Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (3 page)

province,” marking the first time that a Communist official had publicly commented on the book even though the party had already banned it. Within short order, an Anhui newspaper that had been serializing Chen and Wu’s next work—on a rarity in China, an uncorrupt judge—pulled the plug on that work. That same day, a gang of thugs pelted Chen and Wu’s two-room apartment with bricks, forcing them to flee Anhui’s capital of Hefei with their son. The police told them there was nothing they could do. Chen was also asked to resign from his work unit—the Anhui Writer’s Union. When last contacted, they were living in a small village in the poor, southeastern province of Jiangxi. It was not immediately clear if they were doing research there or hiding from goon squads, whom party officials now routinely hire to muzzle and even kill their enemies— perceived or otherwise.

Chen and Wu’s book stands as a challenge to another, more recent, narrative—one about China’s rise. There is a lot of talk these days that China is going to become the world’s next great superpower. From the Pentagon to Wall Street, China’s emer-gence as a global power is viewed with a titillating combination of fear and excitement. In recent years, a series of books have been published in the West predicting everything from an imminent war with China to China’s ultimate surpassing of America as the world’s next economic giant. The hype about China is breathless and unrelenting.

Will the Boat Sink the Water?
is an important antidote to the boosterish pablum churned out by many China experts these days. It is a street-level look at the downside, and the dark side, of China’s economic juggernaut. In this book, you will meet a cast of characters that has generally been denied a voice in the worldwide frenzy accompanied by China’s rise. Their stories are important ones, amounting to China’s version of Jacob Riis’ 1890 classic about poverty in America,
How the Other Half Lives
.

Chen and Wu’s book also helps us to put current Communist policy in perspective. During his annual state-of-the nation address to China’s rubber-stamp parliament in March 2006, China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, set out what he dubbed as a “major historic task.” The aim, he said, was to close the gap between China’s dirt-poor countryside and its booming cities. Wen pledged to abolish all rural taxes and increase spending on rural social services and education as China creates what he called “a new socialist countryside.”

Spooked by a restive countryside, a rapid rise in the number of demonstrations and riots by China’s peasants, the Chinese Communist Party is saying it cares about the countryside. Leaders like Wen and president Hu Jintao routinely commit themselves to bettering the lot of China’s dispossessed. Hu even went down one of China’s many perilous mine shafts to share a New Year’s supper with miners. But while Wen and Hu’s remonstrations have been portrayed as something new in the Western press and particularly by China boosters, readers of
Will the Boat Sink The Water?
will understand that they are nothing new. China’s Communists have been saying that they cared about the peasantry ever since they rode to power on their backs in 1949. But at every turn, as Chen and Wu show, they have let them down.

In 1993, Chen and Wu write, China’s legislature vowed to limit taxes to 5 percent of peasants’ income, but within one year taxes and fees were forcing China’s peasants into debt. A decade before that, the government committed itself to devot-ing 18 percent of its budget toward rural services. But it has never come even close; in 2005 it devoted only 9 percent. Meanwhile, the ranks of China’s bureaucracy, most of them laboring in the countryside, have ballooned, jumping from 2.2 million in 1979 to well over 10 million today. Premier Wen did not say how they would be supported now that the peasants don’t have to pay any more taxes. But the logical conclusion of

anyone familiar with Chen and Wu’s work is that when push comes to shove, the peasants are going to have to pay.

Chen and Wu set their book in their home province of Anhui. American readers might be familiar with Anhui because it was here that Nobel prize winning author Pearl Buck set her most famous work,
The Good Earth
—the story of a poverty-strick- en Chinese family. Anhui is one of China’s poorest provinces. Indeed, for years after most other parts of China were opened to Western travelers, foreigners were banned from Anhui because the Communist government did not want them to see the widespread misery there. Anhui was the site of a series of ethically questionable genetic research projects led by Harvard University researchers in the early years of the twenty-first century. The researchers promised impoverished farmers—desperate for health care—free medical check-ups and medical treatment in exchange for blood samples. The only problem was that once the researchers pulled the blood, they essentially left town.

Husband and wife, Chen and Wu have collaborated before— on a report on pollution on the Huai River, China’s sixth longest waterway and arguably its dirtiest. They visited 48 cities along the Huai and reported that of the river’s 191 large tributaries, 80 percent of the water had turned black. Pollutants expelled into the river from various factories bonded together into enormous barge-like collections of scum that putrefied the river. At times the brown lather—a noxious mix of trash, efflu-ent, and untreated waste—stretched more than 60 miles and stood six feet high in places. Local residents wore masks and wet towels across their faces to keep from retching. Drinking water had so damaged the health of those who lived along the river that the People’s Liberation Army stopped conscripting local residents because they were unfit for service.

Chen’s “Warning of the Huai River” proves to be a caution-ary tale of life in the People’s Republic of China. Just as Premier

Wen did in March 2006 with China’s peasants, the government promised to tackle the pollution problem. Teams were sent to the Huai River to shut down polluting factories, just like teams have been sent from Beijing to ensure that peasants are no longer being forced to pay taxes and illegal fees. Within two years, however, 40 percent of the polluting plants had re-opened. And by 2004, when I traveled the river and met with Chen and Wu in their Anhui home, all the firms were back in operation, without pollution controls. Because of an electricity shortage, local governments had shut down smokestack scrub-bers and waste-water treatment facilities. That July, another 60-mile carpet of sludge swept down the river, killing millions of fish and devastating wildlife. Could the same fate be awaiting China’s farmers?

Near the end of
Will the Boat Sink the Water?
Chen and Wu write about a group of corrupt village leaders who spend their days using tax revenues to fill their bellies. The party apparatchiks’ feasting prompts Chen and Wu to conclude that, contrary to what my professors taught me, perhaps the revolution
is
a dinner party. Only one where the peasants have never been given a seat at the table.

Los Angeles March 15, 2006

post-liberation

time line of events important to

chinese peasant s, with emphasis on agriculture

1949 Founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

1951–53 Korean War.

1952 Land-reform movement.

1954 Passage of the Constitution of the PRC. 1955 Nationalization of industry and trade.

1955–58 Collectivization of agriculture: mutual-help teams— agricultural cooperative—commune.

1955 Campaign against the Hufeng antirevolutionary clique.

1956 Hundred Flowers movement, Mao’s call for all to “bloom and contend.”

1957 “Antirightist movement,” suppressing those who had “bloomed and contended.”

1958 Great Leap Forward.

1959 “Antirightist deviation” campaign.

1959–62 The Great Famine; deaths estimated at over 30 million.

1963 The then head of state, Liu Shaoqi, restores rights of peasants to have a private family plot.

1964 Socialist education campaign in the countryside.

post-liberation time line

1965 Campaign against the play
Hairei Dismissed by the Emperor
(prelude to the Cultural Revolution).

1966–76 Cultural Revolution.

1969 (September) The Ninth National Party Congress: Lin Biao is confirmed as Mao’s heir and the Cultural Revolution is legitimized.

1976 (January) Death of Premier Zhou Enlai. 1976 The Tangshan earthquake.

1976 (September) Death of Mao Zedong. 1976 (October) Gang of Four arrested.

1978 (December) At the Eleventh National Party Congress, Deng Xiaoping announces the new policy of “Reform and Open Up,” and make plans for China’s modernization, under the new slogan “Emancipate our minds; seek truth from facts.”

1978 A handful of peasants in Xiaogang Village, Fengyang County, Anhui, take out land contracts for independent farming. From then onward, experiments in reforming the agricultural system by “household contracts” are carried out in many areas in Anhui.

1982 (January) The Politbureau of the Party Central Committee passes the Number 1 Document, approving the household-contract system.