Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (30 page)

will the boat sink the water
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Revolution, when many peasants were made to recite their sufferings in the “old” society and sing the blessings of the “new,” their memories of misfortune derived not from pre-Liberation days, but from the starvation of the 1960s, the most tragic event in their living memory. And yet our official version of history defines this monstrous tragedy as the result of “three years of natural disasters.”

After the “natural disasters” of the early 1960s came the ten years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when an ultra-leftist critique of capitalism was pushed to monstrous extremes. A peasant would be accused of “taking the capitalist road” if his household kept two chickens or planted a few vegetables for the market. Agriculture was so devastated that by the end of the Cultural Revolution, figures released for 1977 show that the value of one day’s labor in the people’s commune averaged 11 cents, barely enough to buy one pack of the cheapest cigarettes in the rural market. To put it another way, in Anhui as well as in some other provinces, a peasant’s average day’s work could not produce as much grain as that of his or her Han Dynasty counterpart two thousand years ago!

When the Cultural Revolution was finally brought to a halt, following Mao’s death in 1976, the household-contract system was tried out in Anhui Province and proved a great success. The lethargy of the previous years was gone. One would frequently see three generations of a family working together under one of these contracts, looking toward a better life. This reform saw a sustained 15 percent increase of per capita income for the years 1978 to 1984. It was the years of recovery. The long-standing policy prohibiting the free sale of grain and other agricultural products was eased. The government’s monopoly of grain purchases at fixed prices, which had been in place for four decades, was gradually abolished.

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a vicious circle

But just as the restrictions were easing, the Third Plenary Session of the Twelfth National Party Congress convened in December of 1984, a great historical turning point.* The Twelfth Party Congress announced the launch of comprehensive reform in urban areas. Thus, the focus of China’s ongoing reform efforts would shift from rural to urban, and so would capital investment. Once again, the burden of this massive project fell on the shoulders of the peasants.

In order to simplify the administrative process of securing income from rural taxation, the government converted the dis-credited people’s communes into over sixty thousand administrative townships and invested them with power to impose and collect taxes.

Once established, inevitably this lowest rung of state bureaucracy began to expand. Just as in the traditional Chinese saying: “Tiny the sparrow may be, no part is missing that one can see,” so the township administration was equipped with the six divisions of their counterparts in the upper echelons of power: Party, government, Party Disciplinary Committee, People’s Congress, People’s Consultative Conference, and the armed forces. Later added to this were the likewise analogous so-called “seven offices and eight stations”: finance, taxation, pub-lic security, trade and industry, transportation, public health, grain control, agricultural technology, irrigation, seed control, soil erosion control, agricultural machinery, veterinary service, food control, fisheries, and so on. Thus the scale of the township bureaucracy continued to grow.

The cost of maintaining this burgeoning bureaucracy was of course left to the peasants, always at the bottom of the complex. The peasants’ burden, previously hidden within the mech-

• The National Party Congress is in theory the highest body of the Communist Party of China (to be distinguished from the National People’s Congress). For further information, see “National Party Congresses,” http://countrystudies.us/china/101.htm.
  

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  anism of the people’s communes, now emerged into the open in the form of taxes.
  

  Following on this administrative “reform,” which left peasants to the tender mercies of township officials, the central government introduced new rules regarding rural taxation for community welfare, village officials’ salaries, village administration, primary and secondary education, family planning, veterans’ benefits, militia training, road works, and other public service. Those services, which should be supported by the state, were now deposited on the backs of the peasants, who had no say in the matter.
  

  Under the relentless demands for money to cover administrative expenses, fund-raising projects, fines, fees, and allocated contributions, the peasants lost their enthusiasm for reform that had characterized the early days. Wan Li, chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, a man who had distinguished himself in pushing for rural reform, said at a meeting in the late eighties: “The peasants’ gains must not be taken back. We must issue another document to encourage the peasants to move onward. Otherwise, the peasants will cease to listen to the Party.” Despite Wan Li’s admonishments, however, the peasants’ meager gains through the early years of the reform were being eroded.
  

  In 1978, the decision at the third plenary session of the Eleventh Party Congress had established the target that 18 percent of the state’s total investment in the economy should be in agriculture. But this figure was never realized. The slogan was repeated from year to year, but in practice, the state left the growth of investment in agriculture to the peasants themselves. With the reform’s shift of emphasis from the rural to the urban economy, the disparity between city and country continued to grow: urban development grew by leaps and bounds and people’s living standards continued to rise, while the rural areas remained stagnant and lagged further behind. Between 1989
  

  a vicious circle
  

  

  and 1991, when there were strong harvests and growth was in the double digits, the peasants’ per capita income grew only 2 percent per annum on average, though there was no growth for the year 1991. A second phase of slowdown in income growth occurred after 1996, when the rate of increase in peasants’ per capita income dropped for two straight years, from 9 percent to
  

  4.0 percent growth in 1998.
  

  In ten years, between 1990 and 2000, the total of all the taxes that the state had extracted from the peasants had increased by a factor of five, from over 8.7 billion yuan to over 46.5 billion yuan. By 2000, the peasants’ tax burden averaged 146 yuan per head, six times the average urban resident’s tax burden of merely 37 yuan per head. Yet city dwellers’ income was on average six times the peasants’ income! This in itself is already a grave injustice, but over and above regular taxation, the peasants had to suffer further extortion for village reserves and fees for social services.
  

  How Do I Tax Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.
  

  As we made our way through fifty or so counties over a two-year period, we tried to get an answer to the question: How much are peasants taxed? Surprisingly, no one had an authoritative answer. So all we could do was make a list of what we were able to put together from asking around.
  

  According to the statistics of the government’s Department for Supervising the Peasants’ Burdens, there are ninety-three categories of fees and charges, funds and reserves, devised by the State Council and the various ministries whose activities involve the rural economy.
  

  The various tiers of local governments list a total of 269 types
  

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  of tax, but this figure does not include the payments that lower levels of administration tag on to government taxes, literally called “hitching a free ride.”
  

  And then there are the local inventions, which often come across like inspired black humor, but that does not affect the deadly seriousness with which payments are extracted. Absurd they may be; nevertheless they must be paid down to every last penny.
  

  Among the devious rural tax schemes are the following: “fund-raising”
  

  Building the township office building
  

  Building the township school
  

  Setting up the township technology website, Building the township outpatient clinic Building the township broadcasting station Building the township movie theater Promoting township enterprise
  

  Improving the township environment and striking down crime
  

  Management Fees
  

  Repairing village office quarters
  

  Village cadres’ allowance for business trips and entertainment
  

  Activities of the village Party and Communist Youth League Township Party Congress and People’s Congress
  

  Stipends for Village’s Nonproduction Personnel Party secretary
  

  Village chief (chairman of village committee) Chairwoman of village women’s committee Village group leaders
  

  a vicious circle
  

  

  Captain of village militia
  

  Member of village committee for security Secretary of the village Communist Youth League Vet
  

  Broadcaster Agricultural technician Forest guard
  

  Guard of sliding slopes Newspaper delivery man Street cleaner
  

  Electrician Plumber Carpenter Mason
  

  Education expenses
  

  Salary of village school teachers Stipend for teachers in public schools School building repair
  

  Office expenses
  

  Purchase of books, newspapers, and other materials Purchase of teaching equipment
  

  Purchase of sports equipment
  

  Village birth-control project Stipend for the single-child family
  

  Nutrition allowance for postabortion operations
  

  Stipend for member of village committee for birth planning Stipend for group leader of village birth-planning program
  

  Militia Training
  

  Living expenses during training
  

  Stipend for loss of work hours during training Stipend for safeguarding firearms and cartridges
  

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  Social Services
  

  Building the village old people’s home Stipend for workers at said home Group health plan
  

  Stipend for village health workers
  

  Preferential treatment for surviving members of revolutionary martyrs and retired army personnel
  

  Preferential treatment for disabled veterans
  

  Preferential treatment for family members of army personnel in active service
  

  Preferential treatment for workers hurt in work-related accidents
  

  Preferential treatment for families in hardship Preferential treatment for the aged who have lost their
  

  families
  

  Aside from these formally listed items, innumerable other payments are extracted from the peasants on the spur of the moment for such purposes as “building a civilized village,” widening the street to open a market, planning a house site, getting permission to build a private home, inspecting seed, obtaining antivirus shots for domestic poultry, maintaining troughs for domestic animals, connecting electric cables, eliminating rats, purchase of walkie-talkies and motorcycles for the local police, ordering uniforms for local law enforcement officials . . . and so on.
  

  For children in school, apart from regular tuition, there are enforced “donations” to support education, charges for tutor-ing, charges for the price of examination papers, charges for the purchase of study materials, charges for the purchase of a broom for classroom cleaning.
  

  If you are so enterprising as to keep a pig, you will need to pay the “live pig” tax, the pig killing tax, the “capital gain” tax,
  

  a vicious circle
  

  

  the income tax, and the tax toward maintenance of the township. In some places, you are taxed for keeping a pig whether you keep one or not.
  

  The most outrageous case of “fancy” taxation that we came across were the taxes and payments in a certain township for getting married. The happy couple has to pay for the cost of the marriage certificate—the paper it is printed on. Then there are fees for the letter of authorization (provided by the work unit or by the village committee, certifying identity and age of appli-cants); the notary; the prenuptial physical (presumably checking for infectious disease), and a fee for a comprehensive physical for the bride. After these preliminaries, there is a deposit for commitment to the one-child family, a deposit for commitment to family planning, and a deposit for commitment to deferred pregnancy. After the birth-control part is taken care of, there is a deposit for commitment to “mutual devotion,” and a deposit for a “golden wedding.” Apart from these deposits, there is a tax for the wedding banquet, a tax for pig killing, a “green” tax for banquet-related environmental hazards, and finally a donation to the “Happy Children’s Center.”