of new social forces outside of the state power system. Formally, farmers lack their own grass roots organisations and political representatives, and there are almost no meaningful, organised inter-mediaries between farmers and the government. Yet various informal organ-isations have now appeared. These include farmer's self-defence associations in areas where public order is breaking down; mutual aid farming organisations; and clan organisations. Most numerous are secret societies. Groups such as 'Brotherhoods', 'Lodges', 'Reduce Taxes and Save the Nation Associations', and 'Burden Reduction representatives' have appeared in many places. Some simply refer to themselves as banghui (帮会), a traditional name for underworld societies. These organisations are extremely complex, with many of the characteristics of traditional organisations. Some of them have clear political objectives.
At the same time, an ideology of opposition to the system has formed. Thanks to the efforts of intellectuals, the true nature of the problems of China's farmers has been exposed. It is now a commonly accepted fact that farmers have been the victims of long-term systemic expropriation, and this has been expressed in terms such as 'second class citizenship' and 'new serfdom'. These theories about the plight of farmers have already been transmitted from the intellectual elite to the wider public. Because farmers are at odds with the community and disapp-ointed with their future prospects, it is easy for these theories to be combined with a general social dissatisfaction. As Huang Guoqing, who led the incident in Sanjia Township in Lianyuan, said 'Emperors and kings, generals and ministers, are they a breed apart from us? . . . Farmers and officials are both just people born to parents, if we don't stand up and fight back then we don't deserve to be called citizens or men'.
Resolving the crisis
What action is the state taking to ameliorate this crisis? At present, four kinds of measures are being adopted:
i) Attempting to adjust the balance of interests through tax and fee reform (See page 34) The method was to ask all grassroots administrative institutions across the country to abandon all forms of non-tax fee collection. Fees collected in this manner amounted to some CNY 90 billion every year. In return, the central government wanted to raise agricultural tax from 5% to 8.5%. Most important of all, Beijing proposed to allocate between CNY 20 and 30 billion every year to subsidise the rural grassroots, to be spent on infrastructure, education, paying wages and other administrative costs. But the reform ran into difficulties, and the pilot scheme in Anhui has basically come to a halt. The main problem with the 'fees to taxes' reform is that even if central government does give a subsidy of 20 billion it will not be enough to cover the enormous costs of grassroots government. Because the ability of state budgets to ameliorate the impact of this shock is limited, they have no way of satisfying the demands of township governments.
ii) Attempting to restrict the prepond-erance of the intermediary level interest group by reforming the system of township level government - abolishing and combining administrative townships and streamlining organisations. But the state has no way of making provision for the resettlement of the township cadres made idle in this process.
iii) Attempting to establish a new man-agement system for farmers through the village autonomy system. Because this kind of political empowerment occurs on top of the conflicts of interest noted above, it has become in itself a major constituent of those conflicts.
iv) Ideologically, by advocating the 'Three Represents' theory, hoping to use this to restrict the abuses of township cadres. Reality has already given a clear demonstration of the effectiveness or otherwise of placing hopes for reform based on self-awareness and self-restraint by those in power.
Intellectuals, meanwhile, have offered numerous solutions. Of these, the majority are some form of 'treating farmers as citizens', in the sense that farmers living in the countryside ought to be treated the same as urban residents. On the surface there is nothing wrong with this, as there is indeed a polarisation between town and country in China and the status of farmers in society is in urgent need of improve-ment. But in fact, the treatment of those people who in the era of the planned economy made up the 'non-agricultural population' is not in any way that given to 'citizens'.
'Proposed central subsidies of USD 2.4 billion will not cover the enormous costs of grassroots government'
For the broad mass of workers living in towns, even the few pitiful welfare benefits they once enjoyed have long since been reformed out of existence. It is only a privileged minority who are now able to enjoy much more, and in many more ways, the social wealth created by workers. In this sense, it can be said that China does not have an identifiable group of citizens sharing common interests and aspirations, just its poor and downtrodden workers and the privileged with the money and the power. There is no enjoyment of the benefits of citizen-ship, just the enjoyment of privilege. The expropriation of labour by power and money is the true nature of Chinese society.
Calls by the intellectual elite to 'treat farmers as citizens' are perhaps not what farmers themselves would want and not an expression of farmer's interests. More-over, the crux of the issue lies in the call for farmers to be 'given' the status of citizens. Who is doing the giving? It is of course the privileged and this intellectual elite. This is why 'treating farmers as citizens' will not be able to resolve the political crisis in the Chinese countryside.
No taxation without representation
I believe that the first step should be to establish a mechanism for the political representation of farmers' interests. Farmers should be allowed to speak for themselves. This means mobilising and organising farmers, setting up genuine farmer' organisations, and creating and nurturing in the countryside forces capable of conducting an effective struggle against vested interests.
There are two main aspects to this: first, changing the present mode of governance in the countryside in the direction of genuine rural autonomy. This means not just village self-government [through village committee elections] but more importantly it means abolishing township level government and implementing self-government there too.
Second, it means establishing interm-ediary social organisations. We need a new kind of political compact: social organ-isations should be the principal means by which the social movement is carried forward. This includes establishing farmers associations that genuinely represent farmers' interests to act as buffers between them and the state.
Dang Guoying(党国英 )4 says that the higher the degree of organisation of different social groups, the lower the opportunity costs of dialogue between them and the greater the possibility of compromise. Scattered social groups are easily fooled by rumour or cults and easily become the power bases for extremists. According to the renowned scholar of rural questions Migedaier, isolated farmers are the social basis for 'revolutionaries' whereas organised farmers are the social basis for reformers and even for conservatives. If isolated farmers can be organised into farmers' associations, the opportunity costs of dialogue between government and farmers will be greatly reduced, farmers' aspirations can easily find expression through orderly organ-isational channels and there will be a possibility of ameliorating and mediating in any suddenly occurring problems.
Of course, such farmers' associations must be genuine farmer organisations. Many years ago, when critiquing rural reformism such as the Rural Recon-struction Movement Qian Jiaju(钱家驹) said that genuine farmers' organisations:
'First, need to be able to represent the interests of the majority of farmers. If we accept that there are class divisions amongst China's farmers then of course the majority of farmers certainly does not mean the landlords and wealthy; rather it means the poor labourers and some of the middling sort. Second, these organisations must be bottom-up. If we accept that political power in China, especially local political power, still lies in the hands of the representatives of the gentry and the landlords, then we certainly do not want them to establish or lead these organisations. They must be spontaneous organisations, not top-down, or set up on the orders of some government agency. Third, these organisations should fit in to the global mainstream. The world today is no longer closed and isolated, and the road we should go down is already very clear. To go backwards against the flow of history certainly will not work.'
I believe the most important way in which we can satisfy the third point above - fitting in with the global mainstream - is that we should establish a mechanism for farmers to leave these organisations. Whether they are political or economic associations, if farmers do not have the right to freely leave, then they are not something we want.
Wanting farmers to speak for themselves does not constitute a call for the intellectual elite to abrogate their responsibilities. In The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia [Yale 1976], James C Scott says that whether or not radical farmers' move-ments come into being appears to be decided by whether the resources they can access are able to alleviate the pressing needs of their members, and by the level of tolerance or even support they receive from government or outside elites. Of these two factors, it seems the latter is the more important. Without outside help, a local religious group or political party will be to a greater or lesser extent forced into a state of 'internal self-reliance'. There will not be adequate material conditions for 'internal self-reliance' to become the basis for effective self-defence.
In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon', Marx wrote 'Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organisation among them, they do not constitute a class.' This makes clear that the intellectual elite should not only be studying the country-side to understand the true state of the bankruptcy of rural society, they should also being making the political demand for the organisation of farmers. What we can do now is go to the countryside and mobilise farmers to set up all kinds of cooperative organisations. At the same time we should be pushing forward the drafting of a farmers' association law; just as in the early 1980s students at Beida produced a Draft News Law we an provide a proposed draft farmers' association law.
Over 80 years ago, as many Chinese intellectuals at home and abroad were bemoaning the social crisis in China, there was one man who left behind the library at Beida to go to the countryside in Hunan and to Anyuan in Jiangxi, finally inspiring and leading the workers' and peasants' movement of the early 20th century. That man was Mao Zedong. At the time, he was inspired to say 'When the millions of peasants in the provinces of central, southern and northern China rise up, it will be like a storm⋯no force however strong will be able to stop them. They will break off all the fetters binding them and move swiftly on the road to liberation.' But a century has passed and China's farmers did not achieve liberation. The main reason is that the intellectual elites used the power of the farmers to create a false saviour.
We have entered a new century, a time when we no longer need saviours, but should rely on farmers themselves, let them speak for themselves.
Translated by Jim Weldon
Dr. Yu Jianrong is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences'. Rural Development Research Centre. His 2001 book,岳村政治:转型期中国乡村政治结构的变迁
(Politics in Yuecun: Changes in the Political Structure of Transition-era Rural China), charted the twentieth century political history of one village in Yu's native Hunan.
This article was abridged and translated, with the author's permission, from a longer essay, The Political Crisis in Rural China: Manifestations, Origins and Policy Prescriptions, which was first published on the Beijing University website in July 2002.
1'三农问题' The issues concerning farmers (农民), farming (农业) and the countryside (农村). This now ubiquitous term became current in the 1990s, and is particularly associated with the work of economist Wen Tiejun (温铁军), who offers the translation 'three-dimensional ruralness'.
2This refers to China's transition 'from tradition to modernity', which Dr. Yu sees as beginning, for rural China, in 1905.
3This incident, which took place in January 1999, is described later in the article.
4Like Yu Jianrong, Dang is a researcher at CASS' Rural Delopment Research Centre and noted commentator on rural issues.