by Guy Sorman
From the road, we can see steles atop funeral mounds that lie scattered over the corn and wheat fields. The steles are arranged in accordance with the principles of geomancy. In early spring, during the Festival of the Dead, also known as the Festival of Light or the Cold Meal Festival (people eat food prepared the evening before), people weed the burial mounds, an homage of the living to their ancestors. Families come to burn incense and paper money, things the dead take with them to purgatory. Families separated by the Revolution reunite at these tombs. The Festival of Light is about re-creating civil society and keeping memories alive. Each tomb is a small victory over the authorities. If the Party had its way, people would have to cremate their dead en masse to free cultivable land. The peasants resist. They keep sowing and harvesting around the mounds.
After the first 100 miles or so, the highway begins to shrink. The tarmac deteriorates rapidly until there is nothing left of the road. Trucks get stuck in potholes, and some fall into ravines. We have crossed the Shaanxi border to enter Gansu. A to fu road, I am told. The local officials embezzled the money. A few were jailed, but the Party cadres were not bothered. All the world over, public works are a good source of funding for political parties. China is no exception. When corruption is too flagrant, the Party punishes the underlings, without touching the system itself that is so profitable.
The tofu road comes to an end. A stony path takes it place, winding its way up the mountains. A few toll bridges slow us down further. Uniformed inspectors tell us we can either pay the tax or make a donation. We give the money; otherwise, they’ll slap a huge fine on us. It is the same story on all Chinese roads. Officials in fancy uniforms extort money from travelers on the pretext of collecting wholly unjustified taxes. According to Chinese government estimates, 40 percent of taxes taken from the peasants have no legal basis and never go into the public coffers.
The construction boom has not reached the village. With their adobe walls and curved tiled roofs, the farmhouses have remained unchanged for centuries. Our adventure has finally come to an end. We have reached the commune of the Pagoda of the Phoenix. Twelve thousand people live in its ten villages with picturesque names like the Ducks’ Pond and Mao’s Family Hamlet. As I am a guest of the Party’s local secretary, I can stay here without having to explain my visit to the police. I met the secretary at the Baoji hospital where his daughter was being treated. Chance friendships are the best introductions in China.
From afar, the Chinese countryside appears deceptively calm and idyllic. In truth, it is neither. It is an understatement to say that the Shaanxi and Gansu villages are poor. It fails to describe the complete destitution of the area. The houses are bare. The only furniture consists of a minimum of bedding, a gas stove, and a few stools. The adobe walls provide little protection against the scorching heat and the bitter cold. A brick brazier, a kang, provides the only heating. The brazier is lit with harvest waste and twigs from the mountainside, used very sparingly. Hygiene is unheard of, running water scarce. The villages have no public square where people can meet. In fact, there is no social life at all. Old clan feuds spoil good neighborly relations, each family keeping to itself. Some things have changed. The commune does have electricity and television. The public channel, the only one, parrots government sermons, indifferent to what is happening in the world. A few variety shows are thrown in to provide some entertainment and break the isolation.
Where have all the young men gone? In the narrow streets, one sees children of school age and withered old men, pensively drawing on their pipes. The large number of children suggests that parents are careless about practicing family planning. In any case, the single-child norm of the more populated regions is relaxed in Shaanxi Province, where couples are allowed two children. But on average, they have three, either not declaring the third child or paying an enormous fine.
My first trip took place in the spring of the Year of the Rooster. During my second visit, in the autumn, the young were working in the fields, handpicking the cornstalks and tilling the land with wooden rakes to sow the wheat. Each family cultivates two-and-a-half acres located on terraces perilously clinging onto the mountain-sides, eroded by the river, which often floods. With no tools and only human manure, you need the patience of a gardener to survive on this poor soil. Fortunately, the peasants can sell the harvests from some apple and walnut trees, their only source of income. Even this is depleted by intermediaries, who drive up in trucks and take advantage of the peasants’ lack of organization.
There are no men and hardly any young women, who see migration to the cities, the sites, and factories of eastern China as the only hope they have. Already, the countryside is poor, and policies are designed to choke it even further, making it impossible for the peasants to improve their lot in the village. This is the major difference between China and other developing countries. India, Brazil, and Indonesia are also rural economies with an equally dense population. But in these countries, peasants can raise their voices and sometimes be heard. The Chinese peasants have no voice. So it is hard for them to show enterprise, learn, and look after themselves.
Eight hundred million condemned to lifelong poverty
A common argument is this: there are just too many Chinese living on scarce and barren land; they are thus condemned to live in poverty. But with each passing year, the peasants are getting poorer and poorer—something the government admits—and are left with no option but to leave for the city. In the Sixties, the introduction of new seeds and technology increased yields considerably, wiping out famine and food shortages. In the Seventies, the clumsily executed experiment of setting up factories in the villages showed that it was not impossible to develop local agriculture and food processing with the help of the worker-peasants. Other countries—India and Bangladesh, for instance—use innovative methods such as the cultivation of cash crops, private cooperatives, and micro-credit to help farmers improve their lot without uprooting them. China made no such attempt because the peasants have no voice. They cannot invest in the future. They cannot obtain credit, and, as the land belongs to the state and not to them, they have no collateral to offer. In a poor country, unequal access to credit is like a sentence of lifelong poverty. The Party is aware of this. Yet it is not willing to give peasants full ownership instead of the right to cultivate. Property would create a middle class, which would not be dependent on the Party for its survival.
The administration’s allocation of plots by family does not permit the consolidation of land holdings, necessary for more productive mechanized farming. Significantly, national rice and wheat production has stagnated at the same level for the past fifteen years. From my brief conversations with the villagers—it is not easy talking to them, for the Party secretary is never far off—it appears that they would like to come together to sell their apples and even build a fruit-juice factory. The Party is in no mood to oblige. It would mean abandoning the policy of land fragmentation, giving credit to the peasants, eliminating intermediaries, and connecting the village with a proper road. We may think that these are steps in the right direction, but it would be a “headache” for the Party secretary. He would have to account to his district bosses for all these transgressions against the dominant ideology. So he prefers the status quo.
What about schools? The peasants pin all their hopes on their children, believing that education will enable them to escape from poverty. Parents are willing to spend what little they have on their children’s education. The Pagoda of the Phoenix has a quite respectable-looking school that lends itself well to official functions. In principle, the commune’s 2,000-odd children are supposed to get nine years of compulsory education. But a quarter of them can be seen loitering about in the streets or working in the fields. The principal of the school says, “They are handicapped children. We are not equipped to take them in.” I have a feeling that the real handicap is their parents’ poverty and inability to pay the fees.
Isn’t education free? In the cities, schoo
ls can be free or dependent on public enterprises, but not so in the villages. Parents have to contribute toward the school’s supplies, including the purchase of chalk, heating, the canteen, and anything else the principal thinks necessary. Teachers don’t mind receiving gifts from time to time. The children of obliging parents get greater personal attention, and their promotion is assured; eventually, they may be able to enroll in high school. Of course, it is true that teachers earn a pittance, with a monthly salary of eighty yuan. Their accommodations consist of a single unheated room equipped with nothing more than a mean bed and a stove. No teacher trained in the city is willing to work here. The village teachers are often peasants who have completed a two-week training course. Between classes, they attend to their fields. Few of these semi-teachers are truly devoted to their jobs. They know just enough to teach the children how to read, write, and count. The nine years of compulsory education trumpeted by the Party turns out to be yet another fabrication. In truth, a quarter of the Chinese population is illiterate, more girls than boys.
For a peasant, the worst thing that can happen is falling ill. The nearest doctor is at Baoji, a five-hour bus journey on a bumpy road. Hospitalization is prohibitively expensive and beyond the means of most peasants. No matter what the emergency, all hospitals in China ask for an 800-yuan deposit before admitting any patient. The deposit is supposed to cover various medical procedures, whose prices are listed. Most modern hospitals display the price list above the cash counter. Payment must be made in advance. Doctors sell medicines separately, at exorbitant prices. For most families, going to hospital means being in debt for many years. And even after paying exorbitantly, the treatment is at times worse than the disease. Injections and drips are a must for every patient; the district hospitals claim that they have both therapeutic and magical properties. Syringes are commonly reused and medicines dispensed long after their expiry date. Many patients get hepatitis, which becomes cancerous. Widows in the village are legion. Who cares?
Atypical pneumonia and bird flu figure high on the list of concerns of the Chinese government and the international community, even though the number of victims is small. Tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, cholera, and dysentery, however, afflict tens if not hundreds of millions of Chinese—but the government is not bothered, because these are traditional diseases that kill only local people in remote areas. Preventing bird flu is a complex, expensive, and perhaps futile business. But teaching people a few elementary precautions could save many lives. No one knows about hygiene in the villages. People never wash their hands. They live in close proximity to animals, a key source of infection. The Party does not care. Spending on health care brings neither instant glory nor quick profit. Consequently, life expectancy in China’s rural West is on average ten years less than in the eastern cities. Life expectancy is actually going down in the villages.
As the majority simply can’t afford medical care, they turn toward magical practices, the opium of the people, according to Marx. Master Zhao is the village doctor.
Zhao claims to be a Daoist priest. As proof, he produces a certificate stamped by the Daoist Patriotic Association, a religious wing of the Communist Party. Getting such a certificate does not require much knowledge of theology. Good relations with the association and a discreet bribe will do the trick. In China, everything has become commercialized, even the priesthood. Master Zhao has a long beard and smooth manners. “Thanks to the Party,” he was able to restore the Pagoda of the Phoenix, which was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The Pagoda looks as it did before, only more gleaming. Zhao wants me to know that he is not in politics. His principal duty is to preside over funerals and help souls find deliverance so that they don’t return to trouble the living. He is also the local doctor. People come to him with all kinds of ailments: headaches, cancers, depressions. Zhao gives them incense sticks. He makes potions from bark and herbs. He puts his hands on the patient’s head while mumbling ancient prayers. He has a treatment for everything, but nothing is free. Sometimes, his therapy can be dangerous. Chinese medicine has never been tested scientifically, and its efficacy is doubtful. The toxic mixtures he prescribes can cost a patient his life.
Wasn’t hygiene better before the liberal reforms, when there was “real communism”? The village did have a dispensary in Mao’s time. Its ruins still remain. The elders remember the barefoot doctor, a young woman from the city posted to the village during the Cultural Revolution. Master Zhao, they feel, is more skilled.
Similar conditions prevail elsewhere. But perhaps I am painting an unduly grim picture. Evidently, things have improved since the Sixties, when peasants were reduced to eating grass and bark after the Party took away their harvests. Even if they remain in their villages, Chinese peasants survive, an improvement over the period of collectivization and the other such great leaps forward from the Fifties up until 1978. The return to private cultivation (not to be confused with private property), known as the 1979 Reform, saved the peasantry from famine. Yet 100 million still don’t get three square meals a day. That is not a small number, even in China.
Are we to praise the Party’s wisdom for this meager progress? Certainly, the Party doesn’t stop blowing its own trumpet. Yet all it has done is to return to the peasant the rice bowl it had snatched from him. The 1979 Reform was the brainchild of Deng Xiaoping. It is not so much a testimony to his genius as to the rationality of the Chinese peasant. He works when the Party lets him. When his land and harvest are confiscated, he and millions like him perish. The Party’s self-satisfaction is absurd. And why this constant comparison between the China of today and the China of the past to reassure ourselves that it is making progress under the Party’s tutelage? Should China not instead be compared with other countries that face similar challenges? Would that not be more worthwhile, seeing what China was and what it could become, given the hardworking nature of its people and the hunger for education of its peasantry? This seems the fairest yardstick. The Party doesn’t think so. Developing agriculture and improving the lot of 800 million peasants are not high on its list of priorities.
How the young are forced to leave their villages
Even before I ask anything, Lu tells me: “The Party doesn’t command any more, and it doesn’t even manage: it only advises.” Lu is the Party secretary of the Pagoda of the Phoenix. His superiors must have dressed him down when they learned that a foreigner was venturing into their territory without prior authorization. Lu seems sincere. He is a local peasant, not an apparatchik sent arbitrarily by the Party. In many villages, the Party secretary is a tyrant, but there are few complaints against young Lu. No doubt, the villagers have to pay for his and his wife’s upkeep. They have built the couple a modern house covered with white tiles, and they pay all Lu’s petty expenses such as cigarettes and bus fare when he goes to the city. In every village, the Party lives off the poor peasants. When the local bosses invite their family and friends to visit, the villagers must look after them—an unofficial tax, and a heavy one. Often the Party secretary appropriates a plot of land to build his house. Either the peasants submit or they file a petition, sometimes taking their fight all the way to Beijing. En route, the police beat them and throw the ringleaders behind bars. When petitioners are too numerous in the capital, the police round them up and keep them in a stadium until they can be sent back to their villages. If a petitioner happens to win his case, the press lauds the fairness of the national leaders and laments the negligence of the local cadres. That’s how things work. Apparatchiks can do anything, provided the top doesn’t have to hear about it.
Lu, however, is not too greedy. “He can read and write,” villagers tell me. He’s been to high school; he understands official correspondence, which he translates into vernacular for the villagers. Lu is proud of having been elected by the twenty-nine members of his cell. Isn’t that a small number in a village of 2,000 people? The Party should recruit more actively, he agrees, but few are willing to “devote themselves to the people
.” How many women are in the Party? Taken aback by the question, Lu makes a mental count and admits that there are none. After giving the matter some thought, he concedes that it would be good to have one or two.
Lu reverts to the slogans that he has been instructed to repeat for my benefit: “The Party has only one mission: the development of China.” His task is to explain this to the villagers. The country comes first, then the village. This means ensuring an inexhaustible supply of cheap, obedient labor for the factories. As soon as girls and boys turn sixteen, Lu urges them to leave the Pagoda of the Phoenix and sell their labor elsewhere. The district Party has set for him an annual quota of emigrants in accordance with age, sex, and qualifications. The quotas are based on the needs of the industry and service sectors in the cities and the distant East. If Lu fails to meet his quota, the Party will punish him with a fine or a demotion. However, as the young leave the village even before they are asked to, Lu doesn’t have a problem.
Parents, too, are eager for their children to go. Teenagers who remain in the village are deemed good for nothing. If they emigrate, the families hope they will send back a portion of their earnings. Some do; others disappear without a trace. Very few children come back to take care of their parents. The market economy has supplanted filial piety, once a cardinal Chinese virtue. The number of orphans increases by the day. Fathers go to work in far-off places and never return. Unable to raise their children alone, mothers emigrate in turn, or commit suicide by swallowing pesticide, a cheap poison freely available in the villages. Who is to pay for the education of the abandoned children? As soon as these children can, they, too, will join the 100 million—or is it 200 million?—migrants in search of work.