by Rob Gifford
5. “A Single Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire”
Three taxi drivers are standing smoking outside my hotel, waiting for a fare.
“I want to go west into Anhui province,” I tell the first one.
“Anhui?” The word drops from his tongue to the sidewalk, weighed down by five millennia of urban disdain.
“Yes, Anhui” (pronounced An-hway).
He repeats the name, then inhales audibly through his teeth, the sort of sound that is always followed by a dollar sign and a large number.
“Where in Anhui?”
“Hefei.”
He lightens up slightly. The regional capital is at least urban.
“Eight hundred renminbi.” About a hundred dollars.
“Tai gui le. Too expensive.” The mantra of the foreign traveler.
The next guy in line says the same, as does the next, so I decide to bypass their little three-man union and flag down a taxi on the street. He’s willing to do the journey for five hundred. Cheaper, but there’s one condition. His friend must come with him. In most countries, that is an immediate red flag to the traveler, so I ask him why.
“Because it’s too dangerous.”
“But there are no bandits on the roads. China is totally safe!”
“I’m not worried about bandits. I’m worried about the police,” he explains.
“The police?”
“Yes. They’re vicious. They stop any car from out of state, and it’s just safer if there are two in the car.”
This seems vaguely plausible, and so, tired of standing around, I agree. A deal now struck, we pull out onto Nanjing’s beautiful, tree-lined streets, drive over to pick up his friend, and head toward the Yangtze River.
It’s early morning. The rising sun embraces Nanjing in its heat and light, looking for all the world as though it belongs to China and not to its mortal enemy across the sea to the east. Morning is the best time in China, before all the layers of impossibility have piled themselves upon each other. Everything seems possible as a hot summer sun rises on a modern Chinese city.
Route 312 leaves Nanjing across the massive Yangtze River Bridge. Completed in 1968, the bridge enabled trains (and cars if there had been any) to travel in a straight line between Beijing and Shanghai for the first time. The lower level, holding the railroad, was always busier than the upper car deck. Now that is reversed, and there’s a bottleneck as we wait to get onto the bridge.
We cross the rolling, roiling Yangtze, which has swept down more than twenty-seven hundred miles from the Tibetan Plateau. Upstream, the Yangtze has been dammed by the largest hydroelectric project in the world, but here the river’s flow seems timeless and unchanging, passing frame by frame, in slow motion almost, hundreds of feet below the soaring bridge. The activity on land, by contrast, seems to be moving in fast forward.
“Real estate south of the river is too expensive,” explains my driver, motioning to the huge construction site on the north bank. “Everyone’s buying apartments north of the river now.”
The industrial smog lifts completely when you leave Nanjing behind. The air begins to smell different, a mingling of manure and woodsmoke. The sky is bluer, the leaves are greener. Suddenly this is rural China, and to the visitor, its colors and smells and rhythms are soothing after the organized chaos of the coastal cities and their suburbs.
Route 312 runs just south of an invisible line that cuts across eastern and central China. The line runs roughly along the thirty-third parallel and divides the country into two very different geographical regions: the dry wheat-and millet-growing areas of north China and the moist rice-growing areas of the south. The two regions are strikingly different in terms of rainfall, temperature, soil, and land usage. The road itself divides as it enters Anhui province, like a river flowing in reverse, upstream into its tributaries. The shiny new, four-lane Route 312 has taken much of the traffic off the old road. The old 312, one mile to the south, narrow and potholed, built for an earlier age, looks relieved that all the trucks heading west now take the freeway and it needs to deal only with local traffic.
The two roads are in many ways symbolic of the two Chinas that are emerging across the country. The new freeway, which cuts through the green fields without engaging with them in any way, is the road that the government wants everyone to see and use and marvel at. The old road, intimately connected with the lives of the villagers, is the one that tells the real story of rural China, and it’s a very different story from the dazzle camouflage of Shanghai and Nanjing.
Anhui is what the Chinese call a nongye dasheng, a “big agricultural province,” which is usually just a polite way of saying a place is very poor. It has been called the Appalachia of China.
Just after turning onto the old 312, we pass a man on a bicycle with a tall red flag attached to his saddle, waving in the wind as he rides, and a huge yellow sign attached to his back wheel. I ask my taxi driver to pull over, and I jump out to talk to the man. He tells me that his name is Wang Yongkang. The title on his big yellow sign reads ANTICORRUPTION JOURNEY ACROSS CHINA. He says he invested one hundred thousand U.S. dollars in a hotel in southern China but was cheated in the deal by corrupt government officials. The hotel was never built. With no way to get his money back, he says there is nothing he can do except protest in this way. Wang is cycling from the very south coast of China to Beijing, and our paths happen to have intersected. He says people support him wherever he goes and often stop him to offer encouragement.
“Every dynasty is the same,” he says. “It starts off well but then becomes corrupt. Everyone suffers. That’s why we need political reform.”
“Otherwise?” I raise my eyebrows, surprised at his frankness.
“Otherwise, the Party and the country will collapse in about ten years.” He wags his finger at me to emphasize his point.
“You see, in the West,” he says, “people have a moral standard that is inside them. It is built into them. Chinese people do not have that moral standard within them. If there is nothing external stopping them, they just do whatever they want for themselves, regardless of right and wrong.”
This is something that foreigners often feel in the Wild West atmosphere of boom-time China, though they are careful to whom they say it. We stand and chat a little longer. Then Wang climbs back on his bike, and I climb back into the car, and we both head off down the road.
Wang is playing out a certain role in Chinese history. Throughout the ages, there have been honest people, who have not wanted to follow the corrupt ways into which every dynasty eventually descends. They try to stand up against it, and they inevitably lose. They don’t change the political culture of China, they are crushed by it. One sign throughout Chinese history that the end of a dynasty is coming, or that a revolution is brewing, has always been honest officials or citizens performing brave but useless protests against the state. The other sign has always been angry peasants.
In 1926, an angry peasant named Mao Zedong left the central city of Wuhan and traveled back to his home province of Hunan, south of Anhui. Born into a moderately wealthy peasant family in 1893, Mao (whose name was formerly spelled Mao Tse-tung) had seen China’s attempts at republican government come to nothing and witnessed the collapse of the country after the 1912 Revolution. He was angered by China’s continued status as the Weak Man of Asia. Mao looked west to Russia and, in 1921, became one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party. But he then saw the Party struggle to gain support in Shanghai and other cities, partly because there were few urban proletariat to mobilize, and partly because the entrenched Chinese and foreign interests did not want to see grassroots activism on their streets and in their factories. As he traveled around rural Hunan in early 1927, Mao saw the desperate conditions inherited generation after generation by Chinese peasants, and they caused him to rethink completely how to spark the Communist revolution.
Mao realized that Communism would work in China only if he took it to the peasants. When he returned
from that visit, he wrote a prophetic report, parts of which have become legendary in the history of Chinese Communism:
Within a short time, hundreds of millions of peasants will rise in central, south, and north China with the fury of a hurricane. No force, no matter how strong, can restrain them. They will break all the shackles that bind them and rush toward the road of liberation.
Mao took Marxism and adapted it to the Chinese reality. There were few workers, but there were many peasants. They were oppressed by the landlords of the old ruling classes, starving and downtrodden, ripe for revolution. “A single spark can light a prairie fire,” wrote Mao in 1930.
It wasn’t the classic Marxism of urban revolution, but it worked. From 1927 until the day he stood in Tiananmen Square in 1949 and proclaimed the founding of Communist China, everything was about the peasants. During the 1930s and ’40s, even when the Communists were fighting against the invading Japanese, the peasants became the primary base of support for the revolution.
After 1949, Mao’s rural revolution went well for a few years. Landlords were overthrown, amid general rejoicing. But the land was never really given to the peasants. The Communist Party, insisting that it represented the people, became the new landlord, herding the peasants into communes.
Then, in the late 1950s, Mao launched his harebrained scheme to industrialize China at lightning speed in the movement known as the Great Leap Forward. Some 30 million people (30 million people!) are thought to have died simply because everyone had been mobilized to work on massive infrastructure projects and the production of steel and so the peasants were unable to gather in the harvest. Most of the steel produced was of such poor quality that it was unusable. Then, in 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in which he encouraged the young to rise up and attack the old, the foreign, and the bourgeois. Millions more lives were destroyed, but the importance of the peasants as models of loyalty and self-sacrifice was maintained throughout, and millions of urban intellectuals were sent to the countryside to learn from them.
Now, though, after more than thirty years of market reforms since Mao’s death, in 1976, the cycle of Chinese history has come around again. In the 1990s, the Communist Party began to abandon the farmers and ally itself with the new moneyed classes, the entrepreneurs and businessmen, the urban elite, for whom the farmers are just migrant factory fodder. Now, in the new century, even the urban taxi drivers look down on the rural people once again.
The town of Wugang feels empty, as though residents must have heard us coming and fled just a few hours before, leaving everything in place but untended. It’s a typical town along the old Route 312. Beside the road is a fading sign painted onto a wall in the Maoist era that reads SERVE THE PEOPLE. Above the street, a bright red banner with white characters on it has been hung. STRICTLY CRACK DOWN ON FAKE DOCTORS, it says. Trash blows along the sidewalks as the road tumbles through the center of town and out again into the countryside.
Here, as in much of rural China, there are new houses as well as the old mud and brick ones. The new residences are often built with remittances from relatives working in the cities. They are usually slightly futuristic two-story buildings, almost always clad from top to bottom in white tiles, and sometimes boast blue-tinted windows. They stand out like spaceships amid the greens and browns of rural China, proclaiming a newfound prosperity and a very symbolic break from traditional rural architecture. Their only nod to Chinese traditions are two small dragons facing each other at the apex of every roof, the humps of their long bodies rising and falling like a pair of Chinese Loch Ness monsters.
“If you don’t build a new house, you won’t be able to find a wife,” says my driver.
Just beyond Wugang, I ask the driver to pull over when I see a man harnessing a water buffalo to a plow a few yards from the road.
His name is Wu Faliang. He is sixty-six years old and has lived here all his life. His taut, wiry body looks twenty years younger, the legacy of decades in the field. His lined, weary face looks twenty years older, the legacy of his daily struggle to make ends meet. I walk up and down talking with him as he plows his field. Never mind the Industrial Revolution, this scene hasn’t changed in centuries. Wu’s shirt is ripped and soaked with sweat. His hands are callused. When he should be thinking of retiring, he must still come out to his half-acre of land and plant and harvest yellow beans.
Pity the poor, long-suffering Chinese peasants. This was supposed to be their revolution. They form the majority of the Chinese population (some 750 million people), and they have suffered longer and more deeply than anyone. They were promised so much. They were supposed to be liberated by this great experiment in social equality called Communism, but they have ended up back at the bottom of the pile. It is a betrayal of monumental proportions, considering the roots of the Communist revolution and its original aims, a betrayal that could end up having monumental consequences for the Communist Party.
“Life is poor here,” Wu says. “You can’t make a living off the land these days. Both my sons and their wives have gone to the city. I’m left looking after my grandchildren.” One of them, aged about seven, is standing nearby, watching his grandpa talk to me.
Wu Faliang whips the water buffalo as he walks it up and down the field and says there are two issues that most characterize the betrayal of the peasants by the Party: crushing taxes and landgrabs by local officials. Because China is urbanizing so rapidly, its cities are expanding fast. In order to expand, the cities need land. Farmers rent land on a long-term basis, but officially all Chinese land belongs to the state. So local officials, as supposed representatives of the state, have final say in what happens to the land within their jurisdiction. Now they are taking the land by force from the farmers and selling it to developers. Officials of the party that came to power promising to give land to the peasants are taking land from the peasants for their own personal gain.
The central government is opposed to the practice, knowing that it creates anger toward the Party among rural people. But without any checks and balances in the system, it is difficult for them to rein in the predatory local officials. Not without reason have the Chinese said for centuries that “the strong dragon is no match for the local snake.” Beijing launches occasional campaigns to try to persuade officials to be honest, and it will sometimes select particularly corrupt officials for punishment, but otherwise, land grabbing continues on the outskirts of almost every city in China.
The farmers are offered compensation for their land, but usually far below market rates, and if they object, local officials and developers hire thugs to beat them up and force them off the land. In 2005, a rural activist handed the Washington Post correspondent in Beijing a videotape that showed a pitched battle not far from the capital between a group of peasants and a band of thugs. The video looked like a scene from a medieval battlefield, with both sides wielding hoes, pitchforks, and other farm implements. The peasants had resisted official demands to give up their land to a state-owned power plant, and they accused the plant of hiring the thugs to clear them off the land. Several people were killed in the fighting.
Wu Faliang’s biggest problem, however, is not landgrabs but taxes. Road tax, population tax, grain tax, every kind of tax, applied rigidly, enforced ruthlessly. The loosening of Beijing’s direct controls on the provinces since the early 1990s has meant fewer central government subsidies for local officials, so if they cannot supplement their income through landgrabs, they do so in the time-honored manner of gouging the peasants for more taxes.
Occasionally here in Anhui, the farmers who have not left for the cities rise up. The Communist Party’s own statistics admit there were more than eighty thousand incidents of rural unrest in 2005, four times the number reported ten years before. From a few grannies demanding the payment of their pensions to tens of thousands of people protesting some huge construction project on their land, it is happening all over China. In 2006, the number decreased for the first time in a long wh
ile, suggesting a clampdown on rural demonstrations, as the Party leaders become more and more concerned about the powder keg of discontent in the countryside.
Wu Faliang takes a break from his work, leans on his plow, and points a dirty finger toward a nearby town beyond Wugang. Last year a group of farmers marched on the mayor’s office there, he says, demanding that their taxes be reduced. Scared by the possibility of unrest, the government used its usual carrot-and-stick approach with the protesters. Concede to some of the demands but round up the ringleaders once the situation has died down. “The leaders are still in prison,” says Wu.
Aware that the extraction of higher taxes was starting to cause major problems in the countryside, Beijing has announced with much fanfare that the hated agricultural tax—the money peasants pay to the central government based on the amount of land they work and the number of people in their families—would be eliminated. The policy was just being put into effect as I made my journey along Route 312, and some peasants I spoke to were very pleased with it. Wu Faliang admits there has been a reduction in taxes, but he brushes the sweat from his lined face and dismisses the policy with a flick of his gnarled brown hand. “You can reduce some taxes,” he says, “but there will always be others to pay. There is no respite.
“We, the people, Old Hundred Names, get no benefits from the Communist Party. It brings nothing good,” Wu goes on with a sneer. “And if you complain to the local officials, they will lock you up.”
For Americans, so much about their country is summed up in the first line of the Constitution: “We the People…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” “We the People” is what America is all about. For all the messy, money-soaked business of democracy, power in the United States is in the hands of the people. The Chinese have a direct equivalent of “We the People,” and you hear it every day of your life in China. Wo men, lao bai xing, they say, “we, Old Hundred Names.” But “we, Old Hundred Names” is never followed by grandiose statements of individual empowerment; it is usually followed by a lament of helplessness like that of Wu Faliang.