Chinese Society GEE 2190K Instructor: Ho-fung Hung Week 10. Village in Crisis

1. Chinese Society GEE 2190K Instructor: Ho-fung Hung Week 10. Village in Crisis

2. Crisis of rural China before modern times • The most fundamental problem of rural China nowadays is the problem of extremely high man-land ration. That is, there are too many people living on too little land resources (such as cultivable land). • Many people think that this problem did not arise until modern times. But a lot of studies suggest that the problem of mounting man-land ratio began in China long before the twentieth century.

3. For example, historians suggest that in the dynastic cycle of the past 3,000 years, each dynasty faced the problem of diminishing land resource per capita because of population growth. Escalating conflict over ecological resources would bring unrest and warfare that toppled the dynasty.

4. Usually, a newly established dynasty would solve the problem of resource scarcity by territorial expansion. It is why the Chinese civilization kept expanding geographically, as seen in the maps below.

20. But by the end of the Qing dynasty, China had nearly developed all areas with useful resources. The tension between population and land resources (and other resources) could no longer be resolved by territorial expansion after that.

21. Many studies have been done to assess the scale of the problem in late imperial China. For example, one study finds that local historical archive in Guangdong suddenly documented a lot of cases in which villagers were attacked by tigers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But this kind of cases disappeared rapidly thereafter. This suggests that rapid population growth in the eighteenth century led to large-scale deforestation (to turn forests into agricultural land), which destroyed the habitat of tigers and forced them to attack and even preyed on human beings. Further deforestation then led to the extinction of tigers in the region.

22. The increasing scarcity of land resources and other natural resources, in addition to the eighteenth-century population explosion, led to a perpetual overpopulation crisis (defined as a perpetual scarcity of resources in relation to population size) in China thorough the nineteenth and twentieth century.

23. The high man-land ration and the resulting scarcity of land and other natural resources are seen as the root cause of China’s failure in industrializing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century – Provided with the scarcity of resources, feeding the people rather than developing the economy became the no. 1 priority of the society and the government.

24. Rural crisis in the Republican and Mao period • One result of this extremely high man-land ratio was social unrest, under the condition that there were a lot of people who were productive but did not own any land. In an agrarian society like China, these landless people had few choices other than becoming bandits and gangsters. • This problem contributed to the social unrest in early twentieth-century China and the success of the Communist revolution.

25. After 1949, the Communist Party tried to solve the problem through land reform, i.e. to redistribute land resources so as to guarantee that every cultivator could have a small plot of land. • But the resulting system of small household farming was proved to be counterproductive to China’s industrialization efforts, as cultivators working on small plots of land could barely survive and could not provide enough agricultural surplus to support the urban-industrial population.

26. Mao’s solution was to implement agricultural collectivization and aggressive reclamation of cultivable land (e.g. large areas of forest was destroyed and turned into farmland). • Large amount of resources (basically food) was extracted from the rural area to support industrial development in the city. This strategy was successful in the sense that rapid industrialization was achieved.

27. Rural crisis in the reform era • In the reform period, communes were dismantled and an agricultural system based on small peasant households resumed. • The reform increased peasants’ initiative in agricultural production, but it did not solve the fundamental problem of high man-land ratio.

29. Per capita hectare of agricultural land

30. Decollectivization led to diminishing investment in agriculture. Over the 1980s and 1990s, the real income of peasant families kept decreasing when inflation picked up.

32. In 1985, average grain price is 9.5 dollars per jin. Now (around 2002) it is about 40-50 dollars per jin. It increased by 5 times. • In 1985, primary school fee for a kid in the rural area is 1-2 dollars, junior high school fee is 2-3 dollars, senior high school fee is 3-5 dollars. Now primary school fee is 600 dollars, junior high is 1,200-1,500 dollars, senior high is 3,000-5,000 dollars. School fee increased by several hundred times. (李昌平)

34. Some rural areas managed to weather the downfall in agricultural income by running TVEs (township and village enterprises) and hiring peasants as workers. • But only TVEs near big city like Shanghai and Guangzhou were successful, as these enterprises had access to technical know-how (they can hire part-time technicians from state enterprises in the big city) and market.

35. Most TVEs in inland areas and remote from big cities failed. • In the 1990s, even TVEs in coastal areas began to run into difficulties, as the domestic market for consumer goods was increasingly occupied by higher-quality foreign products or domestic products produced by foreign investors. • http://www.chinaonline.com/refer/ministry_profiles/moa-tve.asp

36. The result of these trends is the “three dimension problem” of rural China (三農問題) – the problem of rural people, rural society and rural production (or peasants, village and agriculture). • It means that agricultural production collapsed, peasants was pauperized and village societies disintegrated.

37. Rural politics amid rural crisis • After the dismantling of People’s Communes, local governments in the rural area can no longer receive subsidies from higher level government. They have to rely on taxation for their income. • As a result of the decline in agricultural production and decline in TVEs, tax income of local governments declined. They then try to extort all kinds of fees from the peasants to make ends meet.

38. Collection of legitimate and illegitimate taxes and fees became a thorny issue that often triggered violent conflict between villagers and local government.

39. In response to the escalating rural unrest, the Chinese government has experienced on local election reform and rural tax-for-fee reform (農村稅費改革). • The first reform, starting in the late 1980s, is to implement direct election of Village committee (村委會). • The second reform involves establishing a unitary tax on the peasants to replace different taxes and fees. http://www.china.org.cn/english/8000.htm

40. http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200203/14/eng20020314_92101.shtmlhttp://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200203/14/eng20020314_92101.shtml

41. The effectiveness of these solutions is yet to be seen. But it is obvious that these measures only touch upon the surface of the problem, and cannot solve the fundamental problem – that is, economic decline of rural China.

42. Different proposals are advanced for solving this fundamental problem: 1) To use government resources to launch labor-intensive infrastructure project in the village, so that surplus laborers in the village can find jobs and rural infrastructure will improved. 2) To facilitate the growth of self-sustainable rural communities.

43. 3) Some argue that the above two proposals are unrealistic, and that we just need to wait and let the expanding urban economies absorb all surplus laborers in the village through rural-urban migration. But skeptics think that this proposal would bring disaster as massive rural-urban migration would create urban slums in the cities. It just exports the rural crisis to the cities.