As the camera panned across the bored, yawning — sometimes obviously hung-over — faces of delegates to China’s pseudo-parliament, one could sympathize. They had heard it all before.
Talking heads will now give us oceans of economic jargon about Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's supposedly honest presentation of Chinese problems. His main thrust was China’s disparities — regional and class — are growing. A new remedial “socialist new countryside” will supposedly rectify that.
Much of this discussion, as always, revolves around manufactured statistics Wen, as his predecessor, have publicly drawn attention to statistical falsification. But vested interests — domestic and foreign, those who know or guess at what is really happening because they are often corruptly involved — give widespread verisimilitude to Beijing’s flagrant distortions.
Wen did acknowledge publicly, more than any major figure has, trouble in the countryside. He even attributed it to swindling and greediness of local Communist officials as well as structural weaknesses.
But none of this is new. Former Communist Chairman Jiang Zemin in August 1989 suddenly announced “West Development”, a remedy for rural problems he described not all that differently than Wen. Jiang pontificated on what everyone already then knew: the coastal region’s booming export-led economy was leaving behind interior rural areas. [There is much talk of abandonment of a rural social net in some golden Maoist past which never, in fact, existed; “barefoot doctors” without science and medicines were a cruel joke largely perpetuated by Western Maoistas.]
West Development looked like Jiang’s bid for his 15 minutes of history as an innovator of Party dogma, more tortured than ever after Deng Hsiaoping abandoned orthodox Leninist-Marxist economics. Later Jiang substituted his “Three Reconstructs”, the most infelicitous phrase in the long history of Chinese Communist “newspeak”,. But unlike Soviet propaganda which occasionally abandoned slogans [even “disappeared” leaders, a technique the Chinese did learn quickly], Beijing propaganda mumbles on.
Vast capital expended for projects away from the Coast have been labeled rural development. Most do little for the locals.. Some are largely military such as the incredibly difficult, expensive railway built to the Tibetan plateau so Chinese military hardware — including nuclear devices — could move more easily onto the strategic Top of the World. Ditto expenditures in Singkiang, China’s far west threatened with a continuing separatist agitation among Turkic Moslems.
Other gigantic schemes — multi-billion Three Gorges hydroelectric, irrigation and flood control — provide electricity for the coast and passage for raw materials to reach its manufacturing. Even these projects’ temporary jobs — as well as ruthless displacement of literally millions — only marginally benefit the peasantry.
That’s why common sense deduces growing disparities, and, worse, apparently accelerating differences. No wonder even government statistics counted 87,000 violent rural blowups last year. Most were not media reported; many apparently resulted in substantial casualties. Many revolved around the growing problem of pollution of farmland, waterways, and villages.
Chinese Communist campaigns, including those against “corruption”, more often than not have to do with intra-Party politics, reflecting feuds among leaders and would be leaders. One has to wonder if that were part of this attention to the rural issues. Public confessions of economic failures come at a time when measures against dissidence are growing, supervised by a new nebulous thought-police wrestling with controlling new media created by the digital revolution.
Whatever the Party scuffling,Wen had no remedy for the heart of the rural problem: land tenure. The Maoists destroyed centuries of landholding practices in China in their cataclysmic “Land Reform”, “Great Leap Forward”, and “The Great Cultural Revolution”. These may have contributed to solidifying the new class, the Communists — although they almost brought on collapse with their nihilism. But they did not create a new legal basis for property.
On one thing Mao was certainly correct: the Chinese would revert to centuries old practices if given half the chance. He wanted permanent revolution. It is characteristic one of the new measures to which Wen referred was abolishment of centuries-old peasant taxes — alive and well through dynastic cataclysms and the rise of Communist “agrarian reformers”.
Despite all rationalizations about how China is no longer a Communist state, the fundamental problem of land dogs every development effort — assuaged in urban areas by pervasive corruption squeezed from rapid growth, but missing in the stagnant countryside until it comes out of the hide of peasants living, at best, at subsistence.
With the nebulous West Development’s failure, some semi-official economists have justified an unavoidable phenomenon — flight to the cities. Of the supposed 800 million of 1.3 billion Chinese said to live in rural areas, these “planners” advocate spurring migration to continue to provide cheap labor fodder for “the world factory” Chinese cities have supposedly become. Yet, again, growing part-time and unemployed squatters on the outskirts of sometimes luxurious urban centers will eventually become an intolerable political and economic burden.
With China’s long and dramatic history of peasant revolt, such scarcely camouflaged fears may have been the only legitimate part of Wen’s presentation.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
