Beijing Receives Wake-Up Call on Farmers' Woes
By John Pomfret Washington Post Foreign Service Monday , September 4, 2000 ; A16
BEIJING –– The letter, addressed to China's leaders, came in unannounced from a small town Communist Party secretary, describing in agonizing and often alarming detail the poor state of the rural economy and farmers' increasing burdens in the restive countryside.
"I often meet old people, grabbing my hands, saying they are wishing for an early death," wrote Li Changping, the 37-year-old party leader in Qipan township in Hubei province southwest of Beijing, "and young children, running up to me, recounting the tragedy of not being able to afford elementary school. . . . Being a local-level cadre who doesn't . . . report fake numbers, speak contrary to his convictions and do things contrary to his conscience . . . is extremely hard, extremely hard."
The letter, which Li said was "written with tears in my eyes," was delivered to the cabinet in March and published in the state-run media last month. It has been treated as a wake-up call, another sign of the intense difficulties agitating China's countryside. There, farm incomes have remained flat for four straight years, and government officials, faced with a stumbling economy, are extracting more and more taxes.
Twenty years of economic reforms, which started in the countryside, have transformed China, tripling its gross national product and bringing prosperity and unprecedented freedoms to many Chinese. But recently the boom has slowed--drastically in places such as Qipan.
Township enterprises that brought wealth and jobs to millions of rural Chinese are faltering in many areas. Record grain harvests have become a burden because the government, which monopolizes grain purchases, is opting not to buy all of the grain--while also banning farmers from selling it elsewhere. In some areas, the government is forcing farmers to pay for storing their harvests in its warehouses even though, under the law, the government is obligated to buy it.
As a result, government officials say, the number of violent rural protests is increasing nationwide. For example, last month in Jiangxi province, another rural backwater in the far southeast, tens of thousands of farmers revolted because of government efforts to squeeze them for tax payments that the central government had promised would be canceled. Witnesses said the protests, which erupted in several townships around Fengcheng city, were led by village chiefs and Communist Party secretaries--an alarming development for a government that had relied on these officials to ensure stability.
Until recently, the farmers' plight was under-reported in the state-run media and almost ignored by the Communist Party, which rose to power through the peasantry but has become more attuned to the interests of white-collar workers and the urban working class. Worker protests are also rising. But while peasant uprisings are often met with force, the government is softer on workers, often opting to negotiate cash settlements rather than send in troops.
Letters such as Li's have played a role in China's history and are a throwback to the days when officials in far-flung regions penned circulars to the emperor in Beijing. Writing them can be a dangerous affair. A letter by Gen. Peng Dehuai to Mao Zedong in 1959 pointed out that the disastrous Great Leap Forward was causing a famine. Peng was ultimately killed for disloyalty.
Li said he hesitated for a month before sending his report.
"Local level cadres mainly curry favor with leaders, always jacking up statistics and saying everything is fine," he wrote. "Honest words aren't listened to. If someone speaks the truth, immediately he's said to be politically immature and not reliable."
Li's letter gives a long list of problems faced by farmers in his region. The main problem is taxes, the same issue that prompted the Aug. 17-23 rioting in and around Fengcheng.
The Chinese government has vowed for more than a year to reduce taxes in the countryside, but so far most of its efforts have actually led to tax increases because local officials violate Beijing's bans on excess levies.
Around Qipan, Li said, a family of five working eight mu, or 1.3 acres, of land pays $365 a year--equal in many places to more than the average farmer's income--in poll and land taxes, not including the free labor they provide the state for flood prevention and irrigation works. They also must pay fees for having a house and farming a private plot. Random fees for education and livestock are common, although they have been banned by the central government.
Li noted that 80 percent of the farmers in his township are losing money. In 1995, 85 percent of the farmers had money saved, he said; now, 85 percent are in debt. The average budget deficit of the villages in his township is $50,000. The average debt for each village is $75,000, on which the village must pay 2 percent interest each month. And, on average, village debt is increasing by 20 percent a year.
The situation is just as bad in the other townships that make up Jianli county, where Qipan is located, he said. Their average yearly deficit is $500,000, and their total debts are twice as high. "The burden on the farmer is heavier each year, the collective deficit in the villages is heavier each year, [and] the deficit in the townships is rising annually as well," Li wrote.
In Qipan, the high taxes do not seem to be sparking rebellion. Instead, people are leaving the land.
"Most of our farmers have already left," Li wrote. "For the past 20 days, East Wind trucks . . . have day and night taken our itinerant workers to all four corners of the motherland."
The township had 40,000 people; 25,000, including "men, women, the young and old," have gone. This means that those remaining are now squeezed for more and more taxes. In some villages, he said, the poll tax has risen to $60 a head a year--a whopping sum for many Chinese farmers.
In the past, he said, most people left with a destination or a job in mind.
"Now the farmers are leaving, hoping only for luck or with the idea that 'if I die, I'm going to die in the city. In the next life, I don't want to be a farmer.' "