The recent pledge by China’s top leaders to “construct a new socialist countryside” (建设社会主义新农村) appears designed to stem a growing tide of rural unrest and to address the concerns of urban intellectuals who, for several years, have been harping on “three problems of agriculture” (三农). But it is not yet clear whether the plan amounts to more than a rhetorical acknowledgement of growing “imbalances” in income and opportunity; and the reference to “construction”(建设) is depressingly familiar.

“Construction” in China is an heroic ideal, repeated ad nauseam in street names, and even in the given names of patriots’ children, jian hua (建华, “building China”) being the commonest variant. The idea is interwoven with a quest for modernisation that began in the 19th century when foreign powers humiliated the Qing dynasty in pursuit of trade objectives, and it is overlaid with the early rhetoric of post-war reconstruction and building socialism. In the ideological free-fall of 27 years of “reform and opening,” the idea of construction continued to appear in odd places: for example, the campaign to “construct a socialist spiritual civilisation,” launched in the 1980s to “balance” the advance of “material civilisation,” or the more recent “community construction” drive to create orderly and well managed urban neighbourhoods.

At the same time, China’s development over the last two decades has been closely associated with a literal construction boom as cities expand and local officials seek to maximise economic growth by concreting over farmland for residential and commercial complexes, factories and hi-tech science parks. This has enabled a process of private capital formation, producing real estate millionaires out of property development companies that, with local authorities’ blessing and support, reap enormous profits by taking land from peasants for minimal compensation. Fifty million Chinese “farmers”, the UN calculates, now have no land at all.

So bewitching is the idea of construction, meanwhile, that international aid agencies in China, from the development banks to the smallest NGOs, frequently report great difficulty in getting Chinese government partners, especially below national level, to think about development projects in terms other than constructing new buildings. The health system is ailing? Build more hospitals. AIDS orphans? Better put them in a nice, shiny orphanage. Human rights protection is weak? Let’s build “centres” in prestige universities.

The surplus from agriculture supported imperial rule in China for millennia and funded Maoist industrialisation in the 1950s. In the reform era, farmers’ savings have flowed out of rural areas to finance urban and industrial development; their labour as migrants has kept the export processing zones humming, and their land has been taken for urban expansion. A New Deal is certainly overdue; but it is far from certain that the “new countryside” programme will deliver it.

Commitments to build more rural roads and water supplies and to bolster government expenditure on rural health and education are welcome enough—but similar pledges in the past were not honoured. Welcome too, but not new either, is the decision to scrap an agricultural tax that involved huge transaction costs—and huge conflict between peasants and officials—for a relatively small return. Yet this also gives cash-strapped localities even more reason to neglect agriculture in favour of revenue-generating projects that invariably begin with the pouring of concrete; and to welcome polluting mines and factories relocating from coastal areas that now want to go green and clean. And it ducks the central issue of evolving a progressive, fiscal regime that is prepared to tax the nouveau riche in order to provide economic opportunities and basic social protections for rural people.

Rather than addressing this, Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2005 Annual Work Report, which introduced the “new countryside” concept, finds room to mention “improving the overall cleanliness of villages.” Such talk draws upon the embedded, urban habit of seeing rural people as an unwashed mass who are poor as a natural consequence of their “low quality.” This prejudice persists even though the primary, defining move of the reform era was the decision to let farmers exercise their native wit in agricultural production rather than following the targets and quotas of state and Party planners.

A patronising approach to the rural population can synergise with a construction-driven penchant for bulldozing what exists and creating new structures on state-mandated, “scientific development” principles, rather than, say, respecting and developing the local knowledge and the capacities that rural people have. Exemplary of this synergy is the kind of relocation programme in Qinghai, described by Matt Perrement in the following article, that threatens to create an immiserated population living on state hand-outs and deprived of their dignity—in a dismal echo, let us not forget, of the experience of native North Americans and aboriginal Australians.

Nevertheless, the new slogan—for it is, as yet, more a slogan than a policy—is, at least, a response to public pressure, and as such it is to be welcomed. It will now be added to the pantheon of official catchphrases—“xiaokang,” “harmonious society,” etc—that mark the boundaries of permissible policy debate in China; and it may move us closer to the day when the Communist Party stops insisting on defining the terms of the debate. If the Party could only learn to stop fearing the creative talents of society, who knows but that it might steal a march on the USA, which now also seems bent, in its quest to eliminate un-American sentiment, on closing down public intellectual freedom.