Chinese Peasantry: a Survey 中国农民调查 by Chen Guide

[tokyo_girl]

Anyone read Report on the Condition of China's Peasants

by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao,

There is an article about it in todays Sydney MOrning Herald.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/20/1077072847452.html

China's top leaders have accepted faked examples of rural prosperity and progress on their inspection tours, two authors say in an expose of poverty and oppression that has rocked the country's political circles.

Early economic reforms that benefited farming villages have faded, as many of the 900 million rural population sink into deeper poverty while the 400 million in cities and the booming coastal export industry zones prosper.

It seems long overdue and looks like a very interesting read.

edit: Edited the title to use what appears to be a better translation and include the Chinese. Roddy

[confucius]

"The authors say peasants are trapped in a guaiquan, or vicious circle, that has gripped China for hundreds of years."

Hey, I learned a new word! guai quan!

[roddy]

I have been reading this, and I'm glad to see it getting some international attention - I don't know if I'll be able to finish it, as reading Chinese is still a relatively slow process for me. If you search baidu on the Chinese name, 中国农民调查, you'll find plenty of references.

Roddy

[tokyo_girl]

Roddy do you know if it's going to be translated into English?

I didn't come up with any English from your link - could be though

that my computer can't recognise Chinese script properly.

Having heard stories of the lives of some of my students with 'peasant' backgrounds, it seemed that, in terms of medical care and the like, the government had pretty well a retrospective one child policy in place in the countryside.

[roddy]

I have no idea if this is to be translated or not. I'd hope it would be, but to be honest I doubt it would be of enough interest to enough people. I'm interested to see it's getting a little attention in the western press though.

I had a feeling I'd mentioned this report on the forums previously and found this. Not of great relevance, though.

I doubt there's any English information / comment on this on the web. Should be plenty in Chinese though . . .

Roddy

[Ian_Lee]

Here are some details about this book in Hong Kong's Chinese website:

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/040217/12/x6oq.html

Excerpts from this book:

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/040217/12/x6or.html

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/040217/12/x6os.html

The most earthshakening paragraphs from this book:

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/040217/12/x6ot.html

[Ru Yi]

I am so glad that you guys brought out this topic. Chinese peasantry should receive more international attention. When we talk about contemporary Chinese culture and society, it is more than often that those most trendy, avant-garde, and edgy urban stuff catch all the attention, while 8,ooo,ooo,ooo peasant remains silent, invisible, neglected...

I hope someone will translate it into English.

[roddy]

I've seen this book in a few more bookshops lately, and there was a brief review of it in this week's Pheonix Weekly - it may well be gathering attention. I did a quick search and came up with . . .

A fair chunk of the book online for those of you who don't have a copy (including me, having left mine in a cafe yesterday).

This report on a courtcase launched against the writers (it appears the authors have recieved many offers of free legal aid).

This seems to have the entire book, but I can't check it completely at the moment.

These are all in Chinese. I can't find anything on this book in English, apart from this quite lightweight article (which gives the book a different name).

Roddy

Edit: And if anyone's interested, someone here suggests that author Chen Guidi could teach Muzimei (woman who got briefly infamous by writing about her sex life) a thing or two about writing . . .

[roddy]

An article on this by the UK's Telegraph has just popped up on Google News (well, it'd probably been there for a while, I just didn't see it)

It's described as a bestseller, although I've yet to see anyone reading a copy on the subway.

The article also claims the book is 'forcing the regime to address the issue', which looks strange to me - if the government didn't want to address the issues the book would likely have been stopped before it reached the presses. I find it difficult to believe that leaders are finishing the book and saying 'well, better do something now, eh?'

I'm more inclined to think it's going to focus more attention on this area though - and that's no bad thing.

Thoughts?

Roddy

[Ru Yi]

And if anyone's interested, someone here suggests that author Chen Guidi could teach Muzimei (woman who got briefly infamous by writing about her sex life) a thing or two about writing . . .

Mm, it is a very interesting reading of contemporary Chinese culture--Muzimei vs. Chen Guidi, urban vs. rural, extravaganza vs. poverty and powerlessness. And both are "popular" in terms of large circulation. Someone should write an essay on this...

Roddy, thanks for doing research on the issue. BTW, do you know the whereabouts of Yang Yi, the "Chinese Bob Dylan"? Is he still in Beijing, singing on street? I saw your postings to the topic in music forum.

[wushijiao]

What, really, can Beijing do to help all the nongmin? I mean, the US has about 1-2,000,000 farmers. China, with less farmable land, can't possibly expect its 800,000,000 farmers to have a decent lifestyle. If Chinese agiculture were effiecent, I think it might run on a, say, 100,000,000 people, leaving 700,000,000 people jobless.

Certainly, Jiang Zemin could have done better to help the farmers. But this problem has been brewing for hundreds of years, not to mention, the sans-birth control Mao era.

I'm not saying I have the answers, but it seems a bit simplistic to blame Zhu and Jiang for poverty in the countryside.

[jj]

We're going to try to start translating the book into English at China Study Group. If anyone's interested in helping out, go to:

http://www.chinastudygroup.org/wiki/CategoryChineseTranslationsInProgress

and see if you want to give it a whirl.

Cheers,

Jonathan

[Ian_Lee]

One of the recent reports indicated that Mainland China has one of the world's widest urban-rural income gap: 2.8 times.

I think the problem lies in that most rural and county governments are practically broke. So that is why they have to levy numerous kinds of what-you-know taxes on the rural peasants.

It used not to be this way. Rural peasants were the first batch of beneficaries under Deng's reform policy. Deng was chosen as Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1984 owing to his successful rural reform policy.

[wushijiao]

I think this is the first year that farmers can legally work in the cities as migrant workers. The painful process of going rural to urban happened in a slow, organic way over 100 years in Europe, the US and Latin America. China has to do it much quicker, on a huge scale.

[yan]

The painful process of going rural to urban happened in a slow, organic way over 100 years in Europe, the US and Latin America. China has to do it much quicker, on a huge scale.

Errr.. It didn't take 100 years in my country (Germany). And it didn't happen in a very organic way either. There were huge social problems, poverty, crime, prostitution etc.

[skylee]

What does "an organic way" mean?

[yan]

Hmmm... maybe the opposite of large scale migration :?

[wushijiao]

By, "organic" way, I meant the natural way- by meeting the the gap between supply and demand. For example, my great-grandfather was a young German immigrant on the plains of Colorado. He farmed and ranched. That soon became unprofitable and he moved to the city to find work, along with his wife, who worked for the phone company. A similar thing happened on the other side of my family with swedish immigrants living in the rural Midwest, later moving to big cities.

Now, in China, from what I've read, this process of moving to where the work is was stopped by two things- inefficient state run economies, and the hukou system, in which you can only work where you are from, with exceptions. Russia, under a state run economy rather than a market economy, had a similar problem, detailed in the new book "The Siberian Curse".

Of course, I guess the Chinese by forcing people to stay in the countryside (I guess until this year?) avoided massive slums, like in Rio or Mexico city, Lagos, or in other developing nations.

[roddy]

I think the problem lies in that most rural and county governments are practically broke. So that is why they have to levy numerous kinds of what-you-know taxes on the rural peasants.

That's certainly part of the problem. I read recently (can't remember where, probably the Southern Weekend) that reforms had left local governnment very short of cash, with the result that they were appropriating large quantities of agricultural land to sell on to fund their services (such as they are). This is obviously a temporary solution - and as the land is usually sold rather than rented or leased, it's going to be a massive headache for future generations of ganbu's.

Of course, I guess the Chinese by forcing people to stay in the countryside (I guess until this year?) avoided massive slums, like in Rio or Mexico city, Lagos, or in other developing nations.

China hasn't forced people to stay in the countryside for quite some time - however, the migrant populations are semi-legal at best, which leaves them open to exploitation and makes it very difficult for them to enforce their rights.

Roddy

[roddy]

This topic, as expected, has been on the agenda at the National People's Congress. There's a report on it here. There's a remarkable amount of media coverage on this at the moment - the Southern Weekend has a review of Chinese agriculture and it's problems (the 三农问题) and Caijing magazine has an issue almost entirely dedicated to the rural / urban gap - and I'm off to read them . . .

Roddy