Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (35 page)

a vicious circle

throwing the peasants’ hard-earned money into the pond? “We later learned that this ‘eliminate blind spots’ campaign was not limited to our township, our county, or even our province,” Sun Jianjun told us. The “eliminate blind spots” campaign spread to all parts of the country.

Sun Jianjun proceeded to tell us the list of “enterprises” that the township tried its hand at, in order to “eliminate” its label of being without an enterprise. First it was a rubber factory, started with an investment of almost 5 million yuan. Having no clue as to how to proceed, the villagers invited an expert over from the provincial capital, Hefei. By now, the facility’s furnace is cold, the gate is closed, the buildings stand empty, the equipment cannot find a buyer, and the township is in the red for over 6 million yuan.

The next folly was a zinc-processing factory. There was no zinc to begin with, and no charcoal in the area, but the villagers put in 1.5 million, and everything disappeared before the end of the year. Since then,” Sun reminisced, “we started a chemical factory, and we did produce something but it was something that nobody wanted, and two hundred thousand went into the pond without making a splash. After that it was a steel and iron mill; before the building was put up, the steel market collapsed and that was another three hundred thousand gone, like a meat bun thrown to a dog—gone in a flash with no hope of return. The county also forced the township to invest in a general appliance factory; the enterprise was listed under the county’s name, but when it went down like all the rest, we were slapped with a thirty-thousand-yuan debt. Besides the above, we also had a factory to make seats for cars as well as another one mak-ing tiles. But our products were substandard, we had no buyers, and the two combined failures cost us more than three hundred thousand yuan.”

“Finally,” said Sun, “we started a straw-mat [plant]. We figured that we were peasants, after all, so making straw mats

will the boat sink the water
?

would be right up our alley—all we needed to do was order the peasants to grow reeds in the pond, acquire some straw-weaving equipment, and we would be fine. It turned out, however, that planting reeds was no cakewalk. It was not easy to raise quality reeds, and when we did succeed in making some mats, nobody wanted them. Our equipment, bought for four hundred thousand yuan, was flogged for barely a tenth of that sum. Altogether we were half a million yuan in the red over those reed mats.

“‘Eliminating blind spots’ resulted in eliminating all our savings,” Sun stated. “The money was borrowed from the bank, mostly from the Agricultural Bank. The loans were negotiated by local leaders, who one by one were all promoted to greener pastures in reward for their performances. The debt is still hanging round the neck of the township,” Sun said, sighing, “and ultimately the money to repay it will have to come out of the peasants’ pockets.”

County and township elections take place every three or four years, and cadres are moved about like horses on a merry-go- round; they cannot make long-term plans. Once installed in a new position, they all race to launch their own favorite “image project,” a project to enhance the image of the county or township under their stewardship. Actually, those projects are mainly rushed through within the term of office of a particular leader, in order to enhance
his
image and provide him with political capital. So one after another, these projects are rushed through the townships, and each and every project needs funding. The bulk of the mandatory contributions toward the funding always ultimately falls on the peasants.

These ploys to curry favor with one’s superior are not new. In the Qin Dynasty, the “Records of Officialdom” described a commander named Hu, who ordered his men to attack ordi—

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nary peasants to boost the number of “bandits” he had eliminated, in order to build his record of achievement. In our own era, during the Great Leap Forward, Party officials manufactured similar “achievements” of harvests of “ten thousand-jin per
mu
,” for the same purpose. Their superiors were either eas-ily fooled, or they, too, had an interest in fake achievements to inflate their own records. Such image-boosting projects continue to proliferate in a vicious cycle. The only ones who suffer are the peasants, who have to pay for these games.

In Huagou Township, Huoyang County, Anhui Province, we came across four “ten thousand” projects that typified such foolhardiness. “Ten thousand” alludes to ten thousand
mu
of, respectively, edible yellow lilies, grape vines, vegetables, and households raising pigeons. Consider what a glowing achievement it would be for Chen Xiaoming, the township chief, if he could complete these four “ten thousand” projects for the township under his leadership. The county Party Secretary had praised him in public, saying, “If only there were more township leaders like Chen Xiaoming!” Chen’s stock was on the rise. But the reality was a different story. Chen pursued his projects with the same ferocity that he had exhibited as head of township security. He ordered that ten thousand square meters of forests that lined the highway be cut down, to make way for his “ten thousand grape vines” project. Seventy-eight peasants’ dwellings were demolished, leaving some of the residents homeless. We went to take a look at the ten thousand grape vines. Of the young vines, which had cost anywhere from 50,000 to 60,000 yuan, only a few straggle on limply; the rest did not survive. Ten thousand cement stands, intended to support the grape vines, now dominate the scene of devastation. As for the ten thousand
mu
of yellow edible lilies, they have completely disappeared. The fields have long since been turned into a com—

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mon pasture; apart from that, the people did not get a single cent’s worth of benefit. The ten thousand
mu
of vegetables is now planted over with wheat, with only a few patches of vegetables remaining. As to the ten thousand households who were forced to buy those pigeons, all they got for their pains were dead pigeons and empty nests. By the time we visited, the four “ten thousand” projects had already been exposed in the national press and on central TV, and Chen Xiaoming had been fired.

The township is now in debt to the tune of 880,000 yuan as a result of these projects, and the new leadership’s main job is to deal with the hardships inflicted on the peasants as a consequence of those rash experiments. As for the debt, who will ultimately pay it back? The people of Huagou Township, you can be sure.

And whose image was supposed to be boosted by the image-building potential of those four “ten thousand” projects? Who was going to be put on a pedestal? Isn’t it obvious? When we consider the number of officials like Chen Xiaoming running things in the vast countryside, the amount of harm that they can do is mind-boggling. By the end of the day it is impossible to tell how deeply these officials’ image-enhancing projects, designed to put themselves on pedestals, have damaged the interests of the peasants.

“The Revolution Is a Dinner Party”

In 1997, the Anhui
Reference News
, a newsletter distributed internally for leading cadres, published an article on the debt problem in the countryside. The writer, Wu Zhaoren, the deputy director of the Anhui Agricultural Economic Committee, stated, “Recently a staff [member] from the provincial Peasants’ Burden Relief Office and I did a survey of rural

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debt in the townships and villages. The results were surprising. In three townships that we visited, one owed 13 million, one owed 8 million, and the other owed more than 7 million [yuan]. Many of the [other] villages that we visited owed around 300,000 to 400,000. Distributed over households, every household would owe 2,000 yuan; distributed over individuals, every peasant would owe 300 yuan. When we approached the county heads and county Party Secretaries, they said it was not the exception but the rule.”

We later learned that townships’ debt burden was a long-standing problem, but it had been hidden by operating in the red and faking figures. In 1998, however, the Central Committee ordered, under the general concept of “three deduc-tions and five reserves,” that for the next three years, the peasants’ payments toward various social services and funding of projects must not exceed the figure for 1997. This tied the local governments’ hands in collecting more money from the peasants, and their debts were fully exposed. But by then the problem was very serious and prevalent throughout the countryside. Wu Zhaoren’s article heralded the coming storm.

It is clear that throughout the country, townships and villages are deeply in debt. According to figures released by the Ministry of Agriculture on the basis of its investigations in ten provinces, the average debt of a township administration is 4 million yuan, and the average debt of a village administration is 200,000. How could this have happened? How were the debts incurred? What was the money used for? From what we learned, apart from the “standard projects” and “image-building” projects, there were even more outrageous ways of public spending.