No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  In sum, China’s road to a free society is going to depend on gradual improvements from the bottom up. It is hard to see any prospect of a top-down democratic transition of the kind Chiang Ching-kuo brought to Taiwan. Change from the bottom up will depend on the growing self-awareness among the people, on popular rights-defense movements, and on the autonomous, protracted, and ever-expanding pressures that this awareness and these movements place upon the regime. In a nutshell, rather than to seek radical change of this regime, flawed though its legitimacy is, and then to expect that the abrupt change will lead to a remolding of society, people who are pushing for a free and democratic China should concentrate on gradual change in society and expect that this will eventually force a change in regime.

  Beijing, February 26, 2006

  Originally published in Guancha (Observe China), February 26, 2006

  Translated by Perry Link

  THE LAND MANIFESTOS OF CHINESE FARMERS

  Farmers Declare They Are Taking Their Land Back

  During the final month of 2007 in mainland China, there was a spate of public declarations in which farmers laid claim to their land.

  On December 9 in Heilongjiang Province, 40,000 farmers from 72 villages, one of which was Dongnan’gang Village in Fujin township, declared before the whole country that they owned their land by right. A few days earlier, on November 28, villagers convened a democratic assembly to begin a reclaim of land that had been forcibly taken from them. The next day they surveyed the land, and the day after that prepared to re-allocate the land. On December 9, redistribution formally began.

  On December 12, in adjacent areas in western Henan (the Sanmenxia Reservoir District) and eastern Shanxi (Dali County, Huayin City, and Tongguan County), approximately 70,000 farmers from 76 incorporated villages issued the following public declaration:

  We farmers from these four areas hereby jointly resolve to take back ownership of our land. It is land that has been ours to have and to hold down through the generations. We will confer permanent title to property based on an average amount of land per family member. We are putting an end to the illegal land seizures that officials at all levels have been carrying out for years.

  On December 15 in Jiangsu Province, 250 farmer households from Shengzhuang Village in Yixing City claimed permanent ownership rights to the land on which they lived under the principle that “houses belong to those who dwell in them”:

  Shengzhuang Village has a history that stretches back more than 1,500 years. To one generation of farmers after another, living under successive dynasties, it had always been perfectly clear what piece of arable land belonged to what family, and what parts of the bamboo-forested hillsides each had rights over …

  These lands belonged to our ancestors, and beginning now they will revert to us and to our children and our grandchildren. All the residential land of Shengzhuang Village shall once again be the permanent property of families in the village. The arable land and mountain forests shall forever be shared fairly among all the villagers, for us to occupy, till, and develop through the generations to come.

  In the last few years “the land question” has become a hot topic in the recurrent debates over “reform.” The question has pitted proponents of privatization against those who want to maintain the current system. Yet for all their intensity, these debates have been largely limited to the urban elite—intellectuals, businessmen, and officials. The voices of farmers themselves has not—until now—been heard. At last farmers are speaking for themselves, loud and clear, and a silent nation is hearing a cry from deep inside its heartland.

  These farmers’ declarations—at once realistic, reasonable, and grounded in history—represent a breakthrough against the unreasonable land system that has been in place in China since the Mao era. Chinese farmers are now making plain their determination that land ownership be privatized. Their manifestos, distilled from their bitter experience in the Communist era, go far beyond the institution of “land-use” rights that began thirty years ago at Xiaogang Village in Anhui Province. These new demands represent a self-awareness on the part of the farmers, a true awakening. They are saying, in effect: this land under our feet does not belong to the state and does not belong to some “collective.” It is land where we farmers have lived for generations; it is ours. And beginning today we farmers will no longer pursue our rights by kneeling to ask favors; beginning now we will stand up and declare what we are entitled to. We alone are the masters of the land beneath our feet; it is entirely up to us to decide what to do with it.

  At the Outset the Communist Party Stripped the Farmers Bare

  In the cycles of order and disorder that extend through China’s long history, “order” has meant suffering for Chinese farmers, and during “disorder” they have suffered as well. That much is “normal.” But although earlier dynasties may also have been grasping and ruthless, in matters of robbing and exploiting farmers, and in using odious trickery to do it, none compares to what the Communist Party did. In 1947, at a crucial point in their struggle for power, when they wanted to win the broadest possible support among farmers, the Communists pushed a land reform under the slogan “Down with tyrants, distribute the land.” They also published an “Outline of China’s Land Law” that clearly promised that farmers would own land after it was redistributed to them. It recognized their right to manage their land as they saw fit and to buy it and sell it freely. Then, as soon as they gained power, the Communists reversed themselves by launching their socialist revolution and its comprehensive “nationalization.” In urban areas, all private property in industry and commerce was seized by force; in the countryside, a rousing “collectivization” saw all land wrested from farmers. From the campaign for cooperatives in 1951 through the People’s Communes of 1958, Mao Zedong first liquidated the landlords and rich farmers, then forced the ordinary farmers into communes. In the end not an inch of ground anywhere in the vastness of China belonged to any farmer or to anyone else. The Communist regime became the largest, indeed the only, landlord.

  This comprehensive nationalization laid the economic foundation for Mao Zedong’s totalitarian system. City-dwellers who had lost all private property were reduced to cogs in the machine of the regime’s “work units,” and farmers who had lost their land were reduced to virtual serfdom in the “communes.” If the two must be compared, it was the farmers who suffered the grimmer fate. They were at the lowest level in the new system of nationwide bonded servitude. Denied the freedom to move, they were bound to land that was no longer theirs, had no social security, and had turned into mere feeding tubes to support Mao’s industrialization in the cities. The cost of this industrialization project was that people all over China, urban and rural alike, were mobilized into a slave-wage system. Farmers, who were 90 percent of the population when the project began, paid the biggest price and reaped the smallest benefit. During the catastrophe of the insane Great Leap Forward, the poverty of farmers reached the point where they did not even have food to eat or clothes to wear. The ghosts of starvation victims haunted the land, and people were reduced even to cannibalism. Most of the tens of millions of unnatural deaths were of farmers.

  The “Responsibility System” Was Only Semi-Liberation

  When Mao died and “reform” became possible, the deeply victimized farmers were the first to take action. Beginning in Anhui, and at huge political risk, they instituted a system in which people took responsibility for their own harvests. Today this is called “the revolution that liberated the serfs.” But in truth it was only a half-baked liberation, because it never included the privatization of land. All any farmer ever got was a right to use land that remained “collective.” They could not own land. Now, whenever farmland needs to be “developed” for urbanization or commercial purposes, it reverts to “state property.” State ownership may seem an abstract concept, but in practice it means that state officials at the various levels are always free to decide what to do with land in the name of the state
. In more than twenty years of urban modernization, and across a “great leap forward” in real estate values, officials wielding the power of the state and invoking “government ownership of land” have colluded with businessmen all across our country to carry out a kind of Chinese Enclosure Movement. The biggest beneficiaries of the resultant land deals, at all levels, have been the Communist regime and the power elite. The farmers—once again—have been sacrificed.

  Of Society’s Weak Groups, Farmers Are the Weakest

  The key point in all this is that, in authoritarian China, officials are big and strong while citizens are small and weak. Farmers are the weakest among the weak. Without a free press and an independent judiciary, they have no public voice, no right to organize farmers’ associations, and no means of legal redress. “Petitioning” is their only recourse, but when officialdom guards its own interests and blocks petitioners, this, too, becomes an empty exercise. Petitioners endure great risks and hardships but end up with nothing. And this is why, when all recourse within the system—through public opinion, the courts, or administrative machinery—is stifled, people are naturally drawn to collective action outside the system. It is why the government reports so many “mass incidents” every year. As the proverb says, “it is the mandarins who force the people to revolt.”

  Most of the major clashes that have broken out in China in recent years have pitted commoners against officials. Most have occurred at the grassroots in the countryside, and most have been about land. Local officials, protecting the vested interests of the power elite, have been willing to use a range of savage means, drawing on government violence as well as on the violence of the criminal underworld, to repress the uprisings. Bloodshed has occurred. An especially severe clash took place, for example, on December 6, 2005, in Dongzhou Village in Guangdong, where authorities dispatched more than a thousand police to quell a disturbance. They used tear gas and machine-gun fire against a thousand or more marching villagers, of whom hundreds were arrested and at least three were killed.

  When Oppression Forces Revolt, Farmers Turn to Self-Liberation

  Let us look more closely at exactly what China’s farmers said about their land in the three cases noted above.

  The 250 farmer families who issued the manifesto in Shengzhuang Village in Jiangsu claimed that a powerful clique of local officials and businessmen had seized their land in the name of “the public good” and of building “public infrastructure,” but then in fact had used it to build guesthouses, restaurants, dance halls, and shopping districts—all for private commercial purposes. This led them to ask:

  What is “public” about any of this? What does it have to do with the welfare of us farmers? Whose “state” is this, after all? Whose interests are these “public interests”? Whose interests are the “collective” ones? Every time a land seizure happens, all of us farmers oppose it. We all sign statements registering our opposition, but the village chiefs and Party committee arrogate to themselves the right to “represent” farmers and go ahead anyway … Every time they come to put us down, we see officials, police, and the underworld doing “collaborative law-enforcement.” Their hired thugs are like the bandits of old, who built stockades around their mountain strongholds and knew how to beat, smash, and loot, but that’s all. “We’re here to bulldoze your land in the name of the government,” they tell us. “You have to cooperate. To resist is to resist the government.” They even tell us “it’s against the law for you to go on living here.”

  The farmers in Fujin Township in Heilongjiang also saw through the corruption that was going on in the name of the “state” or “collective.” They made the point clearly:

  For a long time this term “collective ownership” gave farmers ownership of land in name but not in reality. Now officials in Fujin, in league with local magnates, and acting in the name of the state and the collective, are seizing and divvying up farmers’ lands on a huge scale. They have become in fact the new “landlords,” while the farmers, the ostensible landowners, have been turned into something like land-renting serfs. We are resolved to end this usurpation. By vesting land ownership in farmer families and individual farmers, we are making farmers the masters of the land in the true sense.

  In their declaration, the 70,000 farmers of Sanmenxia Reservoir District said:

  We in the countryside see quite clearly that, as things stand now, no governmental law or policy can ever control land use. But when rights to the land are restored to the farmers, those local bullies, blind with their greed, are going to find it much harder to act so high-handedly, because now they will be trying to steal the land not of some abstract “collective” but our land, our lifeblood, and they will have an all-out fight on their hands. Once this power of the farmers themselves is mobilized, the government can relax in its duties to protect the land.

  And:

  In recent years central government officials have thrown a few sops to farmers, but if they really want to make a difference, they must give us rights to own land and to start businesses. Only these two rights will get at the roots of the problems in the countryside. Nothing else will put farmers on an equal footing with city people and let them share in the fruits of modernization.

  A Greater Revolution

  The “responsibility system” pioneered in 1978 in parts of Anhui, where farmers took it upon themselves to begin accounting for their harvests on a per-household basis, can be called the “first revolution” in the liberation of Chinese farmers as well as the first step in the whole of the post-Mao reforms. Now, almost thirty years later, we can say that these manifestos about land ownership by farmers in Jiangsu, Heilongjiang, and Shanxi stand out as a “second revolution” through which China’s farmers are freeing themselves. The second revolution is more revolutionary than the first, and the authors of the manifestos know this. They are laying claim not only to land ownership but to their rights as citizens.

  At home in Beijing, December 19, 2007

  Originally published in Zhengming (Cheng Ming Monthly), January 2008

  Translated by A. E. Clark

  XIDAN DEMOCRACY WALL AND CHINA’S ENLIGHTENMENT

  THE OFFICIAL COMMEMORATION of thirty years (1978–2008) of reform in China will soon be upon us, and it is bound to bulge with self-congratulation. The government will put on an ostentatious show that arrogates all achievements to itself and displays a glorious report card on reform for the whole world to see. All the positive changes will be described as having been initiated by official power and unfolding from the top down. In my view such a reading is not only unjust but also very far from actual history.

  The thirty years of reform can be explained by two very different logics. According to one—the logic of the Party-state, which makes sense only at a superficial level—everything started with the 1978 Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, where the Deng Xiaoping line of “reform and opening” was officially announced. Next, by this logic, reform policy was consolidated in the 1979 debate over Deng Xiaoping’s slogan that “practice is the sole criterion for testing truth.” What was actually happening at this level is this: the rulers of the Party-state were making moves to protect the vested interests of the regime and the power elite. They devised what would turn into “crippled” reforms that changed only the economy, not the political system; they made efficiency their priority and ignored social justice; they worshipped GDP growth as a be-all and end-all; they responded to the people’s political demands with a massacre in 1989; and they used material interests to buy people off and to try to gain popular acceptance of their political system.

  The other logic by which to understand the reform era is to see it unfolding at the popular level, beneath the surface and with a much deeper engagement with reality. Popular demands were that economic, political, and cultural reforms all proceed simultaneously. The earliest reforms, which were rural reforms in Anhui, grew out the struggle of China’s very poorest farmers for the bare minim
um of food and clothing that they needed to survive, and the move toward self-rule in villages by electing “village committees” grew out of the collapse of the People’s Commune system. In the cities, the strong desire to seek new knowledge, to create new wealth, and to protect people’s interests brought about an awareness of the market and of people’s rights, and this stimulated popular demand for individual freedom and social justice.

  In short, the decisions to begin economic reform and to allow more personal freedoms, as well as the calls for political reforms and the decision to begin actually making a few reforms, were not favors granted from the top but rather concessions that the top was forced to make because of pressure from below. It was precisely things like extreme poverty, a spiritual desert, and the incessant violence of “class struggle” that led people to perceive the bankruptcy of the Maoist system, and these perceptions led in turn to the “April Fifth Movement” in 1976, when people flocked to Tiananmen Square to commemorate Premier Zhou Enlai, as a way of demonstrating their dislike of radical Maoism. The same basic perceptions led to the initiatives of Anhui farmers in the late 1970s to de-collectivize agriculture by crediting individual households with the harvests they produced; and they led, too, to the “Democracy Wall Movement” of December 1978 to December 1979, when people in Beijing could post political opinions at Xidan Street in Beijing. This is where Wei Jingsheng posted his famous call for democracy as the “fifth modernization” [to be added to the “Four Modernizations” touted by the Party—Ed.]. It was precisely the huge human-rights disasters of the Mao era that led great numbers of aggrieved people to form a “petition and complaint movement” that brought pressure for “political rehabilitation” of people who had been wronged.