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Very interesting and it tells the environmental change from a neutral standpoint.WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEASANTS GONE?
Ashis Chakrabarti visits the village which once pioneered agricultural reform in China, but now reflects the country's new rural crisis
The bus drops us in the middle of nowhere and speeds away along the shiny, lonely highway. A signboard in English — rare in the Chinese countryside — says Xiaogang is still six miles away. We had travelled overnight in a train from Beijing to Hefei, the capital of east China's Anhui province, and then taken a bus ride for two hours. As we stand by the road wondering how to reach our destination, a man arrives in an old car and offers to ferry us to the village for a price that we consider a good bargain.
A few minutes later, we are finally at Xiaogang village, the birthplace of post-Mao Zedong China's rural reform in the heart of the floodplains of the Huaihe, China's third biggest river. It is early in the afternoon and the main street of the village is empty, the people obviously taking a nap or just resting after lunch as they do everywhere in China. It is not long before we find a place to stay for the night — for about $3 a bed — in a farmer's house, which is run as a hotel by the son of the village committee secretary. The lady of the house, who shows us to our rooms, proudly recalls that the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, spent some time there during his visit to Xiaogang in 2008. There are other such farmers' houses-turned-hotels, but staying in the one run by the leader's son has its advantages.
Out on the main street, lined by aspen trees, we arrive at the site where Xiaogang's famed contribution to Chinese history is preserved. A small courtyard of a couple of thatched mud huts is where the dramatic history is recreated. A modern exhibition centre further up the street records that saga more elaborately.
On the cold night of December 12, 1978, 18 poor, starving farmers met secretly in a mud hut to do something that would change the face of not only Chinese agriculture but also the overall Chinese economy. They put their seals and fingerprints in red ink to an agreement by which they divided the village land into pieces of plots for each family to cultivate on its own. They called it Dabaogan — family farming.
They knew what they were doing and what the risks were. So the agreement also said, "If the trial fails, we are prepared for death or prison sentences under the laws and other commune members pledge to raise our children till they are 18." Their fears were very real. All land in villages in China belonged to and was jointly cultivated by the people's communes and any attempt to divide it among families or groups of individuals was not merely against the law but was also a capitalist deviation that could attract capital punishment.
"They did this because they were very poor and they didn't have enough to eat. Also, that year, there was a bad drought in the area," says Guan Zheng Jin, whose father, Guan You Shen, was one of the signatories to the agreement. We lower our heads to enter an inner chamber of a dimly-lit hut in the courtyard, as Guan shows us a photocopy of the agreement spread out on a wooden board.
Later that evening, sitting in the dining room of the farmer's house where we spend the night, the village committee secretary, Guan You Jiang, also a signatory to the historic agreement, tells us, "We couldn't have done this during Chairman Mao's time."
The farmers did not quite get over their fears even though their desperate move helped them produce much more the next year than they had ever done under the commune system. But words about their success soon started spreading, first to villages and towns in the Anhui province and finally to Beijing.
What followed was not punishment but recognition and reward. The first approval came from Wan Li, the secretary of the Anhui provincial committee of the Chinese Communist Party. A year later, Deng Xiaoping gave the Xiaogang model the party's — and the government's — seal of final approval in his speech on "Issues of the Countryside Policy". Thus was born what came to be known as the "household responsibility system" that revolutionized Chinese agriculture of the time. It was also the beginning of the end of the people's communes which, however, were formally abolished only in 1984.
For Xiaogang's farmers, the next decade saw production and income rising as never before. Brick houses, many of them two-storeyed, began coming up on plots where mud huts had stood for generations. Many families began owning cars and other luxury items such as television. "I can't remember how many families now have cars because tonight I've drunk a little too much," the village committee secretary grins during our evening chat.
The signs of change are obvious. What is not so obvious is that Xiaogang's present is not half as promising as its past has been. Although the village committee secretary says that agriculture is still the mainstay of its economy and that 70 per cent of the village land is still used for farming, Xiaogang, once the pathfinder, has clearly lost its way.
The farmers still follow the household responsibility system. They till their land and increasingly lease them to big city-based companies which operate pig farms or mushroom and grape plantations. A multinational company has recently opened a beverage factory. But most of the 800-odd families are struggling once more. Not long ago, many of them were poor and indebted again, as in the old days. With little to earn from the land, the young people began leaving for the big cities as migrant workers. Last year's census counted 261 million migrant workers in the country.
"Xiaogang lost out because it failed to cope with the market economy," says Li Changping, the man who shook the Chinese government and became internationally famous by publishing an open letter on the plight of the Chinese peasants to the former Chinese prime minister, Zhu Rongji, in July 2000. With "tears in my eyes", Li, the former party secretary in a Hubei village and now an independent researcher, spoke of the "massive rural exodus", the "heavy debt burden", the "locust-like cadres", the "lies of policy statements" and also the "shackles of the household responsibility system". In 2002, The Guardian described him as "China's most famous advocate for peasant rights".
Li's was the first big exposure of the rural crisis in China. It was followed by several others, the most sensational of which was the Survey of Chinese Peasants, a vivid report on peasant life from more than 50 villages in Anhui by the husband-and-wife team of Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. The couple faced persecution for their work, but eight million pirated copies of the Survey were sold before the government suppressed its circulation.
These critiques and the mounting unrest in the countryside forced Beijing to abolish agricultural taxes, make rural children's education free, increase social security for the rural population and start the "New Socialist Countryside" programme in 2005. But the problems, according to Li, are still serious.
During a conversation in Beijing, Li says the Xiaogang model has no relevance to Chinese farming today. If agricultural development has been uneven, farmers in China have been fighting an even more uneven battle since the country opened up the agricultural market to foreign players following its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. "In the battle between the small peasant household and the big market, the former has no hope of winning," he adds.
The solution, according to Li and other rural activists such as Wen Tiejun, lies in reversing the Xiaogang model and going back to collectivization. Such activists, who are mostly intellectuals described as "Leftists" in official parlance, argue that agriculture and peasants have given their blood and sweat to build shiny New China whose economy is now the second largest in the world. But the breakneck speed and the massive scale of industrialization and urbanization have all but destroyed not just agriculture but also rural society and the culture of cooperation.
Activists of the New Rural Reconstruction Movement that Wen founded a few years ago believe that relying on migration to cities to solve the problem of surplus rural population would mean "Latin Americanization of China — the creation of urban slums to warehouse poor rural migrants". The challenge, they say, is to save the rural society from marketization. The household responsibility system, they say, has atomized rural society and a reconstruction is possible, not through the State's intervention, but only through a new cooperative movement led jointly by farmers and intellectuals.
Where have all the peasants gone?
Worth a read.
