China Along the Yellow River: Reflections on Rural Society (Routledgecurzon Studies on the Chinese Economy)

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China Along the Yellow River This book, by leading Chinese sociologist Cao Jinqing, has had a major impact in its original Chinese version. Reviewed in the Far East Economic Review as ‘one of the richest portraits of the Chinese countryside published in the reform era’, the book charts a long journey through the hinterland region of the Yellow River undertaken by the author in 1996. It examines in exhaustive detail the lives and work of peasants, Party and local government officials, providing a wealth of data on the nature of life in post-reform rural China. The author argues that the current economic reforms in China have brought hardship for many small farmers in China’s interior. The latter, he says, are being driven almost beyond endurance by official corruption and excessive taxation; in the past they have frequently rebelled, and he questions whether they will do so again. Cao Jinqing was born in 1949 in Zhejiang province, Central China, and graduated as a mature student in philosophy from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1982. He now heads the Sociology Department at East China University of Science & Technology. This book is not his first publication but it is his first major work. It has sold widely in China, but is little known outside China. Nicky Harman graduated in Chinese at Leeds University in 1972. She currently teaches Chinese translation at Imperial College London, and translated K—The Art of Love by Hong Ying (Marion Boyars, 2002). Huang Ruhua was born in 1960 in Shanghai, Central China, and graduated in philosophy from Fudan University, Shanghai in 1982. Between 1985 and 1990, she lectured in Shanghai, and now lives and works in London.

RoutledgeCurzon Studies on the Chinese Economy

Series Editors Peter Nolan, University of Cambridge Dong Fureng, Beijing University

The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality, research-level work by both new and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of the Chinese economy, including studies of business and economic history. 1 The Growth of Market Relations in Post-Reform Rural China A Micro-Analysis of Peasants, Migrants and Peasant Entrepreneurs Hiroshi Sato 2 The Chinese Coal Industry An Economic History Elspeth Thomson 3 Sustaining China’s Economic Growth in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Shujie Yao and Xiaming Liu 4 China’s Poor Regions Rural-Urban Migration, Poverty, Economic Reform and Urbanisation Mei Zhang 5 China’s Large Enterprises and the Challenge of Late Industrialization Dylan Sutherland 6 China’s Economic Growth Yanrui Wu 7 The Employment Impact of China’s World Trade Organisation Accession A.S.Bhalla and S.Qiu 8 Catch-Up and Competitiveness in China

The Case of Large Firms in the Oil Industry Jin Zhang 9 Corporate Governance in China Jian Chen 10 The Theory of the Firm and Chinese Enterprise Reform The Case of China International Trust and Investment Corporation Qin Xiao 11 Globalisation, Transition and Development in China The Case of the Coal Industry Huaichuan Rui 12 China Along the Yellow River Reflections on Rural Society Cao Jinqing, translated by Nicky Harman and Huang Ruhua 13 Economic Growth, Income Distribution and Poverty Reduction in Contemporary China Shujie Yao

China Along the Yellow River Reflections on rural society Cao Jinqing

Translated by Nicky Harman and Huang Ruhua

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Huang He Biande Zhongguo first published 2000 by Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe Publishers English edition first published 2005 by RoutledgeCurzon 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016 RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Huang He Biande Zhongguo © 2000, 2005 Cao Jinqing Translation © 2005 Nicky Harman and Huang Ruhua All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data ISBN 0-203-48024-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67240-2 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-34113-2 (Print Edition)

Contents

Translators’ foreword NICKY HARMAN AND HUANG RUHUA Introduction: a Chinese ethnography of rural state and society RACHEL MURPHY, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD China along the Yellow River

viii

1 15

Notes

210

Appendix

213

Index

217

Translators’ foreword

Cao Jinqing was born in 1949 in Zhejiang Province, central China, and graduated as a mature student in philosophy from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1982. He now heads the Sociology Department at East China University of Science & Technology. China Along the Yellow River (Huang He Biande Zhongguo) was published by the Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe Publishers in 2000. It was the second of a pair of books written by Professor Cao on the theme of changing society in rural China, the first focusing on northern Zhejiang Province and this, the second, on Henan Province. The book has received acclaim in China among academics and non-academics alike: by the end of 2003, it had been reprinted eleven times and sold over 49,000 copies. China Along the Yellow River, as published in the Chinese, is a book of considerable length, running to 775 pages. When we first discussed translation, it was immediately apparent that this would have to be an abridged version. The question then was how to cut it. The original book falls into two clearly defined sections: the first one-third covers Cao’s first field trip to Henan, in the summer of 1996; the last two-thirds covers his second trip, in the autumn of that year. We chose to cut the first section of the book in its entirety, but that still left us with 500-odd pages. We then decided to leave out or shorten some of Cao’s historical references and to omit some of the accounts of lectures or talks which he gave while in Henan. We were also reluctantly forced to leave out or shorten other material, interesting and relevant though it was, in order to achieve the required length. We have retained the diary format in which the book is written, but have omitted each day’s dates since the process of abridging means that some days are necessarily missing from the English. Cao Jinqing chose, in some places, to refer to people and places by name, and in other places to hide their identity by giving them an initial letter. We have in general adhered to his practice. The translators: Nicky Harman graduated in Chinese at Leeds University in 1972. She currently teaches on the MSc in Scientific, Technical and Medical Translation at Imperial College London, and translated K—The Art of Love by Hong Ying (London: Marion Boyars, 2002). Huang Ruhua was born in 1960 in Shanghai and, like Cao Jinqing, graduated in philosophy from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1982. Between 1985 and 1990 she lectured in Shanghai, and then moved to England where she has settled in London. The book came into Huang Ruhua’s hands in 2002 at a twenty-year class reunion at Fudan University. Both of us were immediately taken by the richness of the materials it contained, its engaging style and thought-provoking analysis. We began our work

without having found a publisher, and so were more than delighted when Routledge Curzon agreed to publish it as part of their China series. Nicky Harman and Huang Ruhua

Map 1 China with its provinces

Map 2 Places visited by the author

Introduction

A Chinese ethnography of rural state and society Rachel Murphy, University of Oxford

According to Cao Jinqing, the Chinese intelligentsia, himself included, is ‘fond of talking about political reform’ but has ‘not the faintest idea about what [is] really happening on the ground’. Cao, a Shanghai-based professor of sociology, decided to address the situation, and the result is this book. Although he is writing about Chinese problems for his compatriots, the vivid anecdotes and critical reflections make this a compelling read for a non-Chinese audience too. Cao rejects outright Western social science theories. He notes astutely that in the twentieth century such theories were not only inadequate for understanding rural China, but also a tool for formulating and realising top-down programmes for social transformation, with often disastrous consequences. He elects therefore to conduct an open-structured ethnography of the state and society in the countryside. Cao travels to the agricultural interior province of Henan with the following questions: How does one modernise? What are the obstacles to political and economic modernisation in rural China? What are the consequences of this failure to modernise for the well-being of the farmers? Despite his suspicion of theoretical models, Cao’s questions and assumptions nevertheless necessarily place him within an intellectual tradition, in his case one which has roots in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The May Fourth scholars brought the concept of modernisation to the forefront of the Chinese consciousness. They felt that the nation needed to be invigorated to deal with the challenges of warlordism and foreign imperialism. One of the scholars of the time, Liang Shuming, had a clear impact on Cao’s work—indeed, Cao has edited and annotated collections of his papers. Like Cao, Liang was concerned with bringing modernisation to rural China, and like Cao he rejected topdown and coercive modernisation in favour of the establishment of rural democratic institutions through which farmers would receive modern education and knowledge and would be guided in finding their own way to modernity. Later, during the 1930s, Liang tried out his ideas by pioneering the Rural Reconstruction Movement in the Shandong countryside.1 Ever since the May Fourth Movement, and particularly following the devastation of the revolutionary modernism of the Mao era, Chinese scholars have tried earnestly to uncover the elements of traditional Chinese culture, values and institutions that might explain continuing economic backwardness and political despotism. Their attention has

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turned repeatedly to the countryside as the repository of Chinese tradition. For example, like the authors of the iconoclastic documentary series River Elegy, screened on China Central Television Station in 1988, Cao argues that the Yellow River symbolises the erratic and earth-oriented character of the Chinese people, and sees an insular land-fixed agricultural society as the source of inertia. Like them also, Cao intimates that just as the floods have plagued rural people throughout history because of their reliance of the Yellow River, so their incapacity to sever the bonds of tradition has inhibited national modernisation. But whereas the River Elegy intellectuals saw the answer to be modernisation through Westernisation, Cao, writing after a further decade of market reforms, feels that he has no answers, only more and more questions. Many of these questions are bold, courageous and hugely provocative. For example, some five decades after Communist liberation, he echoes the concerns of his interlocutors, asking: what is socialism and how does one build it? Although holding very different views about the implications of rural Chinese culture and social institutions for national modernisation, and although stressing political practices rather than social life, Cao’s research method inevitably invites comparisons with that of China’s pioneering rural sociologist, Fei Xiaotong. Both scholars share a conviction that rural China must be understood on its own terms. Each is sceptical about the value of armchair theorising and is committed to careful first-hand empirical research as a way of generating explanations and concepts relevant to the Chinese situation.2 This is not cultural chauvinism, but a genuine intellectual response to the limitations of a body of academic social and political theory that draws overwhelmingly on Western historical experiences of modernity and change. Motivated by a conviction that any adequate theorising of China’s rural problems requires intensive observation, Cao devotes several months to talking with the footsoldiers of the Chinese state—county, township and village level cadres, family planning workers, teachers, agricultural extension agents and Party School officials. He also listens carefully to farmers’ accounts of their interactions and negotiations with these footsoldiers—their everyday experiences of the state that exist alongside the image of the state as a coherent and all-powerful entity above and beyond the locality.3 The narratives in Cao’s ethnography are replete with grievances and incisive political commentary that seldom receive space in the Chinese media because they are so controversial and because it is an altogether radical idea that rural people could have anything meaningful to say. But Cao not only listens to the people, he also speaks. As is traditional for the Chinese intellectual, and in some senses following Liang Shuming’s ideas about the role of intellectuals in rural reform, Cao tries to encourage enlightenment among those he meets. Cao’s personal style for doing this involves inviting them to join his reflection on questions, giving public lectures about his contemplations, and inviting his audience to comment on and continue the discussion. Part of the reason that Cao’s ethnography is so rich and engaging is that he is as much a pupil as an educator, and this makes him a truly humanistic scholar. He engages in dialogue with rural people on an equal footing, giving primacy to their voices, treating them as people who can interpret situations and problems in ways that are as valid as his own. He never explains or imposes his own truth on people’s voices—he only ever contextualises their words and invites further contemplation. The self-reflexive nature of his prose encourages the reader to understand rather than to judge the difficulties and the

Introduction

3

aspirations of people who are caught up in an impossibly complicated and oppressive bureaucratic system, one that they have little choice but to perpetuate if they as individuals are to survive. Cao’s dialogic method is wholly consistent with his moral insistence that government and development in rural China need to be by the people rather than for them. Cao is particularly troubled by the ways in which the household farming economy and the authoritarian political system reinforce socio-psychological tendencies entrenched among the peasants, such as a narrow focus on their own interests rather than on a wider collective good and an expectation that leaders will intercede on their behalf rather than a desire to direct their own development and governance. He asks a question which he provocatively says has remained unresolved from the May Fourth Movement: how can farmers organise and stand up for themselves? Cao’s careful survey of the countryside presents us with a particularly intriguing puzzle. Farmers have undoubtedly experienced very real improvements in their living standards since the communes were dismantled and land was parcelled out to households in the early 1980s. This reform enhanced the incentives for farmers to produce and led to substantial increases in harvests. Continuing improvement such as the development of high-yielding crop varieties, pesticides and irrigation in some areas have led to per unit output that is six times 1950s levels. Farmers have also been pursuing off-farm earning opportunities on an unprecedented scale, particularly through migration to the cities, injecting huge amounts of cash into the rural economy. Nowadays most mud and thatched houses have been replaced by brick houses, and many rural households buy consumer goods. Yet there has been widespread and mounting unrest. Tensions between farmers and officials have become so acute that even Cao, a Chinese native, experienced immense difficulty in conducting his research, with local officials fearing that he might cause too many farmers to vent their spleen, or that he would turn out to be a journalist. Cao suspected that if he conducted his research through official channels he would not be able to participate in the open and honest conversations that he so values. So he relied on the informal introductions of his network of friends, students and colleagues in the Kaifeng Party School. Cao’s writing style might seem unconventional to a Western audience used to social science books which construct an argument and delineate key themes. Cao’s book is more a journal of his wandering and reflections; he invites the reader to travel with him to meet new people and to visit places of interest, all the while interleaving observation with analysis. But it is nevertheless coherent and engaging because his reflections centre on varied aspects of the problem of modernisation, arguing that ‘genuine modernisation’, whatever that might mean, is essential if the simmering dissent in the countryside is to abate. In the sections that follow I highlight the three main themes which I see as being central to Cao’s explorations of the problems of modernisation in rural China: economic well-being, the local state apparatus, and the socio-cultural traits of the Chinese peasantry.

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Economic well-being Most of the farmers that Cao chats with in rural Henan admit that since the economic reforms of the early 1980s there have been big improvements in their economic wellbeing. They talk of these improvements in terms of everyone being able to feed and clothe themselves. But quite clearly, as far as Cao and the farmers are concerned, these historical improvements in economic circumstances are not enough to get rid of widespread dissatisfaction. Cao’s reflections enable us to detect three reasons for this. First, farmers have an unprecedented need for cash owing to their increasing involvement in the market economy, state retreat from direct involvement in welfare provisioning, and a heavy tax burden. Second, people do not define their economic well-being in absolute terms, or in relation to the past, but in relative terms, through comparison with their neighbours. Finally, while the consumerist images of the new market economy have raised expectations, structural features of the rural economy such as small plots, poor infrastructure and low levels of industrial development impede efforts to modernise, and so these expectations remain unfulfilled. To take the first theme: while there have been dramatic reductions in the numbers of people living in absolute poverty as well as sizeable increases in average per capita income, rural people face an expanding need for cash. A closer look at the composition of farmers’ incomes reveals part of the problem. Although official figures show ever-rising rural incomes, these include income-in-kind in the form of grain and other agricultural produce. Rural households eat roughly half of what they produce. But for practical or economic reasons it may not be possible for them to sell the excess, so their realised income is less than that indicated by official figures. In provinces that rely more heavily on agriculture, such as Henan, a greater proportion of the province’s notional gross domestic product is unrealised in cash form. Increasing taxes, fees and levies are the most politically contentious drain on peasants’ cash resources. This ‘farmers’ burden’ has risen steadily because fiscal decentralisation has intensified pressure on lower levels of governments to increase locally sourced revenue. Previously all revenue was surrendered to the centre, with a portion redistributed down through the state apparatus to the local level as a budgetary allocation. But more recently, in addition to a national tax contribution, counties and townships have become responsible for raising a substantial part of their own revenue for expenditure on overheads, administrators’ salaries, welfare provisioning and public works.4 In 1994 further decentralisation requiring county and township governments to ‘eat in separate kitchens’ has meant that township governments are no longer able to rely on the county to help with funding.5 Each level squeezes the one below, and ultimately the farmers bear the brunt. Although regulations stipulate that the taxes and fees imposed on farmers cannot exceed 5 per cent of a village’s annual per capita income for the previous year, an overwhelming array of taxes and fees, many of them arbitrary, means that in some locations up to 40 per cent of farmers’ income is expropriated by local officials. Cao observes that in eastern Henan Province, ‘the standard of living of a large proportion of peasants has not only not risen; it has fallen under the pressure of ever-increasing agricultural levies’.

Introduction

5

Following the erosion of the collective welfare net that accompanied decollectivisation, the costs of health and education have been transferred to individuals. Health is often described as the only asset of the rural poor.6 When illness or injury strike, farmers must pay for the consultation and medicine themselves, commonly plummeting a household into destitution. School fees are another much resented drain on household cash reserves. Although teachers’ salaries are the largest area of expenditure at the township level, local governments in agricultural counties commonly lack the revenue needed to meet all the school’s operating expenses. At the primary school level around 10 per cent of a household’s cash income goes to pay school fees and related expenses, while senior high school fees can push households into debt. Farmers also need cash to buy inputs for their land. This burden is exacerbated by the ‘price scissors’: they receive lower prices for their agricultural produce while paying higher prices for industrial goods such as fertiliser, fuel and tools. A further need for cash is to build houses, accumulate bride-prices and dowries, give gifts for lifecycle celebrations and buy consumer goods. This brings us to the second theme concerning rural livelihoods—how integration into a market economy and the widespread diffusion of a consumer model of modernisation interact with an existing cultural need to have ‘face’, propelling competitive consumption. For decades Maoist autarky closed out information about consumer goods and tried to create an alternative model of progress based on socialism and ideological superiority. But with economic reforms, an expansion in televisions and migration to the cities, farmers have increasingly equated modernisation with money and commodities. The cultural model of modernisation7 causes much dissatisfaction in part because the goal posts are forever moving. Here it is useful to recall Amartya Sen’s insight that as the wealth of a society increases, so does the absolute value of resources needed for living without shame and for participating in community life.8 In rural Henan this is particularly evident in the activity of house-building—‘the battleground of social status’. Young men need nice houses to attract brides, while families need grand houses to win the esteem of their neighbours. As declared by the owner of a newly built mansion: ‘What is the point in being overtaken by someone else the moment your own new house is built?’. Even in poor townships officials feel the burden of rising standards, and they require a tarmac street, a shiny two-storey office block, two black Santana cars, some mobile phones and modern office equipment before they can function with face. The degree to which people can achieve the material benefits of modernisation is affected by the location and the sector of their employment. During the socialist planning era, the household registration system divided settlements and populations into rural and urban. Rural areas were subsequently subjected to an ongoing process of marginalisation involving structural inequalities and the constant outflow of financial and capital resources. Rural people endured mobility restrictions, mandatory delivery quotas and low prices for agricultural produce, while urban people received priority investment, services and benefits for their role in industrialisation. In the reform era, the nation has been pursuing an export-led development strategy characterised by preferential investment in coastal and urban regions. People in agricultural interior provinces are widely frustrated by their inability to share in the material benefits of modernisation. For many, the valve to alleviate this frustration is rural-urban migration.

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Rural-urban labour migration in China now forms the largest peacetime movement of people in the history of the world. Even though rural people are confined to dirty, dangerous and low-paying jobs and are denied access to urban health, education and welfare services, they still see migration as the best way to improve their lot. They send home money to help their families and to prepare for their own future return. If deployed in the city, this money would not change their lowly status, but when transferred to the home community they are able to demonstrate their socioeconomic progress in tangible ways—for example, a motorbike, a new house and even a small business. Less optimistically, though, migration also causes people to form new expectations which may be thwarted by the circumstances of rural life.9 Individuals with political contacts are most able to pursue lucrative off-farm earning opportunities within the rural locality: for example, employment in a government office or rural enterprise or involvement in entrepreneurship. Some individuals with official connections even resort to corruption: for example, the members of village and township committees commonly cream off money from local construction projects. Villagers note resentfully their ill-gotten gains such as cars, motorbikes, commodity housing, liquor and cigarettes. Farming households that lack off-farm income are generally the worst off. They live in the shabbiest houses and face the greatest problems in meeting production costs and participating in the social life of their communities. Because migrant remittances and offfarm income are included in calculations for annual per capita income, farming households also face increased taxes despite lacking the off-farm money. Cao gives much consideration to the question of how to modernise the rural economy to ensure good living standards for all. He observes that the modernisation of agriculture is hindered because under the household farming system plots are small and scattered. In Hunan Province the per capita allocation of land is a mere 1.2 mu, and in many villages farmers have as little as 0.5 mu: for reference, 1 mu equals 0.067 hectares (0.1647 acres), and 0.3–0.4 mu of good-quality land is required to meet the subsistence needs of one adult. An additional consideration is that efforts to distribute good and bad land equitably mean that a single household’s land usually consists of small scattered plots. These make experimentation with new crops risky and mechanisation unfeasible, and farmers who use superior seeds commonly find that their crops become contaminated by the surrounding inferior varieties. A further problem is that the land tenure is insecure and so farmers are reluctant to invest in soil preparation and irrigation: the land belongs to the collectives, with the farmers retaining only land use rights, and despite a national policy of no changes to land contracts for thirty years, many collectives readjust allocations to take into account changes in household composition. According to Cao, a longer-term vision for rural economic modernisation necessitates transformation on and off the farm: creating farms of scale and moving people out of agriculture into factories and towns. Cao says that for political and practical reasons, it is not feasible to return to the large communal farms of the past. He calculates that efficient family farms would require a minimum of 10 mu of arable land per person, which would necessitate 80 to 90 per cent of the rural populace leaving the land. He suggests that this transformation could occur through labour migration to the cities and through the creation of local rural enterprises and towns. But he notes that the insecurity of off-farm employment and the villagers’ need to hold on to their land for a welfare net preclude

Introduction

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both the privatisation of land and the consolidation of plots into farms of scale. Cao also shows that the industrial sectors in interior agricultural provinces generally lack the investment, information and management skills to provide employment secure enough for farmers to leave the land on a permanent basis. Instead, agriculture commonly provides enough portion of subsistence for the rural workforce to provide a competitive basis for township and village industries by depressing labour costs. Cao’s deliberations on modernising the rural economy reveal numerous catch–22s, while demonstrating amply the urgent need for a way beyond the impasse if the rural economy is to keep apace of rising expectations.

The local-state: top-down government for the people Cao’s analysis of the problems of modernising government in rural China focuses on the top-down nature of the Party-state and that government is for rather than by the people. He shows that the Party-state reaches throughout rural Chinese society by means of a complicated network of vertical structures, manned by masses of cadres who are equipped with knowledge of the latest policies and are conversant with the language of socialism and modernisation. As expounded by Vivienne Shue, at each level there are both a Party cell to formulate policies and provide ideological guidance and government functionaries to implement the policies, with much practical overlap between the two.10 Cao’s survey shows that when looking downwards, Party-state officials at the levels of the county, township and village enjoy substantial power. But when looking upwards, they face tightly defined responsibilities and all manner of quotas. This means that officials often use their power to pressure farmers to meet targets so that they can obtain rewards from within the Party-state. Conversely it enables them to use their position in the Party-state to pursue self-interest within their administrative domains. Cao’s observations and reflections yield much original and insightful information about the vertical structure of the Party-state, its detrimental impact on the well-being of farmers and the need for political modernisation. The segment of the vertical structure of the Party-state most influential in farmers’ daily lives is the township and village governments. The township governments follow plans devised and directed by the county government in the areas of education, family planning, land use, economic development, tax collection and public security. Cao shows that cadres at this level are the most feared and hated because they are seen as ‘corrupt bullies’—the source of the unrelenting fees, fines, taxes and demands that plague farmers’ lives. Part of the reason that they continually stretch out their hands to the peasantry is because their work tasks are so numerous that they employ large numbers of managers and subordinates who need salaries and perks of the job such as mobile phones and entertainment expenses. Township cadres are usually outsiders who work at the grassroots for a few years to ‘temper’ themselves before progressing up and out, and so they have very different loyalties to village cadres who are members of their communities and reluctant to offend neighbours and kin. This means that for township cadres, directives from above take precedence over public opinion from below. But this is not to say that they are totally impervious to village opinion. Implementing policy needs the co-operation of villagers,

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and too much social unrest can impact negatively on career evaluations. So township cadres sometimes soften their stance on thorny issues such as family planning and tax collection, but then face the risk of reprimand from the county government for a lax work-style and failure to meet targets. Villages are designated as self-governing, with Villagers’ Committees entrusted to help organise villagers in promoting the construction of socialism. In practice, this means managing village affairs and helping the township to oversee agricultural production, economic development and tax collection, as well as co-ordinating various public works projects such as repairing irrigation channels. While in theory the Party should confine itself to advising and supervising the villagers as they self-govern and manage community affairs, in reality the Party has the final say in all matters. This final say is articulated through the unelected figure of the Village Party Secretary and through the influence of the township official stationed to oversee work in each village. Prior to the 1990s Village Committees were essentially appointed by the township government, but since then, at different times in different counties, the committees have been elected by the adult population (the village representative assemblies) from candidates put forward by the villagers themselves. Although decentralisation and community empowerment might be seen in terms of retracting vertical control, Cao shows that the substance of self-governance continues to be limited to carrying out the work tasks handed down from above. Giving villagers the power to supervise grassroots administrators and to overturn local abusers is merely a way to make them more willing to meet various targets for taxes, crop production and fertility limitation.11 Cadres at each level of the Party-state attach much importance to topdown work tasks because attaining or surpassing quotas directly affects their personal advancement.12 County and township cadres who perform well stand a better chance of being assigned to a good location and institution and to a higher level on their next posting. For many toplevel cadres, reappointments to new locations and institutions occur every two to seven years, creating pressures on them to generate visible economic results within a relatively short time period. Village cadres also prioritise quota completion because they regularly host township inspection teams and are rewarded by good relations with higher-level officials and salary bonuses. Cadres at all levels who fail to reach targets risk public criticism. Cao’s ethnography of the local state reveals that it is precisely because cadres’ horizontal latitude for promoting modernisation, managing fiscal resources and arbitrating daily affairs is exercised within a vertical power monopoly that the worst aspects of governing practices occur. These include forcing farmers to reach production and tax targets, falsely reporting economic achievements, initiating investment in wasteful prestige projects, and engaging in corruption. Township and village cadres commonly force farmers to plant crops that the county government has identified as a ‘winner’. Crops are chosen with scant consideration of local soil and weather conditions, market trends and inherited agricultural knowledge.13 Many agricultural ventures are selected because the county government seeks to imitate the successful example of another county. Other crops such as cotton and tobacco are promoted because the government enjoys a monopoly on purchasing and marketing and can levy a heavy ‘special agricultural tax’. Farmers lose from these projects for two reasons. First, a multitude of households suddenly switching to a particular crop causes

Introduction

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the costs for the raw production materials to go up and the prices for the crop itself to fall. Second, farmers must pay special taxes for the crop even if they elect not to grow it or they are unable to sell it. Similar targets are sent down for developing rural industries. Cao describes how, in one county, the cadres heard about the success of glass factories in a nearby locality and so required all villages and townships to set up glass factories. Village and township cadres duly found ways to produce the physical fact of a factory, squeezing the peasants and incurring substantial financial debt. But as with so many of these schemes, the end result was a trail of failed businesses. Cao laments that this top-down one-size-fits-all approach to economic development stifles innovation and creativeness. He points out that even the design of streets, buildings and offices occurs within the context of narrow ideas about what constitutes modernisation. He notes regretfully that the unique character of China’s modernisation, that it is ‘officially ordered’ and ‘copied’, is evident in the dull uniformity of rural towns. Cao’s incisive critique of top-down governance extends to an examination of officials’ falsification and exaggeration of economic achievements and their wasteful investment in short-term showcasing projects. He shows that the pressure on high-level county cadres to produce rapid results causes them to demand investment in flashy display schemes such as greenhouses, forests, cattle-raising, market squares, dams and roads, with little care for how these are to be funded or how the products are to be sold. He explains that figures for agricultural output and increases in rural incomes are routinely manipulated, and he tells stories of township cadres committing themselves to tax revenue contributions they cannot possibly hope to honour and then taking out bank loans so that they save face in front of the higher levels. He alludes repeatedly to the potentially devastating human costs of this kind of falseness and misrepresentation through his questions about the famine of Xinyang (1960–2) and his accounts of people’s refusal to answer them. Official corruption is the most politically volatile of bad governing practices in rural China, and Cao says that it is likely to lead to a complete breakdown in relations between cadres and the masses. Corruption is endemic because in the absence of any wider commitment to shared ideals such as to the socialist goal of common prosperity, officials use their tremendous and unchecked power over subordinates and farmers to pursue their aspirations for career advancement and money. Cao observes that the disciplinary mechanisms are ineffectual because they exist under the direction of the local Party committees, and that cadres deal with the Party-state’s internal system of monitoring in the same way as under the planned economy—through distortions and fabrications. Cao’s interlocutors explain that corruption is now so entrenched within the Party-state apparatus that it is seen as the norm. As one of his informants observes, ‘Everybody thinks that all officials are corrupt. So what is the point of being squeaky clean? It’s getting the worst of both worlds.’ Even though bad governing practices pervade the Chinese countryside causing immense suffering and resentment among farmers, Cao’s approach of letting the cadres speak for themselves prevents the readers from simplistically dismissing them as parasites and oppressors. Their words let us see their motivations, frustrations, difficulties and humanity. Many of them want some purpose to their jobs beyond forcing women to have abortions, levying taxes and fabricating achievements. They say that they feel

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demoralised by the absence of conviction in what they are doing and that they are searching for a purpose to their work. They would like to be real local leaders who make plans that suit the needs of local people. Many are genuinely distressed by farmers’ suffering. For instance, there are several instances of village cadres and soldiers taking the lead to repair dyke and river banks. Yet the bureaucracy is one of the few avenues for socio-economic mobility in interior agricultural provinces, and the vertical power structure is such that cadres must pay bribes to higher-level officials to hold on to their jobs and they must oppress farmers to reach targets. They must also, necessarily, operate within the ideological constraints about what their superiors and subordinates recognise as modernisation—high yields of cash crops, factories, roads, shiny buildings and even dancing lessons as part of cadres’ training! But Cao argues that true modernisation requires political modernisation. He argues that a material appearance of modernisation is not modernisation, because people need standards of behaviour that are also modern. In the case of rural cadres this involves instituting honest, open and democratic governing. Cao explores the options for achieving good governance. One involves appointing benevolent leaders. He discusses instances of local cadres who have worked to promote the prosperity of the farmers. But he implicitly suggests that this model cannot be applied throughout China because it depends on a charismatic leader and personal authority and is still government for rather than by the people. Another option involves professionalising the ranks of the bureaucracy, inculcating in them the expert knowledge needed for overseeing economic modernisation and the moral principals necessary for good governance. But here I would caution that in the absence of structural democratisation, specialist training only serves to reinforce the top-down, despotic and pastoral aspects of the current regime of governing, which are the main targets of Cao’s insightful critique. This is because such professional training legitimates the current system of government for instead of by the people. The cadres, who were originally supposed to be part of the people, become professional elites who increasingly define themselves in terms of their superior understanding of modernisation and development and their distance from the ‘feudal’, ‘conservative’ and ‘backward’ rural masses. Meanwhile, even with their training, the work of these educated cadres continues to centre on the top-down enforcement of abortion and tax quotas. Pessimistically, Cao suggests that true political modernisation—government by rather than for the people—is unlikely to occur because of the resistance of a vested interest group, the cadres, and because farmers do not know how to organise and demand political modernisation. This brings us to the last strand of Cao’s analysis into why rural China is failing to modernise: the inherent socio-cultural traits of the farmers themselves.

The socio-cultural characteristics of the farmers For many Western readers, Cao’s attention to the social and cultural traits of Chinese farmers may well be the most contested and controversial aspect of his analysis. Cao considers how their cultural values and customary modes of social interaction underpin ‘low economic returns and political corruption in rural China’. Reflecting an education

Introduction

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that must have incorporated Chinese Marxist theory, Cao differs from Fei Xiaotong in that he sees the small farmer mode of production as responsible for a conservative and narrow outlook rather than as a potential source of entrepreneurial vision, and he sees rural modes of social association as the reason for endemic corruption rather than as the potential wellspring for a uniquely Chinese form of civility and modernisation. Cao accepts the Communist Party’s view that, historically, the small farmer mode of production underpinned a feudal and stagnant economy. Households tilled their small plots and relied on family-based networks to secure all the resources that they needed. Their preoccupation with ensuring full stomachs and protecting the narrow range of interests affecting their families prevented them from challenging either the political or economic status quo. Cao is troubled by the idea that decollectivisation and a return to the age-old system of household farming might encourage the perpetuation of the narrow ‘little peasant’ mentality. He argues that because of this insular mode of production and its attendant mindset, Chinese farmers are unable to organise. He observes that they fail to co-ordinate common-good projects such as irrigation repairs, and relates numerous cases of rival clans fighting over water and land rights. He further notes that villagers are unable to organise to stand up for their political and democratic rights. This focus on the inability of farmers to organise echoes concerns from the May Fourth Movement. Sun Yat-Sen referred to the peasants as a plate of loose grains of sand that needed to be forged into an iron weapon, while Lu Xun described them as grasshoppers which, if only they were organised, could make their power felt. While Cao’s analysis of household farming certainly highlights some of the problems in co-ordinating economic and political projects for the common good, recent scholarship by both Chinese and Western researchers is more optimistic about the innovative potential and dynamism of the household mode of production. Francesca Bray, Hill Gates, Kenneth Pomeranz and others argue that historically rural Chinese households were entrepreneurial, deploying their labour and resources creatively and engaging in a wide range of commercial and trading networks every bit as dynamic as those in Europe.14 The implications of this analysis are that rural people and social institutions are not so inert and inadaptable, and that rural people are capable of reworking cultural values and organisational forms to pursue their needs in a changing world. It also suggests that modernisation does not necessarily require the complete eradication of farmers through urbanisation and industrialisation but could also involve petty commodity family producers diversifying their economic activities and responding in entrepreneurial ways to new constraints and opportunities.15 The forms of social organisation that the farmers are able to achieve—kinship networks and clan associations—are seen by Cao as dubious. Following the dismantling of the commune system and the collective security net in the early 1980s, clans and other kinship connections which had been subordinate to state structures started to play a more prominent role in the rapidly expanding market and in society at large. As Cao describes, these groups are now openly organising activities to enhance the group identification of their members and to demonstrate group strength to others, in particular building ancestral halls and compiling genealogies. He sees the emergence of these groups as retrograde—as a return to a feudal and patriarchal mode of organisation—and as a phenomenon that reinforces insular social worlds and frustrates modernising efforts to

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impose progressive values and forms of political participation. For example, he notes that clans often act as vote banks in village elections. Here the influence of Liang Shuming is apparent: like Cao, Liang, writing in the 1920s and 1930s, lamented that clans and other parochial associational forms fell far short of the modern democratic organisations needed to enable rural people to solve their own problems in enlightened ways and to strengthen rural society vis-à-vis the state.16 More generally, Cao argues that particularistic kinship-type social connections impede ‘the spread of modern political, economic and ethical relationships, and the development of the concepts of citizenship and the individual in society’. In the realm of the economy, people are accustomed to giving gifts and participating in the reciprocal exchange of favours as a way of circumventing the obstacles which impede their own narrow interests. This encourages corruption and militates against the emergence of a system of social relationships where people function as equal and independent individuals who honour contracts and respect laws. In politics, Cao argues that villagers’ habit of drawing on connections to solve their problems prevents the realisation of the precursor to political democracy which is ‘social democracy’, the ability of people to get together and manage common problems in ways that recognise the rights and interests of everyone. He argues that instead of acting for themselves, ordinary rural people are accustomed to going up the ladder to find someone to act on their behalf, and that their inability to create democratic institutions to represent themselves lies at the heart of continuing corruption. Other scholars emphasise the positive contributions of particularistic relationships to socio-economic development. Wu Bin’s careful study in rural Shaanxi reveals that kinship networks are the main source of information, resources and support needed for diversifying production, but that this innovative potential is frequently unrealised because of local geographic, political and policy constraints.17 And Lily Lee Tsai shows that clan networks can be an important source of social capital for community welfare and public works provisioning.18 Cao, however, would contend that in a modern and civilised society, these roles would be filled by institutions which are more democratic and in which human relationships and statuses are less ascriptive. Politically, scholars such as Andrew Kipnis, Mayfair Yang, Ming-Cheng M.Lo and Eileen M.Otis suggest that far from polluting all social exchanges in the market economy, traditional modes of interaction provide moral standards for associational life.19 According to this view, moral standards create shared expectations about civility and obligation. For example, the idiom of kinship in social relationships contains norms which curtail excessive abuse. Indeed, Lo and Otis suggest that this is part of the reason that corruption in China is not as severe as in other post-socialist societies,20 and Cao himself acknowledges that corruption and rent-seeking practices in China are not as bad as in some ‘democratic’ developing countries, for example India. Yang, Lo, Otis and others also argue that in China kinship-type social relationships create associational spaces which people can use to circumvent the constraints of monolithic state structures. An obvious example would include the ways in which Cao Jinqing himself has worked through the informal networks of the Kaifeng Party School to conduct his research and engage in political discussion. This suggests that China’s particular history has produced a culture of civility and an associational life different to those found in the West, but ones which may nevertheless perform the same kinds of social and political functions.21

Introduction

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Cao argues forcefully that rural China needs democracy and an impersonal civil society to counteract the pervasiveness of particularistic ties and that forging them requires looking both outwards and inwards. He suggests, rather like Liang Shuming, that looking only outwards is unsatisfactory because when outside modern values and democratic institutions are imposed on the Chinese polity, they are alien to the consciousness and culture of the people, so sit on the surface like oil on water. At the same time, Cao repudiates China’s traditional modes of social interaction, and so dismisses potential endogenous sources of an alternative modernity and civil society. Indeed, in the case of rural China, these networks may well provide one of the most promising possibilities for forging the horizontal linkages that are badly needed to counterbalance the vertical state penetration that is so pronounced in interior agricultural provinces. Cao himself has no answers about how elements of the internal and external might in practice contribute to government by rather than for the people. His only firm conclusions are that the voices of rural people need to be heard and that there are more and more questions. Not coming up with answers is consistent with Cao’s thesis that previous answers to ‘the problem of rural China’ were not helpful because they were not derived from within the Chinese context, and that the way forward must begin with an in-depth and considered understanding of the questions. Indeed, a key finding of Cao’s research and contemplation is that solutions have failed throughout the twentieth century because they were based on an inadequate understanding of the problems. Cao has clearly succeeded in his quest to interrogate and to stir up debate about the meaning of modernisation in the Chinese context. This success is enhanced by his incorporation of rural people’s vivid testimonies about ‘the nature of their lives’ into the debate—so these unheard voices now actually intercede in the contemplations of China’s intelligentsia and bureaucratic elite. Cao Jinqing has excelled in provoking and guiding a hugely important conversation which will, as a result of his book, extend far beyond the peasant houses, Party Schools and government offices of rural Henan.

China Along the Yellow River

Historical and theoretical aspects of sociological research In September, after the summer holiday, I began my visit to Henan. I had spent some months reading and reflecting, mainly on historical and theoretical aspects of field research. From the researcher’s point of view, there was an inexhaustible supply of empirical evidence. But facts often came enmeshed with interests, prejudices and taboos, and so the researcher received a distorted image of reality. The immensely difficult problem I had to resolve was: how to discern the truth which lay beneath the surface, how to arrive at some essential, universal knowledge through analysis of actual cases. Both historical comparisons and theoretical analysis were essential components of this work. History was like an immensely long river: sometimes it twisted and turned, sometimes it gathered new tributaries to it, then again it became a torrent, or suddenly slowed and widened to form a great lake, but it was still the same river. As far as China’s agriculture and peasantry, and their relationship with local government, were concerned, historical continuity greatly outweighed the superficial changes they had undergone. This was a basic fact that had to be faced by all who were in a hurry to modernise. In spite of half a century of radical change in the ideology and political systems of the upper echelons of society, in the Chinese countryside ancient modes of production and similarly ancient social and political relationships persisted. Changes there had been, but they scarcely touched the essential fabric of rural life. The reforms had brought a degree of personal freedom to the peasants, large numbers of whom were now taking the opportunity to seek work in industry and commerce, but whether this could break the historical inertia of rural life remained to be seen. For many years now I had tried unsuccessfully to draw up a theoretical framework with which to conduct an analysis of rural society. I believed that if I started from the real problems and gathered enough empirical material, I could use this gradually to form a framework of theories to aid me in further research, but so far I had made little real progress. I had tried using my own theories, and those of Western sociology and cultural studies, and a combination of the two, but I had failed to develop a hypothesis which could draw together so many disparate phenomena into a single coherent analysis. Of course, contemporary rural, that is to say peasant, society had to be considered within the dual framework of tradition and modernisation. Tradition in this context meant the ancient peasant way of life, together with their social and political relationships. As for the meaning of modernisation, that was a vexed question. Did it mean significant changes in methods of agricultural production? The small amount of arable land available

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per capita had effectively blocked the transition to large-scale farming in China. Did it mean a rise in peasant incomes to so many dollars per head? Without the support of industry, land-poor peasants could only ever hope to live at subsistence level. Did it mean changes in the peasants’ political consciousness? It was debatable whether, with current modes of production basically unchanged, conditions existed to transform peasants into citizens. It looked as if the modernisation of Chinese agriculture would depend upon the rapid and sustained development of industry and commerce, and that of villages and villagers on urban modernisation. Only when cities and industry had absorbed the vast majority of the agricultural population could there be a transformation in rural production, which would bring with it the modernisation of rural society. This was clearly going to involve a lengthy historical process. Modernisation in all Third World countries meant adopting an exogenous, rather than an endogenous, model. China was no exception to this rule. In any developing country which had adopted the exogenous model, modernisation was going to start from the ‘head’ rather than from the ‘feet’, that is to say beginning with a concept, with the imposition of a social superstructure. Chinese leaders who had studied Western concepts of modernisation first promulgated new concepts, then engaged with the political process, modernising the legal and educational system, and imposing social and economic change from the top down. Moving, as the process did, from the outside in and from the top down, this was the complete opposite of the prototypical modernisation process undergone by the West. If, on the other hand, we were to examine the problem from the inside out and from the bottom up, it became clear that ‘the real world’, particularly that great mass of peasantry which formed the basis of the real world, was moving on just as before. Any attempts to alter these ancient modes of production, and their social and political relationships, within one or even a few generations, could only encounter severe obstacles. Moreover, in all sorts of ways, old habits still permeated our new political and legal systems, reducing the ability of the latter effectively to put these new concepts into practice. As a result, many new concepts were being interpreted in the light of past experience: that is, in a particularly Chinese way. Thus, new ideas, new social and economic systems and ancient rural society coexisted within the same physical space. The ideas were far advanced, rural life remained backward and the systems struggled somewhere in between. The radicals and conservatives in China’s modernisation process might argue over what was or should be happening; the aim of my research was different. It was nothing more nor less than to allow rural society to speak for itself and to tell us where it was really going. At 6.35 p.m. on 6 September 1996, I boarded the train that would take me to Luoyang to begin my research in Henan. When would I be back, my wife wanted to know. ‘Before the winter cold sets in,’ I replied.

Making arrangements When I woke the next morning, the train had already passed through Xuzhou on its journey westward. I stood at the train window looking out at the Yellow-Huai river plain hidden under a fine drizzle. The fields of maize, cotton, beans, peanuts and vegetables flashed by before my eyes. During my previous visit to Henan, the serious drought

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affecting northern China had made a deep impression on me. Now, every time I watched the news, I also listened to the weather forecast which followed. Every time large clouds from the north or north west brought rain, I was glad that the droughtridden plains were once again being watered. When I considered China’s past and present, and our hopes and efforts to modernise, from the vantage point of the central plains, my mood of optimism was gradually replaced by a deep feeling of anxiety. My trip to Henan was like going home for a visit— a visit to my country’s past, present and future. This vast, soft, flat, fertile, once temperate and moist earth was the cradle of a great civilisation. Today its people stepped forth on the road to modernisation burdened by thousands of years of history. Shortage of land and of water were the two great obstacles in the way of the development of agriculture. In the coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the peasants had avoided the problem by gradually turning agriculture into a sideline activity. But the great mass of peasants in central and western China were destined to be dependent on farming for some considerable time to come. Moreover, the small amount of arable land per capita–1 mu on average—was a serious obstacle to mechanisation and large-scale farming. Constant pressure from an increasing population meant that the only way forward for the region was a continual increase in crop yield. A key factor here was the provision of irrigation, but a prerequisite for this was the existence of water, which was exactly what the northern plain lacked. It was said of China’s 80 million poor that the poverty of 60 million was directly attributable to the lack of water. The key to China’s Four Modernisations programme was agriculture, but what was the way forward for that agriculture? As regards agricultural technology, the last fifty years in China had seen enormous advances. In this period, the population had doubled or trebled, but the per mu yield had gone up as much as fivefold largely due to the increase in the use of new technology. Yet there had been little substantive change in modes of production—the broad mass of the peasantry still lived their lives within the confines of the old social and political structures, characterised by kinship- and friendship-based relationship networks, smallscale farming and ever-increasing bureaucracy. In particular, the practice of relying on family-based networks to procure all sorts of resources had increased rapidly since the opening up of rural society to reforms. Looking at the situation from the outside, or from the top down, we were making great efforts to inculcate new ideas and to put a legal framework on economic, political and social relationships. Looking in the opposite direction, it was clear that rural customs and practices were increasingly strengthening their hold over the local economy, society and even local government. In my opinion, this was the cultural reason that lay behind low economic returns and political corruption in Chinese rural society. At 9.35 a.m. I arrived in Kaifeng. Within the hour, having settled into my accommodation at Henan University guesthouse, I was on the phone to friends in Kaifeng. Xu and Li, the only ones at home, agreed to come over in the afternoon to discuss arrangements for my trip. I had two requirements for this trip: the first was to cover a wide geographical area, to extend my field research into northern, western and southern Henan. The other was to focus my studies on the county and xiang administrations—a requirement which I had discussed with my friends at the end of my previous trip to the region. Xu and Li turned

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up as arranged in the early afternoon, to give me some very satisfactory news. Xu told me that his colleague Meng had been in touch with people in Wuyang County, Leihe City; in Luoning County, Luoyang City; and Yiyang County, in the Luo River valley. Since Meng had suggested my visit, none of them had any objections to raise—they were his old schoolmates and still close friends. That is what friendship meant in Henan. ‘They said you can go and visit any time you like. Actually, best to wait till Meng comes back from a visit to his family in Ji County, and then he can tell you himself.’ Li Yongcheng then spoke. ‘There’s a teacher at the Kaifeng Party School who’s a graduate from Zhengzhou University. He has a friend who is head of the Teaching and Research Department of the Party School at Zhumadian, and another friend who is deputy head of Xinyang Party School. The regional Party School network will take you all over southern Henan. Besides, there are plenty of our students in county and xiang governments, which will make it easier for you to carry out your investigations. That just leaves northern Henan where we don’t know anyone, but my family is from the border area between Hebei and Henan, and my uncle is an old Village Party Secretary, so there are a number of contacts there that you can use.’ I was astonished at the far-reaching network that my old friends had set up for my research before my arrival. I was touched at their great generosity, but I also could not help finding my situation somewhat ridiculous: I was a bit like a spider, needing to weave a web of personal relationships in order to catch my prey. At six o’clock, I invited Xu and Li to eat with me at the guesthouse. They left, advising me to have an early night and a good rest, and promised that they would return the next day.

Three misfortunes facing the peasants Xu and Meng turned up the next morning to discuss my plans for research in Wuyang, Luoning and Yiyang Counties. Meng said, ‘In the summer, at a reunion of the Henan University History Department, I was talking to Yan [head of the Wuyang Party Organisational Department] and Li [Luoning County Party Secretary] about your trip. I told them that, first, there would be no harm in allowing such purely academic research to be carried out in their counties. Second, I’m actually introducing to them a good friend and a scholar of some considerable erudition with regard to rural life. They want you to come. I put through a call to Wuyang County yesterday and told them that you had arrived in Kaifeng. Yan says he’ll come and pick you up himself tomorrow. Yiyang County is also sorted—you’re welcome to do your research there any time, and they will put you up and provide a car and a driver.’ They then told me a bit about the people involved and the counties they came from: Wuyang ranked slightly above average among Henan’s hundred or so counties, while Luoning and Yiyang were two of the poorer counties, situated as they were in the western mountains and the Luo river valley. Meng was an immensely warm-hearted man, the sort who would provide unstinting help to anyone whom he accepted as a friend doing an important job. He was one of the old school, someone who, at odds with the profitmotivated ethos of the marketplace, put friendship before his own interests. I found this moving. It seemed to me that it was no

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coincidence that I should find people of the calibre of Meng, Xu, and Li in this ancient capital of the Six Dynasties where traditional culture had accumulated over the centuries. I also felt troubled: how did this traditional way of building relationships with one’s fellows fit with today’s world? Emotionally, I appreciated it and felt completely at home. Intellectually, I had my doubts about it. As an observer, as a student of contemporary Chinese rural society, I recognised that it was this kind of personal village-based networking which was impeding the spread of modern political, economic and ethical relationships, and the development of the concepts of citizenship and the individual in society. However, on a personal level I wanted nothing more than to live among friends of such directness and sincerity. In the afternoon, Li Yongcheng and I went to Kaifeng Party School to meet the head of the school. There I found one of the teachers, a Mr Hu, waiting to speak to me. Hu was a 41-year-old economics graduate from Zhengzhou University, and had been teaching political economy at the Kaifeng Party School since then. He wanted to talk to me about the issue of the costs and benefits of reform, a question which had hitherto been largely ignored by academics. He began by saying, ‘If there are costs to be paid for reforming the economy, who’s going to pay?’ I invited him to go on. ‘Most of those costs, as I see it, are falling on the shoulders of the peasantry and, secondarily, of the workers in state-owned industries. If we take the area with which I am familiar, eastern Henan, the standard of living of a large proportion of peasants has not only not risen, it has fallen under the pressure of ever-increasing agricultural levies. In the state-owned industries of Kaifeng City and County, two-thirds of the workers have lost their jobs temporarily or permanently. Once they no longer have the means to make a living, their lives become extremely hard. So who benefits from reform? First, officials at all levels of local government, especially Party officials who’ve got the real power. Second, it’s the factory managers and directors. Third, the bosses of privately run business and industry.’ Hu came from a village in Taikang County, and his mother and younger brother still lived there. He had a thorough knowledge of the lives of the peasants, agriculture and the countryside, and firmly believed that most peasants in the interior of China had gained little from the reforms. He summed it up like this: those at the lowest level of Chinese society, its peasants, suffered from three misfortunes: natural disasters, the shortcomings of local government and market price fluctuations. He gave me two examples. A few days previously he had gone back home to Taikang, to find a number of peasants cutting down apple trees which had just borne fruit and ploughing up the ground to plant wheat. Why cut down trees which had taken three or four years to begin to fruit? Because three or four years ago the market price of apples had been quite high. The county and xiang governments had told the peasants to plant apple trees, as part of the Get Rich Project and to improve farm productivity. If they refused to plant the trees, the xiang government sent people to dig holes on their contract land, and then charged them for it. It was all very well to want peasants to increase their income, but for the county and xiang governments to impose their ‘project’ at every level was an infringement of the peasants’ right to manage their own land. Since everyone was planting apple trees, that created a change in supply and demand, and apple prices fell steadily. This year, goodquality apples were fetching Y0.4–0.5 per catty, and the less good just Y0.1–0.2, which meant that the peasants had expended all that effort for nothing. If the limited amount of

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contract land they had was occupied by apple trees, they could not grow wheat. Since the apples were not bringing in any money, the villagers had felt obliged to chop down the trees and plant wheat, and this, with much grumbling, they were doing. Thus the Get Rich Project had become an Impoverishment Project. Last year, when the market price for cotton in Henan had risen above the state purchasing price, the local police were sent out in force to mount road blocks and force the farmers to sell their cotton to the government. This year, on the other hand, market prices had fallen below the state purchasing price but the government purchasing centres had pushed prices down likewise or even refused to buy at all. If farmers could not sell their cotton, then they had no money to buy fertiliser and pesticides, and this had a direct effect on the wheat crop. Hu went on to say that out of natural disasters, government interference or a collapse in the market, it was government interference that the peasants most feared and resented. At the end of the spring and autumn harvests, when the loudspeakers began their incessant call to make the annual tax payments, the peasants’ hearts would fill with dread. Every local government department was out to get them. Last year, his brother’s family of five paid nearly Y1,000—that is, Y200 each. He and his brother had done some careful calculations: in a normal year each mu produced two crops, one of wheat and one of maize, the net income from which, after deducting agricultural costs, came to about Y500 per person. That meant that they had to hand over one-third of the fruits of a year’s hard labour to the local government in taxes. Yet the State Council had laid down that agricultural levies should not exceed 5 per cent of annual net income. In fact, all over the region, levies were regularly as high as 30–40 per cent. You could feel the tension between farmers and local government officials wherever you went in the villages of the region. ‘When I was in the country a few days ago, I was talking to a farmer about official corruption and excessive taxation,’ Hu continued. ‘This 40-year-old peasant said to me angrily, “There’ll come a day when we won’t stand for it any more. When that time comes, I’ll be the first to have a go at the local government. I’ll kill those rotten bastards.” He was, of course, talking in the heat of the moment.’ Mr Hu’s words made up my mind for me: I wanted to go to his village, first to see why the peasants had cut down their apple trees, and second to talk to this disaffected farmer. Of the four levels of local government—province, city (regional), county and xiang— the county was pre-eminent. Even the emperors of feudal times were keenly aware of this fact. Since the end of the Qing dynasty, the lowest level of local government in China had moved down from county level to xiang level, yet the set-up and powers of the latter were to a large degree determined by the county. So of the four levels of government, it was the county which was of especial importance. In the context of rural society, the county also possessed immense cultural significance. Any studies we did of clans, villages or groups of villages centred on a xiang were no substitute for a study of a county. Not only was a county a relatively discrete, independent unit of rural society, it was also a similarly independent administrative entity, with its own history, language and cultural tradition. I had long wanted to carry out a thorough study of cultural change in rural society based on a county, and hoped that this trip might afford me this opportunity.

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I left for Wuyang County at three in the afternoon, arriving at 6.30 p.m. After dinner I discussed arrangements for the next few days with the Office Manager of the Organisational Department, a young man called Song, who was to be my temporary secretary and guide. He would take me round local villages to do my investigations.

Promotion prospects Mr Yan had arranged for me to stay at the Garden Hotel. This hotel, originally the County Party Committee Guesthouse and now converted and renovated, was a fourstorey building with 300–400 beds. Its Director’s Suite cost Y320 per night, and an ordinary double room, with air conditioning, colour TV and bathroom, about Y150. It had also had low-priced dormitory beds at Y10 per night. There were two main dining rooms, one large and one small, plus about twenty private side rooms, and there was also a beauty salon and a karaoke and dance hall. Thus it combined accommodation, meeting space and entertainment facilities all in one. The hotel had around 120 staff, most of them temporary or contract workers on a monthly wage of Y200 or a little more, not including board and lodging. Although it had been converted into a hotel, it basically fulfilled the same functions as the old County Party Committee Guesthouse: it accommodated provincial and city officials of all departments who had come on inspection visits, and provided conference and meeting facilities. And, of course, with the increase in trade between coast and interior, it also now welcomed the business traveller. This transformation into a hotel was one which official guesthouses all over China appeared to be undergoing. At 8.30 the next morning, the head of the County Party School, Mr Liu, picked me up as arranged from the hotel to take me on a visit to Ouchi (Lotus Pond) Village. Liu was a man of around 50 and had been a middle school physics teacher, xiang Party Secretary and head of the County People’s Congress. With him as my guide, I did not expect to find any obstacles in our way. Lotuses had long ceased to grow in Ouchi Village. According to Liu, in the Song and Ming dynasties this region was still marshland, and people in the surrounding villages made a living from cultivating the lotus plant and breeding fish. While the village had kept the same name, its inhabitants now raised the xianggu mushrooms, whose odour permeated the air. On the walls of the Village Party Office hung numerous certificates awarded by the county and xiang governments and a large chart marking the progress of the Get Rich Project. Tables and chairs were arranged in rows inside the office, much like in a schoolroom. The Village Party Secretary was a 40-year-old man called Zhang. Liu explained to him the reason for our visit. ‘This is not a visit of inspection. You can talk freely, say what you like and answer any questions. Afterwards, we’d like you to take us to visit some peasant households.’ Zhang was happy to oblige, and the following is a summary of what he told me. Ouchi Village was both a natural1 and an administrative village, and was divided up into three Villagers’ Groups. According to figures from 1996, the village was made up of 210 households, 886 people in all. About a dozen surnames were represented, among them Cai, Wang, Zhang, Li, Miao, Liu, Chen, Yang and Xie, with the Cai families in a

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slight majority, at 20 per cent of the village population. The village had 1,400 mu of arable land, giving each person a little over 1.5 mu each. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, lotus was the chief crop. Until the 1960s, there were around 200 mu of low-lying marshland. In the 1970s, there was still an area of uncultivated land to the south of the village, but since the land had been redistributed to individual households, all the uncultivated land had been converted to arable use, which was why the land per capita figure was quite high. Before Liberation this village had had no ancestral temples and no clan records; the most the villagers could tell you about their forebears was the names of their great-greatgrandfathers, and they normally only bothered to go back three generations. Most of the elderly of the village knew very little about generations prior to that. There had been no talk in recent years of reestablishing clan or family records, and even if people wanted to, it would be impossible. Although a number of surnames were represented in the village, there was no rivalry between families of different surnames. At this point Liu put in: ‘In the whole of Wuyang County, only the Mengs and the Xings have ancestral temples and family records. At the beginning of the 1980s when the county annals were re-established, people were sent out to each xiang to collect family records, but none were found. The clan issue in rural areas is complicated—it’s different in each county, each xiang, even in each village. In one village I can think of, where Song is the main surname, there is a great deal of rivalry between the clan branches. When it came to choosing a village head, none of them would give ground—they had to ask someone with a minority surname to take on the job. In some villages in the north of Wuyang County, there is rivalry between majority surnames. When I was xiang Party Secretary, it was common to come up against clan and family problems when a Village Party Secretary and village head was chosen, but not in Ouchi Village.’ The Get Rich Project in this village mainly focused on xianggu mushroom cultivation. ‘In 1994, the xiang government wanted all twelve village cadres to take the lead in this. I took some people to Miyang County to study cultivation techniques, and the experimental crop we planted was a success. In the following year, 1995, twenty more households tried this new venture and did well too. If you use a clean, 15-square-metre shed and invest Y1,400–1,500, you can turn over Y5,000–6,000 a season (and “season” here means the five to six months from the middle of September to February or March of the following year, using the agricultural slack season before and after the Spring Festival). It’s quite simple to cultivate xianggu mushrooms, the returns are good, and the villagers can really see the advantages of it, so there was a lot of enthusiasm for mushrooms this year, with 90 per cent of households doing it.’ As he was speaking a peasant came in and said to the Village Party Secretary, ‘There are people outside, and they’re getting impatient.’ They were going to use this ‘classroom’ to teach the peasants about mushroom cultivation, so the Village Party Secretary suggested we carry on our conversation at his home. When we emerged, there were indeed nearly a hundred villagers waiting, and they pushed in behind us as we came out. The Village Committee meeting room could only take fifty to sixty people at the most, and there were nearly a hundred of them, so some had to sit outside on stools they had brought to listen to the class. The Village Party Secretary’s house was in no way different from those of ordinary villagers: it was a three-roomed, brick-built single-storey house, with a two-roomed lean-

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to in the yard—one used as a storeroom, the other as a cook house. The courtyard occupied an area of 0.3–0.4 mu, and also housed a row of pig sties and a well with a hand pump. The only difference was that the sitting room had an extra side table and a row of chairs, to accommodate villagers who came to see him and xiang cadres on inspection visits. The Village Party Secretary continued to talk about the xianggu mushroom cultivation. ‘After the land was distributed to families,’ he said, ‘they were able to keep themselves fed and clothed, but what they needed was cash. Nowadays it’s more and more necessary to have a disposable income, to buy school books for the children, to build a house and buy fertilisers and pesticides. If everyone grows mushrooms, they’ll make between Y2,000 and Y5,000 per year, and they’ll all be well off.’ It was clear that this Village Party Secretary had put all his hopes for wealth creation in the village into xianggu mushroom growing. What he did not seem to have taken into consideration was that as the number of growers increased, the raw materials needed (chestnut-wood shavings) would increase in price, and the price they could get for their product on the market would fall. I did not want to say anything that would bring our conversation to a halt, so decided not to mention this for the time being. I asked Zhang about village collective enterprises. He replied: ‘We did set some up, but they went bust, and we ended up with a pile of debts. In 1993, we set up a factory making plastic drainpipes, and invested Y120,000 in it—half we borrowed from the bank, and we raised the other half from the villagers. The main problem we had, starting as soon as it opened, was constant electricity cuts. We got no advance warning of them, they just happened, and we couldn’t carry on production. We had to close down.’ ‘We’ve twice got xiangs and villages to set up collective enterprises,’ added Liu. ‘The first time was 1987–8, and the second was 1992–3. All xiangs and villages had to set them up, and whether or not cadres succeeded in this had a direct effect on their career. If they did, it was a feather in their cap. If they didn’t they were publicly criticised, or demoted. So set them up they did—everywhere. But to my knowledge, of all the enterprises which we put so much pressure on them to get going, almost none are still operating normally. As a result the banks are owed money and the peasants have been cheated. A few years ago, the county sent a fact-finding team to Hebei, and they came back telling us to set up lots of glass factories. A glass factory requires a lot of investment—around Y2–3 million—and it certainly couldn’t be done by the villages. So the county invested money directly and we set up three glass factories ourselves and ordered four xiangs to set up one each, a total of seven factories, but not one has been successful. No one has collected accurate figures on the number of enterprises set up at county, xiang and village level during these two campaigns, or of the numbers which went bankrupt or did well. Nor do we have any figures for investment, or levels of debts or wastage. But they must be substantial. If the peasants are to get rich through farming, hard work is not enough—other conditions have to be right, too. Setting up a successful business is even more complicated. If the peasants harvest their food crops and can’t sell them, at least they can eat the product themselves. If we can’t sell what we have produced in our factories then we just have to shut them. Other things matter, too, like investment, technology, the skills of the workers, the state of the market, the way the factory is managed and so on. Is it enough for local government to use its powers just to build factories and install some machinery for the enterprise to operate effectively? This is a

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question I’ve turned over in my mind for quite some time, and I’ve discussed it with local cadres too. Henan’s economy is backward—that’s a fact—and it’s also true that we have fallen even further behind the coastal provinces since the economic reforms. It’s quite understandable that poor people want to get rich, but we’ve been too hasty. We’ve been reckless with poor people’s hard-earned savings. We’ve suffered too much from this in Henan. You get new officials in post and they start setting new targets, issuing instructions and drawing up grandiose plans. At each level of local government they put the squeeze on their subordinates, and it’s the poor who get ripped off. We did it in 1958, and we’ve been doing it again in the last decade. This time, Wuyang’s Get Rich Project has learnt lessons from the past to some degree. To get the peasants to put their efforts into manageable, small-scale, family-based initiatives which require low investment is much more feasible, and the peasants like it better. But I’m worried that the county government now has plans for our county to develop the biggest market for xianggu mushrooms and rabbit hair in the whole country. Big talk like that is a really bad habit here in Henan, and often it all comes to nothing.’ I was extremely impressed by Liu. There is an old saying: it takes wisdom to understand other people, but even more to know yourself. This Party School head, though he only held the most junior of posts, struck me as a man of both wisdom and intelligence. It was now midday, and the Village Party Secretary gave us lunch at his house. The meal consisted of two fried dishes, one meat and one vegetables, a basket of steamed buns, and a bowl of millet porridge and a small cup of the local liquor each. It was a typical, hospitable northern peasant meal. As we ate, the Village Party Secretary talked about his job. He said: ‘I spend more than two-thirds of my time every year on my duties. Of this time, one-third is taken up with meetings, and another third with filling in all sorts of forms. That leaves less than one-third of my time available for getting to grips with village affairs. The biggest headache is that my time isn’t my own. It’s difficult to do any real work. I have to get my superiors’ permission for everything, and I have to have the right connections to get anything done. Supposedly our superiors come to the village to give us guidance, but they spend most of the time carping. We end up getting the blame whether we carry out our instructions or not. Besides, a Village Party Secretary’s salary is too low. All our villages are classified into one of three categories according to criteria laid down at county level. The salaries in Category 1 villages are Y100 a month for the Village Party Secretary (Y80 for the village head and the accountant), in category 2 it’s Y80, and in category 3 it’s only Y60 and Y40 respectively. This system was only set up in 1995; before that it was common for us to not to get paid at all.’ After lunch, while Liu took a rest, I asked Zhang if he would take me to visit some peasant families. There were a number of houses along our route, but their gates were firmly shut. Zhang said that they had all gone off to buy the materials for mushroom cultivation. One gate was open, and we went into the courtyard. A woman in her forties, busy at her work, was the only person at home. I had a look around and we started to talk. I asked her what life had been like in recent years, and she insisted it had been good. ‘We harvest enough wheat in one year to last us two years or more.’ The Village Party Secretary asked her if she would open up her storeroom and show us the family’s grain. The grain store was a 15-square-metre lean-to built onto the kitchen. It had a concrete floor and was very clean. Inside it was a bamboo container about 3 or 4 metres in

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diameter, and 1.5 metres high, heaped full of wheat. There was more wheat next to it in a pile of twenty or thirty bags. The Village Party Secretary estimated that there was 4,000– 5,000 catties2 in total. There were three of them in her family, but she was alone today as the husband had gone off to make the purchases for the mushrooms and the daughter was at middle school. They had 4.6 mu of contracted arable land. This year (1996) the average per mu yield had been 600 catties, giving them a total harvest of around 3,000 catties of wheat in addition to what remained from last year, and it was all stored here. I asked her why they did not sell off some of the wheat. She replied: ‘We’re not short of cash, so if the price is good we sell, and if it’s not, we store it here.’ I asked her what their sources of income were. ‘We get money from mushrooms, Y3,000–4,000 this year. And we rear pigs, which brings in about Y2,000 a year.’ In the corner of the courtyard were two pig sties, each housing three pigs of a lean-meat variety. The woman told me that they raised two pens of pigs (six altogether) each year. In another corner of the courtyard, there was a heap of spent mushroom compost—a pile of cylinders about the diameter of a small plate and a foot long, filled with chestnut-wood shavings. When dry, they could be used as fuel. Since they were damp from recent rain, xianggu mushrooms were growing out of them again. It was apparently the first time the Village Party Secretary had seen this, and he said he should look into the re-use of spent compost. I asked him if all the village families had grain stored. ‘Almost all of them. So long as they have an alternative source of income, they don’t need to worry about selling their wheat. They’ll only sell if the price is right, not if it goes down. That’s the mentality of peasants from these parts, they’ll store it against famine. Having surplus grain makes them feel secure!’ It seemed to me that for peasants to store grain at home had two main advantages: it stabilised prices, and it reduced the cost to the state of storage in silos. The only requirements were that the peasants should have a surplus to store, and that they should have an alternative source of income. However, if the amount of arable land per capita was only 0.8 mu or less, then the average harvest would only be enough to feed them and there would be no surplus after they had paid their taxes. So families with no other cash income would have to sell grain to buy pesticides and fertilisers for the autumn sowing. We went to a further five houses, where I discovered they all had a store of surplus grain. The amount varied with the size of the family, the farm and the crop, but ranged from 2,000 to over 10,000 catties. They all kept anything up to five pigs. Some of the peasants were of the opinion that ‘pigs were not a money-earner’. Why then did they raise them? ‘It’s a way of putting a bit of money aside and also getting some manure,’ was the response. Actually, when the maize price was low and the price of pig meat was relatively stable, it was a way of converting the local maize into something that made a small profit. Among the five families, two had started on mushroom cultivation last year, and were enjoying the fruits of it; the other three were set to begin this year. As the Village Party Secretary took me around the village, I took note of its layout and the style of the local architecture. On China’s northern plains, the arrangement of village streets and family compounds was much the same everywhere. The courtyards were square, and placed side by side in rows, and the streets ran north to south and east to west, in a geometric pattern. Each compound occupied about half a mu with the house itself standing on about a third of that, and the other two-thirds forming a courtyard. A high proportion, 80–90 per cent, of the houses and their surrounding walls were brick-

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built and dated from the 1970s and 1980s. Some of these also used adobe in their construction. A second round of house-building in the village had just begun: as before, they were brick-built but were taller and more spacious. The materials from the old house were recycled to build up the courtyard walls, and the entrance gate tended to be more carefully constructed too. Zhang told me that it cost between Y15,000 and Y25,000 to put up a house like this and so would be very difficult to do on just a farm income. When we got back to the Village Party Secretary’s house, it was already 5 p.m. Liu had woken up some time before and was sitting in the courtyard waiting for us to return. I suggested to Liu that I might stay two more days in the village on my own, as I wanted to do some more detailed research into the lives of the peasants, family planning, surplus grain stores and family finances in the village, but Liu told me that he had already phoned Mr Song (the Village Party Secretary had a phone in his house) and he would be here in twenty minutes to pick me up. Besides, he said, ‘You’re Mr Yan’s honoured guest. We can’t possibly put you up on your own in a peasant house.’ So there was nothing for it but to fall in with my host’s wishes. Song took me back to the hotel in Wuyang, and we sat down and talked. Eventually he called his wife and told her that he would stay the night at the hotel. We carried on talking until it was three o’clock and nearly dawn. In a county like this one, in China’s interior, getting a job as an official was the main way forward for an ambitious young person. It was hard to get a foot in the door, and there was intense competition for promotion. In the course of a lengthy discussion, I learnt what Song had achieved so far, and his aspirations and considerable anxieties for the future. Song was born in Baohe xiang, Wuyang County, of a peasant family. For a child from this milieu, there were only two ways to leave the land and fulfil the family’s dream that he should become something other than a peasant: he could study or he could join the army. Some ten years before, Song had graduated from a technical college in Zhengzhou and, as his first job, had been assigned to teach Chinese language and literature at Baohe Middle School. He was often asked to help xiang Party and government officers draft and revise reports, and subsequently left teaching and became an official. He got the job of secretary to the head of the xiang government and, at the same time, that of Office Manager. To transfer from teaching to a government post was a popular route in the early 1980s, when there was pressure to have younger and better-educated people as cadres. Two years ago, Song transferred to Wuyang County’s Party Committee Organisational Department, first as a clerical worker, then as its director, a post graded at ‘auxiliary Ke grade’. In China’s still rigidly stratified civil service, this was the most junior official position. From it one hoped to make the difficult journey up to principal Ke grade, then to auxiliary Chu grade, right up to principal Chu grade—the highest grade at county government level. This had been the lowest official rank in former imperial times, but as far as Song was concerned was a level of seniority to which as yet he hardly dared to aspire. How to make the leap from auxiliary to principal Ke grade was the main preoccupation for those in auxiliary Ke grade jobs. Once you had an official job, you had to progress up the grades one by one, that was understandable, in the same way that university teachers started as assistant teacher and worked their way up to lecturer, assistant professor, professor and doctorate professor. It was an established route for officials to take but, although it was established, it still had to be most carefully studied

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and accomplished. For most, the first step was to find an opportunity to get a job back in the xiang government. Someone working at county auxiliary Ke level could hope to become ‘number three’ in the xiang government: that is, Assistant Party Secretary in charge of legal, propaganda or organisational work under the xiang Party Secretary and head of the xiang government. Although this was a move downwards, a number three in the xiang government could hope to become number two and then number one, and the latter was a principal Ke grade post. Since there were only fourteen xiangs in the county, there were only fourteen xiang Party Secretary posts and fourteen xiang town headships. Opportunities were few and the road to promotion was narrow and congested. It was, of course, possible to rise from auxiliary to principal Ke grade while staying in a county-level job, but going this route could only offer one administrative work experience, and for any young auxiliary Ke grade with the slightest inclination towards a political career the best choice was to return to the xiang government if such an opportunity presented itself. The two senior posts at xiang level had overall control and so offered wide-ranging experience in every aspect of local government work. It was a relatively smooth progression, then, from xiang Party Secretary (principal Ke grade) to a post at county department level. Because of the structure of county government, there were often sixty or seventy such posts available. This young man’s ambitions were very concrete: to become head of a county department (principal Ke or auxiliary Chu grade), and put his daughter through university. Doubtless these were aims shared by the vast majority of the county’s auxiliary Ke grade cadres. However, there were insufficient county departments to satisfy the demand, even though they had expanded rapidly from twenty or thirty at the end of the Cultural Revolution to sixty or seventy now. There were estimated to be between 500 and 800 auxiliary Ke grade cadres in the county, and most of the newcomers had no hope of realising their dreams. The resulting frustrations and discontent probably caused certain ‘rumours about officials’ to flourish. I asked Song whether it was true that ‘Y10,000 buys a place for your name on a waiting list; Y20,000 gets you on the short list; Y30,000–40,000 buys you a post.’ ‘These rumours started a few years ago,’ he said. ‘Anyone with a cadre’s job has heard them. But obviously the whole organisation is not that rotten. What I’ve learnt in my two years in the Organisational Department is that strict criteria are applied in appointing, appraising and promoting cadres. It’s too easy to say you can buy your way into an official post. But I can’t say it doesn’t exist at all—it’s just not been proved. Anyway, each county and xiang is different, you can’t generalise.’ Just before he went to bed, Song said ‘You know, I’ve learnt a lot from you today’ My response was to feel that I’d learnt even more from him. If I could only have a job for a year in the county government’s Organisational Department, then I would really be able to put my studies of tradition and modernisation on a sound footing.

A visit to a ‘Model of Prosperity’ village In the morning, Liu took me to visit Yuanzhuang, Wuyang County’s ‘Model of Prosperity’ village. There were only two things that happened on these day-trips: a report from the Village Party Secretary and a tour of the village, with a visit to a few peasant

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families. There was no chance to do any indepth investigation of household income and expenditure, the wealth/poverty divide or anything like that. And as for sensitive questions like excess births, agricultural levies and relations between cadres and the masses, these had to be studiously avoided. We arrived at the village at 9 a.m., we left at 5 p.m., and the intervening eight hours could be summarised as follows. A tarmac road crossed the village’s ‘guardian river’ and extended right into the village centre. Along the river banks, beside the road and in front of and behind the courtyards, the trees grew tall, shading the village buildings. All was quiet and clean. Yuanzhuang Administrative Village was made up of two adjacent villages similar in size—Yuanzhuang and Zhangzhuang. Wucheng xiang was made up of a total of thirtythree administrative villages and sixty-seven natural villages—each administrative village usually being made up of two hamlets. The population of Yuanzhuang Administrative Village currently stood at 242 families–929 people. There were 1,600 mu of arable land, or 1.72 mu per capita, slightly more generous than the figure for the rest of the villages in Wucheng xiang (1.56 mu). The surname (that is, the clan) structure of the village was very simple: the entire population of Yuanzhuang Village was called Yuan, so it was a classic single-surname village. Zhangzhuang Village had two surnames—Zhang (75 per cent of the population) and Gao (25 per cent). There were no other surnames at all. According to the old people these three clans had migrated here from Hongdong in Shanxi at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, but as there were no clan records there was no way to verify this. This village had existed for several hundred years, so why were there no families with different surnames? The Village Party Secretary said: ‘There are three main reasons why families with different surnames might have moved in—hired labourers had land and housing given to them during Land Reform; relatives and friends took refuge with local families; or sons-in-law moved in with the bride’s family. These two villages were always farmed by tenant farmers, all the arable land used to belong to a big landlord from Wucheng Town. The tenant farmers were busy looking after themselves, they were in no position to support relatives, friends or sons-in-law, nor could they employ hired labour.’ This seemed a very plausible explanation. Yuanzhuang villagers always ‘hung together’ (in the Village Party Secretary’s words): there was very little trouble within the village and they were united against any threat from the outside world. The Zhangs and the Gaos of Zhangzhuang also coexisted peacefully. All the villagers held fast to the simple old ways where you shared what you had, you stuck together in hard times and you protected each other. Fights over property boundaries, family property and care of the elderly were hardly ever seen here. ‘Even family planning, the biggest headache for village cadres, works quite well here, too, because the villagers treat us as their family and don’t give us any trouble,’ said the Village Party Secretary. I was surprised. Ouchi Village, which I had visited yesterday, was egalitarian in spirit and open to outsiders. Clan consciousness there was weak and this was one of the main reasons why its large number of different surnames got along well. In Yuanzhuang, which I was visiting today, villagers ‘hung together’, the old ways persisted, and the result was the same—peaceful coexistence between families. I asked the Village Party Secretary why they were all so united, but he just said: ‘It’s always been like that.’ Liu and I agreed that it probably had something to do with the historical circumstances in

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which a single clan were all tenant farmers, and the landlord, of a different clan, lived outside the village. One administrative village, two natural villages, three main clans—this structure was reflected in the make-up of the village leadership. This lowest level of rural administration in China is formally composed of two teams: the Village Party Branch and the Villagers’ Autonomous Committee. In fact Party and government combined into just one team. Its most important members were the Village Party Secretary, the village head and the accountant. In this village, the first was a Yuan and the second had been a Zhang and was now a Yuan. The Deputy Village Party Secretary post was filled by a Zhang, and the accountant was a Li. In a village where there were no other surnames represented, how come there was now a Li family, I asked. ‘The accountant is a woman,’ said the Village Party Secretary. I could not help laughing: I had become so involved with my research into rural clans that I was now in a ‘clan consciousness’ frame of mind. As for what the Gao clan, who were not represented in the village administration at all, thought of this power structure, I had no way of knowing since it was difficult to either ask or investigate. Since the amount of arable land per capita was generous here, it was possible for families to rear pigs. In 1981, this village had implemented the Household Contract Responsibility System for land. By the late 1970s, the basic needs of the villagers were being met, with the per mu yield for wheat at over 400 catties and for maize 400–500 catties. Of course, sweet potatoes still made up a certain proportion of the villagers’ diet. At that point very few of the villagers raised pigs, and if they did they just kept one pig a year. After 1981, the per mu yield continued to rise, giving families a grain surplus, and more of them began to raise pigs. They were encouraged in this after 1990 by the fact that the new village collective enterprises were showing a slight surplus. Now everyone raised pigs, between two and five to a sty, and two or three sties per family. Starting in the early 1980s, pig-rearing had become the most important source of cash income for the majority of village households. ‘Some people say it doesn’t make money but it depends how you do it. You’ve got to do it on a certain scale, and if you buy the piglets and buy all their food, then you won’t make money. But we’ve got plenty of land in this village, and the summer harvest gives us enough grain to live on and more. So almost all the autumn harvest, maize and sweet potatoes, can go to feed the pigs. If you do it that way, it’s profitable. Quite a few families keep a sow, and that makes even more profit. Besides, you can use pig shit as a fertiliser. It’s not good to rely only on chemical fertilisers; using more organic fertiliser reduces farming costs.’ This was the way the Village Party Secretary analysed it. The development of village collective enterprises In the 1980s, very few people from here had jobs outside the village. This was basically because they had quite a lot of arable land, they had always been used to farm work, and they had few contacts with the outside world. There was a gradual increase in income based on their crops and their pigrearing until about 1990. At that point, the villagers began to build improved housing and this very quickly gained momentum. During the 1970s, the old adobe-built thatched cottages had disappeared one by one; in the 1980s, part of the village housing was still brick-built outside and adobe inside; but after 1990,

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all the houses were built of brick and concrete. They were more spacious than before, with the poorer ones having brick floors, and the better ones, poured concrete floors. The same went for the pig sties and outbuildings. So in order to meet the demand for bricks for housebuilding, a brick factory was set up in 1990–the village’s first collective enterprise. About Y120,000 was invested in the brick factory. Two-thirds of this was raised from the villagers, and one-third was borrowed from a credit co-operative. Individuals undertook to pay the annual Y2,000–3,000 contract fees to the village administration, but bricks had to be sold to villagers at less than market price, and repayments had to be made on the loan and collective funds. In 1991, a poultry farm was set up and Y150,000 was invested, of which Y140,000 was borrowed from the bank (it was easy to do it at that time, since the county wanted to encourage collective enterprises). Most of the eggs were sold to a Guangzhou egg incubation factory. It did well between 1992 and 1994; it repaid its debts and made Y20,000–30,000 per year for the village. However, in 1995 it lost more than Y30,000. This was partly due to a rise in the price of chicken feed and a fall in egg prices. Of course, there were other reasons too. (I later learnt that these ‘other reasons’ had been the cause of the factory’s downfall: it had begun to make big money, and so county and xiang cadres from the departments to which it was answerable were sent to Guangzhou to tour similar factories. Unfortunately the factory itself had to bear the excessive costs of their board and lodging and fares, and it was brought to the brink of closure. This kind of thing had brought a number of previously prosperous village collective enterprises to bankruptcy.) At the end of 1995, the contract for the factory was taken over by a private individual, it burned down in a fire, and finally did close. It never rains but it pours. In the latter half of 1991 Y100,000 (half of it borrowed) was invested in a nylon thread factory, supplying a shoe factory in Leihe City. Profit margins were slim, but business was stable. It employed around twenty people, annual turnover was Y600,000–700,000, of which around Y30,000 was profit. In 1991 and 1992, shoe sales were growing. The director of the Leihe City shoe factory, who was on good terms with the Yuanzhuang Village Party Secretary, persuaded him to set up a village collective shoe factory. This started in 1993, with an initial investment of Y100,000 (half of it borrowed). It now employed fifty to sixty people, mostly local except for the master craftsmen who had been recruited from Zhejiang. Annual turnover was Y3 million, and profits around Y300,000. The problem was the high level of liquidity required. Shoe sales had stagnated in the previous couple of years, and payments owed to the factory had not been made on time. All over the county, too many xiang and village shoe factories had been set up too fast during this period; technology and management was not up to scratch, and that was the main reason for the slump in sales. The Get Rich Project: getting the peasants to grow xianggu mushrooms In pursuance of the county and xiang governments’ Get Rich Project, the Yuanzhuang village administration encouraged the locals to cultivate xianggu mushrooms. Spores were distributed free and a technician was invited from Miyang County to teach them how to do it. This year, over 80 per cent of villagers had begun to grow mushrooms. I was able to put my questions to the technician at midday, as we had lunch together at the Village Party Secretary’s house.

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The technician told me that xianggu mushroom cultivation in Henan had developed fastest in Miyang County, although it had not begun there, because of support and encouragement from the county and xiang governments. Between 1991 and 1995, xianggu mushroom cultivation had spread to practically every village and household. A fair number of peasants had become rich as a result, had built houses and bought colour TVs and motorbikes. In the last couple of years, nearby counties had rushed to copy them, and mushrooms had become the focal point of the Get Rich Project. Xianggu mushroom cultivation presented few problems for the peasant growers: it required little investment, little technological input, anyone could learn it, and returns in recent years had been good. Local government had made great efforts to promote it and the whole thing had taken off with great rapidity. I asked if this had had an effect on the cost of raw materials and the price they got for the mushrooms. The technician replied: ‘There have been some fluctuations in the xianggu mushroom market in recent years, but on the whole it’s been stable. Last year, grade 1 dried xianggu went for Y120 per catty. I can’t tell you this year’s price, it’s probably gone down a bit. The real problem is that the price of chestnut-wood shavings keeps going up. In 1991, they were less than Y0.1 per catty, but the price this year is between Y0.26 and 0.28. The chestnut trees grow in the mountains and take years to mature. There has been overfelling, so of course the price is bound to shoot up. We are worried about this. When they have all been felled, what will we do? We have calculated that if the price of the compost goes up another Y0.1, it will wipe out any profit on the mushrooms, even if their price remains stable. Looked at like this, xianggu cultivation only has another two to three good years in prospect, at the most four.’ What surprised me was that the Village Party Secretary, who was sitting at the same table as us, showed not the slightest reaction to this news. Perhaps he had not heard. I decided I ought to pass the information to the man in charge of the county’s Get Rich Project—that was Mr Yan, head of the county Organisational Department. We then paid a visit to a village collective enterprise—a shoe factory. Considering the small scale of its operations, the factory area was quite sizeable. The work was largely done by hand, and paid at piece-rate. The machinery was primitive, there was little apparent management, and working hours were fairly flexible. Although the shoe factory employed fifty or sixty people, there were only twenty or thirty in the workshop today. The remainder were probably at home, busy preparing for the xianggu mushroom crop. The county had twice used its powers to promote the setting up of collective enterprises: funds had been poured into them but most had failed. In this village, however, only one of the four enterprises, the poultry farm, had closed down; the other three were still going. Thus its Party Secretary had received a special mention for his work in support of rural business. Even more important was the fact that these enterprises had finally brought industry to this traditionally agricultural area. Concepts like wages, cost accounting and the market had gradually begun to percolate through to these traditional villages and their inhabitants, and this deserved to be seen as a historic step forward. Finally we visited half a dozen families. The construction of the houses and courtyards was largely the same in each case, although a second storey was being added to one house so that I was unable to make notes on it. Of these half-dozen families, all had grain stores, containing between 4,000 and 7,000 catties of wheat. The Village Party Secretary

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told me that the summer harvest this year had been plentiful: the per mu yield had been 700–800 catties, and a number of families still had grain left over from last year! I made a rough calculation that at an average of 1.72 mu per capita, a family of four would have nearly 7 mu; if the per mu yield was 700–800 catties, they would harvest around 5,000 catties. Judging by the amount they had in store, the grain tax cannot have been very heavy, perhaps around 100 catties per person. All the families we visited raised pigs. The pig sties were all built of bricks and stone, and the courtyards were kept clean. The Village Party Secretary told me that the construction of pig sties was regulated by the Villagers’ Committee. The families had between two and five pigs each, and were mostly self-sufficient in pig feed. The villagers’ average annual income had passed the Y1,000 mark for the first time in 1993, making it one of the most advanced in the county and a Model of Prosperity village. By 1995, the average income per capita had reached Y1,780. Around a third of the villagers had TVs, mostly black-and-white, although in the last couple of years newly weds were beginning to buy colour TVs. There were also twenty to thirty three- and fourwheeled tractors in the village. People who previously left the village in the agricultural slack season to become labourers now no longer went. ‘It’s getting more and more difficult to find labouring jobs. The county government called on large numbers of people to head south in search of work, the idea being that the young ones should see a bit of the outside world at the same time, but actually it was easier said than done. A fair few gave it a try and returned empty-handed. If they grow mushrooms at home, they can earn Y2,000–3,000 in half a year. So why would they want to do hard labour elsewhere?’ On our journey home, Liu and I discussed two main questions. There was a world of difference between having 0.8 mu or less of arable land per capita and having upwards of 1.5 mu, and it was a difference that those in local government responsible for rural economic development would do well to pay attention to. In villages where the arable land per capita was 0.8 mu or less, then that land had to be used entirely to grow grain, to feed the family for just one year. If local taxes were too heavy, then families had to plant more sweet potatoes in their autumn crop just to survive. In this kind of village, there was no land to spare for growing cash crops, nor could the villagers raise livestock. Where conditions did not exist for developing rural enterprises, the only way forward was for local people to sell their labour power. In villages with 1.5 mu of arable land per capita or more, on the other hand, there would be a certain amount of surplus land to play with. If families were self-sufficient in grain, then they could develop cash crops or engage in animal husbandry. The gradual economic development of Ouchi and Yuanzhuang villages had been based on livestock and the key to this, in turn, lay in being able to convert the autumn harvest into animal feed. Raising animals could increase a family’s cash income and increase the fertility of their land. This was important, given that overreliance on chemical fertilisers promised to become a major problem for farming in China. Second, there was a need to distinguish the different ‘investment behaviour’ of two types of investors. In national terms, China was in the process of evolving from a planned economy to a market economy. In the traditionally agricultural counties of the interior, this was better expressed as a transition from a natural to a market economy. Here there were two main types of investors: first, the local government and its officials. The main officials at county and xiang level, in whose hands powers to make investment decisions

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lay, were in short-term appointments and were subject to sudden transfers. Thus, although capable of reacting to market pricing indications, they were largely motivated by a desire to do what they were told and get credit for it; they did not, or rather could not, take into account the long-term effects of their investment behaviour. This was the basic reason for the flood of investments in this area which gave low returns or no returns at all. The other kind of investors were the broad masses of the peasants with contracted land. On the one hand, they retained the deeply engrained habits of the natural economy, while on the other they were sensitive to the market. If a product’s market price went up enough to make it profitable, then any family that could started to produce it, and others followed suit. Add to this local government’s habit of issuing orders, and the result was a mad rush into that particular activity. It was not easy for the peasants to get easy access to national retail outlets, and this created a situation where the costs involved in these agricultural sidelines rose rapidly, and the market price of the goods fell equally rapidly. This scenario had been repeated all over China since the mid-1980s, and Wuyang County’s xianggu mushrooms could soon fall victim to the same sad fate. The Chinese market economy had its own particular characteristics, and the chief of these in the interior was the investment behaviour of the two types of investors. In recent years, those economists who were so keen on importing Western economic theories sadly had not taken into account differences in patterns of investment between China and the West, and that was why they made so little sense.

The election of the ‘top ten officials’ My next visit was to B xiang, situated about 20 li3 west of the county town, accompanied by Mr Song. We started in the government offices, three buildings each with three storeys which, although nothing out of the ordinary, were the grandest in the town. My guide found his old classmate, the Office Manager, in the meeting room on the first floor of the main building. On a large oval desk in this room lay bundles and bundles of forms from which the manager was compiling figures, and while Song and his friend were talking I casually leafed through them. I discovered that they were voting forms which every peasant household in the county had filled in with their choice of the county’s ‘top ten officials’. Every family got a form, which every Villagers’ Group made up into a large folder, and these were bundled together by the administrative village. The xiang was made up of over 10,000 families, 250 Villagers’ Groups and 36 administrative villages, which made collating the figures a huge and complex task. I suddenly realised that the handwriting on each group’s forms was the same—they had obviously been filled in by one person—as was the list of the ‘top ten officials’. It seemed very likely that the forms had never got as far as the households of the peasants and that the heads of the Villagers’ Groups had probably agreed to fill them in themselves, or the Village Party Secretary might even have called in a couple of people to do the job. This was, of course, just a guess, and one into which I could not enquire too closely, but it seemed a reasonable one. This task was not the idea of the county government but applied to the whole region over which the city government had jurisdiction. The aim was for the hundreds of

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thousands of peasant families to choose the Get Rich Project’s top ten cadres in every county, and its starting point was therefore the city government. From there the directive was passed down to county and xiang level, and ended up with the Village Committees who, in turn, delegated it to the Villagers’ Groups. Then the results of the vote were passed back through each level of government to the city again. The administrative system had completed the entire process of information transfer and feedback and yet the ultimate aim—to get the peasants to vote for their county’s best cadres—had not been achieved. In fact, it was very unlikely that the peasants, busy as they were with getting on with their own lives, would have been the slightest bit interested in the voting. It may be harsh to say that this sort of activity was a total waste of time and money, but sadly that was often the case.

Two wedding customs: ‘pressing the bed’ and ‘bean stuffing’ In the afternoon, Song, Feng and the County Office Manager, Huang, came to my room at the hotel, and I turned the conversation to the topic of local village customs. Around Wuyang, there was a wedding custom called ‘pressing the bed’. Within three days of the wedding, the younger brother of the bridegroom would spend the night in the couple’s bed with them. If there were no younger brother, then another boy would do if he was a close relative. The boy should be between 5 and 10 years of age: if he were too small, he might wet the bed, too big and he would be too aware—it would not be appropriate. The hope was to ensure that the young couple’s first child would be a healthy boy. This custom had begun to die out in the 1980s, and by the 1990s was hardly seen any more. Another custom, this one still current, took place on the day of the wedding, when the elder sister-in-law would put some beans and grains in the couple’s pillow. As the saying went, ‘One bean brings a string of children and one grain brings a hundred.’ Thus the fertility of the beans and wheat symbolised the couple’s desire for a houseful of children. Before the Household Contract Responsibility System for land was set up, there were still a large number of families in which three generations lived under one roof. After the land was contracted out, apportioned according to the number of people in the family, sons began to set up their own households on marriage. Thus the system encouraged the spread of the nuclear family. In the 1970s and 1980s it was unheard of for couples to live together without marrying or for babies to be born out of wedlock. By the 1990s, cohabiting was quietly becoming more common, the main reason being the increase in the number of young men and women who were getting jobs in the city and being influenced by city ways. Second, television had come to the village, changing people’s attitudes. Of course, the older generation of villagers disapproved of these changes, but there was little they could do when that was the way city folk behaved, and it was on the television too. Couples who cohabited always ended up getting married, however, and sexual relationships which did not lead to marriage were still very rare in the villages. Even in towns such as Wuyang, any gossip about such affairs always spread like wildfire. Two years ago, a company manager and a deputy head of department had both had affairs, their wives made a huge fuss and both of them were sacked from their posts.

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It was permissible for a younger brother to flirt with his older brother’s wife, or a nephew with his uncle’s wife; they could even playfully touch each other—always providing they knew when to stop. The other way round, however (older brother with younger brother’s wife, uncle with nephew’s wife) was absolutely forbidden. Song told the tale of an incident in his village in the 1970s when villagers were going out to the fields. One man mistook the woman in front of him for his elder brother’s wife, caught up with her and jokingly grabbed hold of her. The woman turned around and he discovered it was his niece. Mortified, he fled back home, shut himself in and refused to come out for three days. Relationships between village people were based on either kinship or friendship. Kinship was now generally limited to grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren, or in-laws, although it could spread wider than that. Friendship, on the other hand, was based on feelings and unrelated to surnames. As to which were more important to the villagers, the outcome of our discussions seemed to be that where frequent contact was concerned, the family was stronger, whereas in more intimate social relations, friendship was more important. If you left your village and went to work in a county organisation, then you counted on your friends. Kinship meant natural blood ties, friendship was something you built up over the years. Together they formed the basis for social relationships within rural society. If one family quarrelled with another, you normally sided with your own; the same went for your wider clan and your village. This seemed to indicate the continuing importance of blood ties in the village. If you went to the city, you were unlikely to have family there, and you relied much more on your friends. As the old saying went, depend on your parents at home and your friends outside. However, with the current reforms there had been some changes: people still talked in terms of friendship and kinship but what really mattered to them was personal gain. I pondered the fact that 800 million out of China’s total population of 1.2 billion still lived in rural areas and made their living largely from the land. The way in which these peasants understood and reacted to the reforms, and to the new social environment created during the process of modernisation, merited thorough and meticulous study. This was not only because of the large numbers of people involved, but also because of their impact on the speed and direction of that modernisation. Of course, central government policies, combined with the influence of the urban economy and culture, had brought about many changes in rural society: the peasants, now that once again they were able to manage their own production, were developing ever more extensive links with the market economy. With the advent of television and the increase in the number of villagers seeking work in the cities, the younger generation were adopting an urban lifestyle. Would these two factors lead to fundamental change in rural society? In the interior of China, relations between the local government and the peasantry were still archaic: the villagers still lacked any awareness of their rights or of the concept of political participation; it was still common practice for local government to appropriate an excessive proportion of the surplus produced by the peasants on a variety of pretexts. The enormous population pressure on the land which had evolved historically meant that developing large-scale farming and maximising per capita output was not feasible. The only solution was the old—very limited—one of maximising the per mu yield; this needed to be combined with cheap and effective distribution networks and a broad-based

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specialised service sector. Yet neither the peasants nor the government nor local commerce appeared capable of establishing these. We had developed the most modern industries in certain key cities, but small-scale farming still prevailed to a vast extent throughout the countryside. Any examination of where modernisation was taking China, and how fast, could only be carried out by taking a very close look at all aspects of this question.

A woman who had escaped the confines of traditional village life My visit to Wuyang concluded, I returned to Kaifeng and my room at the Henan University Guesthouse. Meng Qingqi from Henan University and Li Yongcheng, my friend from the Kaifeng Party School, arrived to discuss the next stage of my journey. Once we had settled how we were to proceed, the two of them took their leave; but Li, on his way out, said quietly to me that he would be back that evening at seven or eight, bringing his girlfriend, ‘a very pretty girl’, to meet me. I had by now spent some time with Li Yongcheng and we knew each other pretty well. During our conversations, he had often mentioned his ‘very pretty girl’. Her surname was Lan, she was in her early twenties and was originally from a peasant family in Ruzhou County, Henan. They had got to know each other a few years previously when Henan University and Kaifeng Party School had jointly run a diploma course in Ruzhou City. Lan was class leader, and Yongcheng was course tutor. (He was in his early forties and divorced by then.) When the class had completed their course, he helped her get work, and when Lan was not working she often stayed at Yongcheng’s house. When she was on the course, Yongcheng had acted as her teacher and moral mentor, and he had now become her protector. I was anxious to meet her for several reasons: not just because she was ‘a very pretty girl’ and Yongcheng’s girlfriend, but even more because she was likely to be typical of those new women who, with the reforms, had escaped the confines of traditional rural society in large numbers. Although their parents, their land and their residential registration remained in the villages, their education and their ambitions were leading them in the direction of the cities. Psychologically, they had cut all ties with their place of origin and the traditional way of life of the older generation, but in reality the vast majority of them had no way of making a life for themselves in town. How could this new generation of young countrywomen, unable as they were either to go back to the villages or to get a permanent foothold in the city, settle down and make something of their lives? This was an issue which greatly concerned me. After dinner, I put a bowl of fruit on the table and prepared myself. They arrived at 8 p.m., and I greeted Lan with the words: ‘Yongcheng has told me so much about you’, which I felt would please both of them. Although my friend had possibly exaggerated her beauty, Lan was slender and delicate in appearance, in spite of the trials and tribulations she must have faced in her struggles to ‘get urbanised’, and she still retained a country simplicity of manner. I began my interview by asking her to tell me about her family. Her parents were farmers in a village on the outskirts of Ruzhou City, she had two elder brothers and a younger sister. A few years previously, her father had taken out a loan from a credit cooperative, bought a truck and set up in the transport business. He was doing well when

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one day he suddenly had a brain haemorrhage. All the money he had worked so hard to save went on medical treatment. Fortunately he had recovered and continued to farm, although of course he could no longer do heavy work. Her brothers had married and had one child each; one taught in the xiang middle school, the other worked on the land. Her younger sister was 18 and Yongcheng had got her a job working in a restaurant in Luoyang which had been set up by a friend from his army days. Lan herself worked in a state-owned factory making air-conditioning equipment in Ruzhou. She earned Y250 a month, and spent about Y120 of that on food; the factory provided her with free dormitory accommodation, and water and electricity bills were also covered. When she had paid for her food, what was left over went on buying a few clothes and a bit of makeup. She told me that young men and women doing this kind of work in towns like Ruzhou, Luoyang, Zhengzhou and Kaifeng normally earned Y200–300 a month. Apart from food purchases, the girls would generally spend the rest on cheap, stylish clothing and make-up—this was their way of marking themselves out as city folk. Because of the proximity of their villages to Ruzhou, almost all the young men and women from her area had left home to work in labouring or factory jobs or as small traders, especially the latter. Those who had made the move some time previously, or who had friends to help them in the town, had done well out of it. In the xiang middle school she had attended, a third of the teachers had given up teaching for business. Those who went to Ruzhou, Luoyang and Zhengzhou generally rented premises; some bought themselves a house and moved the whole family into the city, but they were in a minority. Those who did well in the city often built a house in the village. If you only worked in a factory or as a labourer, however, you did well just to survive, and very few managed to save anything to take home. Of course, the young men were different from the girls, they did not need to buy make-up or so many clothes, and they could put a bit aside after they had paid for their food. Besides, the men wanted money to build a house and get married. Most of the girls were like her and spent whatever they had on clothes and make-up. Besides, her family did not expect her to send any money home. Her village had a population of 200–300 families. Eighty per cent of the families had built themselves big houses, of either one or two storeys, with flat roofs on which they dried grains. It was mainly the elderly who still lived in old-style brick and tile houses. Many young people in the village had bought themselves motorbikes, more to show off than to help them in their work. ‘Your village must be very affluent,’ I remarked. ‘It might look like that, but really people don’t eat any better quality food than they used to. Newly weds get a decent set of furniture for their house, but ordinary folk just build new houses and inside they’re completely empty, they don’t own anything of any value.’ ‘Why don’t the peasants pay as much attention to what they eat as the house they live in?’ I asked. ‘You eat at home, and whether you eat well or badly, no one else sees,’ was the reply. ‘But everyone sees what your house is like from the outside. If all your neighbours are building new houses and you’re still living where you used to live, then it looks like you’re poor and they look down on you. That’s why everyone wants a new house, even if they have to scrimp and save, or even borrow money’

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Her older brother was ‘half peasant, half worker’ and he had built a new house; her other brother was just a plain peasant, and he had built a new house too. This brother had to stay in the village to look after his child and his parents, and work on the land. Actually, he had chickens and rabbits so he had a cash income and was doing quite well, making more money than if he had got a labouring job elsewhere. I asked Lan what plans she and her younger sister had for the future. She smiled wryly: ‘We don’t look any further than what’s right in front of us. What do we know about the future? It’s really difficult for a country girl to get a reasonably steady job in the city; it’s even more difficult to get a steady job which pays well. There have been lots of city people laid off and they find it difficult to get jobs too.’ ‘If you couldn’t stay on in the town, would you consider going back to the village?’ I asked. ‘I really haven’t thought about that,’ she replied. ‘I want to keep on working in the town for a few more years, and then I’ll see. I’m just as bright as other people, you know, I’ve had quite a few years’ schooling. If I went back to the country, I’d have to get married and spend the rest of my life surrounded by children and pots and pans—I just couldn’t bear that. If I married a rich man in the city I’d have his child and cook for him, and I’m not prepared to live like that, either. What I’m hoping is that if I work really hard for a few years, I’ll be able to set up on my own in town.’ Whoever would have imagined that this delicate-looking young girl harboured such thoughts and dreams? I found myself rather moved. At 10.30, Li and Lan departed. My conversation with her had given me much food for thought, and it was a long time before I was able to sleep.

A visit to the Kaifeng County Party Secretary, ‘Yang the Just’ I spent the next day organising my research material. At seven in the evening, as arranged, Li Yongcheng turned up to take me on a visit to the Kaifeng County Party Secretary, an ex-student of his called Yang Wensheng. Kaifeng County Town lay 15 kilometres south east of Kaifeng City. On our way, Yongcheng told me something about the man we were about to see. Yang Wensheng was 38 years old and very bright; he had been a head of xiang government and xiang Party Secretary for some years, then Deputy Party Secretary in a nearby county before taking up his post as Party Secretary of Kaifeng County in 1994. He had begun by adopting some vigorous measures: all xiang and village cadres—had to undergo a month’s military training together, in order to ‘strengthen discipline and raise morale’; second, he launched an assault on official corruption, and got rid of any cadre suspected of taking bribes or who was simply mediocre, which quickly earned him the approving nickname of ‘Yang the Just’; third, he put enormous efforts into promoting the Get Rich Project, and into municipal construction projects. This last was undertaken too rapidly, and tensions had arisen between local people and officials. A number of complaints had been made to his superiors, and the County Party Committee were still busy trying to calm things down. Li Yongcheng’s assessment of him was: a thoughtful, very hard-working official, quite free of corruption, not a womaniser; lots of get-up-and-go, but could be impetuous.

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All of this set him apart from more typical local officials: in Kaifeng County, Yang was a controversial figure who evoked praise and criticism in equal measures. Some time earlier I had asked Yongcheng to make two requests of Yang on my behalf: I wanted to pay him a visit and interview him, and also to conduct investigations into the xiangs and villages in his county. He had agreed to the first but refused the second. No doubt he had his reasons for refusing to allow me to investigate his county during this turbulent autumn, but I was still holding onto a slim hope that this meeting with him might allay his misgivings. Whether he would allow me to do research in the xiangs, however, was still uncertain. At 7.30 we arrived at the County Party Committee building, and sat down to wait for Yang in the Party Committee office which adjoined the Secretary’s own office. The Office Manager was involved in settling a dispute between the County Forestry Farm and the peasants whose land abutted the farm; in 1988, when doing research in Lingshui County on Hainan, I came across a similar dispute. At the beginning of June this year, in Lankao County, Henan, I had listened to cadres from the County Forestry Department discussing the problem. After the adoption of the Household Contract Responsibility System for land, xiangs and villages on land around the state-owned Forestry Farm had demanded the return of land ‘expropriated’ for forestry. The latter maintained, however, that the trees had been planted on unclaimed wasteland which belonged to the state; decades of management had made it fertile and there was now no question of ‘returning’ it to the villagers. During the period of co-operatives and communes, land ownership issues could not be raised, but as soon as the land had been redistributed to families, disputes of this type arose with great regularity, proving a vexatious and intractable problem. According to the Office Manager, neither side in disputes over the ownership of forestry land had a case in law: the villagers based their case on custom and practice, the Forestry Farm theirs on the current facts, and each was right in some degree. Of course, what local officials were most anxious to avoid was an appeal by the villagers over their heads to a higher authority. At 7.40, Secretary Yang finished his meeting upstairs and hastened down to meet us. His office was about 30 square metres in size, and was furnished with a large desk and two long sofas placed opposite each other, with two low tables between them. On the wall hung maps of the world, of China and of Kaifeng County. A bedroom adjoined the office, which meant that he lived over the shop, as it were. The system of posting local officials away from home meant it was necessary to provide them with a single bedroom as well as an office. We sat down and I explained to Yang the nature of my research: any data I gathered was for study purposes only and did not need to be reported to any officials. As friends and fellow scholars (Yang was a college graduate) I hoped we could exchange views on issues of mutual concern. I had prepared two questions for him some time previously. I put them to him now: did the peasants’ traditional outlook and way of life have any influence on the process of local government or on the market economy? Could the current local government administrative system adapt to a changing rural society? Yang told me that the development of the economy in the hinterland of China had been slow, for a number of reasons, the chief of which were the backward thinking of the peasantry as a whole and the continuing strength of a traditional feudal outlook. The peasants of the central plains of China had for centuries made a living from the land; they

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had scarcely been touched by the powerful influence of modern progressive ideology. They retained the feudal ways of thinking which had prevailed for so long, and it was this feudal mentality which stood in the way of the development of the rural economy. At my request, he gave me some concrete examples of this feudal outlook. Being content with one’s lot was a classic example. After the redistribution of land to the households, the vast majority of villagers in Henan were able to feed and clothe themselves for the first time; there was a very strong feeling then, especially among the older generation, that one should be content with one’s lot. If you tried to get them to change to cash crops requiring investment and technology and offering good returns, they simply would not do it. It was the summit of the peasants’ ambition to be able to eat wheat buns and have a store of surplus grain. With this they were happy; they lacked the desire to make money or take risks. ‘Good people don’t go into trade, and trade has no good people in it’, was another commonly held belief. Many local people believed that eating the wheat you had planted, and having some to spare, gave you peace of mind, and indeed was an expression of a fundamental moral order. They might be living in the present, but they thought in exactly the same way as the peasants of ancient times. Their economic thinking was based on a desire to be self-sufficient and to reduce their dependency on the market; they were certainly not interested in thinking up ways to make money from agricultural sidelines. A further example was their concepts of ‘virtue’. If a girl went on a trip to Guangzhou or Shenzhen and came back, there was an unspoken feeling that something had gone on, and any money she brought back was ‘dirty money’. Public opinion in the villages held that the coastal cities of the south east were one big den of vice. This made it difficult for young women to leave the village to get jobs in shops or factories. In this county, a fair number of young people from villages on the outskirts of towns had jobs in town, but in the outlying villages this was only true of a small number of young males. Of course, in traditionally agricultural villages, very few people had family or friends in a town, and without their help it was even more difficult to get a job. ‘Generally speaking,’ he continued, ‘these traditional feudal ways of thinking survived collectivisation and the people’s communes intact because there was no conflict with the planned economy or the Communist Party’s new morality. But to get involved with the market economy you have to have a strong desire to make money and you have to adopt new ways of thinking and behaving. The peasants are basically happy with their lot, and it is hard to get them involved in developing the type of agricultural ventures that require investment and technology, and offer both benefits and risks. Some xiang and village cadres have tried to coerce them into switching to cash crops, in order to get the Get Rich Project going, but the result has been that villagers have put in complaints about them to the city or provincial government.’ Yang believed that Chinese sociologists had not made a sufficient study of rural society. During the planned economy, the commune system anchored the peasants in their villages; tying them to the land did not do much for economic development, but it did at least promote social and political stability. This stability was jeopardised when the commodity economy (good though this was for development) collided with the villagebased small peasant economy and with old ways of thinking. For thousands of years, villages had naturally come together and held together through ties of kinship. The impact of the cash relationships of the market economy had caused

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these ties between villagers to disintegrate. The traditional kinship system had not been transformed into contracts entered into freely between equals, but it had undergone other changes. Local criminal gangs had grown up on the basis of clan loyalties; they had spread like wildfire through the villages, tyrannising their residents, and had played havoc with moral standards in the countryside. So far, local government had been strong enough to eradicate this kind of thing, but if its control were to weaken, it would present a very worrying prospect for rural society. Always, in the past, the peasants of the interior had been largely self-sufficient, with the market being a subsidiary force; they counted themselves prosperous if they had enough to feed and clothe themselves, had grain in store and a bit of cash. Now, however, in the current market economy where money was everything, the nouveaux riches built mansions in the countryside, flaunted their wealth, indulged in ostentatious weddings and funerals and even wormed their way into local government and corrupted its officials. The wealthy did not necessarily bring others along in their wake; what they did do, however, was to stimulate the consumer appetites of young men and women who lacked the means to make money; the startling rise in the number of thieves and prostitutes was closely correlated to the ‘example’ set to the young by these people. Contentment with one’s lot might not stimulate the economy but it bred social stability. The danger in using a lust for riches and pleasure as the engine for economic growth was that it made people reckless and led to the loss of social order. Therein lay the core of the problem. Many people regarded economic construction and getting rich as the same thing: the aim being to enjoy oneself and to prove one was wealthier than other people. In the past, for county or xiang cadres, your official post, authority and fixed monthly salary were a mark of your social status. Now people looked at how much money you had, whether you had a modern house, and whether you could afford a motorbike or a car. A position of authority was not enough: you needed money, and most officials used their position to get it. This made it hard to be an honest official working in the interests of the people. Since the reforms, a large number of cadres had proved unable to resist the temptations of wealth and had gone to the bad, and this was a reflection not just on their personal morality but on the state of society. Local government carried a heavy responsibility for the development of the local economy. This was the chief objective for any county government: with economic development, the peasants would have money, the workers would have jobs, and then the government would have money too. Relations between cadres and people, or rather between local government and people, would also be less tense than they were at the moment. The basic reason for this tension between the Party and cadres on the one hand, and ordinary people on the other, was economic backwardness, and the need to raise more cash or grain taxes from the peasants. The peasants got very upset at excessive interference by the local administration in the name of economic development. How to speed up this development was the main question which preoccupied local government at all levels. Some believed that all local government needed to do was to act as administrators, law-keepers and tax collectors. The market economy would automatically deploy wealth and resources in the most advantageous way, and rapid progress would result. But this was an agricultural province and an agricultural county, and the basic units of production were the millions of widely dispersed smallholdings. How were they to use market trends to guide farm management decisions? A minority

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would succeed, the vast majority would not. Besides, it was only local government which was capable of organising the setting up of enterprises at xiang and village level. In truth, current theory was not able to offer a systematic or comprehensive interpretation of the host of problems which had arisen as a result of the reforms, and local government had consistently shown itself passive too. From the vantage point of county government there were two lines of defence: the first was village government, but this would crumble at the slightest impact; the second was xiang government, which was a little more resistant, but might not last for long either. Only the county government seemed able to stand firm. Yang’s general view of China’s future was: ‘We must not despair, but neither must we be blindly optimistic.’ With regard to the present situation, he felt, the chief danger came from blind optimism which, if unchecked, could give rise to grave problems. We talked until 11 p.m. and then stood up to take our leave. In the general office there were still people waiting to report to him. Yang insisted on getting his driver to drive us back to Kaifeng City. Perhaps because he had enjoyed our talk, as he said goodbye he volunteered to allow me to do field research in Kaifeng County. I could visit any xiang, village or government department that I liked, and would I also like to run a few seminars for county cadres? I readily agreed. To have the County Party Secretary’s wholehearted support and to be able to focus my research on a particular county was a piece of good luck I had not expected. I was secretly delighted.

The apple orchard owner Three days later, at eight in the morning, Mr Wu, the Kaifeng Party School teacher who was my guide that day, took me to his family’s home in Xuzhuang Village, Taikang County. We went to see a Mr Liu, the owner of an apple orchard and, in Wu’s words, ‘a clever man, with a good head for business’. His orchard was located 20 or 30 li west of Xuzhuang, and Liu met us in his house, a simple dwelling conveniently placed so that he could keep watch on his land. Liu was 48 years old. His family had been poor, and he had been forced to leave in the first year of upper middle school to earn work points in the production team. During this time, he had learnt two trades: carpentry and tailoring. He said: ‘If I had stuck to the production team, we wouldn’t have had enough to eat or money to spend. The only way to get enough food and money was to use my skills as a craftsman.’ Because his job required him to be constantly on the move, he was not confined to his home village by residence registration and the need for food coupons, so between 1970 and 1975 he had travelled all over China working as a carpenter and a tailor. In this way he had acquired far more knowledge and experience than the great majority of ordinary villagers who had never left the land. He said: ‘I returned home in 1975, and became head of the production team. Life for the villagers then was still very hard: they mainly lived off sweet potatoes, and were lucky if they got an allocation of 50 or 60 catties of wheat per year. In those days, work points were generally paid in the form of goods, there was hardly any money, and in fact at the end of the year between a third and a half of the villagers would be in debt to the production team. So when I became team head I proposed that the team and the peasants

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should earn a bit of cash—we put aside 150 mu and planted apple trees. Then I went on to become a cadre in the production brigade, and the new team head got the support of certain cadres in the brigade and commune to cut the whole lot down, even though the trees hadn’t started bearing fruit. I was so angry, I resigned and went back to my trades. I carried on doing this for a while when the Household Responsibility System for land was set up in 1982, then in 1985 the land contracts in this xiang were re-issued and fixed for fifteen years. So at that point I planted all 16 mu of my family’s contract land with apple trees—I was the first to do this in this area. ‘It was a pretty high-risk strategy in those days to plant all your land with apple trees. But if I had stuck to food crops, we would just have had enough to live on—to make money, you needed a high-yield cash crop. I had been in Shandong and Shanxi, and I could see that apples could be very lucrative. I got my first apple tree saplings from Shandong. You know, apple trees take three or four years to bear fruit, and during that time it’s all investment and no returns. But we still had to eat and there were school fees and the land contract fees to pay. At that point, I made two decisions: I interplanted the apples with paulownia trees (you can underplant with wheat and maize in the first couple of years too). The paulownia trees have a short life span, and you can sell them for timber after three or four years. And I also went back to plying my trades to earn a bit of money. Even so, we lived pretty frugally, life was hard and my family complained, but I told them that once the apples started to fruit, life would gradually get better. ‘In 1989, I had the first returns on my investment. I sold 700 paulownia trees for Y8,000 (the going price was about Y10 per tree then, though it’s gone up to Y50 a tree now). This just about covered my investment costs since 1985. The apple trees didn’t fruit until the following year—they develop more slowly if you interplant them with paulownia trees. My net income from the apples in 1991 was Y3,000; in 1992 it was Y4,500; in 1993, it was about Y7,000; in 1994, Y10,000 and 1995, Y18,000. I reckon this year it should have been Y30,000, but the crop was damaged by pests and prices were down, so I only took Y15,000. Even so, it’s much better than growing traditional crops like wheat, maize and cotton, where you can only net Y400, or at most Y500, per mu. Y400 per mu would only give us Y6,400 on our entire plot of 16 mu. ‘Apple trees have a productive life of thirty years, and are at their peak between the eighth and twelfth year. Now that more peasants are growing apples, the prices have dropped, so the returns are less than I first estimated. This year they fell sharply, from Y60 in the previous two years to Y30–40 per hundred catties. But in the last couple of years, I’ve been subcontracting another 20 or so mu of land, so I’m growing more apple trees, and besides, with the drop in prices, many of the peasants have chopped down their young trees. In my way of thinking, apples will always do better than food crops. Market prices may fluctuate but the price for good-quality fruit doesn’t change much. You need to look at your technology, your varieties and the quality, and you’ll make profits, I’m confident of that. I subcontract the extra land on the basis that I pay all the taxes and levies for the land, plus I give the family who own the contract land 150 catties of wheat per mu.’ Liu was clearly proud of his business venture, and very satisfied with the recent rise in his family’s standard of living. But his pride and satisfaction stopped there. When it came to other areas of life, he had no end of grievances.

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‘The countryside is facing serious problems,’ he said. ‘The real income of the peasants is greatly overstated by local officials. Village and xiang governments report per capita income to the county as Y1,000, where in fact it’s not more than Y500–600, Y700 at the very most. In this xiang, there are no xiang or village industries, so people’s income mainly comes from the land, apart from a bit from labouring jobs. In my reckoning, less than a tenth of peasant families have a regular, stable income from seasonal jobs. So calculations of the per capita net income should be based mainly on their farm income. It’s true that more and more families are growing cash crops, mainly apples and grapes, or raising their own livestock, but most don’t make anything from it, and some even make losses. The fact that many people have chopped down their young trees with the drop in apple prices is the proof of this. You can only net around Y300–400 per mu if you stick to wheat and maize, and the average land per capita is between 1.5 and 2 mu, which is why the average annual income is only Y500–700. Even if the harvest is very good, it won’t be more than Y800 per head. But local officials exaggerate this figure, because it makes them look good and so that they can raise more local government revenues from the peasants. Then again, the cadres won’t give us a clear idea of what all these levies are for, and they’ve become impossibly burdensome. We hardly get a moment to draw breath after the summer and autumn harvests before xiang officials are out in the villages with the local police collecting dues. I tell you, in the last few years, ordinary people have been living in a constant state of fear and trepidation. ‘Most Chinese peasants are simple folk. Providing they can keep body and soul together, they’ll put up with a lot before complaining. It’s a last resort if they do lodge a complaint to the city or provincial government. In 1992, the xiang government pulled down the house of a peasant woman who couldn’t pay her levies, and she killed herself. In 1995, another woman didn’t have the money to pay an excess birth fine and committed suicide by poisoning herself. The pesticides we have now are no good at getting rid of pests, but you can kill yourself with one dose. The year before last in Qi County, there was a case where someone took revenge against official bullying: a couple had a baby and it was a girl. The woman got pregnant again, and the xiang cadres forced her to have an abortion. Then she got pregnant a third time, and she was already five or six months gone when she was discovered. She got down on her knees before the cadres, and wept and begged for mercy, but they took her off to the clinic for an abortion. This time the foetus was the longed-for boy. The husband made plans for revenge. In order not to involve his wife, he divorced her, then one night he went out and killed the three xiang cadres. The county police went after him, but he managed to hide out in the county town, and the next day he turned up at the police station and put up a big character poster explaining why he had done it. You know what folk felt about that? They didn’t see his action as a crime, they saw it as ridding them of evil. It’s not the village cadres who call the shots, it’s the xiang officials. That bunch of corrupt bullies are loathed by ordinary people. ‘Every year I pay my levies to the village and xiang government like everybody else. Whatever they say is the per mu rate, that’s what I pay. Then, because I’m growing apples, they levy a farm produce tax on me too, and a cotton tax. I decided to refuse to pay. They came to my home a couple of times, once even with the police, and tried to get it out of me, and called me to the xiang, but I still refused to pay up. It’s not that I can’t afford the Y1,000 or so, I just don’t see why I should pay up without a good reason.

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‘Local government is rotten to the core at all levels now,’ he continued. ‘Every project intended to benefit the people is turned into an opportunity to fleece us. Anti-gambling laws are a good thing, but they use them against people playing mahjong. They just see people playing, or get told by an informant, and they don’t ask if they’re gambling or just having a bit of fun, they take them straight off to the xiang police station. They’ll only let them go once they’ve paid a heavy fine. Building roads and schools is a good thing, too, but only a small part of the money raised from the peasants gets used for its proper purpose—most of it goes straight into their own pockets. Nowadays, it’s not just individual officials who are bent, corruption is universal. ‘Party Secretaries and xiang heads come and go, but basically they’re all the same. All they ever do is squeeze money out of the peasants on the pretext of putting it into local projects. It sounds like a good idea for the xiang to make a bulk purchase of pesticides for each village to spray at the same time, but in fact the price they charge the peasants is much higher than the market price. It’s the same with bulk buying of wheat seed. It wouldn’t matter if it was good-quality seed, but it isn’t. A couple of years ago, they made the peasants sow the poor-quality seed in fields a long way from the main road so that the inspectors wouldn’t see. In 1995, my brother bought a video projector and a small generator (we have a lot of power cuts around here) and started to show films. He was showing a dirty film one night, and quite a lot of villagers came to watch. The xiang police got wind of it and came straight over to arrest people. The audience were taken off and shut up in the police station, forced to confess and some were even beaten up. They confiscated my brother’s video machine and the generator, and fined him Y3,500, and the rest of the audience were fined Y200–300 each. He shouldn’t have been showing dirty films, but they were using the anti-porn laws to make money. They raked in tens of thousands of yuan that time. At the beginning of this year, the xiang police arrested a prostitute from our village. They locked her up and made her confess who her clients were. Every time she gave them a name, they arrested the man and fined him Y800– 1,000. The woman just gave them any old names—as many as twenty or thirty men. The villagers were terrified of being arrested and not being able to clear their names. She even said one old man of over 70 had been her client and he was fined Y500. How could his family look their neighbours in the face again? It was terribly shaming for him and his family, it nearly killed him. The whole operation earned the police around Y200,000. Levies are heavy enough, without having to pay fines like these. It’s driving ordinary people to despair. ‘I’m nearly 50 years old, and I’ve lived under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. I have to admit that life is better now for the majority of the peasants than it used to be. They used to live off sweet potatoes and never had enough; now they eat wheat and can eat their fill. If you’re bright and able now, you can get a labouring job, or grow apples like I do, and that will give you an income a bit better than the average. But the peasants are still full of complaints—mainly about official corruption and the breakdown in law and order. Sometimes we even get highway robbery, though that’s rare. Official corruption is worse than robbery in a way, because it affects all of us, there’s no way of avoiding it. I pay the levies on my contract land just like everyone else, and then they try and get me to pay a farm produce tax on top. I only grow apples, but they try and get me to pay a ‘cotton deposit’ as well, even though I don’t grow cotton. As soon as the apples are ripe, I get the xiang cadres, the xiang police, and the people from the Tax and Commerce

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Offices, all rolling up in their cars. Then off they go with their bags of apples, which they say they’ve come to buy, but of course, it’s more than my life is worth to ask them for the money. That alone costs me between Y1,000 and Y2,000 every year, or even more. They come and eat my apples for free and I still have to give them a warm welcome and invite them to come again… I ask you, what’s the world coming to?’ While we were talking, the local doctor came in to give Liu his asthma injection, and we invited him to join us. The doctor was a man of about 30, also called Liu. He had completed upper middle school, but had failed his entrance exams for university, and had subsequently put himself through a medical diploma course run by the City Health Department. The course was two years, and had cost him Y4,000–5,000. On graduating, he had obtained a licence to practise as a rural doctor, and this he had been doing for about six years. He too was full of grumbles. ‘We’re bound to buy our equipment and medicines from a hospital designated by the County Health Department, but their prices are much higher than the going market rate. The Department sends us a monthly, singlepage Drugs Information News Sheet, for which they charge Y50. Then every now and then they come and do spot checks on our needles and tubes, for which they charge us an Y80 inspection fee. It means the Department’s screwing Y200–300 out of us every month, and if you refuse to pay, they can withdraw your licence. People round here may have enough to eat, but most of them have very little cash, except at harvest-time, and then the local government takes it all off them. When they come for treatment, they pay with an IOU. Since they have no money, they put up with their illnesses and don’t come and see us until it’s really bad. Any serious cases have to go the county or city hospital, so we rural doctors earn really very little, and half of that the County Health Department finds ways of clawing from us.’ When we had finished talking, I suggested to Liu that we go and visit his orchard, which was almost on his doorstep. He did, in fact, have a proper home in the village, but he and his wife moved to the orchard for the months between blossom time and harvest. This was a simple, three-roomed, single-storey dwelling, with a large fierce guard-dog tethered under an apple tree by the front door, and an enormous sow lolling nearby. The trees he had planted ten years previously were at their peak. We were now in the second half of September, and this year’s fruit had all been gathered in. The returns had only been half what he had anticipated—there had been continuous rainstorms when the fruit was developing which had knocked many of the little apples off the tree, and prices had fallen sharply. When I brought up the latter, he repeated his assertion that if you chose good varieties, looked after them well and produced better-quality fruit than other people, then you could still get a good price for them. He was a man who exuded business confidence. What worried him was not the weather or the vagaries of the market, but the exorbitant demands of local officialdom. At midday, Wu’s mother killed a chicken in our honour and prepared a lunch of chicken, pancakes and eggs. Wu told me that there was no food market in this area, and since the villagers had so little money, no traders bothered to come to the village to sell meat, vegetables or bean curd products. The peasants rarely ate meat and vegetables, and kept their chickens and the eggs they laid for when guests came. We had not obtained the agreement of the xiang government for this trip to Xuzhuang Village, nor had we made our presence known to the Village Party Secretary there. We were effectively making an ‘illegal private visit in plain clothes’. Although I had Wu as

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my guide, and his excuse was that he was there ‘on a home visit’, my presence was likely to arouse the curiosity of the villagers and the suspicion of the village cadres, which was the sort of trouble I wanted to avoid. We therefore decided to make our getaway while the going was good—and that afternoon took the bus back to Kaifeng.

More on Village Party Secretaries and corruption At nine in the morning, I boarded a long-distance bus that would take us from Kaifeng, north across the Yellow River to Anyang, where we arrived in the late afternoon. The scenery was exactly the same as that south of the Yellow River: the few kilometres which benefited from river-fed irrigation canals were mostly planted with paddy rice. Beyond that, maize stretched as far as the eye could see. It was the autumn harvest, and the fields were full of peasants hard at work. Roads and canals were bordered by neat rows of white poplars which protected the embankments and road foundations, their green foliage relieving the monotony of the plains. The villages which nestled among the trees were by no means as dense as on the plains of the lower reaches, but they were nonetheless substantial. What was the relationship, I wondered, between the special character of our traditional Chinese economy, politics and culture and the Yellow River, the sandiest in the world, with its vast alluvial plains, uniform soil, climate and water and irrigation systems? This was a complex question, not easy to elucidate. Historically, the Chinese had been an inward-looking, backward-looking people. In order to shake off backwardness, we, like any people, needed to look outward and forward, yet we also needed to retain a degree of introspection. Only thus could we affirm our national identity, and decide where we were, where we had come from, where we wanted to go and how to get there. I struck up a conversation with a young man who had got on the bus at the same time as me, and was now sitting next to me. He turned out to be both intelligent and observant—an excellent interview subject. Young Wang was an 18-year-old Henanese, who had completed lower middle school and then left. The world’s your oyster now, if you’re capable, he told me. I asked him what being ‘capable’ meant, and he said it was earning money. If you could do that, it meant not only that you had a better standard of living than other people, but that they respected you. You could just about scrape a living if you stayed in the village, you couldn’t make any money. And without money, people looked down on you, and you couldn’t marry or set up in business. So as soon he’d finished lower middle school, he’d gone with a schoolfriend’s father to Guangdong and Shenzhen and got a job. There was no money in farming, he said, or even in stock-breeding. The way you earned money was either setting up in business or becoming a small trader. For both of these you needed either capital or contacts, and he had neither, which left him no option but to get a labouring job. In the south, a labourer’s wages were quite good, about Y500–600 a month. You could skimp on meals, and could eat for as little as Y200 a month. He did not even bother to go home at the Chinese New Year, to save travel expenses. With overtime, you could clear Y3,000–4,000 if you worked hard for a year. A few years like that, and you could save as much as Y40,000, and then you could go home and set up a business of your own. After that, money would come in quicker. Quite a few businessmen in the

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south had started up that way. But at the beginning of this year, on the orders of the Village Party Secretary, he had left the factory where he was working on the outskirts of Guangzhou City and come home to work as a salesman for a village enterprise. Today he had been in Zhoukou and Kaifeng on business and was on his way home. He then told me something about the village collective enterprise for which he worked. His view of joint stock partnerships was that they broke up as quickly as they were formed. Everyone was happy when they were working, and everyone pointed the finger of blame at someone else when they broke up, sometimes even coming to blows. ‘I’ve seen this happen so many times, and heard about it even more often. When the Party Secretary wrote to me at the end of last year and asked me to come back and help with sales, I wrote back asking whether his business was his own or jointly owned. If he was a sole trader I would come; if it was a partnership, I’d rather stay in my job in Guangzhou.’ It turned out that the business, which manufactured machine oil and anti-freeze, was run by a partnership of seven. Two years previously, they had each put Y50,000 into it. During the first year, when they had not yet established themselves in the market and had made no profits, they had worked well together. In the second year, they had begun to make money, and the managing director and the head of the factory (the Village Party Secretary), who were actually from two different clans, had fallen out. ‘As soon as I found out all this, I said I wasn’t coming, but the Party Secretary kept writing and phoning and insisted that he needed my help. He even sent me my travel expenses, and in the end I had to give up my job and come home,’ Wang continued. ‘The Secretary is not the same clan as me, and he’s ten years older, but he’d treated me very well in the past, he’d been like a brother to me. If he was in difficulties and needed my help, I couldn’t really say no. At the New Year Festival, he told me that the factory sales department were all the managing director’s men. He sweated away on the production side, while they just went off with the money. Sales people are crucial when it comes to whether a factory makes any money, and whose pocket it goes into. That’s why he wanted me back, and working in sales. This seven-person partnership has divided up into two camps, and each has their own sales personnel making profits for them. A company can’t go on trading like this in the long term. Sure enough, at the beginning of this year, some of the factory shareholders were having a drink together and the managing director became drunk and abusive. The factory head almost got into a fight with him. I’ll give it six months or one year, no more, before the company goes down the tubes.’ I reflected to myself that there was a clear need in villages where capital, technology and links with the outside world were in short supply, for joint stock partnerships of this type—the fact that they were so common in rural areas was proof of this. With an acuity startling in one so young, Wang had pinpointed a tendency that was equally common— that they were breaking almost as soon as they were formed. Why? Was it due to an inherent weakness in the way the companies were set up? In the modes of behaviour of Chinese peasants? For such businesses to function successfully, it was necessary for the participants to be able to negotiate between themselves on an equal footing and to obey rules laid down by the community. There was indeed an objective need for joint businesses; the trouble was that there was no way that appropriate modes of behaviour could arise out of a society based on the small peasant economy. Quite the reverse: traditional patterns of intercourse militated against the survival of such economic cooperation.

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‘Village Party Secretaries are always complaining that they’re too busy, don’t get paid enough and whatever they do offends people,’ I said to Wang. ‘Do you think there’s any truth in that?’ ‘On the surface, that’s what it looks like,’ he replied. ‘But in reality there are lots of advantages in being the Village Party Secretary, and how much you get out of it is really up to the individual.’ Then he related to me something that his friend the Party Secretary had said to him privately when they had been drinking together at the Chinese New Year: ‘Everybody now thinks that all officials are corrupt,’ the man had said. ‘So what’s the point in being squeaky clean, since no one will believe you? It’s getting the worst of both worlds.’ I put it to Wang that his friend must have made many thousands of yuan after being in office seven years. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘The first two or three years, he just got a few free dinners. In the last three or four years, he’s made a bit, it’s true. He told me so himself.’ ‘How much a year?’ I pursued. ‘I asked him the same question,’ was the answer. ‘He told me Y20,000–30,000. He said you can’t be too greedy or too many complaints are made about you.’ ‘How does he get the money?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never asked that, and he’s never told me. But the Village Party Secretary is the village boss, everything goes through him. It must be dead easy to make that amount. For example, he’s usually the host for xiang inspection teams. If when they spend Y100 on a meal at his home, and he reports it as Y200, who’s to know? Thousands have to be raised for road-building and well-boring, and if he gets a kickback of five thousand from the contractors, who’s to know about that either? He can make a bit out of family planning quotas and planning permissions—that’s very common. So long as he exercises a bit of care and discretion, making Y20,000–30,000 a year should be no problem.’ At three in the afternoon, we arrived in Jun County and my outspoken friend got off the bus and went off to sell his wares. I said goodbye to him with some regret that I had not begun to talk to him earlier. There was no doubt that a great deal of interesting information about his village, the seven business partners, jobs in Guangzhou and the skills of a salesman were stored away in that sharp young man’s head. All the same, I felt a deep sense of gratitude to my temporary travelling companion. His judgement on village collective enterprises accorded surprisingly closely with my own observation and analysis; but his take on local corruption was quite new to me. We arrived in Anyang in the early evening. This, the first of China’s ancient capitals, culturally speaking, now bore the aspect of any other modern city—its intersecting streets, laid out on a grid pattern, were wide and clean, and brightened by the addition of green verges bordering the traffic lanes. It was a busy town, but orderly. There were few of those skyscrapers beloved of ‘modernisers’ in China, but there were plenty of new buildings several storeys high, and the shop fronts looked the same as they do in all Chinese cities. The upgrading of the urban environment had eliminated the simplicity which this ancient capital, in my imagination, had once possessed. We strolled around for a while, before settling on a ‘top class hotel’ near the bus station. My initial favourable impressions of Anyang vanished as soon as I entered its doors. The plaster on the walls was already beginning to flake, and they were unpleasantly mildewed. The bath was filthy, one tap could not be turned on while the other could not

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be turned off, and the lavatory seat was broken. The bedding was still clean, but the carpet was pocked with cigarette burns. I reflected sadly that while modernisation, to most Chinese, meant the provision of modern appliances, having them had not led to a corresponding upgrading in the standards of behaviour of those who made, managed or used them. Achieving the latter would be a long and torturous process—we could not judge how modern we were simply on the basis of how fast we acquired those appliances. From Anyang, Li Yongcheng and I took a series of buses north towards the border with Hebei. We arrived in D xiang, Feixiang County, at around seven o’clock. It was a moonless night, and very dark. This was Yongcheng’s old home, but it was many years since his last visit and we had to ask our way several times. We followed the road, which was deeply rutted by tractors, until we finally found ourselves at his uncle’s house in Zhonghang Village. By this time, it was past eight o’clock, and the old couple were on the point of going to bed. However, they greeted the arrival of their nephew with delight, invited us in and put a typically simple, north Chinese meal before us. The uncle, formerly Village Party Secretary, assured me that I was welcome to stay as long as I liked, in order to carry out my research. The couple then accompanied us to their son’s new house where we were to stay.

The Eye Goddess temple I awoke early, at six o’clock. Our hard-working hosts had already been out in their fields and arrived back pulling a handcart laden with maize cobs. They proceeded to prepare a sumptuous peasant breakfast for us: a basket of steamed buns, a plate of boiled corn, a pan of millet porridge, a bowl of hot chilli sauce and some boiled eggs. In accordance with local custom, only the husband ate with his male guests, and the wife and children ate in the kitchen. Yongcheng’s cousin was a man of 42, with a lower middle school education. In the 1980s, his father’s connections as Village Party Secretary had got him a job in the local Electricity Supply Office, a subsidiary of the County Electricity Department. He had retained his contract land in the village, went to the office by day, and worked the land morning and evening. His wife also did farm work. They had three children to support in school—two at lower middle school and one in primary. A frugal lifestyle and the hard-won fruits of their land, together with an undemanding and wellpaid office job (paid at Y500–600 a month), had enabled them to build a modern house costing Y50,000–60,000. ‘These new-style houses only made an appearance two or three years ago,’ he told me. ‘They’re an improvement on the old, single-storey houses: you have five rooms in a row, and they’re more spacious; they have a room built on to the room at each end, extending forward (what the people around here call ‘sleeve-style’), so that actually you have seven rooms. The eaves project forward about two metres; these are supported by posts and form a veranda. To make the house even better, the floors inside are of concrete, and the foundations are of reinforced concrete. The front of the house is decorated with wall tiles, and the whole thing cost us Y50,000, not counting the courtyard walls, which we built of the old house bricks.’ I was puzzled as to how this middle-aged couple, on the income from 10 mu of land and one job, had managed to put by enough to build a house that expensive. There were

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three in my family, and from our combined monthly income of Y2,500 we could scarcely save a cent. Their frugality was one reason. They had the grandest house in the village, but their diet had not changed in a decade. They were satisfied with having enough to eat, and were not interested in a better diet. Their clothes were mostly Yongcheng’s cast-offs. Their house may have appeared spacious from the outside, but inside there was scarcely a stick of furniture. Only the living room was decently furnished, with home-made wooden chairs, a sofa and a low table. A 14-inch colour television stood on a stand, also homemade. Each of the three bedrooms—one for Yongcheng’s cousin and his wife, one for the son and one for the two daughters—contained a simple bed. The other three rooms were used for storing grain, farm implements and the like. Their son was still in lower middle school, and it would be a long time before he got married. Why had they been in such a hurry to sink all their savings into this house, and become the grandest family in the village? It was hard to explain this spendthrift behaviour in terms of their desire to have a better house, and prepare a place for their son and his bride. Almost all the surplus product of the villagers, even that which they anticipated earning, went into house-building. There appeared to be two reasons for this: the outward reason was that there were still few other ways to invest your money. Even with decollectivisation, investment in land had been restricted, while rural industry and commerce was so poorly developed that it was impossible for funds to flow in that direction. There was another reason, too, inherent in the intense competitiveness of village society. It was not position in the clan which determined a family’s social standing within the village, but the amount of money they had. Under a private land ownership system, competition between village families would primarily be concentrated on the amount of land; under the present land contract system, it was housing that was the battleground for social status. The superiority or inferiority of your house and courtyard thus became the outward manifestation of your wealth and status. This intense competition for status was the driving force behind the peasants’ intense longing to have money, and their willingness to do whatever it took to earn it. After breakfast, I enjoined our hosts to carry on their work as normal, and not to spend any more time on entertaining us. September and October were busy months on the farm, and our talks could wait until we met in the evening. In the morning, Yongcheng took me on a visit to the village. The villages of the north China plains are all broadly similar in layout. The streets are arranged on a north-south axis, the main street running east-west across them. In some, the remnants of ramparts and moats could still be seen. We strolled along the main street, and I was surprised to see four temples in the space of 300 metres. Each was 2 to 3 metres in height and width and built of bricks. Each had a small shrine inside with, hung above it, a large white sheet painted with a variety of immortals and bodhisattvas. One was dedicated to Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, one to General Guan Gong, one to the Eye Goddess, and I was unable to establish who the fourth deity was. We paused at the Eye Goddess temple, and an old peasant came up to greet Yongcheng. I asked him which bodhisattva this temple honoured. ‘The Eye Goddess,’ he replied. ‘And why is the Eye Goddess venerated in this village?’ ‘Because so many of the old women have eye problems. If they burn incense and make obeisance to the deity, their eyes sometimes get better.’

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‘Do you believe that?’ I asked. ‘No, we don’t believe it, but our womenfolk do. They’re the ones who want the temples built. All the villages have temples, some more than us, and bigger too.’ Generally speaking, it was clear that the official ideology imposed from above on the villagers had made little real difference to the way they thought, and still less to the way they behaved. With the dissolution of the communes, government control had greatly weakened and there had been a revival of age-old peasant beliefs all over China. However, this was the first time I had seen such a cluster of temples with my own eyes. Whether the reason was that the peasants around here were particularly backward or that the area straddled the borders of three provinces so that local government control over rural society was correspondingly weak, I had no way of knowing. This was also the first time I had come across a folk deity called the ‘Eye Goddess’. On a north-facing wall on the main street were written seven or eight seven-character rhymes. There were exhortations to obey the law, to use family planning methods, to abstain from gambling, to respect one’s parents-in-law and to live in harmony with one’s neighbours. They all appeared to be the work of the county and xiang Propaganda Departments, with the calligraphy by someone from the Village Committee. With the exception of the reference to family planning, their style and content differed little from Ming and Qing dynasty ‘village rules’, and sundry Confucian and Buddhist moral exhortations which I had seen on previous occasions. On the wall at the eastern end of the village was a bulletin board with two lists on it: one was the village public accounts and the other was lists of target figures for house-building areas, agricultural levies and family planning targets, but neither contained any real information. A declaration had also been written up: ‘The Provincial Electricity and Commodity Prices Departments have fixed the unit price of electricity at Y0.45 per kWh. You have the right to refuse to pay more than that amount.’ I asked a peasant: ‘Is the price per kWh really Y0.45?’ ‘You don’t believe that rubbish, do you?’ he replied. ‘It’s at least Y0.7–0.8, or even as much as Y1.’ The truth was that local government Propaganda Departments often reduced government policies to a simple catchphrase which they painted on a wall, but did not care whether these policies were actually carried out. The bed of an old stream ran south to north and crossed the main street at right angles, dividing the village into two parts. Yongcheng told me that it had originally been a tributary of the Zhang River, but had long since dried up and fallen into disuse. His clan, the Lis, he added, had three branches in the village: the senior branch lived east of the river, the other two branches west of it. There were also half a dozen ‘ponds’ in and around the village, but these were also dried up except for a short period during and after rain. They could not have been used for storing water or washing, still less for raising fish or ducks. Most of the villages I had visited so far had ‘ponds’ of this type, and it was not clear what use the villagers made of them. However, light dawned when Yongcheng explained to me that the villagers needed earth for building, to make mud bricks, to construct walls and house foundations. The latter needed to be built well up on the plains, because of flooding. The ‘ponds’ were not for storing water, which they did not hold since the soil was too soft—they were merely holes in the ground dug by the peasants when they needed building materials.

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This village had experienced two waves of house-building in the forty years since Liberation. The 1960s and 1970s had seen the adobe and thatch houses which had previously made up 80 per cent of village housing gradually disappear, to be replaced by tiled houses built of a mixture of adobe and bricks. These were normally three-roomed affairs, with the courtyard walls still of home-made adobe and the bricks fired by the peasants themselves. Building would be done with the help of neighbours and relatives. In the 1980s, the design of the houses and courtyards continued much the same as previously, although they were taller and more spacious. Adobe was no longer used and the bricks and tiles were bought from a local factory. Co-operative house-building also ceased; the project would be contracted out to a village building team. The reason given for this was always the same: ‘It saves money and it’s less trouble,’ I was told. Of course, the increase in the peasants’ cash income after decollectivisation was another important factor. Bricks from the old dwellings were recycled to build courtyard walls, so that a large proportion of the latter came to be brick-built. In my estimation, 30– 40 per cent of villagers still lived in old-style houses, mainly the old folk and some poor families. In villages all over China, the chief cause of poverty after decollectivisation was feebleness of mind or chronic illness. Then in the 1990s, a new type of single-storey building began to make its appearance. These were generally four or five rooms in a row, ‘mansion-style’, with a veranda; and some had an added room sticking out at each end, which the peasants called ‘sleevestyle’. They were concrete-built and faced with cement and lime inside and out, and the front outside walls were tiled. Such a house would cost between Y20,000 and Y30,000. Only four or five families had houses like this, and the Lis’ new house, costing Y50,000– 60,000, stood out as the best of the lot. I joked to Yongcheng’s cousin: ‘Your family has set the house-building stakes so high, how will other villagers catch up?’ He smiled slyly in response: ‘Well, what’s the point in being overtaken by someone else the moment your own new house is finished?’ We walked right round the village and arrived back at Yongcheng’s uncle’s house, where old Li and his wife were working on the millet they had just harvested. I sat down to help them pull off the ears of millet, and chatted to the old man. He was 62 years old, and had a son and a daughter. When the county had recruited workers from the production brigade for county factories, he had got his daughter a job in the fertiliser factory, and his son a post in the County Electricity Department. He was the Party Secretary of the production brigade at that time, a post which he held from 1971 until 1989. He and his wife now had 4 mu of contracted land, and twenty pigeons, so that they were self-sufficient in food and did not have to depend on their children. The conversation turned to changes in crops and yields, and he told me that up until the end of the 1970s the wheat yield per mu in this region had only been 300 catties, 400 at best. It was the same for maize. The per mu yield of both crops had now doubled, according to Li due to improved seeds and increased use of fertiliser. During collectivisation, the local diet was chiefly made up of coarse grain (maize and sweet potatoes) but now people had wheat to eat all year round. The real problem for several hundreds of li around here was a serious lack of water, an issue about which the old man expressed profound concern. ‘Before the mid-1960s, our water table was quite high. If you were sinking a well, you only had to go down 5 or 6 metres to get water. Since then, levels have fallen year by year. The water is saline as far

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down as 80 metres, and to get sweet water you have to go 200–300 metres down. That costs money—Y100,000 to have the job done plus a pump and other equipment. Our village only has one well that deep, and each family gets a supply of water once a week. That well also supplies most of the water for crop irrigation, then there are three or four 50- or 60-metre wells too, but only about one-third of the village’s 2,000 mu get watered, half at most. The crops in the other fields just have to depend on rainfall. If there’s a drought, there’s only enough water for people and livestock.’ The effect on wheat and maize, he told me, was that if you irrigated with sweet water, you could harvest 700–800 catties per mu, no problem. Saline water reduced the yield by 100–200 catties, and the yield if you did not irrigate at all depended on the weather. The crop might produce only 100–200 catties per mu, or might fail altogether if there was a drought. ‘In the north, we’re largely dependant on well water for drinking supplies and irrigation. Now we have to dig deeper and deeper wells, and they’re more and more expensive, where’s it going to end?’ ‘How much does it cost to water one mu of wheat?’ I asked. ‘Y25 per watering,’ he told me. ‘Each crop needs watering three times, so that’s Y75. Maize needs watering twice, so that’s Y50.’ ‘Is the whole of Feixiang County this short of water?’ I asked. ‘Yes, and several other counties around too,’ was the reply. I knew that the whole of north China was short of water, but hitherto had not had detailed information on this. Old Mr Li’s account, and his obvious concern, made me realise for the first time the import of these water shortages. I then asked about the Eye Goddess temple in the village, and the old man said: ‘A lot of the old women have eye trouble, that’s why they built it’ I asked him what caused the eye trouble, but he said no one knew. I suspected it might be connected with getting soot in their eyes while cooking, and went into the kitchen to have a look. Sure enough, the whole kitchen was blackened with soot, and there was no chimney. I asked the old man why he hadn’t built a chimney. He said: ‘None of the kitchens in the village have chimneys.’ So the reason was simply long-established custom. I wondered why the system of science associations which stretched from central government down to xiang level, had not gone into the villages to show the villagers the ‘scientific results’ of this practice. Yongcheng’s cousin then arrived to invite us to lunch, interrupting my conversation with his father. We got to his house, and I went to look at the kitchen. It did not have a chimney either. I talked to my host about the relationship between soot, eye trouble and the Eye Goddess, and suggested that he take the lead in the village by adding a chimney to his kitchen. ‘It’s a way of looking after your wife, and benefiting your neighbours,’ I said. Li promised that he would do it after the harvest was over. After lunch, the family went about their work, and Yongcheng and I rested until 3.30, when I suggested he might take me round the village again, to see if we might bump into some peasants with whom I could talk. To obtain the right kind of field material in this research, I did not believe in restricting myself to a prearranged programme of interviews. A programme drawn up on the basis of pre-defined objectives was necessary, but brought with it the danger of overlooking important new phenomena or issues which might not be listed in the programme. I believed that one should go into field research in

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a receptive frame of mind, keeping one’s eyes and ears open and allowing one’s curiosity to lead one ever onward to new speculations. We had walked a few metres down the main street when we came across a family of four stripping a large pile of corn cobs in front of a small kiosk set into a courtyard wall. The kiosk owner, a peasant in his late forties, recognised Yongcheng, and insisted we sit down on some stools he brought and drink tea with him. As we chatted he began to shake his head and sigh. He then told us about his recent run of bad luck. Four years ago, his wife had accidentally got pregnant. (He was 48, she was 45, and they already had three children—a daughter of 20 and sons of 17 and 14.) The xiang Family Planning Office had made her have an abortion and undergo sterilisation. ‘I had no problem with that—I didn’t want any more children—but the clinic was poorly equipped and badly run, the operation went wrong, and my wife has never recovered. She can’t work in the fields any more, she can only stay at home and do a little light housework.’ ‘Has she been treated?’ I asked him. ‘Yes, she’s been to the County Hospital, but they couldn’t do anything.’ I suggested she ought to go to the city for treatment, but he shook his head. ‘We haven’t got the money for that’ ‘But it was a medical accident,’ I said. ‘You could claim compensation from the xiang Family Planning Office.’ ‘Compensation? Not likely! There are lots of women like my wife in this xiang who’ve been made invalids by a sterilisation operation.’ It was clear that it would never enter the heads of this couple to bring a civil action and claim financial compensation. It was easy to imagine what losing the wife’s labour power had meant to them. Yet they put it down to ‘bad luck’ and put up with it. That was the first stroke of ‘ill luck’. The second was that two years ago, their mule and five pigs had died. The third was that last year the maize seed they had bought was of poor quality, and only yielded a couple of hundred catties per mu—a number of village families had fallen into the same trap. The fourth was ‘this money-losing kiosk’. The village had had a small shop before, and business had been good. It brought in Y200–300 a month. At the end of the year before last, he had sold 1,000 catties of wheat, borrowed Y900 from his sister, making Y1,700 in all, and built the kiosk into his courtyard wall. For a few months business had been quite good, until suddenly three more shops opened in the village. ‘There are only 200–300 families in the whole village—it can’t support five shops.’ I asked how much he was taking per month. He told me no more than Y70, of which Y35 went in commercial fees. Since the villagers had little cash, most of what they bought was on credit, or they bartered for it with wheat. So when getting in the stock, cash was really tight. Since his wife could no longer work in the fields, he got her to serve at the counter, but they had been open for two years and he had not been able to pay his sister back yet. I looked into his kiosk. It covered an area of about 15 square metres, and contained some crudely made shelves on which were displayed cigarettes, household goods, firecrackers, sweets and cakes, stationery, as well as cheap cosmetics and shampoo. Nothing was priced at over Y7, and the total value of his goods cannot have exceeded Y2,000, including some articles which sold on commission. In every way, it was identical to most other village stores.

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Everything he had told us he ascribed to being unlucky. What concerned him most was their three children who were now approaching adulthood, in particular the elder son. The daughter was 20 and in a few years would be married, the youngest was in middle school, but the family’s misfortunes had forced the middle child to give up his studies to work on the land. It was the duty of the parents to build a house for their son so that he could take a wife, but they only had an old three-roomed dwelling, a lean-to built at the time of their own marriage, and their shop. They would have to build a new house when their son married. ‘We’re too poor for him to marry the way people do in the countryside now. A house would have to be in the new style and would cost Y20,000–30,000, plus another Y10,000 for the wedding feast, and the same in gifts to the bride’s family. We don’t have Y40,000–50,000, so my son won’t be able to get married. With what the farm and the shop brings in, we only have Y4,000–5,000 per year. Once we’ve paid the levies, we can just about scrape by. It’s hard enough paying my youngest’s school fees and books—we don’t have the money for expensive, modern weddings. The first thing a new bride looks at is the house you live in, and her parents look at how many gifts you can give, plus you have to buy a TV, fridge and so on. This is all the doing of rich city folk—and it’s driving poor people like us into bankruptcy’

Abortion targets—bureaucracy gone mad At half past eight the next morning, Yongcheng cycled off to the xiang government offices to make some enquiries, in particular about their budget. I stayed behind, and sat talking to the Village Party Secretary and Yongcheng’s uncle in the sitting room. The Party Secretary was a man of 48, who had completed lower middle school and had once been in the army. He had taken over his job from Li Yongcheng’s uncle in 1989. Zhonghang Village was both an administrative and a natural village, and had a population of 235 families (923 people). There were 2,000 mu of arable land, on which the villagers still chiefly depended for their living. It was only after 1991 or 1992 that people had begun to leave and get jobs—mainly on building sites in Handan and Shijiazhuang cities. In the last couple of years, around fifty or sixty people had become migrant workers, but they normally returned in the busy season. They would be away anything between five and ten months, and could make Y1,000–2,000. At the end of the 1980s, pressure had been put on the villages to set up collective enterprises, and Y48,000 had been invested in a caustic soda factory in this village, in which the xiang and neighbouring village owned one share each, and the village itself, two. Each share was worth Y12,000. Within six months the factory had closed, according to old Mr Li because the price of raw materials had doubled. There was no option but to divide up the Y24,000 owed to the bank, and each household had to pay its share. The debt had still not been repaid when the Village Committee were once more being urged to set up another enterprise—this time a straw hat factory. The village cadres had had to put in Y5,000 each. Unfortunately, this product had not sold and this factory too had shut down. ‘The villages have all invested different amounts in enterprises,’ Mr Li told me. ‘It’s generally between Y50,000 and Y 100,000. I haven’t heard that any of them have done well.’

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Not only had his particular village failed to move from a farm economy to an industrial economy, but the villagers had retained the traditional cropping patterns on their individual plots. They harvested one crop of wheat per year, for food, and one crop of maize in the autumn. They planted less and less cotton, because they were unable to control pests and because the government’s purchasing policy kept changing. The area planted to sweet potatoes had been reduced, too, since wheat production had risen: from what was considered a good crop of 200–300 catties per mu under collectivisation, to a current average of 500–600 catties per mu. This was a new development. With the increased grain production, families were keeping more livestock—around 70 per cent of villagers now had pigs. This struck me as a very traditional way of earning one’s living: the villagers relied chiefly on their crops and secondarily on their animals. Non-farm income came from migrant labour, although this was not universal. We talked about how the villagers felt about their lives, and what they wanted. Q: What are the villagers most satisfied with at the moment? A: Being able to eat wheat all year round, and being able to store some. They like the fact that they’re freer than before, too. The average land per capita is 2 mu, which means that they are left with 700–800 catties after they’ve paid their levies. Under collectivisation, they’d have been over the moon if they’d received that much grain. Q: What are the main causes of dissatisfaction? A: Taxes and fines which are too many and too heavy. The breakdown in law and order in the countryside. Q: What worries them most? A: If levels of groundwater keep dropping, what will happen then? Also, the fear of falling ill. We then talked about family planning. The Village Party Secretary told me that there had been a dramatic reduction in excess births, although he could not say that they had ceased completely. This was due to ever more drastic measures of control. In 1993 and 1994, the fine for a first excess birth had been Y2,000, and for a second, Y3,000. In 1995, the figures had been Y5,000 and Y7,000; and in 1996, Y7,000 and Y10,000. According to xiang statistics, the average annual income here was Y1,300, and in fact it was lower than that. Even if it was, that only came to Y5,200 for a household of four, of which the levies took Y1,000. Food, school fees and fares, and savings to build a new house all had to come out of this Y4,000, so it was well-nigh impossible to take on these huge fines. One excess birth could be the ruin of a family. Then there were the regular three-monthly check-ups for women of child-bearing age. Avoiding these was heavily fined too. The Village Party Secretary told me: ‘Starting in 1992, the city and county Family Planning Offices imposed a new regulation: an annual 2 per cent of all women of childbearing age (from newly weds to 49 years old) had to be sent to the county health centre for an abortion. This was an absolutely senseless target—rates of excess pregnancies were different for each village, and for each year. It meant that every year we had to send two pregnant women for abortions. The year before last, we only had one woman with an

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excess pregnancy. We were one short, so we “borrowed” one from the neighbouring village, or rather, to be honest, we paid out money and “bought” her. Last year we had no excess pregnancies, but we heard the county health centre had special “abortion certificates” for sale, costing Y700–800 each. We had to shell out the money and buy two. So in order to reach this target, we need two women to have excess pregnancies every year—now what kind of nonsense is that?’ In my view, enforcing a single policy, drawing up a single target and imposing it on a variety of dissimilar situations was bureaucracy gone mad. One hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. (I was, of course, unable to get to the bottom of this business.)

Imperious officials in China’s interior I was now free to concentrate on Kaifeng County because here I would have the freedom to investigate anything I wanted. This was not only because Li Yongcheng had been the teacher of the current County Party Secretary, and the Party Committee’s chief adviser, but more importantly because of the personal promise given to me by Yang, the County Party Secretary: he would permit me to investigate any county organisation and any village. I could come and go freely, any area was open to me. I was delighted with his promise, which meant that I could carry out a comprehensive investigation at all levels from household, natural village and administrative village to xiang and county. My plan fell into two parts: the first was to choose three xiang towns, representing higher, middle and lower levels of economic development, from among the twenty-odd which made up the whole county. At the same time, using the same criteria, I would choose three villages from each of the xiang towns, making a total of nine. If I spent two days in each xiang town and village, that would make twenty-four days. The second step was to look at the chief departments at county government level; this should take six days. I could complete my investigations within a month, and could then proceed to the southern and western Henan area. In the evening, I met my three friends, Meng, Xu and Li, at the guesthouse and discussed my plans with them. Our conversation also touched on the nature of officialdom in Henan, and a summary of our talk follows: Officials occupied an extremely important position in China’s interior. In the popular mentality, workers were better than peasants, business people were better than workers, scholars were better than business people, but best of all were the officials. Nothing had changed since ancient times; there was no substantial difference in this social hierarchy and ranking. Young people of talent set their hearts on being an official—achieving this status made them happy, failing to achieve it made them sad. Rising in the ranks was good, failing to get promotion was a matter for concern. In the society of China’s interior, dominated by traditional agriculture, the small peasant economy and rural society made up of Villagers’ Groups were at the bottom. At the top, on the other hand, there was the towering edifice of fast-growing, increasingly privileged, ever more bureaucratised officialdom, to which the worlds of education and commerce were subordinate. To a large extent, the posts and housing available to teachers and the wealth and opportunities open to commerce were controlled by the bureaucrats.

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In Henan, anyone with even the slightest talent and ambition would fight tirelessly for an official post, at whatever the cost. The reason lay in the privileges and advantages which it brought. Official rank and authority was not only a mark of social standing, but also a way of obtaining wealth and advantage. Xiang Party Secretaries had at their disposal private cars and privileged access to hotels, restaurants and the like. And the network of personal contacts they built up as a result of their position brought limitless benefits to their family and friends. At 6 p.m. on 15 October, we arrived at Kaifeng County Party Office. Yang, the County Party Secretary, was in a meeting, and we waited for him in the general office. After half an hour, he emerged and instructed the Office Manager to arrange our food and accommodation, and to make arrangements for our investigations in Chenliu. He did not want to talk to us or to hear our research plans. He had just one—ominous—parting shot for us as he left: ‘You are on no account to disturb the peace!’ Li explained to me what this warning was about: a couple of months previously, some of the villagers of the county had got together and gone over Yang’s head to put in a string of complaints about him to his superiors. Yang would not permit us to investigate this matter, nor were we to take the peasants’ side or speak for them, to avoid arousing even more anti-government feeling. He had, however, given me his personal promise, last time we met, that we would be welcome to carry out our investigations here, and he could not now refuse. As a result he had decided that we should go to Chenliu to do our research. It was clearly going to be impossible to carry out all the research plans I had drawn up. The County Party Office Manager did as he was bid and accommodated us in what used to be the Party Committee guesthouse. This had been completely refurbished and was now the town’s ultra-modern ‘Xiangfu Hotel’ (Xiangfu was the old name for Kaifeng County). It was entirely encased in glass and had star-ranking. In the centre was a large plaza, flanked on the south and west sides by four-storeyed buildings which housed the accommodation, the meeting rooms, the dance hall and the sauna. The dining room was on the north side, and comprised a dozen side rooms and a large central room with twenty or so tables. Around Y4 million had been invested in the Xiangfu Hotel, but even though it was open to outside guests it still basically functioned as a county Party guesthouse, accommodating officials from the offices of local Party and government departments and handling their meetings. The same process of upgrading former guesthouses in order to attract outside business and investment had gone on in every county. However, this brand new luxury hotel was already showing cracks. In Room 109, which we were occupying, the newly laid carpet was pocked with small black holes, burn marks from cigarette stubs; the paint on the walls were already flaking; the taps in the bathroom dripped continually. Poor quality of workmanship and uncivilised behaviour on the part of guests were a common phenomenon in these hotels. The next morning we were to set off to start our research in Chenliu. This town was mentioned in records dating back to the Spring and Autumn Period and had been the county town almost continuously from the beginning of the Qin dynasty (221 BC to AD 1957). It had reached its apogee in the Ming dynasty and had declined thereafter, but with recent reconstruction had reclaimed its position of importance in Kaifeng County. According to 1988 figures, it had 1,611 enterprises of all kinds, employing 5,579

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workers; these businesses had an overall annual turnover of Y40,600,000 and currently yielded Y5 million in taxes. The town, which had jurisdiction over twenty-seven administrative villages (made up of seventy-two natural villages) had a total population of 45,300; and there were 65,000 mu of arable land, of which 48,800 was irrigated. My investigations in Chenliu would be pivotal to my work. I would visit various government departments and also a number of administrative villages. An economically important town4—Chenliu The Chenliu Party Committee sent a car to pick me up at eight in the morning. By 8.30 we had arrived in Chenliu Town. It was situated 26 li to the south east of Kaifeng County Town, with the Huiji River running to the north of it. An evil-smelling grey scum, discharged into the river by the local paper factory, floated on the surface of its dark waters. The source of the Huiji River was also apparently polluted by effluent from Kaifeng City. Called the ‘Suzhou River of the North’, the Huiji River, known further downstream as the Wo, was actually a tributary of the Huai River. Chenliu Town was about the same size as Zhuxian Town, but was far more developed industrially than the latter. Its Party and municipal buildings, however, were rather shabby. The town’s Party Secretary was out of town at a meeting, and we were met by Pei, the Party Office Manager, a young man who had a diploma in music and had been transferred to work in the Party Office in 1992. Once he had heard our plans and objectives, he would make the necessary arrangements, and accompany us to the villages. At 9 a.m., therefore, we set off with Pei to Fanzhuang Village, about 4 li to the east of the town, to start our investigations. The Village Party Secretary’s house was just off the main road. Its surrounding wall was low and crudely built, but the yard it enclosed was spacious and the house itself occupied an area of about 0.8 mu. The one-storey building consisted of a central block apparently built at the end of the 1970s and made up of three rooms. The sitting room was furnished with a black-and-white TV and a ceiling fan. To the left of the central block was a two-roomed building, housing a child’s bedroom and a storeroom. There was also a kitchen and a shed for pigs and cows. The latter housed two cows and a sow with five piglets. In the yard was a hand-operated water pump and a small four-wheeled tractor with a trailer. Thus, this family of three members was fully occupied not just with arable farming, but also with livestock and goods haulage. After half an hour, the Village Party Secretary arrived, with a half bag of wheat seed slung over his shoulder. Mr Yan was a 46-year-old man who had completed lower middle school (as had his wife). After being in the army from 1970 to 1976, he returned to the village to head the Production Team, becoming commander of the Brigade Militia in 1980 and Village Party Secretary in 1988. Among the twenty-nine administrative villages of which the town was made up, demobilised army personnel accounted for nearly half the Village Party Secretaries and village heads. The following is a summary of our discussion. The population of Fanzhuang Village currently stood at 1,147 people: that is, around 270 households. There were 1,330 mu of arable land, giving each person a scant 1.2 mu. In 1983, when the Household Contract Responsibility System was being introduced,

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arable land per capita was 1.4 mu. The main reason for the reduction was the increase in the local population and corresponding expansion of village housing. Although regulations limited the area of each house to 0.25 mu, in reality most occupied half a mu or more. Apparently, in Qi County it had been decided to include the house footprint in with the contract land, in the hopes that villagers would voluntarily restrict the area they built on. However, this way of doing things had only made matters worse: since so many villagers now derived their chief income from industry and commerce, they chose to increase the footprint of their houses to the maximum. Thus there was now a serious conflict between the two uses of land—for housing and for farming. If you increased the built-on area, then the land available for cultivation decreased, everyone understood that. But the peasants had an abiding belief that the land on which your house was built and the walls which enclosed it were yours for ever. Contract land for farming still belonged to the collective, and was certain to be reallocated every few years. We then went on to talk about the wheat yield and the crop mix, and Mr Yan told me that towards the end of the 1970s, the average yield per mu was about 400 catties, with high-yield fields giving as much as 500–600 catties, and low-yield fields between 100 and 200. After 1983, when the Household Contract Responsibility System was introduced, the per mu yield steadily increased until now it had stabilised at 700–800 catties. High-yield fields could give 900–1,000 catties, the lowest, around 500. While one of the factors in this growth in wheat production was an increase in the peasants’ enthusiasm for their work, improvements in seed quality, water conservancy, pesticides and fertilisers were even more important. Irrigation was quite well developed in the Chenliu area, and each wheat crop would get three or four waterings. Although the Huiji River was polluted and stinking, it still served for irrigation purposes. In areas where the Huiji did not reach, wells were sunk. This work was organised by the xiang and paid for by the villagers. The Party Secretary said that the wheat yield was closely linked to land conditions, with marked differences between areas to the north and to the south of the Huiji River. Fanzhuang Village lay north of the river and the land was good. In corresponding conditions south of the river, the same harvest might produce 100–200 catties less per mu. In general, after paying grain tax, one wheat harvest could supply a family with enough grain for a year and more. In the autumn, maize, cotton, soya beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes and vegetables were harvested. Of these, soya beans, sweet potatoes and vegetables were for home consumption, and the beans were also bartered for soya bean products. With regard to the villagers’ income, Yan said that while the land gave them enough to eat, they had to find other ways to earn spending money. No matter how hard one tried, no money could be earned from the land, since there was so little per person. Fanzhuang Village had a surplus of agricultural labour, and anyone not engaged in haulage would look for a labouring job. Around 100 of the 270-odd households in the village had threeor four-wheeled tractors. These were used for farm work in the busy season and for haulage in the slack season. Since there was a building boom in town and countryside at the moment, there was a big demand for both labourers and transport. A few years ago, a Y8,000 tractor would pay for itself in a year. Now it might take one and a half or two years for it to pay for itself, because there are many more tractors than there used to be. As far as Fanzhuang Village went, labouring jobs and haulage were the main source of cash income for most peasant households. A secondary form of cash income was for the

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household to rear livestock, mainly cattle, pigs and sheep, but each household was different. I then asked what effect the market economy had had on traditional village customs, and the Village Party Secretary, his wife, Pei and the head of the town militia, who had come to talk to Yan about a job, were all keen to comment. Their conclusions could be summed up in one sentence: all the jobs that had been previously carried out by an exchange of volunteer labour among relatives and neighbours were now largely subcontracted and paid for in cash. They would still help each other in the busy season with ploughing, harvesting and threshing, but apart from providing dinner for the helpers, no remuneration was offered. However, where previously neighbours would help each other with house-building, this work was normally now undertaken by teams of builders. ‘We used to ask people to help, feed them and then we would owe them a favour, but it’s much easier to get builders in, it saves money and it’s much simpler.’ Finally, at village weddings and funerals, when friends came to offer congratulations or condolences, they would now just give a cash gift of Y10 or Y20 (the amount depending on the relationship) in the traditional red envelope. There was less giving of gifts and fewer invitations to eat, so there were far fewer wedding and funeral feasts. ‘The villagers have got richer, so they are less concerned to make weddings and funerals an occasion for a pig-out’ The decline of these old customs and the rise of new ones had been instigated by Mr Yang, the former town Party Secretary, and had been supported by the village cadres. At the time it had provoked not a little opposition among the villagers, but they now saw its advantages. Clearly, traditional agricultural work, on the one hand, and industry and commerce, on the other, were two very different ways of earning a living. The development of village haulage businesses and the opportunity to get labouring jobs outside the village had given new value to labour power during the old agricultural slack season. The concepts of working hours and of the value of work had now been universally established. It was for this reason that the exchange of volunteer labour had now largely been replaced by the purchase of services in cash. A possible consequence of this was a gradual reduction of the close-knit bonds of kinship and friendship that previously existed. It was nearly noon and Yan said that he had not eaten breakfast and had to sow some wheat that afternoon; he therefore took his leave. It was the busy season and I could not take up too much of his time. I therefore had to cancel my plans to stay the night here and pay some visits to peasant householders. In the afternoon, Pei took us to visit Wulizhai Village, situated 5 li to the east of the town. It had been my impression that a Village Party Secretary would normally be in the front line of the race to make the family’s fortunes after decollectivisation of land. However, this was certainly not the case with Mr Wu, the Village Party Secretary of Wulizhai Village. His house occupied an area of about half a mu, and was surrounded by a very low wall. It was made up of three extremely shabby single-storey rooms and a separate kitchen. The sitting room, used for meetings about village work, was furnished with two old sofas, and the black-and-white TV was its only modern appliance. The courtyard housed a pig sty with three pigs, his family’s source of extra income. A worried-looking Mrs Wu, seeing visitors arriving, invited us in to take a seat and went off to fetch her husband, who was in the process of sowing wheat seed. Pei told me briefly

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about the family’s situation. Wu, another demobilised soldier, was around 40, and had a son and a daughter. The 22-year-old daughter was mentally retarded, and the 20-year-old son had been involved in a road accident, as a result of which he had been bedridden for the last two years. They had taken him to Zhengzhou, Beijing, everywhere, to seek treatment, and spent Y20,000–30,000, all without effect. This middle-aged couple, although they had two children, were truly among the most unfortunate of people. This was the reason for the poverty-stricken aspect of the Village Party Secretary’s home. I was afraid we were stopping Wu from getting on with his sowing, and suggested that we go to the field to meet him. Pei explained to Wu why I had come, and Wu said: ‘Our sowing is mechanised. We get people in to do it, I was just here to keep an eye on them and to help out, so it’s no trouble.’ I still felt he should finish before going home to talk to us, but took the opportunity to ask him how the village organised the wheat sowing. Wu told us that it was a lot easier now than it used to be. In the last two or three years, the ploughing, sowing, harvesting and threshing of the wheat crop throughout the village had been almost completely mechanised. This meant that the autumn busy period was a lot shorter than it used to be. ‘What about other villages?’ I asked. ‘Pretty much the same as here,’ Wu replied. ‘If you get people in to plough and sow mechanically, even if it saves time and effort, doesn’t it increase your costs?’ Wu made a rapid calculation in reply: ‘If you sow the wheat with a hand-operated seed drill, you need four people to pull it, and someone to guide it from behind, and five people can only seed 6 mu in a day—that’s only a bit more than a mu per person, plus it’s very tiring work. If you get someone in to do it mechanically, it only costs Y6–7 per mu so it’s still worth it.’ Looked at this way, the driving force behind mechanisation, which had really revolutionised agricultural work, was solely economic. It had previously been believed that collectivisation was a prerequisite for mechanisation, but now it was enough for there to exist a labour market, and providing that the average labour price determined by that market was higher than the cost of operating the machinery, then mechanisation could be achieved even when the land was managed by individual households. This was especially true in the northern plains of China, which were suited to mechanised farming. After about half an hour, the sowing was finished, and we returned to the Village Party Secretary’s house to interview him. This is a summary of our talk: Wulizhai Administrative Village was made up of four natural villages: Wulizhai, Wuzhuang, Yanchengfu and Maozhuang. There were 1,960 mu of arable land, 334 households and a total of 1,436 people. Only 1,417 people were actually allocated land. I asked about the discrepancy of nineteen between the registered number of inhabitants and those who received land. The Village Party Secretary explained that these four households—that is, nineteen people—had all already moved to Zhengzhou, Kaifeng or Xinmi before the readjustment of land contracts in 1993. Although they were still formally registered as residing here, they had each given back their contracted land and no longer had any economic links with this village. I wanted to explore in more detail how this transition from village-based agriculture to city-based commerce was made, and so shifted the focus of my interview to this point.

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Wu told me that out of these four households, two household heads were brothers, each with a wife and child in the village. In 1972, the father of the two brothers left the army to return to the village just as the Xinmi State-owned Coal Mine was recruiting workers in Chenliu. About ten people signed up from the village, but the work was hard, and the majority only stuck it for a year or so and then returned to the production brigade. However, the father stayed in the mine and became a manager. Between 1987 and 1988, the father used his contacts in Xinmi to get his sons a contract for a restaurant, and this they had run very well. In the last few years, the brothers had moved their families to Xinmi and given back their contracted land to the village. Wu had heard that they had since bought themselves registration in the city. ‘Nowadays, money really can buy anything,’ he commented. Another of the families had moved to Kaifeng. The head of that family was 30 years old and very able. By using heaven knows what contacts, he managed to rent a place in Kaifeng and began to make and sell steamed buns. The business slowly developed, he put aside some money, and he now rented a three- or four-roomed commercial unit where he had started a restaurant. Three or four years ago, he moved his mother (his father had died), his wife and son to Kaifeng. Since the whole family ran the restaurant, they did not need to hire other workers. The uncle of another family worked in the Zhengzhou Railway Office and the aunt had a clothing business. She had needed help, and their 27year-old nephew had gone to Zhengzhou to work in his aunt’s business after finishing lower middle school. He had made some money and bought a house and registration, and moved the rest of his family—his mother and older sister—to Zhengzhou. After these four households had settled in the city, they cut all links with the land. Out of the 334 peasant households in the village, there were, however, around a dozen who had made the transition from farming into commerce, and moved into town to live, but were not willing to give up their contracted land. The Village Party Secretary gave me two examples: A man of 60 or so, called Zhang, was originally the village bricklayer and carpenter. He had three children. A cousin of his was a bank manager in the Shangjie area of Zhengzhou, and in the early 1980s Zhang went there in search of work opportunities. With his cousin’s help, he became a labour contractor. A labour contractor could not fail to make money, and Zhang was rumoured to have fixed assets of nearly a million and the same amount in ready money, although he did not show his wealth. In Shangjie he had contacts via his cousin, and he was also a wealthy man in his own right, so he could get anything done. First he got a job for his eldest son as a driver for the Shangjie Party Committee. Next he got his youngest son made head of the print works set up by the Shangjie Tax Office, and his second son got the job of driver for the Chenliu government. The family still owned the contracted land for seven or eight members in the village, and this was managed by the second son, since the village was close to Chenliu Town where he lived. Mr Mao and his family of four: Mao had obtained a job in Kaifeng County Town, through some contact or other. His wife had been a dressmaker, and then ran dressmaking classes in the county town. After a few years, they bought a house there and settled down. In the busy season, they came back to the village to do the farm work. That was easy for them to do, as Chenliu was only a dozen or so kilometres from Kaifeng County Town.

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In Wu’s words, the city had long since become the focus of the lives and incomes of these ten or so families, but they lived nearby and refused to give up their contracted land. They limited themselves to sowing and harvesting, and did not look after the crops in any other way, so that their crop yield was of course lower than that of most other farmers. But because dues paid by the peasants were lower in Chenliu than elsewhere, there was still something in it for them, and the village had no right to demand the land back for redistribution to other peasant families if they did not want to give it up. There were also four or five village girls who had married husbands from Kaifeng City and moved there. They were good-looking women with a bit of education and did not fancy a hard life spent working on the land. But it was very difficult for them to get their registration changed from here to Kaifeng, and their children’s registration was in the same place as the mothers, as a result of which the village had to apportion contract land to both mothers and children. If they could sort out their registration and formally leave the village, then there would no longer be the need to allocate land to them. Looked at from this point of view, the combination of the existing land contract system and city household registration system were inimical both to the concentration of farm land and to the developing urbanisation of country people. Only if villagers with a permanent home and stable employment (or other stable source of income) in the towns were given the right to transfer their registrations there, would it be possible to resolve this problem. We then talked about the gap between rich and poor, and the Village Party Secretary told me that for the last decade or so, all 330–odd village families had been able to feed and clothe themselves. The difference between rich and poor really lay in whether they had money and could build a new house. As far as the villagers’ diet went, they ate noodles with greens or Chinese cabbage for lunch, and for breakfast and supper, steamed buns flavoured with pickled vegetables or soy paste. They grew their own greens, and produced their own pickles and soy paste. Sometimes they ate bean curd, and this was obtained by bartering soy beans. It was only meat that they purchased, and most families would eat meat only once a month, buying between one and three catties at a time. They ate a little better at the New Year and other festivals, but basically rich and poor ate much the same diet—on the whole, they spent very little on food. With regard to clothing, up until the beginning of the 1980s many villagers wove their own cloth. Now, however, it was only a minority of households who had kept their looms for occasional use, since clothing made from synthetic fabric was cheap and hard-wearing. What villagers spent most money on, Wu continued, was building houses. Most new houses consisted of four rooms and had cost around Y4,000 per room. Increasingly, rather than build a new four-roomed house, they would add two rooms, one on either side of the existing house, in a U-shape. Building standards were improving, and the work cost more—around Y5,000 per room, Y30,000 for a six-roomed house. More than thirty village families in this 330 household village had built new six-roomed houses. Since the introduction of the Household Contract Responsibility System, nearly half of all families here had built new homes. There were no collective enterprises here. Most people worked in the construction industry or ran their own haulage business at slack times. There were sixty-eight tractors in the village, including thirteen small three-wheeled tractors and fifty-five four-wheeled vehicles. That was how things stood at the beginning of the current year. Most of the

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four-wheeled tractors had been bought in the last three or four years because you could make a lot of money from goods haulage. However, at Y10,000 for a tractor, and another Y8,000 for a trailer, they did not come cheap. You had to add to that a number of other expenses—licence fee, for example—and the total could easily come to Y20,000. Tractors were bought primarily for goods transport, for carrying materials like sand, stones and building blocks, or transporting straw for the paper factories, and only secondarily for agricultural use. You could easily earn Y7,000–8,000 per year this way, and could generally recoup your costs within two or, at most, three years. (A few years ago, however, when fewer people had tractors and they were cheaper, costs could be recovered within a year.) Urban construction was the driving force behind the haulage business. There was so much building going on in towns and cities, heaven knows where they got the money from. When you built a house, you needed labour contractors, technicians and casual labourers. Villagers who went along with the labour contractor could earn Y15–20 per day as labourers. The richest people in the village were the building labour contractors. There were seven or eight of them, and they had built the best new houses. There were thirty to forty families (this was only a rough estimate) who worked just on the land, of whom a dozen were really poor. They might be poor because they were elderly and had no children, had a chronic illness, had no one to do the work, were feeble-minded or just lazy. It was as much as they could do to manage their contracted land, and generally speaking their output was lower than average. Agricultural levies In the last seven or eight years, these had been at the rate of about 140 catties of wheat per person per year, levied from summer harvest, with no further cash payable in the autumn. This payment in kind covered money raised for both the village and town budgets, as well as the agricultural tax, and had always stayed within the levels laid down by the central government. This, in large part, was thanks to the actions of Mr Yang Jianfeng, the former Chenliu Party Secretary. Wu gave me further examples of this man’s many virtues—when he went to inspect a village, he took his own lunch pack and did not expect the village to wine and dine him at their expense. All the other town cadres had then followed his example. He had also promoted simpler wedding and funeral ceremonies, and thus saved the villagers a considerable amount of money. So Chenliu levies were the lowest in the region. In other nearby xiangs, each person had to hand over around 200 catties of wheat, and cash taxes were levied in the autumn as well. The Village Party Branch and Village Committee Members of these two organisations were nominally elected from a number of candidates—five were chosen from a slate of seven. During the 1994 municipal elections, each village also re-elected its branch and committee. The Party branch members were made up of the Village Party Secretary, the Deputy Village Party Secretary and three other committee members; the Village Committee included the village head, the accountant and the heads of Women’s Affairs, public security and the militia. The two organisations really functioned as one, with a total of eight cadres, since three of them

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held two posts concurrently. However, whenever the county officials came to visit, it was the Village Party Secretary they looked for; similarly when ordinary folk had a problem. With almost everything being the responsibility of the Village Party Secretary, he was extremely busy. As a village cadre he had to act on behalf both of the county government and of the villagers, and this meant that he was overloaded. There were two main problems: one was that the tasks which were delegated from above were sometimes extremely difficult to carry out, such as when the Tax Office required the village cadres to help impose a public transport tax or a tax on local farm and forestry products. Also, although the agricultural levies in this village were low, for the dozen or so poor families the payments required caused them real hardship. Second, salaries were too low. The Village Party Secretary and the village head received Y60 per month, the rest even less. Another problem was that, although some families had made a fortune out of the Household Contract Responsibility System, the village as a whole was quite poor. To do things for the village required money which had to be raised from each and every family, and such levies were unpopular. With everyone now taking care of themselves, who wanted to give time and money to the collective? So village cadres simply did what the county government told them and washed their hands of anything else. This was true of almost all villages. We then talked about the mechanisation of farmwork and agricultural overheads. Wu told me that, in all Chenliu’s twenty-nine villages, hand ploughs and hand-operated seed drills had begun to fall out of use in about 1993. Cattle were still raised for sale; and mules were kept for pulling carts, but they were much reduced in number. Mechanised ploughing cost Y15 per mu, sowing Y7, and harvesting and threshing, Y35. (The latter was done using a combine harvester and was arranged by the town government.) This gave a total cost per mu of Y57. Add to this, for a mu of wheat, base fertiliser at Y50, top dressing at Y30, irrigation at Y20 and pesticides at Y10 –Y110 altogether. Wu pointed out that farming this way was much easier than in the past. He also said that Chenliu had been a cotton-producing area, though now scarcely any was grown—it was very timeconsuming, it was hard to control the pests and there had been changes in the state purchasing policy in that the cotton was no longer bought at a fixed price. If people wanted to earn money, they preferred to set up in the haulage business or work as labourers. Finally we talked about village clans. Wu had already told me that Wulizhai administrative village was made up of Wulizhai Village, Wuzhuang, Yanchengfu and Maozhuang. Maozhuang had a population of 100 people, all called Mao. Thus it was a classic single-surname village. Wuzhuang had 500, of whom 70 per cent were called Wu, with the remaining 30 per cent being made up of several other surnames; the same applied to Yanchengfu—in fact these two were typical dominant-surname villages. Wulizhai was 600– strong, and a dozen surnames were represented so this was a classic mixed surname village. This area had no collections of genealogical records, and there had been no talk recently of recreating them. The clans coexisted peacefully, there was no feeling of ‘your clan’ and ‘my clan’, still less was there inter-clan rivalry. Any quarrels that there were in the village—say, about property boundaries, family property or care of the old folk—tended to be between neighbours or within families. There was no factional in-fighting around elections either. The fact was that each family looked after their own

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now and concentrated on making money. They did not care who was elected, and being a cadre was regarded as a thankless task. I was struck by two features of Wulizhai Administrative Village: one was the fact that it was made of villages with all three surname structures, and would therefore make an excellent place to study clan consciousness and relationships between the clan and the administration. The other was that the source of villagers’ cash income was gradually shifting from farming to non-farming activities. It would therefore be an excellent place to study the effect that market exchange behaviour was having on local friendship and kinship ties. However, such a study would entail spending some time in the area. It was the agricultural busy season and there was no way I could arrange this. We had talked till 7.30 p.m., and outside the house all was shrouded in darkness. Luckily the village was not far from the main road and we soon arrived back at my lodgings. Henan xiangs or towns generally had no government-run guesthouse, and so Yongcheng and I were staying at a privately run guesthouse. According to Pei, this one was the best in the town, but in fact it was dirty and shabby. Our room had clearly been little used; it was airless, covered in dust and there was a bad smell. It was hard to sleep in such surroundings, and Yongcheng and I sat up talking. This Party School teacher had proved a wonderful guide and a loyal companion during my journey through Henan.

Joint enterprises and family-run businesses in Zhuqingzhai Village The Party Office Manager, Pei, had a meeting today and arranged for a Mr Liu, who had recently retired as head of the town Agricultural Technology Station, to take us to do some interviews in Zhuqingzhai Village, 5 li distant. It so happened that the daughter of the Village Party Secretary of this village was Liu’s daughter-in-law, so this was an excellent arrangement for us. When we arrived at 9 a.m., Mrs Wang, the Village Party Secretary’s wife, told us that he had just left to attend a meeting. Liu asked her to go and find the village head or some other cadre to come and answer our questions, and while she was out he explained the background and current circumstances of this family to me. At 68, Wang was the oldest of the twenty-nine Village Party Secretaries in Chenliu, and was one of a minority who had survived the collectivisation era. The Wangs were the only family of this surname in the village. Before Liberation, they had lived in great poverty as hired labourers. In order to keep the family alive, Wang had joined the army, but the payment in grain which he received for this was all taken by his guarantor. He later left the KMT army to join the Communist Party’s army and, after Liberation, was demobilised and returned to the village. There he was involved in land reform, collectivisation and, when the People’s Communes were set up, became Party Secretary for the Production Brigade. He had served nearly forty years as Party Secretary, the longest of any in the region. He was known as an honest and hard-working man. Not surprisingly, in view of his popularity, his superiors were unwilling to let him retire and he remained in post, in spite of his wife’s urgings to give up this demanding work. The Wangs had three sons and three daughters, all of whom had done well. The eldest son had risen quickly to become Party Secretary to Banpo xiang in Kaifeng County, a fact of which his father (who after forty years had never been promoted beyond Village

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Party Secretary) was inordinately proud. The second son was head of the Chenliu Land Office, the third ran the in-patient department of Chenliu Hospital. The daughters had long since married and left home—the second had married Liu’s eldest son and worked in a shop in Chenliu. The courtyard where the Wang family lived had originally formed part of the residence of the village landlord, and had been given to Wang during land reform. The old building had been pulled down in the 1970s to make way for the three rooms they now lived in. Although they now appeared cramped and old-fashioned, they were nevertheless clean and tidy. The couple had a black-and-white television in the bedroom, and a telephone and a simple PA system—for making announcements—in the sitting room. Liu told me that this was the only village in the area with telephone connections. It occurred to me that the Wang family’s history neatly encapsulated one aspect of half a century of rural development in China. Wang and other ‘Poor and Lower Middle Peasants’ like him had experienced Liberation, land reform, collectivisation and the people’s communes and finally become part of the Village Party political structure. For this degree of local political power, basic though it was, to fall within the grasp of such peasants represented a considerable rise in their status. The next generation in their families could build on this advantageous political position and complete the historical transition from village to town, and from agriculture to commerce or to the higher echelons of Party and government. After half an hour, Mrs Wang returned with the head of public security in the village. He would give us more information on Zhuqingzhai and, in particular, tell us about the leather goods businesses and small chemical plants run both collectively and by individual families. Zhuqingzhai Administrative Village was made up of Zhuqingzhai itself, Lizizhuang, Wulimiao and Xiaozhaozhuang. The Village Committee was located in Zhuqingzhai and so, as was usual, this village gave its name to the whole administrative unit. The total population was 2,500, and there were 3,400 mu of arable land. Chenliu Town was the most developed in the whole county in terms of its rural industries; and Zhuqingzhai Administrative Village, in particular, was famous for its large number of leather goods and small-scale chemical enterprises. Out of the 600 households in the village, seventy to eighty produced their own leather goods, while in 1990, the heyday of the chemical enterprises, over a hundred families were involved. These latter had now declined in importance, but the leather goods businesses were flourishing. Leather goods here meant making gloves, and all were family-run businesses. The smallest employed only family members and had just one or two sewing machines; the largest had as many as a dozen machines and employed ten to twenty workers from this or neighbouring villages. This was piece work and working hours were flexible. Each business undertook the entire process from manufacture to sales. At the end of the 1980s, Chenliu set up the first collective leather goods factory. This did well at first; a young local man with an upper-middle school education took charge of both how the product was made and finding sales outlets. In 1988 or 1989, he left to set up the first family-run leather goods business in the village, and made a lot of money. Little investment was needed and the technology was simple. Villagers learned techniques in his house, copied him and set up their own businesses—there were now as many as eighty of these.

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In this case, the collectively run enterprise appeared to have been the mother of the family-run or private businesses. The former provided free training in the technology and developed the sales outlets, but when the latter took off, the former declined. All over China, low-technology collective enterprises commonly fulfilled the same role. In the same way, rural collective industries had been helped into existence by free or low-cost technology, equipment and materials donated by state-run industries. Once the products of the collective enterprises began to appear on the market, the state-run companies, who were not used to competing in the marketplace, found themselves squeezed out. I asked the head of public security to take me to visit some leather goods businesses and small chemical plants. The first enterprise we came to was a leather goods workshop making gloves and run jointly by two brothers. They were both married, with one child each, and lived with the parents in one large compound surrounded by a high wall. Inside, there was a recently built two-storey building, with four rooms on each level. The lower four rooms were divided into two dwellings, each with a large room and a bedroom, for the brothers and their families. The parents lived upstairs. The courtyard also housed a workshop, with six sewing machines and a finishing press. Six women were employed here, three from the village, three from neighbouring villages. They were paid at piece work rates, and their hours were flexible—they came and went more or less as they pleased. They apparently earned about Y300 per month. The older brother was in charge of sales, and his wife did the cutting; the younger managed the operation, and his wife took charge of the finishing. The grandmother cooked and looked after the children, while the grandfather worked the land. During the agricultural busy season, however, they all downed tools and went to help with the sowing and harvesting, as did their workers on their own plots. I asked them to tell me more about the business, and the younger said that in previous years sales had been good, with salesmen coming to the village to make their purchases, so that they had not needed to find sales outlets elsewhere. The profit on each pair of gloves was anything between Y2 and Y4, or up to Y8 on the better-quality gloves. The year before last they had made Y40,000–Y50,000; last year it was Y30,000–Y40,000; and this year they would be lucky to make Y20,000–Y30,000. Few salesmen came to the village now, and they had had to undertake their own marketing. This had not been easy, and when transport costs were added in, profit margins had been reduced still further. I suggested to him that the seventy or eighty glove-making enterprises in the village could cut their costs by making bulk purchases of the raw materials and by marketing the gloves jointly. ‘Well, we all know that,’ he replied. ‘But peasants don’t work together in that way, we just don’t. This village has a few enterprises jointly set up by brothers; they stay together a year or eighteen months, and then almost always split up. There are only two or three such businesses in the village where everyone’s getting along all right. If brothers can’t work together for long, how are you going to get seventy or eighty businesses, with seventy or eighty different points of view, working in harmony?’ I asked this entrepreneur if he was satisfied with the life he had now. His reply was, ‘We get food from our farm, and profits from our factory. Everything that townspeople have, we have too. Houses, modern furniture, TVs, fridges—we’ve got them all. We’ve got a phone, too, so we can get through to anywhere in the country. How could I not be satisfied?!’

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I asked a further question: ‘Now that you’ve got everything you need in the way of housing, clothes and domestic electrical goods, what will you do with your profits?’ ‘My only desire is to put my son through university,’ he said. The fact that I never got beyond lower middle school is my greatest regret. My teacher and my parents all tried to persuade me to go on studying but I wouldn’t listen. It’s only now that I travel around selling, negotiating, setting up contracts, that I’ve really become aware of the value of education, and now it’s too late. I just want to make enough money to keep my son in school and send him to university.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ I said. ‘You’re only 28. You don’t need to go to school to study. You could take out a subscription to a newspaper or magazine, and you would gradually learn more if you stuck at it.’ ‘Just what I’ve been thinking!’ was his response. Their courtyard was neatly paved with bricks, and contained a raised flower bed with Chinese roses in full bloom. Even a small family enterprise like this one not only brought in a cash income but also changed that family’s whole outlook and way of life. I then visited a second glove factory, also housed in a two-storey building surrounded by a high wall. The lower floor had three rooms, the one on the left measuring about 30 or 40 square metres. There were twelve sewing machines arranged in four rows, and about six women working on them. They were paid by piecework, and earned around Y300 per month. When I asked about the factory’s annual turnover, the woman manager looked cagy and said with a smile, ‘Enough to put food on our plates.’ My guide answered for her, ‘At the lowest it would be Y30–40,000, and at the highest Y50– 60,000’—an estimate she did not deny. I asked her the trade price for her gloves. ‘That depends on the quality of the leather—the less good quality ones go for Y15–18, the better ones Y25–28.’ I saw some gloves waiting to be packed; they had been crudely made, and the leather and colouring of each glove in a pair was different. The woman manager told me that these gloves would mostly be sold in the villages. ‘Peasants are different from city people. They’re not bothered about quality or packaging; they just want gloves which are cheap and hard-wearing.’ This woman certainly knew something of the consumer psychology of country people. We said goodbye and made our way to the northern part of the village to find out what a small chemical plant consisted of. A pit had been dug in the ground, and a large vessel (1.5 metres in diameter) had been sunk in it. Next to this, a square, brick-lined pit had been dug. A large pile of sticks formed the fuel for heating the vessel, and next to that lay black bags of solidified raw material. The head of public security explained the production process: first the raw material was heated in the vessel. It was stirred until it melted, and the top layer was skimmed off into the second pit. When this had cooled and had the consistency of paste, it was bagged up and this was the finished product. What remained at the bottom of the vessel was discarded. The product was called Separating Agent, and was all sold to rural factories making concrete blocks, where it was used to keep the blocks off the ground. He went on to explain that the raw material for this process was a waste product of the county’s state-run chemical plants. Some years ago, faced with the need to get rid of it, they had been only too happy for them to take it away and did not charge anything. But as the demand for the raw materials increased, the county chemical plants not only began to charge but kept raising the price, and now for

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the villagers there was no profit to be made from producing Separating Agent. It had not needed any skill, he went on, just a bit of effort, and you could make money. The whole village had got involved in digging pits, but these were now all abandoned. Zhuqingzhai Village had a collectively run chemical plant, situated near the main road at the western end of the village. In the factory manager’s dilapidated office, the deputy manager (who was also deputy head of the Village Committee) told us how the factory had been set up and how it was run. At the beginning of 1990, the county and xiang governments ordered each village to set up village collective enterprises. At that time, the village had neither capital nor ideas, but pressure was being applied from above. They had to get together their own capital: each of the village’s seven cadres put in Y2,000, so that made Y14,000. The employees each put in Y500 and there were twenty-five of them, so that made Y12,500; and then they borrowed Y10,000 from a xiang kiln. They used this Y36,500 investment to set up a small chemical plant making dyes. Why a chemical plant? One, because if they set up a leather goods factory, they would be in competition with the villagers (there were already a dozen such privately run workshops in the village); two, because a friend from a Kaifeng chemical plant (who had come to the village on holiday) said they had some old dye-production equipment that they were disposing of; they could borrow it, and return it when they started to make money. They had also heard that a Gongyi chemical plant had some waste that could be used as raw material for dye production. For all these reasons, the Village Committee decided on a chemical plant. It was a low-investment and lowtechnology enterprise, and they used their money to buy bricks and built the factory and compound wall. They started work at the end of 1990, and actually found they had a market for their product. So the next year they borrowed money from the bank, expanded their premises and bought new equipment. In 1994, they again borrowed money, added a new workshop and began to produce the raw alcohol used in grain spirits production, and this also sold well. The agricultural electricity supply, which they had been using, suffered frequent power cuts and was very unreliable, so in 1994 they invested a further Y50,000 and switched over to industrial electricity. They now had much contact with the outside world, and so in 1995 put Y50,000 into installing fifty programme-controlled telephones. With so many leather goods factories in the village, there was an urgent need for telephones. The village chemical plant had originally been set up with funds contributed by the cadres but this was a village collective enterprise, not a cadres’ shareholding cooperative. The business currently had fixed assets of Y1.5 million and employed sixty people. Last year’s turnover was Y1.3 million, and profits were Y130,000. For this year, they were predicting a turnover of Y2 million and profits of Y200,000; the average wage was Y200–300. Cadres were paid a little more, and the factory manager got Y400–500. The deputy manager showed us around. The factory compound was rectangular in shape and was set in a large expanse of farm land. The site occupied several mu and housed two extremely rudimentary factory buildings: one workshop produced dyes, the other, the grain spirits alcohol. At the main gate was a four-roomed single-storey building—the chemical plant main office. The whole factory appeared deserted. The dye workshop had halted production, pending a delivery of materials, I was told, and the staff and workers were off working in the fields; only in the liquor workshop were there a few people busy at work. I was unable to work out whether this kind of business was

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profitable. Nor could I be sure which hat my guide was wearing: factory manager or village head. Was the siting of the factory in a rural area far from the town economically viable or not? The only fact on which I was quite clear was that the factory was providing these peasants, who for centuries had been bound to the land, with an opportunity to learn about organisation, management, cost accounting, profits, taxes and market conditions— in other words, a whole way of life that had been completely foreign to them. It was nearly noon, and my guides suggested we go and eat lunch at the Village Party Secretary’s house. Since we were here, they said, we should at least meet him. Back we went, and had only been seated there a short while when the head of public security conjured up from somewhere four or five cold dishes: stewed peanuts, vermicelli, beansprouts, chicken’s feet, pork liver and pigs’ ears. The Village Party Secretary’s wife produced a plate of fried eggs for us, and the head of public security brought two bottles of grain spirits from an inner room. I protested that surely one bottle would be enough for four people. But my host replied: ‘When we have guests from the xiang government, each person gets through a bottle each, that’s standard, so we couldn’t possibly offer four people just one bottle.’ I reflected that no social interaction with the Henanese is considered complete without the consumption of a certain amount of alcohol. The Village Party Secretary did not return on his bicycle until 2.30 p.m. His meeting in the town had finished, he said, in the morning, but he had been delayed by an old friend who insisted on taking him for a drink. Wang had been Village Party Secretary for forty years, and I was keen to ask him about the changes in the per mu wheat yield and in the villagers’ lives which he had seen in half a century. My notes on our conversation follow: Prior to Liberation, the yield was between 100 and 150 catties per mu. Wheat was the main summer crop, with sorghum, millet, beans and sweet potatoes being harvested in the autumn. The sorghum and millet per mu yield was 200–300 catties. This depended on weather conditions, of course, and drought, flood and pests might cause the harvest to fail. A middle peasant family with 20–30 mu would only expect to eat wheat buns at the New Year Festival, and would get by on other grains for the rest of the year. ‘Even the Lius, the landlord’s family from our village, with their 300 mu, ate mixed wheat and sorghum grain all year round, and only ever had buns made from wheat at New Year and during the busy season.’ There were no great changes in the per mu yield for wheat as a result of land reform and the formation of co-operatives; and even in the communes the average per mu yield had only risen to 250 catties, with the best land producing 300, and less good land, 200. By 1976, the average per mu yield was 300, and up until 1983, when land returned to the individual household, it remained steady at 300–400, with the best land producing 400– 500, and less good land, 100–200. After 1983, with the peasants’ improved morale and an increase in the use of chemical fertilisers, there was a small increase in yield but this was not marked since seed quality and pesticide use had failed to keep up. During the era of collectivisation in the 1970s to early 1980s, each person received around 80 catties of wheat per year, and everyone was happy. On the whole, the peasants lived off sweet potatoes, prepared in a number of different ways—baked, stewed, cut into strips, dried and so on. At the beginning of 1988, wheat production in this and surrounding villages experienced a sharp rise, the key factor being the widespread use of improved seed

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varieties and, secondarily, the increased availability of chemical fertilisers. Another important factor was the improvement in irrigation, mainly achieved by digging wells. The peasants invested in new wells themselves, and each well could irrigate 30–40 mu. The average per mu yield was now around 600 catties, with good land yielding as much as 800. Chenliu land lay both to the north and to the south of the Huiji River. The land to the north was better, and produced 700–800 catties per mu—1,000 catties on the best land. This village being south of the Huiji, the per mu yield was 100–200 catties lower even though use of irrigation, pesticides and fertilisers was the same. All the villagers now ate wheat products all year round, and no longer lived off sorghum, millet and sweet potatoes. (Of course, some families did grow these crops, either because they liked them or for a bit of variety.) Thus the diet of even the poorest families now was better than that of the richest landlord prior to Liberation—it was just that they did not live as grandly. I turned the conversation to the Household Contract Responsibility System for land, and put the following question to Wang, the Village Party Secretary: ‘Let us imagine there are four possible ways of doing things: one would be to reinstate the old system of agricultural collectivisation; or one could go for large-scale farming, by concentrating land in the hands of big farmers; third, one could return all land rights to individual peasant families, and go the privatisation route; or, finally, one could retain the current Household Responsibility System in the long term. If all the peasants had a free vote, which land system would they choose?’ All three of my hosts agreed that they would definitely go for the last choice. The peasants were very satisfied with the Household Responsibility System—there was no demand either for re-collectivisation or for privatisation, and if land was concentrated in just a few hands, what would the rest of them eat? As Wang put it, when the system was first set up in 1983, some cadres did have their doubts: they thought that with the land divided up, they would lose control; a small number of peasants were also doubtful, because they felt they needed the protection which collectivisation gave them. The majority of peasants preferred to manage the land individually, and after a couple of years everyone was in favour, first because it gave them personal freedom, and second because the grain they harvested, once they had paid their dues to the government, was all their own, and they could eat wheat buns all year round. The problem now was deciding how frequently the land should be reallocated. The government had laid down that contracts should last for thirty years, but this was very difficult to implement. In this village, the land had been divided up in 1983, then redivided in 1988, and again in 1993. Reallocating the land every five years meant that a balance had been achieved in the amount of arable land per capita given to each household, and the villagers were happy with this. As regards problems facing the Village Committee, Wang said that their chief work was dealing with tasks allocated to them from above. In the Chenliu area, agricultural levies, at only 80 catties per mu, were lighter than in neighbouring districts, plus the villagers were pretty good at following the family planning directives, and that all made the Village Committee’s work much easier. Problems arose when village-wide projects had to be carried out. The money for such projects had to be raised from the peasants, who were unwilling to contribute. There had been an idea to sink one deep well and install pipes to supply water to the whole village, but this provoked arguments which could not be resolved. ‘But you do have a collectively run factory in the village,’ I said.

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‘That can’t supply us with funds,’ Wang replied, ‘It’s been in debt for years. We’re under pressure to set up village collective enterprises,’ he went on. ‘We’ve done all right, we set one up. In some villages, businesses folded before getting going; in others, they collapsed shortly afterwards, leaving the Village Committee owing a shit-load of debts.’ At five in the afternoon, I said goodbye to my hosts and set off to cycle back to Chenliu. As I pedalled, I reflected on two things: one was the transfer from agricultural labour to non-agricultural (that is, industrial and commercial) labour; the second was the question of the modernisation of agriculture itself under the Household Contract Responsibility System. The changeover from agricultural to industrial labour seemed to happen in one of two ways—one involved staying on the land, the second involved leaving it. The haulage and construction businesses I had seen in Fanzhuang and Wulizhai Villages, and the leather goods factories in Zhuqingzhai, all fell into the former category, as did the labourers who found work outside the village while retaining land under the Household Contract Responsibility System. This, generally speaking, was the preferred way for rural enterprises to set up and develop: the current land ownership system, together with the instability inherent in urban employment, encouraged this type of shift in present-day Chinese agricultural labour. The second scenario meant a definitive transfer of the peasants’ home, income and life from the village to the town. There were two ways in which this move could take place, depending on how far their new home was from the village. If it was distant, they would normally relinquish their contracted land, and abandon farm work for good in favour of a job in industry or commerce. If it was nearer, they might retain their land (which, in turn, might mean that they really fell into the first category described above). The real issue that required study was how to encourage this last group to give up their contracted land. Urbanisation was one of the central issues of modernisation, and policymakers needed to make it easier for people to leave the land by expanding household registration in small to medium-sized towns, encouraging the concentration of rural enterprises in nearby towns, and so on. In theory, migration of the population away from the land would mean both an acceleration of the process of urbanisation in China, and an increase in the arable land being farmed on a large scale. In actual fact, it was clearly going to be a very long time before these expectations were realised. To achieve an arable land per capita ratio of 10 mu—the minimum necessary to enable large-scale family farming— would mean that 80–90 per cent of the agricultural population would have to move to the towns. This process could not take less than half a century and would require the greatest caution. The most that could be hoped for was that government policy would encourage it rather than putting obstacles in its way. The Household Responsibility System for land was going to be the basic system of organisation for Chinese villages and Chinese agriculture for a long time to come. ‘Retreating’ to collectivisation was not a viable option, and ‘advancing’ to privatisation was even more risky. As for the duration of the land contracts, this should not be subject to a single central government ruling. The decision on how often to reallocate the village’s arable land should ideally be handed over to a Village or xiang People’s Congress and was not a matter in which the government should interfere. Since the Household Responsibility System was right for the peasants, and the government had repeatedly announced its intention to retain it in the long term, what we needed to study was the key issue of the relationship between the prevailing fragmented small peasant

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economy, and the market economy and modernised agriculture. At its heart, this was a question of whether millions of peasants could rely purely on their pig pens and plot of land to achieve higher production levels and better returns, and in this way gain for themselves a more stable and comfortable existence. There were those who answered the above question in the negative, for the following three main reasons: (1) the production levels of a family unit within a defined period would always have its limits; (2) there was no way to expand the peasant household’s arable land, and in fact, with the increase in population, this was likely to decrease in size; (3) the profitability of agriculture was here, as all over the world, relatively low. There were also those who answered in the affirmative. The desired objectives could be achieved because: (1) there was huge potential for a household with even a small plot of land and a courtyard to increase its productivity, if they could meet the demands of the market; (2) the transport costs for agricultural sidelines could be reduced, and the peasants could be allowed to keep the profits from these products. Deep in reflection as I was, I almost fell off my bicycle into a ditch.

Local government in a predicament over the ‘veto’ system Of Chenliu’s twenty-nine administrative villages, the three that fell within the town’s urban boundaries (Nanjie Village, Xijie Village and Dongbeijie Village) came top in industry and commerce, with Nanjie Village the overall leader. The latter had five collective enterprises and a dozen privately owned businesses. Of the first five, the biggest was a paper-making factory, and in the morning the town’s Party Office Manager, young Pei, took me to visit it. Our host was a Mr Chang, the factory boss and also the Village Party Secretary (or perhaps that should be put the other way round). I asked him to tell me first about the village, then run through its collective enterprises for me, and finally take me around the paper-making factory. Nanjie Village had a population of 2,335, subdivided into nine Villagers’ Groups, and 1,200 mu of arable land. When the Household Responsibility System was set up in 1983, the land was measured and totalled 1,327 mu. There were three reasons why 127 mu had been lost in the last dozen years: the collective enterprises had occupied 80 mu, the state had requisitioned 40 mu (mainly for a road-widening scheme) and an expansion of the village primary school, and additional housing had taken up another 7 mu (five of those were for the new houses). ‘How come only 5 mu went to new housing in a village of 600 or so households in twelve years?’ I asked. Chang explained that the 5 mu had been built on between 1983 and 1988. Since 1988, planning approvals had been frozen, and new houses could only be built where old ones had been pulled down, extending upwards not outwards. I wondered if this had provoked opposition. ‘No, the arable land per capita here is only 0.5 mu—the problem is obvious to all of us, whether we are cadres or villagers. Who’s going to object?’ I asked if the arable land per capita figure was the same in Xijie Village and Dongbeijie Village. ‘More or less, though in some Villagers’ Groups it’s only 0.3 mu or 0.4 mu, in others it’s 0.7 mu or 0.8 mu. Generally speaking, there is much less arable land per capita in villages which fall within town boundaries than in rural villages, and that’s

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true in all towns.’ Chang went on to explain that Nanjie Village was both urban and rural: rural, because they still had some arable land—there might be little of it, but 0.5 mu per person could feed a family—and urban, because historically Chenliu had been situated on an important trade route. The villagers had always used commerce to supplement their farm income. Since the reforms, the residents of Nanjie Village had leapt at the chance to set up businesses. They had started, in 1983, with a leather goods factory, principally making gloves. This was the village’s first collective enterprise and had been followed, in 1988, by a building contractor (to meet local demand) and a livestock farm. In 1989 they set up a paper factory, and in 1991 a plastics factory. A dozen private businesses had been set up during the same period: foundries, leather goods and electric cable factories and the like. Chang could tell me little about how these businesses were run, except to say that falsification or failure to report their annual returns and tax avoidance was all too common. In his estimate, the annual profits of the best-run of these might be as much as Y100,000. Additionally, the majority of villagers had shops or kiosks, and were engaged in all sorts of commercial activities. Generally speaking, agriculture had become a subsidiary economic activity for the nearly 2,000 village families living within the urban boundaries, providing them merely with grain and vegetables. Industry and commerce had become their chief means of support, and provided all of their cash income. The leather goods factory Set up in 1983, the factory had kept going, although with some difficulty. It employed a total of 120 people, and had about sixty sewing machines and a dozen or so finishing presses. The factory was in an unusual position, in that newly recruited workers generally only stayed about a year and a half—long enough to learn the ropes. They would then go back home and set up on their own, salesmen even taking clients with them in the process. When they had lost a bunch of workers, the factory would hire another bunch and the same thing would happen all over again, so that they were basically providing free training for local villagers. Several hundred households were now running their own leather goods businesses, seventy to eighty in Zhuqingzhai Village alone. In the latter village, the people who had been the first to set up household leather goods factories had been in the first group of salesmen in this factory. It was often the case that collective enterprises provided training and the impetus for individual private businesses making the same sort of goods to get started, and then the latter would outstrip the former. Why? Well, the private ones, unlike the collectives, had no proper accounting systems and could avoid taxes. They were managed more flexibly, too. In this situation, it was extremely difficult for the village collective leather goods factory to stay in business. The livestock farm Mr Chang told me this was set up in partnership with the Kaifeng Daily newspaper in 1988. It mainly raised chickens, and employed twenty people. Both the animal feed and the baby chicks were supplied by a Kaifeng company. It had done well for the first couple of years, but the suppliers had spotted that there was an increase in poultry farming, and gradually raised the price of feed and chicks, thus making the farm completely unprofitable. At that point, the Kaifeng Daily pulled out of the partnership

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and there was talk in the village of closing the farm. Then last year there was a call from the county government to raise cattle: this was the way to make money. Every xiang and town government had to raise cattle, and encourage individual households to do it too. ‘Chenliu government wanted our village to take the lead,’ he continued. ‘Since this was going on all over the county, we had to go to neighbouring counties and cities to buy the calves, and the price of calves shot up. However, on the basis of last year’s beef prices, we reckoned there was still profit to be made, and at least we wouldn’t lose money. Anyway, since the order came from above, we had to do our best. We bought 120 calves last year, but now the time has come to slaughter them, and the meat price is plummeting. On the basis of today’s prices, we would have wasted a whole year’s hard work if we killed them now, and a great deal of money into the bargain. But if we keep them in the pen, they consume food every day, and they’ve stopped gaining weight. Whatever we do, we can’t win. And it’s not just us, all the county livestock farms are in the same position. The county government is pretty worried, since they were the ones who called for us all to get into the cattle-raising business, and all those who responded are facing the same disastrous debts. Apparently they’re sending people off to Shandong and Guangdong to market the meat, but who knows what the results will be?’ I felt that there were different reasons for the livestock farm having failed twice: the first lay in mismanagement of the ‘company plus peasant’ model, and shortsightedness on the part of the ‘company’, as was frequently the case. The second reason for failure was political interference in local and peasant production. The government was used to a planned economy and had no awareness of how to operate in a market economy. The government officials’ mistake was their blind belief in their right to run things. The plastics factory The village collective plastics enterprise was set up in 1991, and now employed a hundred people, mainly making horticultural plastic film and industrial plastic bags. The raw materials were pricey, and they could not raise the price of their products, so there was no profit to speak of—the factory just managed to provide a living for its workers and that was all. The Village Party Secretary’s view was that the factory had been set up too late—a couple of years earlier and it would have done better, because then it could have been listed in the National Plan, and could have obtained a certain proportion of the raw materials at a fixed low price. Zhoukou area had a plastics factory which they had set up in 1988, and because it was listed in the National Plan, they got 500 tons of raw materials each year at a fixed price. At that time, the difference between the fixed price and the market price was Y5,000 per ton, and just selling on the raw materials produced Y2,500,000 net profit, without needing to produce anything from them. ‘In 1991, I did the rounds of the departments with responsibility for chemical industries and light industry in the provincial capital and even Beijing, but I couldn’t get them to let us have the fixed price. The thing is, we needed friends at court, we should have greased a few palms…’

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The village paper factory Set up in 1988, this now employed around 280 people. The decision to manufacture paper was based on the fact that the raw material was wheat straw, of which there was an unlimited supply in the area. There had been much discussion about what kind of paper to make, and they had finally settled on white gloss printing paper. Small factories could not make this kind of paper, and a large enterprise would not want to, as the profit margins were too slim. Production had been projected to start at 10,000 tons, and total investment was Y10 million. The initial fixed capital investment was Y3 million. ‘We borrowed Y3.3 million from the bank, and raised Y1 million from the villagers. The employees put in a total of Y100,000, making Y4.4 million altogether, of which Y1.4 million served as working capital. Current investment stands at Y13 million and annual turnover at Y30 million, of which Y3 million is profit. They have four machines, with a current production capacity of 7,000–8,000 tons. The biggest problem with the paper factory is the high rate of reject products. National standards allow for a reject rate of around 10–15 per cent but here it is 40–60 per cent. This meant that around half or more than half of the paper they produce is useless and is a clear indication that the management isn’t doing its job.’ Management issues in rural collective industries In Chang’s view, poor management, high costs and low returns were problems common to all rural collective industries in Chenliu. The sort of workers they got, and where they had come from, was the basic reason why they were hard to manage. Around 700 people were employed in collective enterprises in this village–280 in the paper factory, 100 in the plastics factory, 20 on the livestock farm, 120 in leather goods, and 150 in building. Of this 700, the overwhelming majority were peasant labourers from elsewhere. (Nanjie villagers were generally involved in managing and marketing, and accounted for about 100 people.) They were all temporary or contract labourers, aged between 15 and 18 years, who had either just completed lower middle school or had dropped out of school. (At the xiang level, there were only lower middle schools and village-based primary schools. Only in the county town were there upper middle schools. Barely 50 per cent of those who finished primary went on to lower middle school, and only 20 per cent of those would continue to upper middle or vocational middle school. This contrasted with the communes, where every commune had had its own upper middle school.) These young men and women knew nothing of life; at home they just hung around, unable or unwilling to do farm work, and their parents sent them to the factory to keep them safe and out of trouble. The monthly pay in a rural collective industry was no more than about Y200, and whether they came to work or not did not really make any difference. If the manager tried to come down on them a bit harder, or if they got into a fight at work, or if the work got a bit heavier, they would simply up and leave, irrespective of their contractual conditions. There were some young women workers who had been around three or four years and knew what they were doing, but once they got married and had a child, their husband’s family generally did not allow them to go out to work any more. So while the management level was relatively stable, the workforce was very fluid and this made

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managing production and quality control very difficult. Another problem was that there was huge wastage of water and electricity; the factory paid Y150,000 monthly just in water and electricity charges. I asked Chang if he had had any ideas on how to solve these problems. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we tried starting new workers with a week of military training, to instil a bit of work discipline into them, but it had no effect at all.’ ‘Have you tried pay rises and bonuses as a way of stabilising the work force?’ I asked. ‘If we give small bonuses, it’s no incentive,’ he replied, ‘And if we give big bonuses, then we make no profits.’ ‘What about making the business a share-ownership co-operative, so that workers in key technical positions share the interests of the business?’ I suggested. ‘I’ve heard talk of shares or share-ownership co-operatives, but I’ve never seen them in action, and I would have no idea how to set about it,’ he said. But Chang seemed genuinely interested when I told him a bit about them, and suggested he went to Shanghai or another big centre to see how they worked. I asked about the factory’s effluent disposal, and was told: ‘Our effluent is discharged directly into the Huiji River. We pay nearly Y100,000 a year to the Environmental Protection Department in wastewater disposal charges.’ ‘But didn’t the government say it was determined to close down businesses that didn’t meet pollution control standards?’ I asked. ‘Only those paper factories with an annual production capacity of less than 5,000 tons, and we’re not in that category,’ said Chang. ‘And from what I’ve heard, the ones which are closed down quietly start up again after the inspectors have gone,’ he added. These factories have invested millions in their enterprises, how could they close their own factories down willingly? What are they going to do about equipment lying idle…and the workers who’ve lost the jobs? Who’s going to pay back the bank loans? Where will local government collect taxes from? It was the central government who promoted rural industries as a way to get rich in the first place.’ ‘Most of the Huai River’s hundreds of tributaries are polluted now by effluent from paper and leather factories. It’ll be a serious problem if the Huiji River just becomes a stinking ditch,’ I said. ‘That’s true,’ he responded. ‘But you can’t expect rural industries like us to put millions of yuan into wastewater treatment plants. Where would we get the money?’ That evening I had dinner with Mr Tian, Chenliu Party Secretary, and over our meal he told me something of his job and the difficulties he faced. He said that the job of someone in his position consisted entirely in receiving and implementing directives received from Party and government departments above him. This made it impossible to be a real local government leader, even to have independent plans, and there was no way to develop programmes adapted to and directed at local conditions. Almost all his efforts went into dealing with inspection and appraisal of each of these initiatives which came from above. ‘We spend all day rushing around chasing our tails.’ The family planning work was subject to ‘veto’, so were the Integrated Social Control project5 and the xiang or town enterprises. I asked him what exactly the ‘veto’ meant, and Tian explained: if any task had not attained the government’s targets, then your whole year’s work could be rejected on that basis, even if the rest of your work was up to scratch. If your work was ‘vetoed’, then whoever was in charge of that task got the sack,

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or was publicly criticised. The Party Secretary and the head of the xiang or town were held responsible too, and would receive a ‘yellow card’ warning. ‘We’re on tenterhooks all the time, and we’re terrified of losing our jobs, so we’ve got to do what our bosses say though we know some of their instructions are quite unrealistic. Those above us lean on us, we lean on the village cadres, each level puts pressure on the one below, and so it goes on. When there’s a problem and people get annoyed, they put in a complaint to those above you. Then your superiors criticise you for being too heavy-handed. If you’re an official in China, the lower down you are, the less power and the more responsibility you have. It’s really difficult to be on the lowest rung, to be a xiang official, especially if you’re the one in charge. You have to meet unrealistically high targets and you’re subject to repeated inspections and appraisals. The result is either complaints from local people or the production of all sorts of false statistics.’ ‘But presumably there’s a reason why government departments come and assess the results of the tasks and targets they’ve set. Otherwise, would local officials implement them in accordance with the spirit of the plan and local conditions? Would they carry them out effectively?’ I asked. ‘That depends on the person,’ he replied. The provincial Party Secretary once told us at a conference, “If I don’t lean on you and set you targets, you won’t do anything. But if I do, you just do what you feel like.” I’m afraid this is very common. I won’t say there aren’t any local officials who are capable of carrying out their work willingly and effectively, in the spirit in which central government intended and in line with local conditions, while also staying within the law, but they’re a small minority.’ We finished dinner at 8 p.m. Tian had another meeting—he was a busy man—but we agreed that he would make time the next morning to see me and continue our discussions. The carve-up of power at xiang or town6 level I met up with Tian again at 8.30 the next morning. He expressed the desire to be absolutely frank with me and to answer any questions I cared to put to him. The following is a summary of our discussion. The old question of the carve-up of power at xiang level was extremely involved. In principle, local government and the regional offices of central government were supposed to work together, with the local government taking the lead. In practice, the situation was extremely messy and caused endless wrangling. In general, personnel, money and materials in the following departments came under the direct remit of the xiang government: family planning, civil administration, land management, agricultural technology, agricultural machinery, irrigation, animal husbandry, forestry, local radio and so on. The Commercial Office, the Tax Office, the Office of Finance, the Office of Justice, the police, the Electricity Office and so on either came under the remit of regional branches answerable to a central office, or were jointly managed by these together with local government. The latter had no power over the work of regional offices of central government, and was only there to provide assistance and support. The regional offices also meddled in the administrative work that should have been done by the xiang government. ‘To put it simply,’ said Tian, ‘they get hold of anything that brings in money, while things that require expenditure get pushed our way. Just as an example, the

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Agricultural Technology Stations of four out of Kaifeng’s nineteen xiangs and towns are quite efficiently run. They don’t just cover their expenditure, they make a profit too. So the county agricultural technology department then decides to take these four (including ours) and manage them directly’ The Office of Finance ‘This is supposed to look after the xiang government’s money. How the money is spent, and how much, is supposed to be determined by the Office of Finance according to local needs, and that’s up to us to decide. But the local Head of Finance is appointed at county level. Even the salaries and bonuses of the office’s employees are laid down by them, and we have no say in it. Financial control at xiang level is in the hands of the County Office of Finance. We can’t spend our own money without their approval. So you can see that as head of the town administration I don’t have any power at all.’ The Commercial Office ‘This is set up and managed one hundred per cent by the county Commercial Office. The office collected Y1 million in commercial charges in Chenliu last year. But they told us they had only received half of this. They only carry out the county office’s orders and also put their own interests first. All they think about is raking in the money, and that increases the burden on local industry. Just because Chenliu is quite developed, we represent rich pickings and they’re determined to squeeze the last drop out of us. Apart from high levies, they can impose fines when they want too, and all this has made many business owners take their business elsewhere. I tell the Commercial Office to stop killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, but they don’t listen and I’ve no power over them.’ The Tax Office ‘They drive us mad. There are only five employees in this office but the county wants us to allocate ten people to help them collect taxes, and we have to pay their wages. Our Tax Office is directly answerable to the County Tax Office, and of course has to put their work before ours. As our Tax Office sees it, they are doing us a favour collecting our taxes and they want us to be grateful to them—in other words, to treat them to gifts and dinners. This year, the County Tax Office demanded that a number of local tax centres be set up between county and xiang level. We got one and we were required to build them an office and supply equipment. The County Tax Office appointed its staff. I really couldn’t understand why they wanted to add this extra level of tax administration. Was it to give the tax collection system more muscle? Wasn’t it enough that they had already claimed almost all of our tax revenues? I would guess that the reason for setting up this extra layer of administration was largely job creation. Out of all the local departments, commerce, tax and electricity are the most lucrative, and the powerful wanted to stuff these offices with their sons, daughters and friends.’ I then went on to ask about moves to streamline the administration at county and xiang level. Tian’s response was that it was easy to talk about—it had been for years—but

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difficult to put into practice. In actual fact there were an ever-increasing number of government offices and employees, and any real attempt to simplify the administration would put an awful lot of people out of a job. As it was, getting a job in local government and Party offices, especially those with a bit of money to play with, like the bank, commerce, tax administration, electricity, finance and public security, was only possible if you came from the right sort of family and could pull strings. There was a lot of nepotism in these departments. There was no way of streamlining administration where such an intricate web of personal relationships was involved, though it was clear that with 300–odd people in the Commerce Offices in the county and 500–600 in the Electricity Offices there was considerable over-staffing. The Family Planning Office Family planning was government policy, and with so little arable land there was no room for an increasing population. Everyone understood that, but to get a peasant couple to voluntarily limit themselves to one child posed enormous difficulties. Those who had power used it to get the right to an extra child, those with money bought the right, and those with neither power nor money just had an extra child on the quiet. The town government and Party expended almost all of their efforts on family planning work, and it kept them frantically busy. The real killer was the number of annual inspections. The provincial government carried out spot checks and required the city governments to do inspections at county level. In order to comply, the counties, in turn, had to carry out inspections at xiang level, and so everyone put pressure on the level below them. ‘We hardly have time to draw breath, what with several major family planning inspections each year. None of us at xiang level can honestly say we have no extra births, so we get up to all sorts of tricks to pass the inspections. And if you look a little more closely at the whole business, what would these huge family planning departments do without the income from “excess birth” fines?’ The Electricity Office ‘They’re an even worse case. They set their own charges for each kilowatthour,’ he said. ‘The power keeps going off but we never get a peep out of them. Some villages have got together to install their own transformers and put up their own lines, but the office still charges them. The annual electricity consumption for agriculture and industry around a developed town like Chenliu is probably between 8,000,000 kWh and 10,000,000 kWh. If the Electricity Office increases the charge by just Y0.1 per kWh, they can rake in an extra Y800,000–1,000,000.’ I suggested to Tian that the duties of local government could be summarised as follows: (1) to keep the peace, and (2) to promote steady development of society and the economy. In the language of central government, stability and development were the watchwords. However, in my months of research into rural conditions in Henan, I had discovered two chief obstacles to these broad aims. The first was that in China’s interior there was rapid annual percentage increase in the number of local government and Party organs and their employees. This huge corps of officials, seduced by the luxury lifestyles of the richest of their number, were constantly

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demanding salary increases, bonuses and other benefits. They wanted ‘modernisation’ of their offices and their office equipment. Put simply, the costs of government at every level continued to rise with the ever-increasing number of staff and levels of expenditure (both personal and collective). When regular sources of revenue could not satisfy demand, those offices with regulatory powers used those powers to build up their own funds as a sort of second private exchequer. Ever-increasing ‘government expenditure’ was fundamentally sourced from the peasants and local enterprises, and this could not but have a negative impact on stability and development. The second was that many Party and government officials in China’s interior had a one-sided view of economic development and modernisation. They believed that the former just meant the government building roads and hotels and investing in enterprises, while the latter consisted in renovating town buildings and buying new office equipment. They forgot, or ignored, that key factor of the market economy—economic returns. A luxury hotel was just a modern building, and in no way represented genuine modernisation. Investing large amounts of money in urban reconstruction was merely a cosmetic exercise if it did not bring economic benefits to the whole urban environment. It served principally to advance the careers of the officials involved, and was largely paid for by local agriculture and businesses. This kind of economic development on the part of the government, far from being a real help to the rural economy, merely increased the burden on peasants and entrepreneurs. After nearly four hours, our meeting drew to a close. That afternoon, I was to visit the offices of rural economic management, irrigation and land management. The Rural Economic Management Station The head of the Rural Economic Management Station was a 25-year-old man called Han. He had a diploma in accountancy from Henan Agricultural College, had started work in Chenliu government offices in 1992 and become head of the station in 1995. The station consisted of four people: its head, the accountant, the cashier and the bookkeeper. It was set up when communes were abolished in 1983, with the aim of jointly managing funds belonging to the villages and to the xiang. Village funds covered three things: public funds, used to pay for village public building work; welfare funds, which supported needy (‘Five Guarantee’)7 families; and administrative funds, which paid the wages of village cadres and office expenses. The xiang budget covered five items of expenditure: supplementary educational programmes; militia training; benefits payable to the dependants of war veterans; rural road construction; and family planning (Chenliu had abolished this last category). In 1995, the entire combined budget had amounted to about Y3 million. The average amount levied from each peasant was Y60, and last year this had been kept strictly to within 5 per cent of net income. There were three other forms of rural taxation which they collected on behalf of other departments: the agricultural tax, which last year had amounted to Y870,000; Yellow River water charges, levied at Y3 per mu and bringing in around Y1 80,000; and livestock inoculation charges, totalling about Y40,000. The grand total from these three was Y1,100,000. If levies to village and xiang or town funds were included, the total income was Y4,100,000, or Y82 per head. Strictly speaking, the term ‘agricultural levies’

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only referred to contributions by peasants to village and town funds, and did not include the other taxes. The peasants used the old term, ‘the emperor’s grain levy’, for everything, though really only the agricultural taxes came into this category. Mr Han told us that the tax budget was drawn up each March or April, and came into effect after being passed by a joint meeting of the xiang government and the xiang People’s Congress. Revenues were obtained from the summer grain crop levies. For some years now, he said, Chenliu had not made a further levy after the autumn crops. Normally, the national Grain Stations made a compulsory purchase of grain from the peasants, and the peasants also had to pay their levies to the Rural Economic Management Station—these were two different things. But in order to facilitate tax collection the two departments combined their efforts, and the cash levies (including those which went to the Tax Office) were deducted from the compulsory grain purchase payments to the peasants. So naturally, the peasants made no distinction between the compulsory grain purchase and the agricultural levies. Village funds were managed by the Rural Economic Management Station and were used by the individual villages; the xiang budget had to be approved by the xiang head. Han then talked about the process of determining the rate of agricultural levies, collecting them and putting them to use. They needed to determine the peasants’ net income per capita of the previous year. A number of problems arose here: the first was to decide what to take as the basic unit. The State Council had laid down that this should be the xiang. The xiang normally comprised twenty to thirty villages, and there was always a big income gap between rich and poor in each village. For instance, in the three villages within Chenliu’s urban boundaries, most people now worked in industry and commerce, whereas in other villages the people were chiefly engaged in agriculture, and labouring was a subsidiary activity. There was a significant difference in income between rich and poor villages, as much as double or treble or even more. If you calculated the average income on the basis of the whole xiang then the resulting agricultural tax burden was very light in the rich villages, but very heavy in poor ones. Some years ago, the Henan Provincial Government had decided that the village should be the basic unit of calculation, but the richer villages had protested that the area of arable land per capita was the same, so why should they pay more in taxes? So the basic unit went back to being the xiang. Of course, the most rational way of doing it was to take the household as the basic unit, but this presented huge difficulties for the auditors. Even though taking the xiang as the unit was the least logical solution, it was at least easy to manage and the equal apportionment of agricultural levies appealed to the peasants’ egalitarian mentality. The second problem was how to set the level of agricultural levies. Since the land had been redistributed to the households, even the peasants themselves were unclear on their annual net income. Income from agricultural sources could still be calculated, but they did not really know their non-agricultural income. Some xiang governments just added a few percentage points to the previous year’s levy when setting the current year’s rates. Worse still, some xiangs determined the amount they needed to raise by deciding what their expenditure would be. This was then apportioned to each village and, within that, to each family. The result always went far beyond a reasonable level of peasant taxation. When this summer’s harvest taxes were being collected, groups of peasants from seven or eight xiangs had appealed to the provincial government against these taxation levels. Chenliu’s agricultural levies were

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the lowest of all the county’s nineteen xiangs. Partly this was because Yang Jianfeng, the former xiang Party Secretary, had attached great importance to protecting the peasants’ interests and ensuring social stability in the countryside, and for this reason kept taxation low. But it was also because Chenliu had a well-developed industrial and commercial sector. Han also told me on the quiet that the County Party Committee had forbidden xiang cadres to gossip about the peasants’ recent appeal against taxes. Tax collection presented numerous problems, said Han. If the per capita taxes due in cash were greater than the amount they received from the compulsory grain purchase, the peasants would lose out. For example, if the state bought up 100 catties of wheat per capita, the compulsory purchase price that year was Y65 per 100 catties and the market price was Y80. Suppose that the total agricultural levies that year were Y130. Normally if the peasants got Y65 for their compulsorily purchased grain, and sold another 80 catties on the open market for Y65, making Y130, then they could pay off their levies. But many xiang governments took it upon themselves to increase the compulsory grain purchase by another 100 catties, so that, without anything being said publicly, each peasant was making a loss of 20 catties of wheat. Basically, the higher the levies and the quantity of grain compulsorily purchased, the greater the difference between the market and the state purchase price, the more the peasants were disadvantaged. Han added that regulations stipulated that village and xiang budget expenditure was to be used exclusively for specifically designated purposes, but in practice this was something that was very difficult to achieve. Finally we discussed the Agricultural Funding Co-operatives set up by the Rural Economic Management Stations. Han said that Chenliu and Zhuxian were the only xiangs in Kaifeng County not to have set one up. This was because Chenliu already had five banks (including credit co-operatives). In other xiangs or towns, there was a great deal of conflict between the Agricultural Funding Co-operatives and the banking institutions. This August, the banks had reduced the rate of interest on savings which the Funding Co-operatives could pay to 1 per cent, in order to bankrupt them. It was commonly felt that either the Funding Co-operatives should be abolished or they should be merged with the credit co-operatives. The Water Conservancy Office This office was headed by 29-year-old Mr Liu, a graduate of the Henan Institute of Education Political Education Department. He had taken up his post in Chenliu in 1993, and lived in the county town. Three other people worked at the Water Conservancy Office: a technician appointed by the County Water Conservancy Department, who was also the Liu’s deputy, and two other employees. The head of the Water Conservancy Office’s wages were paid by the xiang; the county government made a contribution of Y6,000 annually, most of which went to pay the wages of the deputy. The wages of the other two workers and office expenses were settled out of office funds. The main channel for these funds was the water usage charge levied under the Water Law—the rate was Y0.05 per ton of water, and it brought in Y7,000–8,000 annually, which was nearly enough meet the two employees’ wages. The Water Conservancy Office’s chief duties were (1) to carry out tasks delegated to it by the County Water Conservancy Department, and (2) to draw up plans for xiang water

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conservancy improvement projects—for example, assess the need for silt-clearing operations and distribute the work to each village. Irrigation works for the fields were normally carried out once each autumn harvest was completed. Apart from silt clearing, there was nothing else for the Water Conservancy Office to do. When there was no work, the office’s employees were given odd jobs to do by the xiang government, for instance helping out the Village Party Secretaries. I suggested to Liu that they might form a drilling team, thus killing two birds with one stone—help the peasants and earn money from it. Liu told me that the office had owned a well-borer at one point, but the then head of water conservancy was old and sick. He had sold it for Y5,000, and had used the money for medical treatment and to pay wages. Besides, several years ago Chenliu had received a loan from the World Bank (as part of the Yellow River/Huai Hai Flood Control Project) to sink a well for every 50 mu of land, and this work had been completed. Apart from keeping the water courses clear, there was nothing else for the office to do. The trouble was, not enough money was being put into water conservancy, and almost all the Water Conservancy Offices at xiang level were strapped for cash, with no money to carry out any projects. The Land Management Station Mr Wang, aged 35, was head of this office. He was an upper middle school graduate, and had been in the army between 1979 and 1983. The office employed four people altogether and had been set up in 1983; its principal brief was to enforce arable land protection regulations, to support urban construction programmes and to assist the Village Committees settle disputes about house-building land. Wang told me that there were many problems associated with house-building planning applications and approval in rural areas, the main one being when peasants exceeded housing area allowance limits. These allowed 0.25 mu per family, but in actual fact it was usually nearer to 0.5 mu, or even 1 mu. Last year there had been a ‘clean-up’ operation and offenders had been fined, but the county was concerned not to antagonise the peasants and had put a stop to it. The peasants habitually regarded the family home as land which they would pass on to their children and grandchildren, and even if it was a vacant plot they were not disposed to pass it on to another family. Also, when the villagers built houses, they left lots of holes and pits in the ground where they had excavated earth to use for the foundations. On 1 October 1996, the Henan provincial government had passed new detailed regulations on village house-building, and if these were enforced most villages could cut down their built-on land by a half, or at least a third. However, it would be extremely difficult to enforce the rules properly and this was not something that village cadres would willingly take on. The Land Management Station not only had to manage the entire wages and office expenses from their own income, they also had to hand over Y2,000 annually to Chenliu’s Finance Office. As for the sources of income for the station, Wang added that house planning applications were subject to a tax (Y2.35 per square metre), the Tax Office gave 20 per cent back to the Finance Office who, in their turn, passed some back to the Land Management Station. In 1995, they had received Y5,000. A second source of income was land management charges levied by the station on behalf of the county Land Management Department. Thirty per cent of this was given back to the xiang, and his

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office had received Y4,000 in 1995. A third source was fines for illegal occupation of land, a certain percentage of which came back to them. The figure for fines each year was not fixed—Wang could not give me definite figures. Fourth, they rented out a building belonging to their office which fronted on to the street, and that brought in Y2,000 annually. Finally, in the last few years the Land Management Station had invested Y40,000 in setting up a knitting factory, which supplied flannelette to the leather goods factories. These contracts brought them in Y6,000 a year. This gave them a total annual income of about Y30,000. Their expenditure, apart from wages and office expenses and the Y2,000 in tax which went to the xiang Finance Office, also included hospitality expenses (about Y2,000 in 1996) and Y600 which went on buying newspapers every year. ‘How could such a small office spend Y600 on newspapers and magazines?’ I asked. ‘It’s what Head Office told us to do,’ he said. ‘They say we’ve got money, and made us order some more. Now we have ten different ones.’ Wang was an ex-serviceman, so I asked him about the percentage of exservicemen and women in local Party and government. His answer was: ‘At xiang level, 40 per cent, at villages, about 50 per cent.’ The Office of Civil Administration The head of the Civil Administration Office was a Mr Zhou; he was 33 years old and had gone into xiang government after graduating from upper middle school. He had been a reporter, an administrator, then deputy head, in the Office of Justice, and in 1993 had been transferred to the Civil Administration Office as its head. The office employed four people: its head, the marriage registrar, the accountant and an administrator. Although this indicated a division of labour, in practice they were frequently given other tasks by the local government. Zhou told me that the duties of his office were very varied. They included: registration of marriages; registration of associations; administration of funerals; help and support for the needy, for army widows and their families, for army personnel on active service, for the handicapped, and for Five Guarantee families; social welfare; and anything else that came within the remit of civil administration. They would need considerable manpower and funds to carry out all the many tasks they were supposed to do, and the xiang government did not have that kind of money. ‘Just take funeral reforms, for example. We’ve been calling for simplification of funeral ceremonies for years, but the peasants have grown up with these burial practices and they are deeply engrained. Especially after decollectivisation, the peasants just dug graves and built tombs on their contracted land, and no one could stop them. The Village Party Committees couldn’t do any thing about it, so how could just four of us push for funeral reforms throughout the xiang? Then there’s the Five Guarantee families provisions, laid down by the Henan provincial government. This says that the living standard for these families should be no lower than the per capita average for that xiang. We have sixty-three people in that category, of whom thirty-six live in the town’s Old People’s Home and twenty-seven live in the villages. Even if we’re really pennypinching, the Old People’s Home takes more than Y100,000 to run every year. Old people are often sick, so add medical expenses to that, and it comes to about Y200,000.

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Well, last year, we only got allocated Y220,000, so that only covered the running of the Old People’s Home. There are regulations for protection of the disabled, we’re supposed to help them get jobs, and they’re entitled to exemptions, but, with 500 of them, it’s impossible to fix up all those who can work with jobs. It’s even difficult to arrange small benefits for them, like exemption from agricultural tax and from community duties. They are very unevenly distributed throughout the villages; the other families don’t like it if there are a lot in one village and the rest have to contribute more to make up the shortfall. It’s all very well for our superiors to make regulations—no matter how nice and simple they sound—they’re not the ones who are paying. It’s the towns and villages that pay and, in the end, the peasants. On the one hand, we’re told to lighten the load on the peasants, but on the other hand it’s increasing. It makes our work impossible.’ We then talked about revenues for the Civil Administration Office and Zhou told me that they came from three main sources: (1) the office was allocated the whole of the town’s budget for support of Five Guarantee families, and part of the villages’ social welfare funds—a total, last year, of Y220,000; (2) the county Civil Administration Department allocated them Y98,000 annually, and this went towards benefits for army widows and dependants, and disabled and retired soldiers—these first two items were ring-fenced; (3) the third source of income was the Y110,000 for poor relief given by Head Office in the form of a deposit. Only the interest on this could be touched, and it did not even amount to Y10,000. Altogether the Civil Administration Office received Y330,000 annually for its work; anything extra had to be paid for out of their own funds. They raised their own funds from two sources: one was three small factories they had set up as tax-free charity enterprises (in chemicals, concrete blocks and gloves). The tax from the revenues and contract fees from these factories was divvied up in a 4:6 ratio between their office and the county office. ‘Only Y10,000 came from that last year: Y6,000 to them, Y4,000 to us. We also get Y3,500 in annual rent from two small shops we own.’ The other was fines. For example, there were the Y500 fines levied on couples who got married but did not register their union. Zhou could not tell me how much this had added up to last year. Two years previously, the Chenliu town government had carried out reforms, and any departments who were supposed to be able to support themselves out of their own income, like the Civil Administration, had to do so. The wages of the four of them, office and hospitality expenses and newspapers came to Y20,000–30,000, of which Y10,000 came from the interest on the Poor Relief funds and Y7,500 from business revenues and rentals. I guessed that the shortfall was made up from fines and service charges, but did not pursue this question. The Agricultural Machinery Station The station head was a Mr He. He was 37 years old, and had completed upper middle school. He had served in the army between 1988 and 1992, when he began working for the Chenliu government, first in the Land Management Station and then as head of the Agricultural Machinery Station. His office employed four people in addition to himself: an agricultural machinery inspector, an accountant, a marketing manager and a clerk in charge of vehicle registration. There were also four retired employees of the station.

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Beginning a couple of years previously, a number of offices, including the Agricultural Machinery Station, the Agricultural Technology Station, the Water Conservancy Office and the Livestock Station, had been ‘weaned off’ dependence on the xiang Finance Office and told to become self-supporting. The Chenliu Agricultural Machinery Station ran three commercial units: an agricultural machinery salesroom, which also stocked spare parts; and two petrol stations, supplying fuel for agricultural use—they were run by private contractors, who paid contract fees to the station amounting to an annual Y20,000 (the salesroom contract fees, by contrast, were only Y1,000 per year). This Y21,000 represented the station’s total annual income. However, these were just the figures written into the contracts; in reality, in Chenliu alone, there were a dozen other sales outlets for agricultural machinery. Competition for business was extremely fierce, and the three contractors involved were therefore unable to keep up with the monthly contract fees. Mr He told me that the station had not paid wages for five months. ‘So what are you living on?’ I asked. ‘People who’ve got a bit of land go home and help their wives cultivate it; everyone who doesn’t have land does a bit of business on the side. They won’t wait till they die of starvation.’ ‘What about the four retired employees?’ I asked. ‘If we can’t even pay ourselves, then we certainly don’t have the money to pay them,’ was the reply. The work of the Agricultural Machinery Station had been almost entirely commercialised except for some administrative duties, which consisted of issuing registration documents for farm vehicles. (The fees for this came to Y2,000–3,000 annually, all of which was paid over the county office.) I asked Mr He whether the station might close. ‘Well, it might,’ he replied. There’s nothing to stop it closing, although there’s an Agricultural Machinery Department at county level, so there should be an office at xiang level. The truth is that our department’s main task is to be financially selfsupporting, but it’s not even able to do that!’ In the afternoon, I visited the Family Planning Office, the Rule of Law Committee and the Office of Justice. The Family Planning Office The head of Family Planning was 30-year-old Mr Liu. He had completed upper middle school and had been a soldier from 1986 to 1990. After leaving the army, he had been assigned to work in the Family Planning Office and then became its head. Of all the town government departments, the Family Planning Office had developed fastest and had the heaviest workload. Its work is the most important part of local government, said Liu. ‘In 1983, we only had one woman, who was head of Women’s Affairs and did all the Family Planning work. By 1990, there were ten employees, now there are thirty-two, and we can still hardly keep up.’ The office was made up of three family planning teams. Then there was the head, three deputy heads, three secretaries/statisticians, a bookkeeper and one administrator who worked on the figures of the floating population. The deputy heads also each headed

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a team, made up of seven or eight people. The twenty-nine administrative villages were divided up, with each team in charge of their patch. Liu explained that after some years of hard work, Chenliu had basically attained its goal. The slogan was: ‘Promote one birth per family, control two births, put a stop to three births.’ In 1996, just ten families had had excess births, which was lower than the target set by the provincial government. Liu attributed this drop to an ever more rigorous and draconian system of pregnancy testing and excess birth fines. Since 1993, they had had the system fully up and running. It worked like this: every married woman of childbearing age had to report to the xiang health clinic for a pregnancy test every month; those who missed were fined. The xiang set limits on the number of women allowed to give birth every year, and these quotas were enforced at village level; those who had unplanned pregnancies were fined as well as being made to have an abortion (this was separate from the excess birth fine). After one birth, the woman had to have a coil fitted. If a woman was not using contraception, the family was fined. If any woman with one baby had another without permission, the family was fined, and not only that but she also had to be sterilised. Those who refused were subject to a further fine. These kinds of rigorous controls at every stage had basically put a stop to families having more than two children. There were two main sources of revenue to support this large amount of family planning work. One was the family planning budget from Chenliu town funds. At Y1 per head of population, that came to more than Y50,000. The second came from the various fines (the so-called ‘Three charges, one fine’). I asked what the total for fines was annually and how the money had been used, and Liu hesitated a moment before giving me some approximate figures: ‘Before 1990,1 really wouldn’t know. Between 1990 and 1992, the annual fines amounted to about Y250,000–300,000. At the beginning of 1993, the provincial government made the excess birth fines fiercer, and that year they amounted to Y700,000–800,000. In 1994 and 1995, it was Y1–Y1.1 million.’ I noted that in 1995 Chenliu’s total budget, including funds retained by the village, came to Y3 million so that family planning fines came to more than a third of Chenliu’s agricultural levies. Moreover, the levies were shared by all peasant families equally, whereas the fines fell largely on excess birth families. Using heavy fines as a means of coercion to control the rural birth rate was a last resort and a very poor one, since those penalised were not only parents who wanted another child but, to an even greater degree, the children who resulted, the majority of whom were born into extreme penury. Liu told me that in principal 20 per cent of the total fines revenue was paid to the County Family Planning Committee, 30 per cent went back to the administrative villages and 50 per cent was retained by the Chenliu Family Planning Office. In general, the xiang funds, administered by the County Finance Office, were guaranteed, but the 30 per cent apportioned to the villages usually were not. The guaranteed funds were used to pay wages, hospitality and other items of expenditure like newspapers and office equipment. The salaries of the thirty-two Family Planning Office employees came to Y140,000– 150,000 per year. In 1994, they had built themselves a new office block in the grounds of the xiang government, which had cost Y350,000. In 1995 they had bought two cars, costing Y150,000. Newspapers and periodicals (largely published by the different family planning departments) came to Y8,000. The Family Planning Office was subject to

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numerous inspections by their superiors, and so hospitality expenses came to a fairly hefty sum. Office of Justice The head of the Office of Justice was 27-year-old Mr Chen. He had a law diploma from Henan University in 1992, and had then started work in the Chenliu Office of Justice. Five of the office’s total of seven workers were permanent staff and there were two contract workers. Apart from Mr Chen and a secretary, the other five employees were each in charge of five or six administrative villages, where they aided the heads of public security in settling a variety of civil disputes. Chen told me that xiang Offices of Justice had been set up in 1984. Until April 1996, the xiang or town was responsible for appointing and fixing the salary of the head of this office but thereafter, on the orders of the provincial Department of Justice, these powers had reverted to the County Justice Department. The latter also paid the head’s wages. The result was that whereas the office had originally been locally controlled, it now came under the remit of the local branch of a central government organisation. The aim of this transfer was to reduce administrative meddling by the xiang government in the judicial process, and thus to guarantee the independence and impartiality of the judiciary. Chen then talked about the functions of the Office of Justice: to educate the peasants about the law; to provide legal services; and to intercede in and resolve civil disputes. Criminal matters in the countryside were dealt with by the local police station. Civil disputes tended to fall into the following five categories: 1 Marriage disputes. There had been thirty-five divorce disputes in Chenliu in 1995, and in the majority of cases the result had been a reconciliation, with only three cases actually ending in divorce. Most of those involved in divorce proceedings fell into the 22- to 30-year-old age group. The number of such cases had risen sharply in recent years, and this was closely related to the increase in the numbers of young men and women leaving the village to look for work, and the greater freedom in sexual relations. 2 Residential land disputes. There had been about twenty of these in 1995, and the ones which reached the Office of Justice tended to be the serious ones, since most were resolved at village level. 3 Contract land boundary disputes, and disputes about use of water and electricity. 4 Support for the elderly. Since the redistribution of land to the households, the children tended to set up their own homes after marriage. This meant that once the parents no longer had the capacity to earn their own living, they had to be looked after. Most of these disputes concerned particular families, and over the years were almost impossible for any official to resolve. You had just settled one, and disagreements would break out again. In the whole of Chenliu, only a dozen families were involved in serious disputes. 5 Commercial disputes. These mainly arose within the rural enterprises, and had gradually increased in recent years. I asked Chen where the money came from to pay for the work of the Office of Justice. Apart from his own salary, which came from the county, he told me, his office had to

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raise the salaries of the other six employees, together with office expenses, themselves. The money came, first, from legal services they provided: they had set up a legal services office, which had signed contracts with twenty-four administrative villages and eight enterprises to provide legal advice and help to settle cases. That brought in Y100–300 per contract in service charges per month. Second, there were notary fees, and third, mediation fees (Y50–100 per case). Fourth, they could earn money by acting in commercial cases; how much depended on how big a case it was. All the above work had brought in about Y30,000 in 1995. His office was really strapped for cash, and they never had enough to buy another piece of office equipment or legal reference material. Chen raised three main problems they faced in their work. The first was lack of funding. They used to settle some disputes by levying fines, but since last year the county office had forbidden fines and had abolished all existing provisions for fines, so that had reduced their income. Second, when the office was under the xiang government leadership, there had been too much interference from the government executive. Now that the head of the office was appointed by the county, the situation had improved somewhat, but it seemed impossible for his office to achieve real independence. Besides, any work in the countryside kept coming up against family and personal connections, which made it difficult for them to act impartially. Third, ordinary peasants, including village cadres, were hopelessly ignorant about the law and the judiciary. Very few people were clear about the differences between civil and criminal cases, and the procedures to follow. They waited until things got serious, because so few of them knew that the Office of Justice was there to help them resolve disputes. Of course, this was also closely connected with the poor quality of work and lack of influence of the office. ‘Also, the calibre of people working in the xiang Offices of Justice is a big problem,’ said Chen. ‘Take our office for example. I’m the only one who’s studied law,’ he went on. ‘The other six completed upper middle school but have no legal education or training at all. So how can they do legal work? Why hasn’t Head Office given us all legal training since we were set up ten years ago? They say they want to promote the rule of law at local level, but they really haven’t paid much attention to that law!’ Chen was also acting deputy head of the Chenliu Rule of Law Committee. The Office of Justice had originally had two offices, and one had been redecorated and turned into the Rule of Law Committee office. The Provincial Rule of Law Committee had just been established by the Henan provincial government this year; and they had required local governments at city, county and xiang levels to follow suit. The Chenliu Party Secretary and Deputy Secretary were to become head and deputy head of the Committee, the government Office Manager performed the same function for the Committee, and the head of the Office of Justice took on the post of acting deputy head of the Rule of Law Committee. All the work in actual fact was done by his office. It was clear that the aim of the Committee was to encourage a shift from ‘rule by people’ to ‘rule by law’, but it was extremely doubtful that it could effectively be carried out by setting up an organisation which existed in name only. In my view there were two different ways of enforcing the law. One was law enforcement by a centralised power (more properly known as despotism); the other was the democratic rule of law. In the former, the rulers from above exercised power (restraint) over those below them, coercing the latter to conform as far as possible to their will. Democratic rule of law, on the other hand, enabled those at the bottom to restrict the

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powers of their rulers, and to ensure that the powers of those who managed public affairs were subject to the judiciary, thus avoiding as far as possible abuse of that power. For too long, we had not made a clear distinction between the two ways of enforcing the law. Of course, the real issue was not the theoretical distinction between the two—it lay in the real situation of local government and people. The transition from despotism to democracy went hand in hand with real social changes whereby peasants became citizens, law prevailed over personal relations, and people treated each other without regard to the degree of kinship between them. Thus, in order to promote the rule of law in the modern sense, we had first to make an objective study of the social ethos, and also seek out really effective ways to democratise society.

A visit to Chenliu’s Head of Finance Today was Saturday, the beginning of another weekend. When I was away on field research, I habitually made no distinction between weekdays and weekends. Happily, the Head of Finance had a house inside the local government compound so it was easy enough to go and have an informal discussion with her. Ms Huang was 32 years old, and had done a correspondence course at Henan University, obtaining a diploma in finance. The Office of Finance employed eight people: the director, the budgetary accountant, and six others who each specialised in a particular area: two in tax revenues, two in extra-budgetary funds, one in revolving agricultural support loans and one in funds from local government. Of the eight, only two had completed any higher education (in both cases, they had done correspondence courses in finance); the other six had been on three- to four-month finance training courses in the city or provincial capital. Ms Huang told me that her office relied on three main sources for its funding. First, there were taxes levied by the office itself, including agricultural taxes, taxes on rural special products, arable land use taxes and tax on contract deeds. In 1995, agricultural taxes had brought in Y520,000 (that was the total that reverted to her office; the total for the town was Y870,000) and taxes on rural produce raised Y70,000; arable and residential land use taxes were calculated at Y2.35 per square metre, and industrial land use tax at a bit more than Y4 per square metre. In 1995 all this had raised about Y50,000. The imposition of a contract deeds tax was basically limited to certain towns, and only three towns within Kaifeng County (including Chenliu and Zhuxian). Chenliu had collected Y12,000 in this way last year. The total tax revenue therefore came to Y652,000. A second source of funding was that portion of national and land taxes collected by the Tax Office which was paid to the local Finance Office. In 1995, this came to nearly Y2 million. Third, there were the funds they raised themselves, from two main sources: a share in the profits or contract fees from enterprises they had set up (Y140,000 last year), and rentals from shops owned by the town government (Y30,000 last year). Ms Huang told me that the total revenues for her office last year had come to Y2,790,000. We then came to expenditure, and Ms Huang explained that this broadly fell into three categories. The first was education. This was a very big item of expenditure: monthly salaries alone came to Y140,000, and at Y1,680,000 annually that was more than 60 per

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cent of their total budget. That did not count school maintenance costs, the purchase of educational equipment and office expenses. (She could not tell me what the latter amounted to.) The second item was government expenses: there was a monthly bill of nearly Y60,000 of which around Y40,000 went on salaries, and Y10,000 on office expenses and cars. The annual total was Y720,000. The year before last, the town government instituted reforms, and a lot of organisations were weaned off dependence on Finance Office funding; now they have to support themselves.’ The third was civil administration (Y130,000 last year), which mainly meant support for the families of war veterans. Ms Huang’s final words were a lament that: ‘Our main job is to make money to pay the monthly salaries of our primary and middle school teachers. The government doesn’t have the money to support so many departments and employees, so it just has to make them self-sufficient. That means that there just isn’t the money for developing the local economy or for any rural construction. In all of the county’s nineteen xiangs and towns, 65–75 per cent of the income of the Offices of Finance goes on teachers’ salaries and education. It’s much the same in other counties.’ We finished our discussions at 10.30 a.m., and after lunch I decided to go back to Kaifeng County Town. In the five and a half days I had spent in Chenliu, I had visited four administrative villages and eight government offices, given one lecture and had two interviews with the Chenliu Party Secretary. There were still some departments I had been unable to see, which was a pity. I had originally hoped to make my investigations into rural society at town and village level more thorough, more comprehensive and more detailed, but had only been able to accomplish this much. It was at least some comfort that I had exerted my best efforts. Chenliu was probably the best governed of all of Kaifeng’s nineteen xiangs and towns: agricultural levies here were quite reasonable, rural industry and commerce were well developed, government was relatively free of corruption, and cadres and people alike honoured the memory of their former Party Secretary, Yang Jianfeng. Even superficial examination of the state of affairs in a town like this, however, revealed a number of problems. Undoubtedly these problems were to be found in all the other xiangs and towns too, and the root causes lay deep within the system. The financing of the town government was one issue: in 1995 the Finance Office revenues had been Y2,790,000; the levies raised by the Rural Economic Management Office (just the amount which made up the xiang or town and village budgets, as determined by criteria laid down by the State Council) came to around Y3 million; in the same year, the town Family Planning Office had raised Y1 million from its ‘three charges, one fine’ system. In any one xiang or town, three kinds of organisations had the right to raise and spend revenues from the peasants’ surplus product, and this led to a number of abuses. My proposal would be that all this income should be collected and managed by a single department (for example, the Office of Finance) who would also be responsible for putting it to use. In this way, the rights of all administrative and executive bodies to levy fines would be separated from the benefits which accrued from those fines; and this should put a stop to the kind of corruption whereby departments abused the fines system in order to make a quick profit. Second, all agricultural levies paid by each peasant household should be combined together into a single ‘agricultural tax’, calculated

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per mu. Chenliu had 60,000 mu of arable land, and the agricultural tax had raised Y870,000, or Y15 per mu; if the agricultural levies raised Y3 million, or an average of Y50 per mu, that made a total of Y65 per mu, which was equivalent to the ‘ten one’ tax of ancient days.8 This would not only simplify the tax collection procedures, but would also put an end to random charges, since the peasants would pay agricultural taxes at a unified rate. Third, the xiang or town Office of Finance ought to publish its annual income and expenditure figures to the local People’s Congress and Village Committees. Wherever such figures were not published, the law should give the peasants the right to refuse to pay taxes. The second thing was that there was an urgent need to stress the importance of the role of the xiang and village government and to improve the calibre of local cadres. Xiang and village governments were dealing directly with the people, they had direct control over local affairs; it fell to their officials (including public servants from the various departments) to carry out directives, manage programmes and resolve problems. Guidelines, policies and laws laid down by higher levels of government could only be properly enforced by government at the local level and its officers. As the old saying went, xiang and village government officials looked after the people whereas their superiors only looked after other officials. Since serving the people was the noblest aspiration of an official, those at the lowest level who actually looked after the people should surely be regarded as more important than the higher ranks who merely looked after their juniors. The situation in the real world, however, was just the reverse. The duties of village and xiang cadres revolved not around the people but around those officials who were their seniors. They had low status, few powers and heavy responsibilities. For these reasons the calibre of the lowest-ranking cadres was often very poor. By calibre here I do not mean that they were not educated—in fact, most had completed upper middle school or further education, and a high proportion were army-trained. However, their specialised knowledge for their jobs was very limited. All the departments with the most highly specialised functions—public order, justice, taxes, commerce, credit, electricity and finance—were stuffed full of employees the majority of whom had received no specialist training whatsoever. It seemed to me that regular training courses and examinations should become mandatory, and all those who did not pass the exams should leave the departments. Second, dedication to serving the people and upholding the law was distinctly lacking. In my view, there was a need to set up specialised institutes of management all over China, with the aim of training public servants for all the various government departments appropriately. Of course, the focus of this education should be on strengthening their awareness of civil rights and the law. The next day Yongcheng and I were to set off for Liudian xiang in the Yellow River dyke area. After dinner, we had nothing to do, so Yongcheng suggested we go and see an old friend who lived in Kaifeng County Town—the deputy director of the County Party School. His friend was not only open and honest, he told me, but very knowledgeable about the county; he was sure to tell me a great many useful things. The deputy director of the County Party School, a man of about 50, lived in a small courtyard. This had a single, two-storeyed house in it, with three rooms on each floor. There was also an outside kitchen with a cooker fuelled by bottled gas, and a toilet cum

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shower house. A few flowers still grew in pots outside. The sitting room measured about 10 square metres, and was furnished with two sofas, a low table, a colour TV and plastic wainscoting panels on all four walls, which made it look quite cosy. Yongcheng’s friend, when told why I was here, received me most hospitably and the conversation flowed freely. The Kaifeng County Party School employed twenty people, of whom fifteen were teachers. The school received Y8,000 per month, all of which went on paying salaries. As for building and vehicle maintenance, educational equipment, water and electricity, these all had to be funded by their own efforts. The school had two factories, one making ceramic-effect paint, the other making new-style wainscoting (the plastic panels in this room had been made there). These two factories had been set up within the last four or five years, and their employees were all teachers from the school. In this way, each teacher got an additional Y200 on their monthly salary, and the factories together made an annual profit of Y20,000–30,000, which offset the expenses of running the school. The school compound included several mu of arable land, 0.2 or 0.3 mu per person, on which the teachers grew vegetables for home consumption. ‘This is like the ancient system where land came with the job to supplement the low salary,’ I said jokingly. My host replied: ‘Many County Party Schools are like this. With 0.2 or 0.3 mu of land per person, the family doesn’t need to go out and buy vegetables.’ Yongcheng added: ‘Kaifeng City Party School used to have this system too, but with a shortage of teachers’ housing, all the arable land was built on.’ Our host earned Y401 per month, and when his factory wages were added to this it came to a total of Y700–800. His wife had been laid off a few months before, and his daughter had just passed the entrance exam for Nankai University in Tianjin. At a rough guess, the university would cost at least Y5,000 per year. Our host could only shake his head and sigh; he was clearly in financial straits. The conversation gradually turned to agricultural levies and cases where groups of peasants had lodged appeals with the city and provincial governments. The deputy director told us that there had been such cases in seven or eight xiangs all over the county after this summer’s harvest. Numbers of people involved in each case ranged from a few score to over a hundred. Although county organisations did all they could to discourage such protests, even setting up road blocks to stop them getting through, they had still happened. They had various grievances, largely concentrated on exorbitant taxes levied on the summer harvest, although the precise details were not clear. The County Party Committee gave an order that cadres should not get involved in discussing it. The per capita wheat levy was about 200 catties. The average arable land per capita in Kaifeng County was only a little more than 1 mu; in many villages it was less than one. Since the per mu yield from average land was no more than 500–600 catties, on the best land 700– 800 catties, if the local government expropriated a quarter or a third of that, then that really was a heavy burden on the peasants. Our host told us that Henan officials loved to spout fine-sounding ambitious slogans, but these bore little relation to reality. One County Party Secretary had taken up his post with great vigour in February 1995 and had pronounced that between 1995 and 1998 county revenues were to see a substantial increase. In 1994 revenues had totalled Y34 million, and Secretary Yang had set Y50 million as the target for 1995, Y68 million for 1996, Y80 million for 1997 and Y100 million for 1998. Was it possible for revenues to

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almost triple within four years? This was largely a traditional agricultural county where it was only recently that the basic needs of the peasants had been met, and industry and commerce in the county was underdeveloped. Where was the Finance Office supposed to raise such a lot of money? In the end, they had to ask the peasants for it. In reality all the County Party Secretary could do was to ensure that finance directives were passed down to xiang level, where such pressure was applied to officials that they went in fear of their jobs. In my host’s opinion, trying to direct the economy by the simple expedient of issuing administrative directives led to many abuses. For example, in order to develop rural businesses, each xiang had been ordered to set up a collective enterprise and invest Y300,000 in it; and each administrative village had to put Y100,000 into a similar enterprise. The product, the funds, the technology were to be decided at local level. Where were these villages supposed to get the money from? If they could not borrow money, they made the village cadres raise it. The cadres were worried about losing their jobs, so they had no option but to set up a business. Some villages had not yet set anything up and the money had been embezzled. In other cases, the business lasted a year and then the money ran out. Or the factory was built, and the equipment bought, but nothing had been produced. Or the factory was making the goods, but there were no sales outlets. Truly profitable xiang and village collective enterprises were thin on the ground indeed. The whole exercise had been a complete waste of time and money. Then there was the call for xiangs to set up cattle farms, and for families to keep cows. All over the county, the cattle were now ready to go to market, and the meat had dropped in price from Y3.50 per catty to Y2.80, and still remained unsold. The Get Rich Project was just an exercise in making people poorer. Then there were the ‘business groups’. The county had eight state-owned businesses, and one of them, a factory, was made up of five workshops. The latter had been upgraded into ‘factories’, and thereby a business group had been formed. The factory had just turned itself into a business group. The only difference was that the number of managers had shot up. The dining room of the factory guesthouse had started out with just one table for entertaining outside guests. They had now crammed five or six such tables in. Another example was the county’s state-owned grain spirit factory. It had few sales outlets and was making a loss. The county then issued a directive that all county organisations and guesthouses had to serve this factory’s liquor, in the spirit, so they said, of supporting the county. County funds were used to buy crates of the liquor and the money was attributed to departmental office expenses. Our host then recounted to us an incident that had happened in the Family Planning Office of another county. Apparently, Luowang xiang Family Planning Office had managed to spend Y1 million during the course of 1995, of which Y800,000 came from the various fines they imposed, and Y200,000 had been lent them by other departments. The relevant accounting records consisted of a large number of claims without receipts attached, indicating that the sum had been spent in large part on buying gifts. The county’s disciplinary and supervisory departments were currently holding an investigation into the matter. The xiang was subdivided into ten administrative villages and forty-four natural villages and its population currently stood at about 28,000, so it was small by Kaifeng County standards. Nevertheless, in 1995, if this figure was correct, the xiang’s excess birth fines totalled Y1,600,000 (since the xiang kept half of that, 30

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per cent of the remainder was paid to the County Family Planning Committee and 20 per cent to village funds)—which was an astonishing figure! And finally my host imparted a snippet of gossip: the former Party Secretary of Kaifeng County (1993–4) once organised all the county cadres of auxiliary Ke grade and above to join a two-week-long dance course, and solemnly incorporated it into the ‘Cadre Assessment Targets’. His idea was it would ‘transform their outlook, and make them really modern cadres’. It earned him the nickname of the ‘Dancing Secretary’. It was eleven o’clock before we left to return to the guesthouse.

Liudian xiang—land reclaimed from the Yellow River At 9 a.m. a car arrived from Liudian to pick us up. About 30 kilometres east of the Kaifeng Yellow River bridge, the famous Yellow River Dongbatou Dyke began (the river made a sudden turn to the north east at this point). The north and south dykes were 7 to 10 kilometres apart at this point, and the main watercourse hugged the north dyke. There was a strip of alluvial land 5 to 6 kilometres wide and 30 kilometres long between the southern shore of the river and the south dyke. The part which lay against the dyke was known as the upper flats, and the river bank was the lower flats, the upper flats being between one and two metres higher than the lower. There were two xiangs on this river plain, Liudian (which belonged to Kaifeng County) to the west, and Sanyizhai (Lankao County) to the east. At 9.45 we were at the Yellow River southern bridgehead. We crossed the south dyke, turned east, drove several kilometres down a poplar-lined tarmac road and arrived at Liudian, the seat of the xiang government. My first impression of the government compound was of a large, orderly and unadorned space. The 37-year-old Party Secretary, a Mr Duan, came out of his office to welcome us and expressed his willingness to facilitate our investigations in whatever way he could. I first asked him to tell me about this year’s floods. Liudian xiang was made up of twenty-two administrative villages, forty-four natural villages, with a population of 35,000 and about 50,000 mu of arable land. Fourteen of the administrative villages and 10,000 mu of land were on the upper flats. The whole xiang was located within the river plain and covered nearly 80 square kilometres. The floods did not normally reach the upper shore. The lower flats, on the other hand, were part of the original course of the Yellow River, until this had shifted north at some point during the Ming or Qing dynasties, allowing the lower shore to be reclaimed. It was usually the lower flats which suffered from flood disasters. After Liberation, as a flood prevention measure, the 4- to 5-kilometre-long ‘inner dyke’ had been built along the present course of the river. It had apparently been designed to withstand the impact of a 10,000 cubic metres per second flow of water. In the flood season, the flow was usually less than this, but in some years it had exceeded this, reaching as much as 22,000 cubic metres per second. Thus the people and land of the lower flats were always vulnerable. Those who lived on the river plain paid a high, sometimes a tragic, price for the land they had reclaimed from the Yellow River. Outside the dyke, there was another long narrow strip of land, actually part of the present river course. Every July, August and September, the flood season, the waters rose and submerged the land. After the waters had receded, a

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crop of winter wheat was planted, and harvested just before the following year’s floods. There was just one crop a year and, as with the land within the dyke, the yield was variable, between 400 and 500 catties, as opposed to 800–900 on the silt. This was because the fiercest current left behind it a layer of sandy soil while the slower-flowing waters deposited fertile silt. The flow of water this flood season had only been 7,600 cubic metres per second, I was told. This might have been due to a change in the direction of flow of this section of the river: large amounts of flood water had rushed southwards, had hit the inner dyke, and broken through. Eight administrative villages and tens of thousands of mu of arable land had been submerged. Luckily everyone had been evacuated and there were no casualties, but damage to houses and property was extremely heavy: 971 buildings had been destroyed, and 1,271 were in a dangerous condition and would have to be demolished. Seven of these villages and 22,680 mu still lay under the waters. It was the rural industries which had suffered worst. Liudian was a xiang which owed its very being to the Yellow River: it suffered from the flooding, but gained great benefit from it, too, in the form of an inexhaustible supply of Yellow River earth which the floods provided. The xiang governments had established enterprises, the majority of which were brick kilns, to develop the local economy. In order to get at the clay more easily, the great majority of these kilns were set up on the lower shore. This year’s floods had swept away forty of the xiang’s kilns, out of a total of fifty, and destroyed 140,000 metres of high voltage cable. Each kiln represented an investment of anything from Y 100,000 to over Y1 million, and all were now useless. It was estimated that the loss to the local economy was in the order of Y81,400,000. Luckily there had been no loss of life this time, Duan went on. People and grain had been moved to safety in time. Right now efforts were being concentrated on draining the flood waters—on average 1.5 metres deep—from tens of thousand mu of land. At the same time, the young and fit were being encouraged to look for labouring jobs elsewhere to support themselves. The County Civil Administration Department had given Y300,000 in disaster relief funds, and this had mainly gone to buy pumps—about twenty diesel and twenty electric pumps. With this amount of money, they could buy enough pumps to get rid of all the water, and the peasants could plant their wheat a bit sooner, otherwise they would be in trouble with grain stocks next year. The main problem they were facing at the moment was housing and bedding for the thousand-odd families from the lower flats over the winter, and some hundreds who were also short of food. This was an acute need which the xiang did not have the resources to do anything about; they were going to have to rely on donations from city and county folk. The next step would be to gradually get the forty-odd brick kilns back up and running again. At noon Duan invited us to lunch in the xiang government building, where we shared a table with the deputy director of the County Town Management Committee. He had been the head of Qiulou xiang, and had come over today to see Duan, who was the exParty Secretary for Qiulou. (For the time being, the heads of Liudian xiang, the xiang People’s Congress and the local militia were all in the front line of operations to drain the flood waters.) During our meal, the conversation turned to the problem of over-frequent job transfers for xiang officials. Duan felt that xiang heads and deputy heads were moved too often: Qiulou had had five Party Secretaries and five xiang heads in as many years. In Liudian, there had been a change of head and deputy four times in the last five years. I asked why there had been so

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many transfers. The consensus was that there was no simple answer. One reason was that xiang cadres had to change if there were transfers at county level. Or there might be a transfer if the head and deputy did not get on; or if the leaders in one xiang were not doing their job well then they would be moved, and that might trigger transfers in other xiangs. Duan’s friend added: ‘The County Party Committee reckon that the dynamics of frequent job transfers speeds up economic development. That’s the reason why xiang cadres have moved around so much in recent years.’ I asked what the ‘dynamics of job transfers’ meant. ‘If xiang heads and their deputies—heads in particular—can’t get quick results, then they’re out, and someone new comes in. But such a rapid turnover doesn’t work. You can’t expect to see quick results in rural economic development. Miniature garden showcases for the leaders to come and visit is all you can expect. You can’t do long-term planning or really get to grips with practical work. Just take Qiulou, where we used to work, for example. We used to plant trees every year. The Kaifeng, Lankou and Qixian area has always been prone to dust storms, which is why there has been a lot of emphasis on afforestation work. When the land was collectively owned, this was easy to do, but since the Household Contract Responsibility System, the peasants who’ve taken on land contracts think that trees will keep the sun off the crops and reduce the yield. So you can plant as many trees as you like, and get the leaders to come and look at them, and they look very pretty, but protecting the saplings and getting them to turn into woods…well, that’s much more difficult, because the peasants just go and pull them up on the quiet afterwards. Every time there’s a new Party Secretary, they want to plant trees, and the last five have all replanted with new saplings, but the landscape looks just the same as it always did. Not to put too fine a point on it, when cadres go in fear of their jobs and keep getting transferred, what that fosters is not genuine economic development but ‘formalism’9— purely cosmetic changes. When our bosses get an idea into their heads and get on to us to do it, then we all fear getting criticised for lagging behind. When the county wanted us to raise cattle then we had to get a move on and do it. They wanted greenhouses built, we had to get on to the village cadres to do it; they wanted to see the development of new markets, we built new roads and buildings; they wanted us to set up rural enterprises, that’s what we did. And when it comes to seeing how the cattle or the vegetables are selling—well, that’s nothing to do with them any more.’ It occurred to me that it would be worth doing a statistical survey of the length of tenure and reasons for transfer of all heads of county departments and xiangs over the last twenty or so years. The trouble was it would be impossible for me to get hold of the detailed data needed for this kind of study. In the afternoon, Duan got Tan, the young secretary of the xiang Party Committee, to take me out to look around. We got on bicycles and turned to the west out of the xiang government compound. After a few hundred metres, we took a tarmac road northward until we reached the Yellow River inner dyke. The road was 2 or 3 kilometres long and raised a couple of metres above the level of the flats. The road had been specially built to service the brick kilns, Tan said. As we went on, on either side of the road there was nothing to be seen but a huge expanse of silt. Beyond the flats was still flooded, but where the waters had receded a number of peasants were busily engaged in planting wheat, either hand sowing or using a seed drill.

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One person pushed, two or three pulled. The seeds lay in the drill dipper, and dropped through small holes under the drill into a furrow made by the drill head. Since the flood waters had only just receded, the layer of alluvial mud was thick and sticky. The peasants were knee-deep in it, which made progress forward extremely difficult. On the slightly drier ground, peasants were moving forward on their knees, sowing seeds by hand. Wherever we looked were mud-covered figures. It was no easy task to be sowing wheat seed, dressed in shorts and wading through mud: especially as it was the second half of October and the weather was turning cold. The northern end of this road joined up with the inner dyke which ran from east to west. At this point, the dyke, which was faced with stone on the outside, stood 2 to 3 metres above the flats, was 3 to 4 metres wide and 1,000–2,000 metres long. Scores of breakwaters 3 to 4 metres wide extended some dozen metres towards the river. Their function was to reduce the impact of the floodwaters on the inner dyke. I stood on the dyke gazing at the Yellow River flowing tranquilly eastward a few hundred metres away to the north of me. It seemed quite oblivious of its bad behaviour in July and August. Yet one could not put the blame on this capricious river: all of the flats had originally been the river bed, and it had been used to wending its way to and fro across this broad expanse. Did not its dual nature—by turns in violent spate, and peaceful the rest of the time—reflect a similar dualism in the nature of the sons and daughters of the Yellow River, China’s peasantry? To the south of the inner dyke, east of the highway, were half a dozen brick kilns of various sizes. Having been submerged by the waters which broke through the dyke, they were now in a tumbledown state. Tan told me that thirty of the forty kilns in the xiang had been destroyed by the floods, including, worst of all, a new kiln in which they had invested Y1 million the previous year. Brick kilns were the mainstay of the xiang finances, he added. (I remembered Duan telling me that the xiang had fifty kilns, of which forty had been destroyed; I do not know which set of figures was more reliable.) I had originally wanted to visit some villages, but those which lay on the east side of the highway were surrounded by silt, and I felt I could not reasonably ask Tan to roll up his trouser legs and wade knee-deep in mud to accompany me. The village houses were all single-storey, brick structures, built on metre-high mud platforms. A metre above these platforms, on the walls, could clearly be seen a water mark left by the flooding. Thus this year’s floods had risen around 2 metres above the level of the flats. On our way back, we met a group of middle-aged peasants who had knocked off for the day, and I struck up a conversation with them. I suggested to them that they might not get much from a wheat crop planted this late in October. One said: ‘Yes, it’s a bit late, but we’re lucky to have been able to plant at all this year. We’ve just increased the amount of seed we’ve sown. We used to only use 15 catties of seed per mu; this year we’ve had to use about 100 catties, and we should harvest 300 or 400 catties overall.’ I pursued my questioning: ‘Wouldn’t it be more profitable to get a labouring job elsewhere, rather than have the trouble of planting in the mud, using 100 catties of seed and only getting 300 or 400 catties back at harvest time?’ Another man answered: ‘Of course, we could get jobs, but the fields would still need sowing. We peasants can’t let land go to waste. Anyway, if everyone else is sowing and you’re not, then people might think you’re lazy!’

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I found this last reason rather puzzling. I handed out some cigarettes to them, and Tan told them: ‘These are the best cigarettes in Henan—each one costs Y1.50.’ One man took a cigarette, looked at the packet and said: ‘Are there cigarettes as expensive as that?’ Another man, in his fifties, put in: There’s nothing surprising in that. A few days ago, my nephew gave me ten packets of foreign cigarettes, and they were more expensive than that.’ I asked him what brand it was, but he thought for a while then shook his head and said he had forgotten. I asked him where his nephew worked and he said with pride: ‘In a tax office. The foreign cigarettes they smoke are all given to them, they don’t have to fork out for them out of their own pockets. So my nephew smokes over a thousand yuan’s worth a month! My nephew says ten packets of foreign cigarettes cost several hundred yuan.’ The others seemed quite envious that he had a nephew who smoked foreign cigarettes ‘for free’. It struck me that although the Chinese peasants wanted honest officials, they were in fact tolerant, even envious, of ‘the perks of the job’. We had little more time for talking, as the peasants needed to get back to wash off the mud that covered them from top to toe. That evening, Zhang, the young xiang Office Manager, lent me his room for the night. This was an office which doubled as a bedroom. Most xiang cadres, notably the head and deputy, did not come from around here, so they tended to live within the government compound. Thus many offices were either office cum bedrooms or had an adjoining bedroom. This one was simply furnished—just two desks, a stool and a bed. The quilt and mattress were very thin, and as it was almost winter I was forced to sleep with my clothes on.

Liudian’s drainage project I was awoken at five in the morning, perhaps by the cold, perhaps by the cocks crowing, and could not go back to sleep. I got up, wrapped myself up and went out into the courtyard. Thank heavens yesterday’s rain had ceased. To have rain on top of their drainage work was really too much for the Liudian people to bear. The compound was still and empty. I was on the Yellow River flats; I had wanted to see the river, the yellow earth and the peasants who had tilled this great expanse of land since time immemorial. In terms of ideology, they had made huge historical strides from a small peasant economy, via the collectivisation of the people’s communes to the Household Contract Responsibility System. However, how much real difference was there between the small peasant of old and the commune member and peasant of today? The truth was not just that due to technological progress production had increased many times over; but that the ancients, when faced with natural disasters, would have fled or perished, whereas today’s farmers could fight the floods with the collective strength of their government. This was probably the most genuine measure of progress. At eight in the morning, the xiang head, the head of the xiang People’s Congress and the head of the xiang militia were off to inspect the drainage works, and to reconnoitre the next stage of the project. I went along with them. Tan had things to do, and could not take me out on visits today. We drove east for a few kilometres, and then turned north west; in a few hundred metres, we reached the drainage works. A dyke made of earth 3 metres wide by 2 metres

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high stretched 4 or 5 kilometres from the upper flats north to the lower flats. This was the main access route in and out of the lower flats villages. In a temporary command post on the upper flats, drainage machinery was piled up; in addition, they had rented a house for use as a canteen. There were also two tents supplied by the National Civil Administration Flood Relief Office which were used as rest areas. The embankment road, which dated from the 1950s, effectively divided the flood waters into two large ‘lakes’, the waters of which, once part of the muddy rushing river, stretched as far as the eye could see. In the distance to the north could be seen villages, like solitary islands amid the waves. Nearer to hand, forty or so pumps were positioned at the southern end of the dyke, their engines making a deafening roar. Day and night they pumped a cascade of water from the ‘west lake’ into the ‘east lake’. After more than a month’s unremitting effort, the water level of the ‘west lake’ had dropped nearly 1 metre lower than ‘east lake’. The xiang head told me that the floods at their height had risen nearly a metre above the level of the dyke, and even after they had receded, much water had remained in the low-lying area of the old river course and would not drain away of its own accord. The ‘west lake’ covered an area of 26,000 mu and the ‘east lake’ about 5,000 mu, so that between them they had submerged most of the xiang’s arable land. There were two stages to the flood drainage project: first, to pump the ‘west lake’ water into the ‘east lake’, and second, to pump the ‘east lake’ water back into the Yellow River. To the east of the ‘east lake’ lay Sanyizhai xiang (Lankao County). There were two options for the second stage of the project: either a channel would be dug from Sanyizhai to the river so that ‘east lake’ waters could drain into it naturally, or a ditch could be dug to the north of the ‘east lake’ to take the water as far as the north end of the north-south dyke, from where it would be pumped back into the river. The xiang head went on to say that the first option, the channel, would save time, money and effort, but negotiating channel-digging on peasants’ contract land had become extremely difficult since decollectivisation. Even if county and xiang governments reached agreement, how were they to persuade the peasants to participate? They would therefore choose the second option, and had come here today to look at the situation for themselves and plan the next stage. In another three weeks, the ‘west lake’ would have been pumped dry, so that by the end of November the peasants could plant their wheat. Of course, it was very late to be planting crops, but a late crop was better than none at all. It looked as if it would only be possible to plant spring wheat on the 5,000 mu to the east. In any case, every effort was being made to reduce the effects of the flooding to the minimum. We followed the xiang head on foot 3 or 4 kilometres northward along the dyke, and only then did we get a good view of the Liudian lower flats. They covered an area which was about a dozen kilometres long, and five or six wide. The higher land lay in the middle, slightly to the north, and the northern and southern ends were lower. Three administrative villages (nine natural villages) were dotted around this long narrow higher strip. In my estimation, the depression which lay between the higher part of the lower flats and the upper flats must some centuries ago have been the river bed. When the river changed its course to the north, the depression to the south had gradually been turned into cultivated land. However, the old river course was not much higher than its current course, and once the waters broke through a lake was formed which would not drain on its own. However, pumping was proceeding and some planting could begin in another week.

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A couple of kilometres further north was the northern end of the dyke and to the west of it a village. The houses were all built on metre-high platforms. The village streets looked like interlacing rivers and channels, no longer water-filled but full of mud, and impassable without boots. There was an obvious water mark nearly a metre up the walls of the buildings, which indicated what the floods had done to the village. A number of temporary dwellings made out of tarpaulin could be seen, replacing houses which must have been destroyed. I asked the xiang head if consideration had been given to moving all the lower flats dwellers to the upper flats. ‘Just moving one family would be difficult,’ he replied. ‘We could not possibly move over a thousand households. Anyway, there is no spare land on the upper flats, and also the lower flats people would not want to move.’ I decided to ask Tan to accompany me on a visit to these villages. We walked along a high, narrow embankment which led east from the northern end of the north-south dyke, turned north and came to some new flats. There were pools of water still, and sparse clumps of reeds waved in the wind. These flats were higher on the east side, and wheat was being planted here. Several kilometres to the north, the Yellow River, only a couple of hundred metres wide at this point, flowed peacefully by, in stark contrast to its former swollen self. There were more flats on the river’s northern bank and I could just make out the great north dyke and a number of villages dotted across this vast expanse. I asked the xiang head why there was no silt on this part of the flats. He explained to me that a fast current deposited sand, a slow current silt. At the height of the floods, the waters which submerged the inner dyke had been trapped into the old course of the river and left a thick layer of silt. But this strip of land was outside the inner dyke. When the flood waters which covered it receded, only a layer of sand had been left, and the silt had been carried away by the river current. So saying, he scraped a hollow with his heel and it filled almost immediately with water. ‘It’s all water under here,’ he said. ‘There are several thousand mu of land outside the dyke but they are not considered part of the xiang’s arable land, so that if the peasants do cultivate them, they are not required to pay agricultural taxes on the crop.’ ‘In the Kaifeng County Records,’ I said, ‘it says that in 1988 Liudian had 44,800 mu of arable land. But today I heard Duan say that the figure was over 50,000 mu. Where did the extra 5,000 mu come from?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Both Duan and I only started work here at the beginning of this year.’ We returned to the drainage works by the same route. We had covered more than 10 kilometres on foot. The car took us back to the xiang government offices, and by the time we arrived, hungry and exhausted, it was 2.30 in the afternoon. We had a bowl of rice and a bowl of fried shredded meat with green peppers each. They were indescribably delicious—hunger really is the best relish. It was midnight before I slept that night, and I was later disturbed by the clamour of cocks crowing.

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Village cadres who kept the flood drainage work going At eight in the morning, the village head and his group were off to the flood drainage works to continue their reconnaissance work and to determine the next stage of the drainage project. Tan and I got a ride in their car to the site and then walked 4 or 5 kilometres along the long dyke until we arrived at Zhongwangzhuang Village, situated at its northern end on the east side. Zhongwangzhuang appeared to be composed of about a hundred families, with each house built about a metre above ground level atop its own mound. By contrast, the village streets looked like nothing so much as a grid of intersecting deep-cut channels, in some of which there was still water lying. There was silt of varying depths everywhere. There were few people around, and many house gates were bolted shut. On a raised piece of ground near the north-south dyke, we came to a temporary shelter made of canvas. An old lady sat at the door doing something, so we began our visit by talking to her. The canvas was held up by wooden supports and measured 7 or 8 metres square. Inside were a couple of simple wooden beds covered with worn quilts, a low square table and some chairs, two small jars, one containing water and the other probably provisions, and a stove. There were also some small farm implements and a walking tractor, minus its trailer. The old lady was 71 years old; her home had originally been a three-roomed adobe house with an outside cookhouse, but the floods of July and August had completely destroyed it. (Thankfully, the village had been evacuated at an early stage and there had been no loss of life. They had moved all their clothes and food supplies too.) The xiang flood relief committee had given her this temporary shelter, but it was very draughty and seemed an unsuitable place to spend the winter. I asked the woman about her family, and she told me that her old man had died some years ago. She lived with her son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. Her son was 33 years old and was in poor health, suffering from a stomach complaint. He had gone off to get a job in town to earn some money; her daughter-in-law had taken the children to her mother’s house on the Liudian upper flats, so that left just her looking after the house. She told me her son and daughter-in-law would be back in a couple of days to sow the wheat. There were five of them in the family and they had 17 or 18 mu of contracted land. I asked her if, since the autumn crop had been washed away, they would have enough stored grain to last them until next year’s wheat ripened. ‘No,’ she said, ‘We’ll be two or three months short.’ I then asked her if she remembered floods as big as this year’s in the past. ‘Sixty years ago there were floods as bad as these, and many people in the village drowned. It was terrible. When the waters went down, there were corpses everywhere in the sorghum fields and the clumps of reeds. Terrible, it was, really sad! In those days, all the houses were adobe, and they all came tumbling down when the floods hit them. Those who didn’t drown had to flee, they became beggars. Those floods were really awful.’ It occurred to me that sixty years ago the flooding had had quite different consequences from now, which showed that rural local government in China had made considerable strides in its ability to fight the floods.

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The old woman spoke very indistinctly and mumbled a lot, so that I would have had a hard job understanding her if Tan had not ‘interpreted’ for me. It was impossible to pursue our conversation so we took our leave and went in search of the next person to interview. Not far off, a group of villagers sat on a raised mound chatting and, by walking along an earthen embankment slightly to the north, we came around to where they were, and Tan introduced me (as someone sent by the county government) and my reasons for being here (to learn how the villagers were living in the aftermath of the floods). The platform on which they sat was both higher (3 metres) and bigger (a dozen metres in diameter) than a normal mound, and acted as a sort of refuge for the villagers. Every hamlet in the lower flats had something similar. There were three ways in which villagers in the lower flats were protected against floods: one was the dyke to the north; then there were the metre-high mounds on which the houses were built; and last, the towering platform in each village. These had not crumbled even in the worst floods for sixty years, which broke through the dyke and submerged the houses. This one was roughly circular in shape and was planted with a number of willows, their trunks as thick as a man’s hand. On the west side of the platform, there was a single-storey, west-facing house. On the south side of the house was a wooden bed and, sitting on the edge of it, two middle-aged women stitching cloth shoes and knitting. A man in his fifties sat on a chair under a tree, talking to them. I sat down and put a few questions to them: I wanted to know the number of people and families and the amount of arable land in the administrative village, how much land was outside the dyke and how much inside, how the county and xiang governments had organised flood control and relief, how many houses had been destroyed by the waters, and so on. Their answers were all either conflicting or hard to make out, and they astonished me with their apathy about local affairs, especially the recent floods. Whether they were wary of ‘a man from the county’ or simply took the floods for granted and did not care about them was impossible to judge. We exchanged a few words and then got up to go. Not far from the platform I saw a middle-aged couple in the process of building a small shed next to their house, and we made our way over to interview them. In the man of the couple I had finally met someone sensible. He had completed lower middle school and had once been the village head. What follows is a summary of our conversation. He told me that there were three administrative villages and seven natural villages on the lower flats; they were located on the narrow strip of high land running east to west. The land to the north and south of this strip was low-lying. Most of the Liudian xiang arable land was on the lower flats, while the villages and villagers were mainly on the upper flats. The land to the north of the lower flats villages mostly belonged to the upper flats villages, while lower flats villages arable land started outside the dyke to the north of the villages and ran right up to the shores of the Yellow River. The available land per capita was 3 to 5 mu. This was a sizeable amount of land, but there was often only one crop per year and the yield varied enormously. Every July to September was the flood season, and wheat could only be sown outside the dyke after the waters had gone down and harvested just before the next year’s floods. That was why only one crop was possible. The quality of the land outside the dyke varied every year depending on whether the floods had deposited sand or silt. In sandy soil the per mu yield was 100–200 catties; in silt it could be 500–600 catties or even more. Where the land was mixed sand and silt, the yield would be between 200 and 400 catties. They could live for two to three

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years on one crop of wheat from soil that was all silt; but on all sand they were lucky if the harvest kept them going until the following year. So if you lived on the flats, everything depended on whether the Yellow River gave you a helping hand. He also said that in recent years the flow of water in the Yellow River flood season had not been great. Nevertheless, possibly because of the direction of flow of the watercourse at this point, it habitually broke through the dyke to the north of the village. The latter was low and made of earth, not strong enough to stand up to the flood waters. When the village was flooded, the villagers would build up the height of the platform on which their houses stood until the platform was a lot higher than the floors of the houses which stood on them. This year’s flooding, the highest for sixty years, submerged the houses with water a metre deep for about ten days. All the adobe houses fell down and a number of other older buildings would have to be demolished. If all the water could be pumped away before winter, the wheat could be sown and there should be no problem with next year’s grain rations. I asked him what the villagers would live off this winter and next spring, and he replied: ‘The summer harvest was not very good, plus the autumn harvest was completely lost, so probably about half the villagers won’t have enough to last until next summer’s harvest.’ ‘What will happen then?’ I asked. ‘Well, some will make some money by getting jobs elsewhere to cover the shortfall.’ ‘Won’t the government help?’ ‘The government gives limited aid. We got Y520,000 from the County Civil Administration Department, of which Y360,000 went on buying pumping equipment and diesel fuel. We only had enough left over to assist Five Guarantee families and other families facing special hardship—the rest of the villagers just have to shift for themselves.’ I asked him about the origins of the seven lower flats villages, and he told me that the Wang clan was in the majority in the two villages to the east, while in the centre two villages it was Zhang, and the western two villages were populated by a mixture of families. According to the old folk in the villages, lower flats people had come from north of the Yellow River, while upper flats people were from south of the river. About a hundred years ago the Yellow River changed its course, and the watercourse shifted many kilometres further north, destroying a large area of flats on the northern bank and adding a large section to the south of the river. The Wang clan from Guantai Village had crossed the river in boats and started to cultivate the new land to the south, returning north after the planting. Apparently there had been conflict historically between villagers north and south of the river over land and crops, and in order to guard their crops the northerners first built rough huts for themselves on the new flats, and then gradually settled on the south bank permanently. Thus Hebei (‘north of the river’) people became Henan (‘south of the river’) people. I had also heard that some years previously there had been heavy fighting between two villages over arable land. Some said it was between two villages on the upper and lower flats, others that it was between villages on either side of the river. I asked the ex-village head and he told me that it had involved the administrative villages of the Wangs and the Zhangs on the lower flats, and had happened on 12 June 1988. The cause of the conflict had been the title to land on the borders of the two villages. Thousands of people on both sides turned out to fight, including almost all

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the youth, and women, children and the elderly gave behind-the-lines support. Three of the Zhang were killed and a dozen wounded; on the Wang side, there were no fatalities, only a dozen wounded. The incident alarmed the city and county governments and they sent a large number of police officers to the area. They marked out a cordon sanitaire, established village boundaries and reorganised the village leadership teams, after which peace was restored. ‘But this wasn’t a real solution. Recently, Zhang villagers took it upon themselves to shift their boundaries eastwards, on the grounds that this was land their forebears had cultivated. It obviously belongs to our village, plus the county has marked out the boundaries, but they still say it’s theirs. If it goes on like this, there may be more trouble in store.’ (During the course of my investigations, I had on several occasions heard accounts of conflict over land, for instance the dispute between the Lankou state-owned forestry farms and neighbouring villages, and land disputes sparked off by urban expansion into the surrounding countryside. The current land law did not provide clear boundaries or demarcation lines, nor did it explicitly regulate land ownership. With the advent of the Household Contract Responsibility System, I felt, land boundaries should be clearly defined between families, Villagers’ Groups, villages, even xiangs and counties; and forms of land ownership should also be clearly laid down.) I asked about the flood disaster of sixty years previously, and he told me that it had taken place in 1932. According to the old folk almost all the houses on the lower flats had been destroyed. The waters had risen in the middle of the night; they had not had time to do anything about it and many had perished. (There were no figures available as to how many had drowned.) That was the old society, and the local government had not organised any flood relief. Those who survived had fled. They returned bit by bit after the waters receded, and rebuilt their homes and plots from scratch. You could imagine the hardships they had faced. It was a completely different time. This time, the county and xiangs organised the flood-fighting efforts and the evacuation of the villagers. They were organising the pumping so that the winter wheat could be sown as quickly as possible. Only a few old adobe houses had been destroyed, the majority of brick-built houses had survived the flooding intact. The vast majority of the peasants had enough food and a place to live. So in spite of the seriousness of the flood disaster, the villagers had remained calm. In the last month, rural cadres had led the flood drainage work, and most of the fit young people had gone off to get labouring jobs. He then told me how the lower flats villagers made their living in normal times. They relied chiefly on the summer harvest, since there was unlikely to be an autumn harvest. Although the arable land per capita was 3 to 4 mu, soil quality varied every year and so, therefore, did the harvest. In a good year they got enough grain per person to last two or even three years; in a bad year they were lucky to harvest enough to keep them going till the next harvest. Because of the lack of an autumn harvest, families raised very little livestock. In order to have a cash income, most of them were either in the haulage business or got labouring jobs. The brick kilns were the chief rural industry in this area, and in the farming slack season a lot of people did odd jobs there, earning about Y20 a time. About half the village families had bought three- or four-wheeled tractors; they used these for farm work in the busy season and in the slack season they took them to the brick kilns and carried earth and bricks, and earned good money. In the last ten years, about half the villagers had built themselves new houses, mostly from money earned in

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the kilns. About thirty of the latter had been destroyed in the floods and to rebuild them all would take two to three years. This was a heavy blow to the Liudian economy. When I asked him about his family, he said simply: ‘We get by.’ The couple were in middle age and had had just one son, who had gone to join the army this year. They also received some support from the xiang. Their house had three rooms, and was a one-storey brick and tile building, dating from the end of the 1970s. It was small and sparsely furnished, but clean and tidy inside. The courtyard level was nearly half a metre higher than the floor level inside, as a result of adding to the platform height in an attempt to keep the flood waters out. Their mound stood 1.5 metres above ground level and was planted with brightly coloured flowers and trees. A lean-to housed a four-wheeled tractor. The family’s drinking water came from a hand-operated pump by the front door, of the type almost universal in homes throughout the northern Chinese plains and costing Y300–500 to buy and install. I wanted to go to the Zhang Village on the west side, but was told that the road was deep in mud and we could not get through in ordinary footgear. Many of the villagers were away working, and the women had taken the children to their parents’ houses. Besides, it would be difficult to find someone sufficiently well informed to talk to, and I did not have the heart to drag young Tan along on such a trek, so we said goodbye and made our way out of the village. It was 12.30 by the time we were back at the north-south dyke. About a kilometre to the east, we could see the village head, his trouser legs rolled up, wading up to his knees in mud, making measurements which would determine which Villagers’ Groups would take on excavating different sections of the drainage ditch. On seeing us, he waved to indicate that we should go back to the drainage works site to have lunch. The site canteen was operating on a ‘wartime footing’. Everyone was given a big bowl of cabbage and meat, a cup of the local liquor and one wheat bun (and they could help themselves to more when they had eaten it). People squatted or sat in circles on the ground to eat, and we talked. I learned that all the dozens of people working at the flood drainage site were Village Party Secretaries and village heads. They got no pay for the work, but were provided with three meals a day and a cup of spirits at each meal. (The xiang government had earlier promised a packet of cigarettes per person per day, but had not delivered.) I asked pointedly: ‘Isn’t it unfair if ordinary people can go and get jobs elsewhere, and you cadres have to stay at your post?’ ‘How would it look if we, as village cadres, and ex-army too, couldn’t make sacrifices at a key time like this?’ one replied. Of six cadres eating together in one group, four were ex-army. They told me that most of the village Party members had joined the Party while in the army. This clearly indicated a very close relationship between the peasants, the army and rural Party cadres. By mid-afternoon we were back at the xiang government offices, and bumped into the head of the County Civil Administration Department with three colleagues in the courtyard. I thought they had come to inspect the flood-fighting and rescue work, but it transpired that they were the ‘Party Consolidation Working Group’. Every morning for the last two months a red saloon car had brought them to the xiang government offices from the county town, and they would not complete their ‘Party Consolidation’ for another three weeks, since the County Party Committee had decreed that the project should take three months in each xiang. The exercise was no doubt aimed at easing

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tensions between the Party and its cadres and the masses, and at putting a stop to the constant stream of peasants lodging complaints at county and provincial level. Yet surely the heroic battle being waged by the cadres against the floods was the best possible way to ease those tensions. I went to introduce myself to the head of the County Civil Administration Department, a frosty-looking man clad in a Western suit and leather shoes. He greeted me with: ‘You’re Professor Cao from Shanghai, in Henan on a research trip. It must be hard work. I hear you were in Chenliu and gave a lecture to the local cadres which was very well received.’ I was somewhat taken aback by his words. How come he knew so much about my research and my movements? It appeared that my work was being closely monitored. My suspicions were that although the county head, Mr Yang, had let us into his fiefdom out of consideration for the feelings of Yongcheng, his old teacher, he had also been keeping a close watch on me. I hoped I was being oversensitive in this interpretation. Luckily I had heeded Yang’s parting warning to me not to disturb the peace and had therefore studiously avoided asking any questions that might stir up trouble during my research. I was a scholar deeply concerned about the state of the nation and its prospects, doing research in my own country, yet I was being treated like a foreign spy out to steal national secrets. The thought was extremely depressing. Back at the government offices in Liudian, Yongcheng had been waiting for me for some time. He had hurried back here as soon as he had finished his classes at the Kaifeng Party School. Apart from a few friends at Henan University and the Party School, he was the only one who understood the difficulties involved in doing field research—and its significance—and had been most willing to accompany me on my entire trip. One of the greatest rewards of this trip had been to meet colleagues like him on these ancient plains of China. I discussed the situation with Yongcheng and decided to bring my investigations in Liudian to a close earlier than planned: I could see how busy the cadres were in floodfighting and drainage work. I could do nothing to help and felt uneasy at taking up any more of their time. Besides, my aim in coming to Liudian had been to see the Yellow River, its alluvial plains and the villagers who wrested a living from them. This visit had given me a pretty good idea of the lives of all the other villagers on the river plains which stretched 200–300 kilometres between Mengjin and Lankao, and thus my aim had basically been achieved. At six in the evening, a car was leaving for Kaifeng County Town and Yongcheng and I got a lift in it. That evening, we went to pay our respects to Mr Yang. I wanted to bring him up to date on my activities (although I guessed that he was probably well informed on what I had been doing) and, second, depending how he reacted, to make a decision about my next move. However, he was not to be found. We would try again tomorrow morning. At eight in the evening, the County Government Deputy Office Manager arrived at the Xiangfu Hotel with the editor of the Henan Daily who, it turned out, was staying in the room next to ours. The Office Manager told Yongcheng, an acquaintance of his, that the editor had for some time been in charge of the rural affairs page of his paper, and so he must know a fair bit about the peasants, agriculture and the local government. I therefore got myself introduced and put some questions to him. The editor was a dignified-looking man in his fifties; he was open-minded and friendly and our conversation ranged widely.

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We started by talking about the attitudes and behaviour of some local officials. Common failings, according to the editor, were a craving for grandiose projects among the higher-level cadres, and a tendency to aim too high and go for quick results, or even to fiddle the figures, in the lower grades. The problem had its roots in history: during the Great Leap Forward in 1958 it was Henan Province where the loudest boasts about their achievements were heard and which, as a result, suffered worst when it all went wrong. The current call to ‘make spectacular strides’ was a case in point: it had come not from any County Party Secretary but from the provincial government, and had apparently been copied from elsewhere. No doubt conditions existed for ‘spectacular strides’ in the coastal cities, but Henan was a largely agricultural province in the interior, where the basic needs of the peasants had only just been met, and steady economic progress was an achievement in itself. Any attempt to speed up development could only lead to violent upheavals; it was hard enough for the peasants to take ordinary, small steps, let alone attempt extraordinary strides. Provincial government was fond of setting high targets for annual production, fiscal income, investment figures and xiang enterprises, and each level of government below it raised the stakes for the level below that until finally the task could not be carried out and the only thing for it was to fiddle the figures. It had happened before and it would happen again. No lessons had been learned from the past. It was one of the biggest problems in economic development in Henan. The editor told me that many Party and government cadres interpreted making great strides as meaning pulling down old buildings and building new roads and hotels. What was the point of every government department building luxury hotels? What economic returns did such huge levels of investment bring? In truth, it was only the officials themselves who enjoyed the results. Almost all official guesthouses in Henan had been converted into hotels, complete with dining suites and discos, and the principal clients were not the hoped-for outside investors but local cadres. And where did the money for all this investment come from? From the sweat and toil of the peasants. Central government could issue all the guidance it liked on lightening the burden on the peasants, but levies continued to grow heavier. Any serious attempt to reduce agricultural levies had first to deal with two major factors leading to their increase: one was the too rapid growth of local Party and government organisations. The second was over-consumption by their employees. Officially the monthly salary of a County Party Secretary was only Y300–500. However, if his/her perks (each had a car and a mobile phone for free) and expenses were added to that figure it jumped alarmingly, and all these expenses were met out of agricultural levies. This was the chief reason why so many complaints had been lodged with the provincial government by peasants from Kaifeng County. Official corruption, in the editor’s view, came in many forms. For officials to use their power and authority for private gain was a form of corruption. For administrative departments to use their executive powers to levy innumerable fines and build up private funds to spend on nice offices and other benefits, that was another form of corruption. If in the current social climate the law could not put a stop to corruption, relying on moral education would be still less effective. The Inspection Committees and the Supervisory Departments were powerless to stop the law enforcement bodies using it to make money. There was all this talk about the rule of law, but what had to happen first was that those departments with responsibility for enforcing the law had to be made to do so with due respect for that law.

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We talked on and on, and it was 11.30 p.m. before I finally said goodnight and went back to my room, by which time Yongcheng had long since fallen asleep.

Five perks for the Village Party Secretary At 8.30 the next morning we returned to the County Party Committee to look for Yang, but were told that he was busy with a big meeting and had no time to see us. I suspected he might be deliberately avoiding us. He had gone from actively inviting me to come to a grudging promise that I could do my research; was he now regretting that promise? I wavered between staying and leaving, and discussed the matter with Yongcheng. The latter said, ‘Yang probably is very busy. We’ll try him again this afternoon. This morning I suggest we go and visit some County Party Committee departmental offices. The heads of these offices have been to some of my classes, so I’ve been their teacher, and they know I am advisor to the County Party Committee. There shouldn’t be any problem if you’re with me. After all, we’re not trying to prise state secrets out of them, we’re only trying to get a better picture of the situation.’ So off we went to visit the County Organisational Quotas Office and the County Records Office. At nine o’clock, when we arrived at the Organisational Quotas Office, the director, a man in his thirties called Liu, was in the middle of doing some figures on amalgamating departments and cutting down on staff. Yongcheng explained why we were here, and Liu smiled: ‘That’s just what’s going round and round in my head at the moment,’ he said. The County Quotas Office had started out as a section within the County Personnel Department; it became an independent office in the 1980s, but Liu had retained his other post as deputy director of the Personnel Department as well. There was a proliferation of Party, governmental and mass organisations at county level, Liu told me, each one bursting at the seams with employees. This county was not exceptional in this. The phenomenon was universal—from provincial to xiang level. There were sixty or seventy such organisations in each county, with nearly 1,000 employees. It came to even more if you added in the county’s nineteen xiangs: at 120 workers in each, that came to 2,280. The number of employees in county and xiang Party, governmental and mass organisations had trebled in a mere thirteen years since 1983, the year that the powers of the communes were transferred to the xiang. The provincial Organisations Quotas Department had laid down that the ratio of Party, governmental and mass organisations should be 15:78:7. According to this ratio, the eight main departments of the County Party Committee structure (the County Party Committee Office, the Organisational Office, the Propaganda Office, Disciplinary Committee, United Front Office, the Legal Committee, the Integrated Social Control Office and the Retired Cadres Department) were authorised to employ 97 people, but actually employed 183. The nine mass organisations (for example, the County People’s Congress and bodies representing women, the disabled, culture and commerce) were only supposed to employ 45 people, but actually had 108. As for the 47 government offices and departments, the figures were 503 (authorised) and over 700 (actual). In short, the regulations permitted a maximum of 645 in total—where on earth was he supposed to deploy the rest? It was a real headache, a nightmare.

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‘There are only two things we can do at the moment. One is to make cadres, both men and women, retire five years early; that would allow us to get rid of about 130 people. The other is to turn some government departments into simple operational units, so that we no longer administer them and they are unhooked from County Finance too. If we did that with the offices of broadcasting, commerce, light industry, forestry and animal husbandry, we could lose 140 people that way. However, that all adds up to fewer than 300 people; we have to get rid of another 150 and I haven’t thought of a way of doing that yet.’ Simplifying the organisational structure of government really meant merging departments with similar functions. Liu told me that they planned to amalgamate a number of different offices: for instance, the Political Research Bureau, the Classified Documents Bureau and the Security Bureau would all be merged into the Party Committee Office. He gave me numerous other examples of proposed departmental mergers. It occurred to me as I listened to him that the intelligentsia in China were fond of talking about political reform, but had not the faintest idea what was really happening on the ground. I included myself in that: I knew that national mass organisations like the trade unions, Communist Youth League and the Women’s Alliance were accepted as a standard part of Party and government, but I had never heard of the People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference being classified as mass organisations. I knew that there had been an ‘Educated Youth Work Office’ during the Cultural Revolution, but it was news to me that this still existed twenty years on. Why had it not been abolished long ago, since educated youth were no longer sent to the countryside to work? Every kind of organisation at county level had a corresponding department at a higher level, and some organisations also extended right down to xiang level. This organisational structure from central to local government was based on the premise that the problems and tasks of each province, city, county and xiang were identical—a supposition which ignored differences in local conditions. While there was a real need for the Taiwan Affairs Office in coastal provinces, what on earth was it doing in the interior? In Liu’s view, this whole process of splitting or merging organisations, cutting or taking on more staff, was merely the usual cosmetic exercise which did not address the substance of the problem. The key issue, especially for the county and xiang, was the establishment of an employment programme. In Kaifeng County, 600–700 people had to be found work: ex-soldiers accounted for about half of these, and college graduates the other half. Allocating jobs to ex-soldiers, in particular, had always been used as a political measure to ensure social stability. Where were you going to place people in a traditionally agricultural county where county-run industries were cutting staff? Xiang and private industries were still fairly small-scale and paid low wages, and in any case the bosses did the hiring and firing and could not be made to take on these people. So they were found jobs within local government. With county offices full to bursting, the xiangs were made to accommodate them. This was the main reason for the increase in the numbers employed in local government. Another factor was the need to look after the children of old comrades: it was only reasonable that those who had dedicated their working lives to the Party and government should try and get positions for their offspring. The provincial government’s guidelines on the employment of cadres’ children

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said that each department should look after their own. The result was that employment in many departments, especially the ones that paid better salaries, was almost entirely ‘kept within the family’. The departments of public security, electricity, banking, commerce and taxation were all cases in point. It made the running of these departments very problematic and led to many abuses. Liu gave as an example the Kaifeng Shoe Factory, once a county-owned enterprise. This was expanding fast in the mid-1980s, and pay and bonuses were better than in other factories. Anyone who could pull rank and had the right connections had forced their way on to its payroll, with the result that, within three or four years, the workforce had shot up from 200–300 to around 800. The factory had been doing very nicely until that point, but now it became impossible to run and collapsed under the burden of additional salary costs. We left the Organisational Quotas Office and paid a visit to the County Records Office, where old Mrs Yang, a retired middle school teacher and deputy director of County Records, had been awaiting our arrival for some time. I had already perused the Kaifeng County Records and discovered that they contained no mention of either folk customs or clans (most recent records contained no information on clans) so I directed most of my questions to this issue. Mrs Yang told me that they had considered compiling clan records, and indeed had sent out researchers to collect family and clan lineage records, information that was needed now that the area was trying to attract outside investment, but they had returned completely empty-handed. The most numerous clan in Kaifeng County was the Duan clan, a member of whom had been county magistrate in the late Qing dynasty, but even they had no clan annals. There had been no talk of reconstructing family trees in the last couple of decades, because you had to have kept old records to start with. Mrs Yang had no knowledge about which clans had maintained ancestral temples before Liberation. As to where Kaifeng County people had originated, according to the villagers they had come from the Hongdong area of Shanxi Province. The fact that the Records Office had not discovered any family or clan lineage records within the boundaries of Kaifeng County was probably an indication of constant shifts in the Yellow River flood zone population over the last few hundred years. According to the Kaifeng County Records, there had been severe floods in the county 371 times in the 750 years between 1194, when the Yellow River changed its course through Kaifeng County for the fourth time (the fifth major change, in 1855, was a move north, through neighbouring Lankao County) and 1944. On average, serious flooding occurred every other year, and each time villages were destroyed, arable land was submerged and the people were forced to leave their homes. Villages were, of course, rebuilt, and the flood waters did not destroy ties of kinship or a way of life that had persisted since ancient times. However, they might actually have diluted people’s recollections of their family and clan history, and indeed washed away their records. The frequent moving of the villagers was also a reason why in this area no clan records were to be found. I explained to Mrs Yang my reasons for researching into clans and clan records. I was interested in the reappearance of clan records since the start of the Household Contract Responsibility System. On the one hand, peasants were increasingly drawn into market exchange relationships, but on the other hand we were witnessing the recreation of rural clan records and the ancestral temples. According to Western theories of social

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development, the two phenomena were incompatible, since economic organisations and relationships which arose out of the market economy were contractual in nature and involved independent parties. In the centuries-old villages which made up traditional agricultural society in China, on the other hand, it was kinship which formed the foundation of social relationships. We were talking here about a system of exchange relationships familiar to us all which was dictated by the degree of kinship, by reciprocity and by feelings—a far cry from, even the antithesis of, market relationships. In Western sociological theory, these kinship ties should weaken as contractual relationships in the marketplace strengthened. Yet in Chinese rural society, the two were developing side by side. The failure of peasants in Kaifeng County to reinstate their clan records could not be attributed to a weakening of kinship ties, but rather to the depredations of the Yellow River floods. There were other questions which I felt bore close examination: what was the relationship between clan-based villages and administrative villages built over or within them? And what was the relationship between cadres in the latter and villagers who came from differing clan backgrounds? And when local government policies and the interests of the villagers came into conflict, how might this give rise to changes in this lowest level of local government? I knew that I was not alone in my interest, as I had seen an article in the Henan Party Construction Monthly on the challenge posed by clan influence to local government which unfortunately, however, did not contain any empirical evidence. When the peasants turned to the clan to provide them with a form of organisation and a degree of influence, this was presumably driven by a pressing need for mutual protection and security. They faced a market economy which was new to them and full of hazards, and a multiplicity of forms of taxation imposed by local government. They needed a network of contacts, as a form of self-protection. Since they could not set up new democratic types of organisation, they naturally reverted to that afforded by the old familiar clan system. It seemed to me that this might explain the renaissance of the influence of the clans in rural areas. Furthermore, it appeared impossible that in rural China the rise of the market economy should give rise to a Western-style civil society, specifically one based on private property, individualism and social relationships which were both generalised and contractualised. As a result, it was unlikely that we would see the rise of democracy and a legal system in the Western sense. The persistence of small peasant modes of production in age-old rural communities meant that relationships built on blood ties and the modes of behaviour derived therefrom would be a significant influence for a long time to come. Of course, one might see superficial modifications in response to changes in the external social environment, but there would be no fundamental internal reform. This would, in turn, have an effect on economic activity, the process of local government, the legal system, even patterns of consumption in China as a whole. Yongcheng and I had a working lunch in the dining room of the County Party Committee: a plate of buns and four dishes of meat and vegetables. The County Party Deputy Secretary, a man named Wang, an acquaintance of Yongcheng, happened to be at the same table. Wang had special responsibility for organisational matters, commerce and family planning and so, as an opener, I started by asking him about the latter. ‘I’ve visited four xiangs in this county,’ I began. ‘It seems that as a result of all the work you’ve done in recent years, you’ve basically got the excess birth problem under

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control.’ I had phrased my comment as a statement rather than a question—I was being circumspect. However, Wang’s response was surprisingly candid. ‘I would put it like this,’ he said. ‘We’ve got it down to two births. It’s very common for there to be more than one child per family. Fewer and fewer families are having more than two children, but even that is not completely under control. Not many families have just one child either. The peasants still believe very strongly in the importance of carrying on the family line, and in having children to look after them in their old age. The kind of violent methods used to enforce family planning some years ago were a desperate last resort, they only served to create enormous tensions between the Party and cadres on the one hand, and the people on the other. We have had it better organised and regulated in the last couple of years. I have been discussing the situation with comrades in charge of family planning at the xiang level, and the consensus seems to be that it is unrealistic to limit peasant families to one child, and makes their work very hard. The result is that the peasants have extra children anyway, either because they have connections and can pull rank, or because they are rich and can buy a dispensation—or if they have neither, they just go off and do it behind our backs. It creates a host of problems. If the government would encourage a single child, permit a second child, and impose a fine for further births, it would make our work a lot easier, because the peasants now largely accept that policy. Think of it this way: you have a hundred young couples, the woman has a baby, you have fifty baby boys and fifty baby girls. If the couples with a baby boy want to stop there, then that’s fine. If they want another child, it would be allowed and they would be very happy. The couples with a baby girl would definitely want another one. Let’s say twenty-five of them have a boy, then they are happy and will stop there. If the other twenty-five have another girl, it’s just tough luck. If you add to that a rigorous system of inspections and heavy fines, then it would be easy to stop families having more than two children. But no one is happy with the one-child system.’ After lunch, the Deputy Party Secretary had to leave us, as he had a meeting waiting for him. I had been most impressed by his frank and objective assessment of his work. Yongcheng suggested that we fill in the time while we were waiting to see Secretary Yang by visiting some heads of departments, most of whom had attended his classes and would therefore be prepared to receive us. He called a friend of his, G, now deputy departmental head in the county government, a man thoroughly familiar with rural affairs through long service as xiang head and Party Secretary. G arrived at 3 p.m., and I began by asking him about Liudian, where I learnt that he had spent a year or two. G told me: ‘Liudian has had twelve Party Secretaries in the twenty-two years from 1974 to 1996. The current one had only been in post a short while when they had the worst flooding in sixty years, which was very hard luck on him. I was the tenth one. Flood control work is a constant task for the Liudian government, and cadres have to be on the spot, ready to lead their men into battle, every flood season. So where relations between Party and people may be tense in other xiangs, in Liudian they are pretty close.’ I asked G why they did not move lower flats villagers to the upper flats, or build dykes to the north of the villages. ‘The upper flats are just a narrow strip of land, there’s no room to accommodate so many lower flats villagers. As for building dykes, we have built some stone walls, but it’s expensive. Mud-built dykes are no use because they just collapse under the flood water. The truth is that the lower flats have always been part of

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the river bed. That area is its natural course in the flood season. You can cultivate the flats in the low-water season, but whoever said you could go and live in the river bed?!’ We all laughed at this. I asked G about land ownership on both sides of the Yellow River, and he told me: ‘The watercourse is fairly predictable at the moment. The river flats get flooded on both sides in the high-water season, and the river returns to its original course as the floods recede. But there are small changes every year, with shifts to the northern or to the southern river banks; sometimes one part of the flats is washed away, other times a new piece of land is added. There are no clear rules governing who owns the new bit of land, or who has the right to till it. In fact, that kind of land is not counted in when the government does grain tax calculations. The peasants are fond of saying, “No crossing the river to till”—meaning that when land is washed away on the north bank, and new land emerges on the southern flats, the north bank villagers cannot cross the river and claim the new land on the south bank. But this is just talk. In fact, the lower flats villagers all originally came from the north bank, so that is exactly what they did. The real principle that operates is “the land belongs to whoever occupies it” and “whoever sows, reaps”. Anyway, “cultivation” doesn’t mean much on this land: they just scatter a few seeds, don’t bother with weeding or fertiliser, and go and harvest when the time comes. And there’s no guarantee that the sower will reap, either. When it’s time to harvest, it’s whoever gets there first. There’s a long-established tradition of pilfering crops, and it’s still common practice. That’s why methods of cultivation are so primitive—nobody bothers—also because new land tends to be fairly far from the villages.’ (I happened to know that both ancient Roman law and the Napoleonic Code laid down detailed provisions for settling disputes of this kind. It would be interesting to carry out a comparative study of these types of local practice.) I asked if there had been major clashes over land ownership among the Yellow River flats residents. ‘Yes, indeed!’ replied G. There was one in June 1988, between the Zhang and Wang villages on the lower flats, and another in April 1993 between villagers on either side of the river. This was when Liudian villagers, whose ancestors had fled when the river changed its course to the north, heard the old folk say that there were several hundred mu of land on the north bank (part of what is now Fengqiu County) to which their families had title. So a number of families got together some money and sent some people over to reconnoitre; they then laid claim to some of the land. In April 1993, scores of lower flats villagers crossed the river and began to cultivate it. They were then besieged by several hundred locals, in a well-organised group armed with hunting rifles and sticks, and equipped with stretchers too. About a dozen people were seriously injured. This caused a lot of anger among the lower flats people, who organised an attack in retaliation. Luckily the xiang government found out in time and put a stop to it. A few days later, some of the north bank Villages Party Secretaries came over. We were discussing the matter with them when some lower flats villagers who had heard of their arrival broke in and gave the north bank cadres a merciless beating. The latter lodged a complaint with the provincial government, who sent someone out to settle it in person.’ (When I had visited the lower flats village the previous morning, the former village head only told me of the first incident in 1988, and concealed the second! I cannot think why.) I asked G: ‘The People’s Republic has been in existence for fifty years, and it was nearly a hundred years ago that the north bank people settled the lower flats. How come

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they’re still laying claim to ancestral land on the north bank?’ G shook his head: ‘Who knows how the peasants’ minds work?’ he said. We sat around quaffing cups of the local spirits, and finally I took the bull by the horns and put four more questions to G. His answers were frank and to the point. Q: Apart from their tiny monthly salary, what are the other advantages of being a village head or a Party Secretary? A: Well, there are five main ones. One is having a higher political and social status than ordinary villagers. The second is that you can use your connections with xiang officials to get jobs for your children. Third, you get to attend the dinners given for the xiang cadres on inspection visits. Fourth, you can do a bit better than average for your family and your friends when contracts for farm land and house-building land are allocated. It’s the same with family planning. Then, fifth, you can make a bit of extra money for yourself with charges. You can expect backhanders whenever there’s a public project set up, like building roads or primary schools, or well-digging. I’m not saying that all village cadres are in their jobs because they can make a bit on the side for themselves, but what I am saying is that anyone who becomes a village head or, especially, a Village Party Secretary, gets these sorts of privileges. It’s very rare for a village cadre to stick to their legal monthly salary and not to look out for themselves. Of course there are perks, otherwise you wouldn’t have people fighting for these posts. Q: What kind of person becomes a Village Party Secretary or a village head? A: The person who can do it is someone with a family which is influential in the village. They have to actively administer quite a few different policies, like grain and tax levies, abortions and fines. The villagers don’t like these policies, and no Party Secretary could carry them out without the backing of a powerful family Second, you have to be someone of integrity and ability, who can act in the interests of the ordinary villagers. If the xiang government approves of you, you might get one of these jobs even if you’re not from an influential family. Third, if you’ve got family links in the county Party organisations, that helps too. Actually the first and the third criteria add up to much the same thing. Without them, it’s hard to become a Village Party Secretary or head and even harder to do the work and keep your job. It’s quite a tricky job. Q: How would a xiang Party Secretary go about maximising their personal advantages without raising agricultural levies to the point of enraging the peasants? A: Set up xiang collective enterprises. This is good for the country, for the xiang and for yourself. The trouble is, building the factories is easy, making real profits is difficult. Q: What would be the best way for a xiang Party Secretary to achieve quick successes without fleecing the peasants? A: Borrow money from the bank to build roads, houses and factories. You get the credit for your successes and your successor has to pay back the loan.

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Q: How do you get this bank loan? A: By having the right connections, and giving them a rake-off. It was 9 p.m. by the time we finished dinner, and I suggested doing the rounds of some clubs so that I could get an idea of nightlife in a county town in the interior. G first took us to the night club run by the county government Cultural Department. Its premises belonged to the department and consisted of two large rooms. In the outer room there was not a single person apart from three or four waiters. The inner room was smartly decorated. There were just seven or eight customers and three or four waiters, no receptionist or hostesses. I asked the manager how the club was doing and was told that there were about ten dance clubs in Kaifeng County so competition was fierce. Business was slack, and the monthly turnover scarcely covered the wages of the dozen or so staff. On our way, G said to me, ‘That’s a club run by officials, so it’s very staid. Not many people want to go and let their hair down there.’ We then came to the Hot Springs Bathing Centre. This was an entertainment centre combining swimming pool, guesthouse, dining facilities, massage rooms and disco. It was a joint venture, costing Y13 million, between the Kaifeng County Office of Finance and a business in Kaifeng City. Perhaps because it was a late autumn night, the 100-metre by 50-metre heated pool was completely empty, and all the other facilities were shut too. Only the sound of karaoke floated down from the disco on the floor above. We wandered up, to find three or four waiters and seven or eight young customers, but apparently no dance hostesses. Business was slack here too. According to the receptionist on the door, business was more lively in the summer, but tended to be quiet in the autumn and winter. G told me that when the centre had opened, it had been very lively and done good business. Then it was rumoured that the centre offered sex massage and other sexual services. There was public outrage, and at the beginning of this year the police clamped down. Since then customers had stayed away. G also took me to a karaoke club owned by a ‘mate’ of his. The place was small, but the décor, the lighting and the sound quality was better than in the first two clubs. The owner was a young man in his thirties who welcomed us courteously and showed us to some chairs. He asked a young woman to bring us a pot of tea, and said it was on the house. As I sat down, I did a quick calculation of the number of customers: there must have been twenty or thirty people, and seven or eight hostesses. There were two or three side rooms, two of which appeared to be full. G explained to the young man why I was here and took pains to reassure him that I was his ‘good friend’ and he need have no worries about speaking to me. I learned that the owner had originally been a xiang Party Deputy Secretary; however, his career had not progressed and so for the moment he had left and gone into business. The entertainment industry was where the money was being made at the moment. The premises were rented from the County Property Development Company The lease was for three years, and he had invested Y220,000 in décor, lighting and sound equipment. It had been open only two to three months, but business was good and he should be able to recoup his investment within a year. ‘It’s difficult running a club,’ he said. ‘So many government departments are involved: commerce, tax, health and safety, electricity, pricing, public security all want to keep an eye on you. If any officials from those departments come here, we generally

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can’t charge them. That costs us about Y5,000 a month. The other problem is that people gossip, we’re under a lot of pressure. If business isn’t good, they say you’re a poor manager; if you’re successful, they say you must be selling sex services. There’s a very narrow-minded conservative outlook in a county town like this away from the coast. In their eyes all money from the entertainment business is dirty money.’ I asked him what he charged, and he explained: The basic charge is Y10 per person. Then it’s Y40 per hour if you dance with a hostess, and that Y40 all goes to the girl. The side rooms are Y30 per hour, and if you have a girl to wait on you, that’s Y40 per hour, which also all goes to the girl. It’s Y4 per song requested, Y5 per pot of tea, and Y10 for a cup of coffee. Other drinks are individually priced. Our prices are a bit lower than other clubs. I asked what kind of people came to the club for a night out, and the owner told me: The provincial government has had a big clamp-down on the sex industry, and tried to clean up the clubs, so Party and government officials don’t come to places like this much any more, but staff from the government departments still come. We’ve only been open a couple of months, and so far our customers have fallen into one of two categories: the owners of private businesses, who have money and do a lot of entertaining; and factory or company directors and managers with their out-of-town clients. The average wage here is only Y200–300 a month, so other people can’t afford it.’ I asked about the ‘girls’, and he told me: They come from all over: Zhumadian, Xinyang, even from Sichuan and the north east. Most of the ones here are from poor mountain areas. They all live in hotels in Kaifeng City. None of them are from Kaifeng itself: they’re scared of meeting someone they know, which would be embarrassing. The girls’ monthly income ranges from Y4,000 to over Y10,000. It’s not as much as it sounds, because they have a lot of expenses—board and lodging, clothes, make-up, taxis—all of which costs thousands of yuan every month. Because most of them are from poor families, they send almost all their savings home. I have at least half a dozen on call every day. Some are regulars, others not. As for what these hostesses plan to do afterwards, I’ve asked them that question too. One thing is certain: those from the country won’t go home. Their outlook and lifestyle have changed completely, and they wouldn’t put up with the hardships of life in a poor village any more. You could say that they are doing this job just because they want to escape from that poverty—and they have no other way of making a living so they have to rely on their youth and good looks. ‘They say they’re earning money to send home to support their family, and also that they’re on the lookout for a rich businessman to marry. Not that that’s easy. Any rich businessman is going to be over 35, and have a wife and family. They might pick up a pretty girl to dance and have fun with, but they’re not necessarily going to get divorced and marry her. And rich divorced businessmen are fairly thin on the ground. Of course, some succeed. I’ve met three couples who got together like this. I’ve no idea whether they stayed together happily after marriage. One is looking for a partner with money, the other is going for good looks, but neither are going to say this out loud. I always used to think that hostesses were nothing but nasty prostitutes, but now I’ve got my own club I’ve had a lot to do with them, and to be honest I sometimes feel quite sorry for them.’ He sighed and added: The market economy is all based on money, it’s turned our lives upside down, we all think about nothing but making money. Take me, for example, I

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wanted to be a government official, but now I’ve started this club, I can’t help wanting to make money. And once I’ve made it, what will I do then? I really don’t know.’ Since he had been so frank with me, I put an even more candid question: ‘Do these girls offer sex services?’ ‘Outsiders all think that a club like this is just a brothel and a gambling den, a secretive, shady sort of operation. To some extent they’re right. Last year, the Hot Springs Bathing Centre was offering sex massage and other sex services, until the city police clamped down. To be honest, they were making a lot of money out of sex massage, and after the police put a stop to it their business took a nose dive. Whether a business is state-run or privately owned, they’re all out to make money. These expensive clubs—who are they making money from? Officials who can put it on expenses, or businessmen who’ve made it big and have money to spend. When it comes down to it, if you’ve got a club where you don’t allow betting or prostitution and other clubs do, you’re not going to make much money. All club owners know this. After the clean-up of clubs this April and May, sex services were stopped for a while. This club didn’t start up until after that. I can assure you that I don’t offer sex services here. I’ve just got a dance space and two or three side rooms, there’s no space. I do have dance hostesses to attract business. As for whether my clients and my girls get up to anything outside these premises, that’s not my business, how could it be? That’s the truth. Setting up the club was a bad decision on my part but I had no option. I won’t be doing it for long.’ I asked what he would do then. ‘I’ve been in two minds about this club all along. If you run it well, it can make a lot of money, but it gives you a bad reputation. Places like this are conservative and narrow-minded, not like cities on the coast. I can’t go back to being an official at the moment. But I might think about it if the opportunity arises. Although a county or xiang official’s salary is much lower than what I’m getting at the moment, you do have political and social status, people respect you. Or maybe I should say an official can really make a difference to the lives of ordinary people. You get a feeling of satisfaction from anything you achieve in the job, and peace of mind too.’ By now it was 11.30 at night and we took our leave of the club owner who really wanted to be an official. The next morning I asked Yongcheng to go and see Yang on his own, to find out what he wanted us to do. He came back half an hour later, saying that Yang was lukewarm about my research. He had given his promise, but he did not want to know any more about it. My work in Kaifeng County would have to stop. Every level of Chinese rural society was hedged around with barriers which I, as an outsider, could not penetrate without permission. I had arrived as a researcher in the county at a politically sensitive time, and the ‘boss’ of the county was wary of me—this was all understandable. Most of my original plans I had not been able to carry out—this could not be helped either. I decided to go back to Kaifeng City. On our way back, I suddenly decided to go and take a look at the Yellow River Dongbatou Dyke. From the southern end of the Kaifeng Yellow River bridge, we followed the great south dyke eastward for about 10 kilometres. This dyke was 7 or 8 metres high, nearly 20 metres wide at the base, and the road on top was 5 or 6 metres wide. The dyke sloped gently down on either side, and the road verges were planted with protective tree cover. Parts of the slopes had been brought under cultivation by the peasants. At that point we came to the head of the famous Yellow River Dongbatou

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Dyke, situated in Lankao County. On the dyke stood two steles, one engraved with the words: ‘In 1901 and 1933 the Yellow River broke its banks here’, the other commemorating the visit by Mao Zedong on 30 October 1952 to inspect the flood control works. Mao went first to Liuguokou, then came to the Dongbatou Dyke, and it was from here that he issued the call to ‘sort out the Yellow River problem’. Dyke construction had begun in October 1949; the dyke was 1,000 metres long and had involved building thirteen breakwaters. I stood on the Dongbatou Dyke and looked west along the river and realised the expression ‘the Yellow River waters come from the sky’ was not just poetic exaggeration. The rolling torrent surged eastward until it reached Dongbatou where it came up against the streamlined form of the great stone dyke which ran north-south, and abruptly turned to the north. A series of breakwaters helped to weaken the force of the west to east flow and force the waters northward. And so this mighty stream flowed majestically on until it entered Shandong Province to the north. On the northern bank of the river, a vast expanse of flats stretched away into the distance. Not a house was to be seen, there were only sparse clumps of reeds swaying in the autumn wind. Neat piles of stones lay on the dyke’s broad top. The Yellow River Affairs Department Lankao Section was based in a small town near Dongbatou, and had special responsibility for flood control emergency works on the Mengjin to Dongbatou stretch of river which, being higher than the level of the surrounding land, was considered the most dangerous section. The peasants called this vulnerable point of the Yellow River ‘bean-curd waist’. The worst bit was at Dongbatou, because of the abrupt, right-angle bend in the river. In 1901 and 1933, the whole of Lankao County had been inundated. On the return journey, I reflected again on what people meant when they called the Yellow River ‘the mother of the Chinese people’, or said that Chinese civilisation was really a civilisation of the Yellow River basin. What was the inherent relationship between the Yellow River, especially in its lower reaches, and the Chinese people, the way they lived and their cultural idiosyncrasies? The lower reaches were not navigable and so had never allowed river-borne trade. Nor, where the river was suspended above the level of the surrounding land, was it possible to use it for irrigation—on the contrary, its waters brought calamity more often than benefits. Our ancestors were wont to look on the Yellow River more with fear than with love and respect; unlike the Nile or the Ganges, it had never been worshipped by the early peoples who dwelt on its banks. Ancient Chinese poets rarely wrote hymns in praise of the Yellow River. To what were we referring when we called it the mother of China? Unless to the great quantities of silt its waters carried down to form the great plains of its lower reaches, thereby providing a vast arena in which our early agricultural civilisation could develop. In my view, the impossibility of using the river for water-borne commerce or (at least in ancient times) for irrigation, combined with the uniformity both of terrain and of climate which it afforded, was a fundamental reason for the age-old persistence of a natural economy on those plains. At around 1.30 p.m. we reached Kaifeng City. At six, I invited my friends Meng, Xu and Li over to the Henan University Guesthouse for a drink and a discussion on the next stage of my research. It was eventually decided that Yongcheng would take me to Zhumadian and there hand me over to Party School friends and associates who would

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take me around the regions of Zhumadian and Xinyang. I was to take letters of introduction with me, first confirming that I was a specially appointed Kaifeng Party School lecturer, and second explaining the aims of my research and asking for local government help. The man with the Zhumadian contacts, Mr Liao from the Party School, brought me my letters of introduction late that evening, and sat down for a chat. Liao was an economics graduate from Zhengzhou University. He began by telling me about something called the Dual Field System which was being pushed through in his family’s village in Zhumadian, and was very concerned that I should include it in my investigations. Under this system, he said, all arable land which had been allocated to the families was taken back by the Village Party Committee (not by the Villagers’ Groups). It was then divided into two parts: one part was reallocated on a per capita basis (0.8 mu per person). Cultivation of the remainder, ‘responsibility land’, was contracted out to big village families. According to the xiang cadres, this was on the orders of the Zhumadian Party Committee and government. Their aims were threefold: to encourage large-scale farming and maximise efficiency of land use; to increase village public funds; and to use the rents on the responsibility land to cover contributions to the village and xiang budgets, thus reducing the levies imposed on families who had a per capita allocation but no extra land. Liao told me that while this system sounded good, the reality was that it had led to a number of abuses.

Trip to southern Henan The plan was to spend two weeks in southern Henan, but whether I could use my personal contacts in the Zhumadian Regional Party School to reach local peasants to carry out my research I really had no idea. The letters I was carrying vouched for the fact that I was an academic, not a reporter, and that I would not in any way obstruct the work of local government. It was my safeguard, and a precautionary measure. Yongcheng accompanied me to Zhumadian. It was a whole day’s bus ride and we arrived, exhausted, at about six o’clock, checked into a hotel near the bus station and went to bed early.

Dual Field System At eight the next morning, we hurried over to the Zhumadian Regional Party School. We found Mr Yang of the Philosophy Teaching and Research Department, and he took us to see a Mr Wu, a man in his forties and deputy director with special responsibility for pedagogy and research. When I explained to him my research plans and objectives, he expressed great interest. ‘With the reforms, rural society has changed and faces new challenges,’ he commented. ‘And whether or not current theory can adequately interpret the new reality has been much discussed in our cadre study groups. Fundamentally, it’s the Party School’s job to study these new situations and problems, but for a number of years we’ve put all our energy into teaching, holding meetings, making extra income. We’ve had no time for any sociological studies, but now that you’ve come, that might

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spur us into action.’ He asked if I would give a couple of lectures to the whole staff (to which I immediately agreed). He assigned Yang to accompany me in my investigations, and I thanked him profusely. Yang took me to the Party School hostel to settle in, and we discussed practical arrangements: Yongcheng had just a week before he was due to attend a study course in Beijing at the Central Party School. Yang could also spare me just a week, as it was near the end of term and he was very busy. So any research in and around Zhumadian had to be completed within a week. Zhumadian region consisted of the city itself and nine counties (Xiping, Suiping, Queshan, Miyang, Shangcai, Runan, Pingyu, Xincai and Zhengyang) but in the time available we would be limited to lightning visits to one xiang and one village from two or three of these counties. It was going to be impossible to do any serious long-term research at grassroots level. We decided to set off for Zhengyang that afternoon, followed by Xincai, and then return to the Zhumadian Regional Party School via Pingyu and Runan. Between nine and three in the afternoon, Yang needed to go and make arrangements for the following week’s work, so I used the time to go to the library and look up the records on Zhengyang, Pingyu and Xincai counties. The library was very rudimentary. Only the records for Zhumadian City and Queshan County were available, and the librarian had no idea whether records for the other eight counties had been published. However, some items did catch my interest, and I note them down here. Under ‘Living Conditions’ I found notes on how hired labour, poor, middle and rich peasants, and landlords lived before Liberation, together with specific examples. This could serve as a point of reference from which to measure changes in the last fifty years: Hired labour Zhang Yongqing, single, landless and homeless, had worked for a long period as a long-term hired hand. Diet: coarse grain (that is, maize and sorghum). Did heavy work, lived in a cowshed. Owned just a quilt. If he could not find work, he could still sleep in the cowshed, but he would starve. Poor peasants Liu Shetang and his mother. Lived in a thatched two-roomed adobe hut, slept on straw. Owned 1.5 mu from which they harvested about 300 catties of grain—not enough to last them the year. In the busy season, they worked as casual labourers; in the slack season they kept body and soul together by gathering firewood from the mountain and selling it (to the west of Queshan County was hill country, to the east, plains). Every year when they ran out of food, the elderly mother would go out begging. Middle peasants Zhang Yongdian and family—total eight people. Seven rooms built of adobe and thatch, 28 mu of arable land. One cow, one donkey. Fairly complete set of farm tools. Total grain harvest, 5,000–6,000 catties per year. Diet chiefly consisted of maize and sorghum, except for special holidays when they had a little wheat flour. Wore homespun clothing. Zhang Yongdian himself was a bricklayer, and could therefore sell his labour helping with house-building for part of the year, in the slack season. In a normal year, they could put a little money by.

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Rich peasants Li Wanfu and his family of seven. Had ten rooms of brick and tile construction, and four of thatched adobe. They had 38.5 mu of land, an ox and two donkeys, a cart and a complete set of farm tools. Hired two labourers, harvested about 8,000 catties per year. Lent out grain at interest during the spring (loaning out a measure of grain before the harvest and receiving back two measures after the harvest was a common and highly profitable form of loan in the Queshan area before Liberation), which brought in 1,000–2,000 catties annually. Li Wanfu himself, as head of the family, ate buns and noodles made of wheat flour all year round, while the staple diet of the rest of his family was maize and sorghum. The whole family wore homespun clothing. The landlord Li Wannian. Family size, fourteen. Two brick and tile residences, a total of fourteen rooms. Each compound was protected by an adobe wall and ditch. There was also a gun turret. The family had two guns and armed hired hands patrolled at night on the lookout for the brigands with which the region was infested before Liberation. Arable land: 210 mu. Livestock: one donkey, one horse, two oxen. One ox cart, one horse-drawn vehicle, two hired hands. Tilled half his acreage (employed casual labour in the busy season), rented out the other half. Received 10,000 catties from the rented land (total harvest divided half and half between the landlord and the tenant). Total grain for the year, about 30,000 catties. Family diet during the busy season, wheat; during the slack season, maize and sorghum (except for Li himself, who ate wheat all year round). The family dressed mainly in fine clothing, with fur-lined jackets in winter and thin garments in summer, and also spun some of their own clothing. These records told me that the average per mu yield in the Queshan area then was about 200 catties, a level which had probably remained unchanged for an extended historical period prior to Liberation. As a result of fifty years’ hard work after 1949, the average annual per mu yield (including two harvests) had risen to 1,000 catties or more (the per mu yield in the Kaifeng wheat and rice-growing area could be as high as 1,800 catties annually). During this same fifty-year period, the population of the area had doubled or tripled, but cereals production had increased sixfold. This was the most significant sign of progress made by the peasants of China’s interior in the last half century, and from the dietary point of view it had enabled the peasants to enjoy as high a standard of living as the landlords and rich peasants did formerly. The same could be said of the houses they lived in and the clothes they wore. The Xinyang Affair during the Great Leap Forward At the time of the Great Leap Forward, the city and all except one of the nine counties which now made up the Zhumadian region belonged to the Xinyang region. Apparently, in 1958, the seventeen Xinyang counties had a total population of 8 million, and in the three years of the Great Leap Forward, 1 million of these had died from hunger or starvation-related diseases. The affair had reverberated throughout China, and one of my motives in pursuing my investigations in Xinyang was to shed some light on a matter hitherto shrouded in mystery. According to the Zhumadian City Records, in 1958, the population of the city, including two xiangs on its outskirts, was 18,471 families (83,087 people); in 1959, it

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was 17,938 families, 78,912 people; in 1960, it was 18,030 families, 76,965 people; in 1961, 18,020 families, 73,095 people; in 1962, 18,400 families, 78,373 people. After 1962, the population resumed its yearly increase. If we took the 1958 population figures as the base, and assumed that there had been no percentage increase between 1959 and 1961, then it was clear that between 1958 and 1961 at least 10,000 people had died from other than natural causes since the population had declined from 83,087 to 73,095. That meant it was likely that at least one-eighth had died from hunger or related diseases. When we take into consideration the fact that the grain supply is usually slightly better within the city than in the country, then it is clear that in predominantly agricultural counties the death rate must have been even higher. The material contained in these records seemed to prove that the claim that 1 million people had died from hunger in the whole of Xinyang did indeed have a basis in fact. We lunched with Wu, the deputy head of the Party School and a man from Lin County, and he began to tell me about the Red Flag Irrigation Canal. Lin was a hill county, on the eastern slopes of Taihang Mountain, where there had traditionally been a scarcity of land and water and the able-bodied emigrated in search of work. In the 1960s, the County Party Secretary, a man named Yang, led his people in a great battle to build an irrigation canal high up in the mountains. It took them several years, stretched for many hundreds of kilometres (including the trunk canal and branch canals) and basically succeeded in providing enough water to meet the needs of the people of the whole county, their livestock and their agriculture. Yang therefore was still to this day remembered with gratitude. The Red Flag Canal Project brought an additional benefit: it trained up skilled construction workers, and bred in them a team spirit of toughness and endurance. As soon as the reforms started, one construction team after another left Lin County and went all over the place taking on construction projects and setting up other xiang enterprises. Lin County had consistently been in the forefront of economic development in Henan. Wu went on: ‘A lot of people have a poor opinion of the communes, and some will even tell you they were a complete disaster. But actually, the commune structure was very important both in the organisation of rural society and in the construction of agricultural irrigation projects. Now that the land is in the hands of individual peasants, it would be quite impossible to carry out a water conservancy project of this size just relying on their enthusiasm and individual efforts, and without the benefit of significant state investment.’ One of the teachers at the lunch, Wang, came from Zhengyang County, which happened to be the next county I would be visiting, so I asked him to tell me about Zhengyang and, in particular, how the Dual Field System had been set up. Zhengyang had around 700,000 people and 2,100,000 mu of arable land (or 3 mu per capita), he told me. It had the biggest per capita land allocation of all the Zhumadian counties. However, the per capita allocation between the villages was very uneven: in some it was only a little over 1 mu, in others as much as 6 mu. The Dual Field System was now in operation throughout the county (and as this was a Zhumadian regional policy, it applied to the other counties in the region too). The system was run from the administrative villages, and under it 95 per cent of the land was contract land, allocated per head of population, while the remaining 5 per cent was reserve land, directly controlled by the Village Committee. This was then rented out to big families in that village. This land had two main functions: first, the rentals contributed to village funds and were used on public

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works. Second, it formed a reserve which could be distributed to newcomers in order to maintain the stability of the Household Contract Responsibility System for land. (This was very different from the way Liao had described the Dual Field System; and I had to assume that Wang’s definition was correct.) The people who designed the system had meant well, but actually putting it into practice caused more harm than good. The system was actually run by Village Party Secretaries and village heads and accountants, and all too often the land was privately distributed by a small number of cadres. How much rent people who rented it paid, or whether they paid it at all, only the cadres knew. Even when the Village Committee got their hands on this rent, there was no guarantee that it would be used on public projects. Nor had the levies the peasants had to pay been reduced as a result. The peasants were very dissatisfied with the system. If a village had 3,000 mu of land, then there would be 150 mu of reserved land. If the levies due on this land were lumped in with the amount due on the other 95 per cent of land, then this increased the tax burden on each person. And if the annual rentals on each mu were Y150, that made Y22,500 which would in all likelihood go to line the cadres’ pockets. Water shortages in Lin County, he added, had forced people to leave in search of work, and in the end something good had come out of the bad. In Zhengyang it was just the opposite: they had plenty of land, so the traditional land-based way of life had carried on as before, and there was little motivation or pressure to learn how to do something different outside the village. Recently some people had left to work as labourers, but the labour market was already oversupplied and they had spent their travel money and ended up coming back home. The only change in the last decade was that there had been a steady increase in the number of walking tractors.

A reflection on the Xinyang Affair That evening, the School Party Secretary, Wang and the school head entertained us to dinner, and once again the 1959 Xinyang Affair came up during the conversation. Wang was from Tanghe County in Nanyang. He said: ‘Tanghe County in 1958 had a population of 730,000 people. In 1961 it stood at 620,000: that is, it had fallen by 110,000 in three years. During that time, there were hardly any births. Over and above the normal death rate, at least 80,000 or 90,000 people died from hunger. The vast majority of these were peasants who, for whatever reason, were not able to do heavy manual work. When the famine was over, central government ordered an investigation into who was responsible, and the County Party Secretary committed suicide and tried unsuccessfully to get his wife and son to kill themselves too. The death rate was high in other Nanyang counties too, but was worst in Tanghe. There was much the same starvation in Hubei and Anhui too, it was just that Xinyang became known about.’ After dinner, I asked my hosts if there was a teacher who was from a nearby village and could take me there to have a look. They both came up with a Mr Lü who, they said, had spent many years working as a local xiang cadre. He was just the person to go with me. At eight o’clock, Yang brought Lü to see me and discuss the next day’s village visit. Lü was in his mid-fifties and had graduated in politics from Zhongnan Institute for Nationalities in 1965. Now, twenty-odd years of dedicated work in the countryside had

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transformed him from an intellectual into someone who looked like nothing so much as an old peasant. When asked about his life since graduating in 1965, he summed it up as ‘tough’: after starting in the provincial government Organisational Department, he had been transferred progressively downward to a county (in the Propaganda Department), then a commune (as a secondary school history teacher, then secretary) and a xiang (as director of a xiang enterprise office). It was only in 1988 that he succeeded through an old school friend in the provincial government in getting himself transferred to a teacher’s post in the Party School where he still worked. The next day Lü and I visited Zhaizhuang Village in Suiping County. At the entrance to the village, we met up with a group of peasants herding sheep. They recognised Lü as their old teacher and we stopped while I exchanged a few words with them. Q: What’s it like living as a peasant now? A: Not bad. Much better than it used to be. We’ve got decent clothes, food, places to live, transport. If an old person goes to market, they can take a three-wheeler. (This was said with a smile. The people around here had more than the average arable land per capita, plus they were near the main road and the city, and the majority owned three-wheelers or small four-wheeled tractors.) Q: So are all the villagers satisfied with the way things are? A: No, of course we’re not all satisfied. There are still things we’re dissatisfied about. Q: Like what? A: The community isn’t like it used to be. There’s pilfering and theft everywhere. Q: But wasn’t there a crackdown the first half of this year? How come public security here is so hopeless? A: It has been better in the last few months. But it will get worse again. Nowadays, people think of nothing but making money, and it drives them crazy. Q: Anything else you’re not happy about? A: The xiang and village cadres do nothing but pig themselves, and screw money and grain out of us peasants. (Another peasant added: ‘The agricultural levies are too heavy.’) Q: How come? A: We each have to hand over 200 catties of wheat every year. I said: ‘You have more than two mu per capita arable land, and the per mu yield is 1,000–odd catties of grain over two harvests, and you’re contributing 100 catties per mu. In the old days the imperial levy was one-tenth of the per mu yield. Isn’t it just the same now as then? Surely that’s not too much!’ This reduced them to silence. Then two middle-aged peasants standing nearby put in: ‘The cadres ask for money too.’ Q: How much money per person? A: Y70. (Another answered: ‘Y80’, and still another: ‘Over Y100.’)

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Q: What do they do with all that money? A: This year they said they needed to repair the road. Last year it was building a primary school…who knows what they do with it? Q: I expect they tell you all about the xiang and village finances? A: Like hell they do! Q: Why don’t you go and ask the village accountant what they need all that money and grain for? A: No one would dare do that. At this point, I saw half a dozen peasants at the other end of the village discussing something, and realised that news of my visit must have spread. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an excellent opportunity to hear what the villagers had to say. However, I was concerned not to alarm the local cadres and thereby get into trouble. This kind of unofficial visit was always hampered by the need not to annoy local officialdom. I therefore decided we should leave, and by 6 p.m. we were back at the Zhumadian Regional Party School. Yongcheng had returned to Kaifeng in the morning, and the next day Yang, another lecturer, was to accompany me south to Xinyang City. I was surprised, that evening, when Yang and Lü turned up at my hostel saying that two teachers who had transferred to jobs in the regional government were to make a special trip to meet me and discuss some important matters tomorrow morning. My visit to Xinyang would therefore have to be put off for a day.

Some issues of mutual concern At eight the next morning, Lü brought Cao and Guo to the hostel. Cao had a Master’s in Economics from the Central Party School, while Guo had a Master’s from the Shanghai East China Normal University in Politics. After graduating, they were both sent to teach in the Zhumadian Regional Party School. Shortly thereafter, Cao had moved on to a job in the regional government Organisational Department, while Guo had gone to the Propaganda Department. The two of them had come back to the Party School yesterday and, hearing that I was here on a research trip and lecturing to the Party School teachers, had decided to come and see me and discuss ‘issues of mutual concern, and hear your views on them’ (their words). I had also studied for two years at East China Normal University and we had acquaintances in common, so that our talk was unusually relaxed and frank. An assessment of the pros and cons of the Household Contract Responsibility System for land Guo began: ‘Allocating the right to till collective land to families on a per capita basis has given the peasants more responsibility for production and increased their motivation; it has also released the surplus labour previously confined within the collective on a limited

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amount of land, thus giving peasants freedom to control their own labour. This has never been in question. However, it has raised a number of serious problems which were not foreseen, in connection with land, water conservancy, the clan system and the revival of superstition.’ Cao added, The system as it was set up in 1980 was in reality a reworked and expanded version of the Three Freedoms and One Contract System10 which followed on from the so-called “three years of natural disasters”.11 It may have been appropriate to the circumstances as they existed then. But in over twenty years of collectively organised agriculture, great strides had been made in economic development and the experience of working collectively. Collectivisation and the benefits it brought have been eliminated all over China in one fell swoop: no matter how any one commune or production brigade was doing, land had to be reallocated to the individual, and this caused a great deal of damage. Take irrigation, which has become the most problematic factor holding back agricultural development. In the 1960s and 1970s, the commune system mustered hundreds of thousands of workers in Zhumadian and worked immensely hard over a period of ten years to construct an automatic irrigation system based on the Banqiao Reservoir. As a result, a huge rice paddy area was created in Queshan, Suiping, Miyang, Xiping and Runan counties. Rice production reached 800–1,000 catties per mu, enough to enable the people in those areas to meet all their basic needs. In 1975, all this hard work was swept away in the worst floods in Zhumadian for a hundred years. The irrigation system was completely destroyed but we were inspired by the Dazhai spirit, people and materials were mustered, and the system was partially reconstructed in 1976 and 1977. Since decollectivisation, it has been damaged and repaired a number of times—and the damage has been done not by natural disasters, but by the short-sighted desire for personal gain which comes with small-scale farming methods. Because the irrigation channels occupy a fair amount of land, peasants living along the banks are forever trying to claim land back from them. Building work done in winter is dug up again in spring, with the peasants taking land which is part of the irrigation system for planting, and damaging the system in the process. Once you’ve breached a channel in one place, it’s useless, and the peasants make thousands of holes in them. So all the winter’s repairs on the irrigation system are a complete waste of time and effort, and a once excellent highyield rice-growing area now just grows wheat and maize. Two harvests of these are worth less than one harvest of the rice. ‘There has also been a lot of resistance to scientific advances in farming methods from individual peasant farmers. Each individual farmer is an economically independent decision-making unit, and the way each one operates, and how much money and education they have, varies too. Some buy quality maize seed, others use their own crop for seed, to save a few pennies, but when the plants flower, the pollen all blows away so that good seed goes to waste. If one farmer puts on the pesticide one day, the pests migrate to the next field—then the neighbour applies a bit of pesticide and the bugs just fly back again. Then there’s use of agricultural machinery—it’s a terrible waste of machinery lying idle, because in the better-off villages which have a bit of extra land, almost everyone has bought walking tractors and water pumps.’ ‘Would it be possible to return to collective cultivation?’ I asked. ‘Definitely not!’ was the response from both of them. They gave two main reasons: the peasants had already accepted the new system which, after all, was in line with

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traditional peasant farming practices; second, to re-collectivise the land would cause a huge increase in local cadres’ powers. That could only exacerbate the corruption currently rife at local government level. This was another reason why the peasants would be unwilling to see the land re-collectivised. I then gave them my own views. The crux of the problem is that the peasants have wholeheartedly accepted the land contract system, which is a sort of halfway house between collectivisation and private land ownership, and it’s not possible to go either back or forward. This system is therefore here to stay in the long term, and no politician either now or in the foreseeable future would dare to enforce a new land system which could have profound effects on the stability of the rural economy and society. It is true that the restoration of a system of scattered individual smallholdings has created many new problems but since there is no going back, these can only be resolved by carrying out further reforms. As to the sort of problems you have raised, they all relate to the peasants’ willingness and ability to co-operate with each other (which is important in a scattered small-farming economy) and to the need to transform local government. Local government has to adapt both in function and in working style to the new environment. If solutions can gradually be found to these major problems, then other issues will resolve themselves. ‘The rural clan system, on the other hand, is a more complex matter. Since the start of rural reforms, we have seen how the nuclear family unit has become a universal phenomenon, and how the peasants’ increased awareness of and involvement in commodity exchange relationships has tended to weaken rural kinship ties. On the other hand, especially in rural areas in the south, we have seen a revival of ancestral temples, clan records and ancestor worship, to the point where even Village Committees are being run along the lines of patriarchal clans. In my view, while there is no fundamental change in family-based rural society, clan consciousness will retain a hold. Yet with the development of the nuclear family, freely contracted marriages and the market economy, those clans can never return to forming the sort of communities they once did. What I really want to know is whether we will see a development of individualism and of the contractual nature of social and economic relationships characteristic of contemporary Western societies, and the establishment of democracy and the rule of law as a result. But to this question I really have no answer—we will have to wait and see. ‘Superstition is a still more complex matter: during the communes, its external manifestations may have been prohibited, but superstition itself had certainly not been eliminated. It appears to be connected to a deep concern about an uncertain future. People are now full of desires and the future is difficult to predict. If divination and fortunetelling is popular among officialdom and in the world of commerce, it is not surprising that it is widespread in the villages.’ Corruption in local government Guo began: ‘There was a xiang Party Secretary in Xincai County who took Y500,000 in bribes in two years in office. The way he got his post was through connections of his wife’s family, but once he’d grasped the reins of power he ditched his wife for someone a bit more exciting. Her family got angry and she reported his fraudulent dealings. Central TV did an expose about it. This official has lost his job, but the trial is still going on after

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a year and there hasn’t been a verdict. There may well never be one. When there’s a corruption case like this, large numbers of people get dragged in. How do you investigate it, or pass judgement? Then there was a deputy head of Runan County who kept a string of mistresses in and around Zhumadian City. He built the city girlfriend a modern house, and then had children by two of the other mistresses. When the affairs came out, it was just treated as a private peccadillo. He lost his job, but now it has all blown over, and he seems to have got himself transferred to another post elsewhere. The political reforms towards the end of the 1980s devolved power from the centre to the regions. Local officials now have much more power than before and they’re subject only to limited and ineffectual monitoring by their superiors. Mass organisations and public opinion have no say in it. Add to this the focus on economic construction, and local government powers and economic interests are now inextricably intertwined, which has led to all sorts of corrupt wheeling and dealing between officials and business. It happens all over Henan. Just look at the houses local officials live in—where would they get the money to buy a city apartment and build a nice country retreat on the salaries they get?’ ‘How do officials use their position to make money for themselves?’ I asked. ‘There are two main ways,’ Cao explained. ‘One is through urban capital construction projects. The money comes in rapidly and continuously, so it’s hard to keep tabs on it all. Besides, attracting funds counts as a mark of personal achievement for a cadre. A few years ago, every inhabitant in Guanwangmiao xiang, Suiping County, put Y80 each towards building a new road. The xiang has a population of 50,000 so the total raised was Y4 million, yet all they got out of it was a stretch of tarmac 200 metres or so long. How much of ordinary people’s hard-earned money went into the pockets of the local cadres and labour contractors, heaven only knows. According to some labour contractors I know, 10, 15, even 20 per cent of the cost of a contract routinely goes in backhanders. There’s so much construction and road-building going on in Henan, and it’s common knowledge that cadres all get a rake-off. The second main way of making money out of your position is by constantly transferring your subordinates. A Party Secretary of the Zhumadian region, a man called Liu, has been in the job five years, and has moved all the county departmental cadres around four times. With every transfer there’s a loss of morale, and things have gone from bad to worse for Zhumadian cadres. Every time it happens it creates anxiety: some fear for their jobs, others are looking for a better salary or for promotion. So they’re frantically trying to buy their way into the boss’s favour. It gets worse and worse. There’s a popular saying: “If you want to make money, transfer cadres around.” And it has a basis in fact, it really is the way things happen. At the Party School we see a lot of the local cadres, and after they’ve had a drink or two they’ll tell their friends what’s going on. According to them, to fix the job they want with the xiang Party Secretary will cost them Y70,000 or Y80,000, or even up to Y100,000. Apparently, some even get a loan to “buy” their officials.’ ‘Is “buying” officials a common phenomenon in Zhumadian?’ I asked. ‘It’s hard to say with any certainty,’ they told me, ‘since it’s all kept very quiet. But we have a lot to do with the county and xiang cadres, we’re friends with them, they’re our students. To hear them talk, if you’re not prepared to put a bit of money into it, there’s no way you can get a job. Once you’ve got one, it’s hard to keep. That’s what the world of cadres is like. If other people are bribing officials and you’re being incorruptible, it doesn’t matter how good your work is, you’ll get pushed to the bottom of

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the heap. Five years or so ago, you only occasionally heard cadres talk like that; now it happens all the time. It’s become an open secret. It happens, we reckon, in about 80 per cent of cases. The whole of officialdom is tainted by it.’ The fight against corruption, and building democracy and the rule of law In Guo and Cao’s opinion, the root cause of the lack of effectiveness of the fight against corruption lay in a political system whereby the Disciplinary Committees and the Supervisory Departments were under the direction of the local Party committees. Their proposal was that: ‘These organisations should become part of a vertical monitoring structure which is completely independent of local party and government. That’s the only way they can carry out their supervisory responsibilities, and put a stop to cadres making private fortunes out of their jobs.’ In my view, the kind of major reform they were proposing might have a significant effect on controlling personal corruption, but the idea that the monitoring structure might become independent and override local Party and government had no basis in current political theory in China because in practice the ‘leadership of government and Party’ meant leadership by Party committees at the equivalent level. Supervisory powers, just like political power, were rooted in Party power, which meant that, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view, monitoring organs had to be subject to local Party control. Even if the kind of independence they were advocating were achieved, who would guard against corruption within that supervisory body? A higher level within the same organisation? If this were possible then why was it not possible for upper levels of Party committees to keep the lower levels in check? The real issue was how to enable this process to happen. The problem was that there were too many layers of government between central government and the villages, which meant that the government’s regulatory powers became gradually weaker in the process of being transmitted down through each level. Adding another monitoring body to supervise the Disciplinary Committees and the Supervisory Departments would cause anti-corruption costs to escalate and this, in turn, would be a new cause of corruption. According to my companions: ‘Among educated people, the main topic of conversation when we meet up is whether there are any effective ways to stamp out official corruption. There are two camps—the pessimists and the optimists. The pessimists believe that it’s hard to keep corruption in check in a society focused on making money where the people have no rights. In fact, they feel that it’s pointless to keep discussing it. The optimists hold that corruption is abhorrent and can—indeed, must—be eliminated. But the optimists differ when it comes to how to do it: some believe that in the interior of China it has become an impediment to economic growth and a key cause of popular resentment and social instability, and we should launch a Maostyle mass movement against corruption. Others think this would result in massive social upheaval and would prefer to see political reform involving a strengthening of democracy and the rule of law. But what they have in mind is a Western-style model involving a multi-party electoral system with separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers.’

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They then asked for my views on these divergent opinions. I had to admit that although I had given much consideration to the problem over the years, I had not come to any firm conclusions. The current reforms involved the biggest transformation in the social structure of China since Liberation in 1949 or, to go even further back, the Revolution of 1911 or the Opium War, but the process had only just begun and we could not know where it was going to end. Were the educated people of China up to the momentous task of formulating updated concepts and systems appropriate to current circumstances and problems (to borrow a key concept from the historian Toynbee)? They would need to do so if they were to meet the challenges which we now faced. I put myself in the optimists’ camp, but agreed that a mass movement against official corruption could lead to chaos, with such a high number of urban unemployed and so many peasants labouring under the great burden of agricultural levies. An anti-corruption movement would fan the flames of their indignation and would lead to the certain and instant destruction of the fruits of the past twenty years’ economic development. And there was no simple yes or no answer as to whether Western-style democracy could achieve the desired result. It was arguable that we had not tried it out; on the other hand, the majority of Third World countries who had adopted Western-style democracies had worse graft and corruption than China. We needed to acquire more knowledge and understanding, both of the pervasiveness of corruption in the Third World and of the reliance of democratic systems on the effective implementation of certain social and educational conditions. It was a commonly held belief among both Western political theorists and the vast majority of Third World scholars that democracy was a political system. I, on the other hand, saw it also as a way of life, as a collection of customs, procedures and methods employed to settle the common business of society. The pumping of water from a flooded village was common business; so was the maintenance of an irrigation canal which, although it took up villagers’ land, also brought them benefits. What we called democracy encompassed the methods and procedures by which negotiation took place between independent but equal individuals with shared interests, to establish a constitution and elect executive and supervisory bodies to manage business which concerned the community as a whole. We could also call this ‘social democracy’. If a people did not manage affairs which affected their own personal interests in a democratic way—that is to say, the way in which they interacted with their fellows in their daily lives was undemocratic—then how could we expect the majority of those people to implement a democratic system in political affairs? In all sorts of social matters, we kept hearing complaints that ‘nobody cares’—for example, in unpoliced public areas, there was often a lack of public order. Surely this was explained by our lack of experience in and aptitude for ‘social democracy’? Our reaction to many problems which were clearly resolvable through co-operation was to adopt a philosophy of passive avoidance—to put up and shut up; or we regarded it as something which concerned only ourselves or another individual—we rarely regarded it as ‘a matter of common concern’ to be resolved by organising ourselves as a community. We attempted an individual solution drawing on kinship and friendship networks available to us, and this was what had given rise to all those modes of behaviour so familiar to us in China—using family connections, pulling strings, getting in through the back door, inviting our putative benefactor to dinner, giving gifts and so on. ‘Connections’ in China was a word richly imbued with social and

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cultural connotations, and these networks of personal connections, and the role they played in society as a whole, made it well-nigh impossible for us to establish a system of social relationships in which we functioned as equal and independent individuals. Yet this was precisely the soil which democracy and the rule of law needed if they were to flourish. My belief was that if the manner in which we lived together in society was not democratic, then superimposing the edifice of political democracy would not eliminate the corruption of its officials. The phenomenon of political corruption in Third World countries who had adopted Western-style democracy was proof of this. ‘But Chinese peasants lack any awareness of “social democracy”,’ my companions objected. ‘Their main political demand is for an honest official to take decisions on their behalf. This is the way it has been since ancient times and still is now. But officials who claim to be acting for the people are more often than not acting for themselves. And a centralised state gives ordinary people even less power to act for themselves.’ ‘What I am currently concerned about,’ I replied, ‘is the question whether the spread of corruption indicates the rise of a new social group in China with a vested interest in political power; and whether this privileged stratum will allow the people that they govern to express and realise their own interests. I hope to establish what real changes have taken place in society since the start of the reforms, and especially since the introduction of a market economy, and whether this has given rise to an awareness of and the capacity for the practice of “social democracy” as I have defined it. Are peasants, workers and other social strata abandoning traditional modes of behaviour, and adopting new and effective ways of tackling new problems? Are they beginning to see that they share common interests and, if so, what new procedures and methods are they employing to tackle common problems? It is astonishing how Chinese scholars have, over the last twenty years, continually tried to introduce new concepts, theories and methods from the West, while ordinary people have just carried on behaving in the same old way. With the peasantry now operating as individual smallholders, there is a real lack of spontaneous co-operation between them. When faced with a common problem, they either put up with it, or complain, or use personal connections to get around it. This is especially true of the cities where personal networking is becoming more, not less, widespread. When faced with ever-increasing heavy taxes and levies, today’s peasants protest to a higher level of government in the very same way as did those in old feudal times. Yet just because our people have not found ways to take up this new challenge does not mean they will not do so in the future. It is possible that this is already happening and I have not seen it, or have seen but not understood it. In the process of my research, I continually remind myself that we cannot wholly rely either on our past experience or on Western idealism to interpret Chinese society today. Instead, we have to listen to the voices of the living, to allow them to bear witness to the nature of their lives. The vitality of society comes from ordinary people finding their own way forward. I am by no means a blind advocate of social spontaneity but I do believe that a people still young in spirit will find effective means to deal with the challenges that face them.’ We went on talking until 1.30 p.m. People said that the younger generation cared only about qualifications, salaries and advancement, but this was not necessarily so: some, at least, maintained the old scholarly tradition of concern with politics and society.

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A visit to the Xinyang region At 8.30 the next morning, I set off with Yang as my guide to Xinyang City. The Xinyang region was at the southern tip of Henan Province, and was bounded in the north by the Huai River and in the south by the Dabie Mountains. It was made up of nine counties (Xinyang, Luoshan, Xi, Huaibin, Huangchuan, Guangshan, Gushi, Shangcheng and Xin counties). Seven of the nine were nationally classified ‘poor counties’, the other two were on the provincial ‘poor county’ list. Apparently this designation was coveted, not because it conferred honour on the holder but for material reasons: there was a policy that such counties, especially those classified nationally as needing special support, should be able to get access to loans on favourable terms. In 1992 there were 300 poor counties on the national list. We arrived at 11.30 a.m. Xinyang City, much like other Henan county towns I had passed through, was in the throes of urban improvement and modernisation. Roads were being widened and straightened. Concrete was being poured, traffic lights installed and trees planted at the roadside. On either side of the streets, old buildings were being torn down and new ones were going up. Walls which faced the street all had white ceramic tiles decorating them. Every shop looked the same, from the type of goods it sold to the window displays, and any local features in these towns were rapidly vanishing under the dull uniformity imposed by modernisation. Why did each town and city have to have the same make of white ceramic tiles stuck to the walls? Some people said it was an order from the Urban Development Office of the provincial government, others that it was copied from Zhangjiagang City in Jiangsu Province. What were the things that made this process of modernisation especially Chinese? Well, for one it had been officially ordered, and for another, it had been copied. We then got into a taxi for the journey to the Xinyang Regional Party School, in the north-west corner of the city. The school was situated between the river, in front, and the mountains with, beyond them, the Nanwan Reservoir. The setting, amid a clump of green trees, was serene and beautiful. It was Sunday, and Yang and I walked around the campus trying unsuccessfully to find Mr Ni, the deputy director. Ni was a classmate and old friend of Yang’s, and the vital Xinyang link in the network of connections which were necessary to enable me carry out this sort of research. Yang’s aim was to introduce me to Ni who, in turn, would put me in touch with old Party School students and friends at county level, and they would make my field research possible. It turned out that Ni was no longer living on campus. We went back to the entrance to ask the porter for Ni’s new address and phone number, but could make no sense of his ramblings. We were still standing there unsure what to do when an old gentleman passed by and said to the porter: These are the deputy director’s friends—you’d better be quick and fix them up with a place to stay!’ Whereupon the porter called the Head of Administration who came to take us to eat at a small restaurant nearby. A dinner was already in progress in the restaurant: three or four teachers from the Party School were entertaining two teachers from the Party Schools of Guangshan and Gushi counties. More chairs were pulled up, and cups and chopsticks brought for us. During the meal I learned that the old gentleman was the recently retired School Party Secretary, and ‘a good man’. Afterwards, the Head of Administration asked one of our

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fellow-diners, a man called Cheng, to help us sort out our accommodation in the Party School guesthouse. That evening, we were invited to dinner by Ni, who had come as soon as he had heard of our arrival. Also in attendance were half a dozen section directors and teachers. The wine flowed freely and drinking games were played. The Henan tradition of lavishing hospitality on guests was prevalent even among officials and academics. As for me, it was a question of when in Rome, do as the Romans do. With regard to my research, Ni expressed his wholehearted support, and delegated two of the teachers, Ma and Cheng, to escort us. Ma was a man in his forties, a graduate in economics from Zhengzhou University, while Cheng was a philosophy graduate from the same university. After dinner, Ni drove Yang back to Zhumadian while Ma and Cheng walked back to the guesthouse with me and we discussed the Xinyang trip. I explained to them why and how I carried out my research, and stressed that data obtained from private interviews were for research purposes only, and in general did not involve using names of actual people or places. Thus there was no danger of creating problems for the local Party and government. Cheng said that in the past couple of years, they had had several visits from the New China News Agency and Central TV reporters. The resulting reportage had alarmed and shaken local officials. It had therefore been decreed (they had even put it in writing) that no reporters and researchers were allowed unless their visit was organised by the city (regional) or county Propaganda Departments. And there were only two possible outcomes if you went via the Propaganda Department. First, an official accompanied you throughout your trip, and you were only allowed to go to approved places; all you would find out in interviews with approved people were things which they had discussed and agreed in advance. The second was that they would use any pretext— albeit with the greatest courtesy—to get rid of you. If you avoided going through approved channels and went direct to villages and households, there would be trouble or even danger. ‘That’s why I’ve avoided official channels and have come through the Party School system in the hope that you can help me,’ I responded. ‘You could take me to see county and xiang officials who are your old students, ideally ones who have graduated from university and are capable of thinking independently. If I am introduced as a friend, as a fellow intellectual, then they would trust me enough to talk about mutual concerns. And then, maybe some of the Party School teachers could take me to their home villages and I could talk to their family and friends. That way I can get to see and hear about really significant problems at village level.’ ‘Finding local officials to talk to would not present a problem,’ said Ma. ‘We’ve invited you to the Party School to give lectures. If we’re with you, they’ll talk openly. Besides, officials are unpopular with ordinary people at the moment, and officials are always being complained about—so anyone in an official position always has plenty to bellyache about. But the problem will come if you try to get to the villages without going through official channels. As soon as officials get wind of it, they’ll think you’re collecting material on their “poor performance”. Nothing you say will make any difference. Also, the people might think you’re an investigative TV reporter, or an official of integrity sent to sniff out corruption. So you would have to be taken there by an official. And if one of our teachers were to go with you to their home village, that might cause trouble for their family.’

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We eventually decided that the focus of my visits would be three counties and xiangs where I would carry out private interviews with officials. As for visits to villages, we would have to play that by ear. We decided to limit the trip provisionally to a week. Tomorrow, as Ni had arranged, I would lecture to all the teachers on the topic of ‘The small peasant economy under the contract system and the conduct of local government’. The day after, we would set off for Guangshan County.

Tensions between Party and people It was raining again, and looked set to continue for several days. It seemed as if even God was against me getting to do research in the villages. At 8.30 I began my talk to a hundred or so teachers and students of the Xinyang Regional Party School. My lecture focused on three main themes: the peasantry under the Household Contract Responsibility System for land; the role and sphere of influence of the local government executive; and labour migration between agriculture and industry and commerce, that is between village and town or city. I had given this talk several times, but on this occasion intended to develop my arguments further. For this reason, I have set down the main points below. While it was true that there were common features in exchange mechanisms and modes of behaviour between the peasants under the current land system and the peasants under past systems both of private land ownership and of collectivisation, there were also newly emerging differences. In my view, there was a fourfold structure of exchange mechanisms which operated under the current contract system, which could be summarised as ‘upward, downward, inward and outward’. Downward exchange was between the peasants and their contracted land: the peasants invested seed, fertiliser and effort, the land gave grain in return. New features in this ancient mode of exchange included the almost universal tendency of present-day peasants to form what sociologists call the nuclear family—father, mother, children. As an agricultural production unit, these were even more fragile than the traditional extended family, as if even one working family member was unable to work, it had a serious effect on the family’s economic activity. Then there was the nature of the land contract: a short-term contract favoured the maintenance of equitable distribution of the land but discouraged long-term investment in the land by the peasants; a long-term contract had the opposite effect. Additionally, most peasant families now worked in other jobs as well as farming. In farming communities in the undeveloped interior of China, this generally meant seasonal migration into labouring jobs by those whose labour was surplus to agricultural requirements. Thus the labourers benefited both from work invested in the land, and from the opportunities and income which accrued from their labouring jobs. When we reached the point where most rural incomes came from non-agricultural sources, then farming could be undertaken on a larger scale. By upward exchange, I was referring to ‘exchanges’ between the peasants and local government or the state. The peasants had always accepted the payment of grain taxes as their lot. In return, they expected local officials to take decisions on their behalf. Although in the peasants’ political consciousness democracy, or rule by the people, did not exist, they still required local officials to rule for the benefit of the people. While this

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may have been their hope rather than their right, it was nevertheless a duty which local officials could not ignore. The greatest source of dissatisfaction among the peasants nowadays was not that local government imposed too heavy a tax burden on them but that they did little or nothing for the peasants in return. If this was the only kind of relationship between peasants and government then it would lead to major problems— that lesson had been learnt only too frequently in Chinese history. By inward exchange I meant the exchange of goods and labour which took place within the peasants’ network of personal contacts—the gift-giving, invitations to dinner and cultivation of friendships which were so familiar in China and which served to help solve problems and difficulties which the single family unit could not resolve singlehanded. In this way, ties of kinship and friendship became economic and social relationships, and could indeed be considered the most habitual and widespread mode of exchange not just among the peasantry but throughout Chinese society. This essentially rural mode of social intercourse had permeated the local political and legal process and was infiltrating the currently developing market economy, leading to abuses on a vast scale. The problem, I warned my listeners, was that on the one hand such exchange relationships were widely regarded as permissible in rural society, but, on the other hand, in a modern political and legal context they sometimes became a sort of corruption. Outward exchange referred to the relationship between the small peasant economy and the market. Under the current contract system, all families received a parcel of land of much the same small size, in which they were able to invest very similar amounts. Therefore the reaction of each individual family to the market prices of agricultural sidelines was also going to be identical. Every time prices were favourable, they scrambled on the bandwagon; and when prices dropped they leapt off again. This often meant that the years went by and they made no headway at all. Many local officials did not understand this and, full of good intentions to ‘make the people rich’, just made matters worse, inducing in the peasants rancour against the government and a fear of the market. What was the solution? In some areas, new company-peasant co-operation schemes had been set up, thus, as it were, making one big ship out of a flotilla of little boats. However, the problem was still that the great market ‘ocean’ might capsize the ship. And the precondition for the effective implementation of a scheme like this was the peasants’ willingness to co-operate and ability to keep agreements. Used to dealing through personal relationships, they had no experience of drawing up and adhering to a contract between equal parties with shared interests. The challenge facing local officialdom was how to teach the peasants, by example, about contracts, and how to encourage cooperation. It had been and continued to be common in Henan for there to be direct local government intervention in this small peasant economy. The peasants were ordered to plant this and rear that, by cadres who still lived mentally in the planned economy. The watchword was to get rich, but the peasants continued to lose money. Instances of this were legion. Finally, Henan was a predominantly agricultural province, yet the average land per capita was only 1.2 mu, which explained why there was so much surplus labour in the countryside. Those who took labouring jobs on a seasonal basis were pejoratively known as migrant workers, yet they had nothing in common with the landless migrant workers

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of old: they had the security of a home base, and of their contract land. In the slack season they took the opportunity to earn a bit of money elsewhere, and in the busy season returned home, laboriously tilled their patch and harvested the fruits. This seasonal migration represented the most important force behind economic development since the beginning of the reforms, and it was one that would endure for the foreseeable future. Families who relied purely on farming were now a minority, but peasants who had moved the whole family to the city were in an even smaller minority. In the vast majority of cases, the chief wage earners of the family, both men and women, worked between city and country according to the season. In outlook and values they were becoming urbanised, yet, like it or not, they were destined to retain their rural roots. However, in the process of this transformation these men and women found innumerable obstacles placed in their way, and the resentment that this aroused was one of the direct causes of a breakdown of law and order in town and countryside—something which all levels of local government would do well to recognise. My talk got a very favourable reception, and I was suddenly surrounded by people promising help and support for my research work. Ma was among the most enthusiastic and agreed to introduce me, that afternoon, to a retired history teacher who could tell me more about the Xinyang Affair of thirty-eight years previously. The teacher in question was a man in his sixties, with an impressive grasp of the history of Henan from the Southern Song to the Qing dynasty, and from the change of course of the Yellow River in 1855 to the military consequences of breaching of the dyke at Huayuankou, Zhengzhou, in 1938, and the resulting sufferings of the people. However, when I raised with him the causes and effects of the Xinyang Affair, he showed a marked unwillingness to respond. Ma went to some lengths to explain my mission and to reassure him, but all he would say was: ‘The Xinyang region at that time had seventeen counties, including eight counties which are now part of Zhumadian region. No one knows how many out of their total population of around 8 million people died of hunger—no figures have been collected. Conjectures have been made, but they vary greatly. The lowest figure is 400,000, the highest nearly a million, with other guesses falling somewhere in between. We’ll probably never know the truth.’ I thought of a famous saying of Thomas Hobbes: if a simple geometric law violated someone’s interests, then it would be regarded as a lie. The truth was that there was no such thing as a sociological fact independent of interests or value judgements. What were known as historical records were far from being real history. It was by no means easy to lift the lid, to clear away enshrouding interests and taboos, and get a clear view of reality. That evening Ma, Lei and Cheng paid me a visit. My lecture that morning had brought us all much closer together. Since, as teachers, they had intimate knowledge of how local officials worked and, at the same time, retained close ties with the villages from which they originated, I began by asking them about local political tensions. They agreed, after an initial hesitation, to try to give honest answers to two key questions which I put to them: what was the current state of play in relations between the government and party cadres, on the one hand, and ordinary people on the other? And what was the likelihood of this continuing series of complaints by peasants to a higher level of government escalating into a peasant uprising? With regard to local political relationships, they quoted to me a saying which was going the rounds and which, they said, reflected people’s general feeling. It was to the

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effect that in the 1950s and 1960s, cadres and masses were as inseparable as fish in water; in the 1980s, they were beginning to separate like oil and water, and by the 1990s they were as incompatible as fire and water. According to the xiang and village cadres for whose education and training the Party School was responsible, their chief tasks since the 1990s had been to put funds into local government coffers and give women abortions. If problems arose, their bosses criticised them for ineffectual and heavy-handed management, while the villagers accused them of corruption worse than that of the old Guomindang. The xiang and village cadres found themselves caught in the middle. Mountainous Xinyang had historically been a poor area, with scarce resources and prone to natural disasters, bounded as it was by the Dabie Mountains in the south and the upper Huai river plains in the north. Arable land averaged 1–3 mu per capita, and with frequent droughts the crop yield was unreliable, yet agricultural levies continued to rise remorselessly, albeit with annual and regional differences. In some cases, local government was taking roughly half of the peasants’ gross agricultural income. My companions themselves had done a few calculations with the village elders back home and reckoned that farm inputs took one-third of their product, they kept one-third, and the government took one-third. Life was tough if you had no income other than from agriculture, and local people who took labouring jobs did so not so much in order to get on in life and earn some money, but because the burden of agricultural levies had forced them into it. When the government talked about levies they did not include huge extra birth fines, yet in Xinyang it was very common to have one extra child, and so fines were correspondingly widespread. Apparently in some xiangs such fines amounted to between Y700,000 and Y1 million annually—or about the same as the xiang’s entire annual revenue from other sources. In families which had been fined, almost all their annual farm income went to the government. My companions told me that Xinyang region was made up of one city and nine counties. Apart from some villages on the outskirts of the city and county towns, the vast majority had no rural enterprises. Overall, the industrial base was very weak, particularly since most of the county-owned state enterprises had lost money and closed down, leaving the counties almost entirely reliant on farm taxes as a result. So a limited agricultural output not only had to support the peasants themselves, but also an ever expanding corps of local functionaries—and this was one of the main reasons for local tensions. When officials and the peasants talked about the burden of agricultural levies, they meant two different things: the former were referring only to what went into village and xiang funds, the latter to everything that officialdom took out of the peasants’ pockets. The central government had required levies which went towards local government budgets to be reduced to 5 per cent of each person’s previous year’s income, and all the xiangs had produced statistics to prove that they had achieved this (some had actually done so). On the other hand, they used any excuse to collect additional contributions from the peasants, which caused continual complaints, but from the point of view of local government this was the only way to balance the budget. My companions then addressed my second question. They agreed that there was a degree of antagonism between local government and the people, for all the reasons they had already mentioned. An indication of this antagonism was the unending stream of official complaints lodged by groups of peasants. Yet these were limited to groups from

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one or several villages and did not yet amount to collective protest across one or more counties. The tone of the complaints was generally mild and rarely turned into violent behaviour. Rather than seeing these incidents as a portent of large-scale popular protests, it would be more accurate to interpret them as a safety valve. They gave me three reasons for this judgement. Historically speaking, peasants only revolted when driven by hunger, as the vast majority were by nature law-abiding and timid. Xinyang was the poorest part of Henan, yet even here the basic needs of the peasants were being met. Of course, they would be in difficulties if they were hit by a major natural disaster, but in that case the state could be relied on to come to their aid. Second, most of the peasantry in China’s interior preferred to believe that central government issued good edicts which were wrongly interpreted by local officials. Local government, to them, meant xiang and village cadres, and certainly went no higher than county level. So lodging official complaints meant going over the heads of xiang and village cadres to city (regional), provincial or even central government—which showed how the peasants still had confidence that the higher levels of government were working in their interests. Finally, with modern communications, it would be easy for central and provincial government to apprehend and put a stop to large-scale protest. They all agreed that the key issue was ideology. The 14th Chinese Communist Party Congress had reported that the two main questions, what is socialism and how to build it, had basically been resolved. Yet most local cadres coming to the Party School for their training did not feel it had been resolved at all, nor did many of their teachers. It was hard to deny that current theory lacked the answers to the new problems being thrown up by the reform process. It was difficult for the broad mass of the peasantry, groaning under exorbitant taxes, to believe that local officialdom represented their interests. Ordinary people who saw increasing disparity between rich and poor did not believe in the socialist goal of common prosperity, and local cadres did not believe in it either. Why then become an official? At study sessions at the Party School, it was not unusual for the conversation among the cadres to revolve around two main themes—promotion and women. Many officials were only in the job in order to line their own pockets. Party members and cadres could no longer be united under the banner of socialism and commonly held beliefs, and this was an inherent and systemic cause of official corruption. Moreover, with the current emphasis on making personal fortunes in market economic conditions, was it possible to have a government of integrity, united under a common socialist ideology? We were all pessimistic on these issues. We talked on until midnight. Outside my room, it continued to pour with rain.

Tobacco and cotton—crops doomed to fail In the early morning the drizzle stopped, although the sky was still overcast and threatened more rain. As we had planned yesterday, Ma and Lei were to escort me today to visit a xiang and a village. We would then go to meet the Guangshan County head, a Mr Liu, a friend of Ma’s from his student days, for discussions on matters of mutual interest.

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It so happened that the head of H xiang was on a course at the Party School. Ma asked him to take us to H xiang in his car (a Santana saloon). As we drove, he told us something of his xiang. H xiang was situated in the hills 35 kilometres south east of Xinyang City. It had a total area of 225,000 mu, half of which was plains and the rest hilly. The population was 41,000, divided into eighteen administrative villages (around a hundred natural villages) and there were 60,000 mu of arable land. This figure had been fixed during the land reform of the early 1950s, and had not been changed since. There were about 100,000 mu in total if you added in the hill land brought under cultivation since Liberation on top of this, but the official figure was still 60,000 mu. The xiang head told us that it was common practice in hilly areas for the reported arable acreage to be less than the real figure, H xiang was not alone in this. Both 1994 and 1995 had been drought years, but 1996 had been a good year with a bumper harvest. The wheat yield had averaged 506 catties per mu, and rice 1,060 catties. However, these figures were calculated on the basis of the 60,000 mu area, so of course the real figure was not as high as that. Agriculture in these parts was still largely ruled by the climate: in times of drought and floods, they would often be short of grain, while when the weather was good, everyone would have a surplus. Because the crop yield was unreliable, animal husbandry in most families was limited to breeding a couple of pigs a year. Some families had sheep and cattle too. Rural enterprises consisted of a few small shops. There was no industry. The people did farm work in the busy season, and in the slack season went off to find labouring jobs—their chief source of cash income. Those families who relied solely on farming were very poor. Xiang revenues still came wholly from agriculture; as a consequence there was only enough to pay for the upkeep of the teachers and cadres, with none left over for any other initiatives. We arrived at a run-down market town. Apart from the xiang government compound, there was just a post office, a credit co-operative, a supply and marketing co-operative, half a dozen shops and a few score houses. In recent years, apart from keeping its functionaries alive, the xiang had actually undertaken a few projects, the chief of which was a 20-kilometre tarmac road linking the town with highway NR107. They had just bought two cars (one for the xiang Party Secretary and one for the xiang head) and also owned an old Beijing jeep and another car used for visitors and for transporting goods. Even though the new road was intended for the new cars, it had actually made communications easier for the villagers too. They had also built a two-storey xiang office building. These three things absolutely had to be done, even if the xiang was poor. I did not like to enquire too closely into how much they had spent on them. The xiang head had to return to the Party School, and the head of the xiang militia, who was on duty, was delegated to take us to a village. Dirt roads led from the xiang government building to the villages and, with the stickiness of the local soil and the recent rain, the tractors had turned them into a quagmire. Our first visit was to B Village and our guide advised taking the jeep. Since the head of the xiang militia was in charge of conscription locally, I took the opportunity to ask him about it as we drove. He told me that they had been ordered by the county to conscript sixteen people this year, but over a hundred had already put their names down. When I asked why they were so keen, he replied: There are lots of advantages to the peasants in joining up. They can do army training, see the world and maybe learn a useful skill, which will help them get a job

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when they leave the army. Also, they get to keep their contracted land but are exempt from agricultural levies. And when they’re serving, they get a subsidy equivalent to 70 per cent of the average per capita income in the xiang.’ The Village Committee Office in B Village was a row of old-style, single-storey buildings set within a square walled compound. There were four or five offices, empty apart from a single accountant busy doing the family planning figures. The Village Party Secretary was quickly sent for. The latter was a man in his thirties, an upper middle school graduate. According to our guide, all eighteen Village Party Secretaries in this xiang were now both young and educated. Those who were not middle school graduates were ex-army. As usual we began by talking about the village, its clan make-up and labour migration—questions about sensitive issues like excess births and agricultural levies would have to wait until the right moment arose. Visits always took this course, even more so if I was accompanied by a local official. B Village had a population of 2,579, on 3,624 mu of arable land and living in eleven natural villages, each of which corresponded to a Villagers’ Group. All eleven were ‘majority surname’ villages, occupied by families with one or two main surnames, together with a few minor ones. The Bs occupied three villages, and the Ds another two, so that the B and D clans together made up 60 per cent of the entire population of the administrative village. My guess was that the Village Party Secretary and the village head would most likely be from one of these two families and, on asking, confirmed that this was correct: the former was a B, and the latter a D. Under collectivisation, village cadres would have been appointed on the basis of their class origin. Now that the land was farmed by individual families, in many cases clan origin tended to be the determining factor. It would be worth doing research to find out if this tendency prevailed everywhere. The Party Secretary told us that B and D were originally brothers-in-law who had migrated here at the beginning of the Qing dynasty from Macheng in Hubei Province. The original clan records had been lost after Liberation. It was only at the beginning of the 1970s that members of B and D clans were allowed to intermarry, and this had become common by the 1980s and 1990s, but intermarriage was still not permitted within each clan. The old custom of naming children and grandchildren according to their position in the family hierarchy still persisted.12 Migration of surplus labour ‘The village has no enterprises,’ said the Party Secretary, ‘so almost all the young and able-bodied go off to get jobs in town during the slack season, mainly to Beijing and Shenzhen. Some settle there long term, and even move their families.’ And he told me of a typical case. The Wu family in this village had two daughters and six sons. Both daughters had married and moved away, and the two eldest sons had done likewise and set up their own homes. By 1982 the four youngest sons, aged 15, 12, 9 and 6, were still at home being brought up by the mother on her own, as the father had died. Decollectivisation had not been a good thing for the family—they were short of food and life was extremely hard. The Wus’ near neighbours, the Weis, had a daughter who had been sent to Beijing for some reason after Liberation in the early 1950s, had studied there, married and had a job. She had come back to visit her family in 1982 and, seeing

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the Wus in such dire straits, thought of a way to help them: she took the 15-year-old back to Beijing with her, and got him a job in a restaurant with a salary of Y30 a month. This was the first case of someone getting a job away from home in the village, indeed in the xiang. The boy was hard-working and intelligent, and within a few years had risen from clearing tables and washing dishes to being the restaurant chef. He had a secure job and a good income. As time went by, he gradually brought all his brothers to Beijing to work in the restaurant industry, leaving just the oldest and the mother to tend all the family’s contracted land. According to the Party Secretary, 145 people from this and neighbouring villages had got jobs in Beijing either through the Wu brothers or others who had followed them. The effects of one boy leaving had spread like ripples on a pond. Around a hundred people had also gone to work in Shenzhen; he was not clear on how they had managed it. There were 600 families in the village, and 300–400 people among them were seasonal migrants: in the slack season they worked elsewhere, and in the busy season and at Spring Festival returned home. A few score people worked away all year round, and a dozen or so families had moved away for good, and settled in town. They kept their houses but gave back their contracted land to the village or subcontracted it to relatives or friends. His impression (he did not have any figures for this) was that those villagers who had no income from external work made up 20 per cent or so, not more than 30 per cent at most. I wanted to know more about housing: in the 1950s and 1960s, the norm was for homes in rural China to be built of adobe and thatch (or adobe inside and faced with brick outside), that is to say in a style which had remained largely unchanged for millennia. In the twenty years up until the beginning of the 1990s, there had been a gradual shift to brick-built single-storey homes with tiled roofs. In Suiping County, nearly all homes were of this modern type, but in many villages in Zhengyang, Xincai and Pingyu Counties, this historical leap was by no means complete. At the same time, a new generation of two-storey houses was beginning to appear. Just from the type of homes people lived in, we could learn a great deal about three questions: first, the degree of economic development in the last twenty years in villages in China’s interior; second, the increasing gap between development in the interior and on the coast; finally, the incipient disparity between rich and poor in the interior. The Party Secretary told me that before the mid-1970s, the majority of village homes were of adobe and thatch, and some had tiled roofs. A very few homes had been brickbuilt and tiled at that time, and these had largely been the homes of rich families before Liberation. More recently built homes were single-storeyed and of brick and tile construction, and their number had increased rapidly since the allocation of land to individual families, due to the money earned by migrant workers. A strong motive for the young men, in particular, to migrate in search of work was to earn enough money to build a house and take a wife. Of the 600 village families, 60–70 per cent now lived in singlestorey brick and tile homes, costing between Y10,000 (for less good quality houses) and Y20,000 (for better constructions). In the last couple of years, people had begun to build houses of more than one storey, though these only accounted for 10 per cent of dwellings–15 per cent at most. The remainder were traditional mud-walled, thatched dwellings. Some families would build themselves a new brick and tile house and keep the old adobe and thatch house to use as a kitchen, pig pen or storage for tools and fodder. Others would move into town and keep the old village home as a ‘base’. Most of these

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were unoccupied. Some people still lived in the old-style adobe houses—they were either elderly or poor families without a migrant worker’s income. When young people got married now, it would not do if they did not have a decent, brick and tile, three- or fourroomed house to move into. And nowadays the fashion had changed yet again—now they wanted two-storeyed houses. As regards diet, the Party Secretary told me that, apart from a very small number of families, everyone could feed and clothe themselves now. Most families were self-sufficient in vegetables, although they ate meat only occasionally. We finished our meeting, and I asked the Party Secretary if he would take us to visit a few families nearby. The village streets were muddy, and it was difficult to walk far in our leather shoes. We therefore chose the nearest home. This was a single small compound enclosing a three-roomed brick and tile home, a separate kitchen and a pig pen with two pigs. A young man of around 20 sat in the doorway eating sweet potatoes out of a bowl. He looked ill. The home belonged to a middle-aged couple; the man was thin and taciturn, but the woman was quite garrulous. Seeing us arriving with the Party Secretary, armed with questions about how they lived and how much they earned, she must have taken me for some bigwig on a rural inspection visit. With my first question, she immediately launched into a litany of complaints. ‘You officials live in town, eat well, dress well and live well. Look at us peasants! You officials have all the luck, all we’re left with is hardship.’ I wanted to ask her in what way the peasants were suffering, but looking at the embarrassment on the faces of my companions, the Party Secretary and the head of the xiang militia, I desisted. I also decided to cancel my plans to visit any more peasant homes, and they looked very relieved. On the way back to the Village Party Office building, the Party Secretary volunteered an answer to one of the questions I had felt unable to raise: ‘The agricultural levies in these parts really are very heavy. I shouldn’t say this, as Party Secretary, but it’s the truth.’ I pressed him for more details. ‘The central and provincial governments keep sending down directives about keeping the levies to within 5 per cent of income per capita for the previous year, and we’ve succeeded in that. But our superiors have found other ways to increase the burden on the peasants. What really arouses most resentment in ordinary people is the enforced planting of tobacco and cotton. We’ve never grown them here, because we don’t have the right soil or climate conditions, but it’s been imposed on us by the County Party Committee and government, so what can we do? All the xiangs and villages are told they have to cultivate a certain acreage of each crop, so we have to make the peasants do it. They have to plant a certain proportion of their contracted land with tobacco and cotton. It’s just too much to ask, to have to force the peasants to grow crops which we know will die. Some plant a token patch but the majority don’t plant any, because they know there’ll be no harvest. The county don’t care. What they care about is the difference between the state price for cotton and tobacco and the price on the open market, and achieving the per capita sales target figure. Last year the county set a target of 30 catties of cotton per head, and the price was fixed at Y1.5–Y1.7 per catty. But the market price was Y3.5–Y3.8–a difference of Y2 per catty, or Y60 per 30–catty target. The same goes for tobacco, so that’s a total of Y120 per person.13 When you add the stipulated Y80 regular levy to that,

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it means that last year each peasant faced a tax burden of Y200. And that doesn’t include the budget for the village primary schools and xiang roads.’ The Party Secretary continued (by this time the head of militia and Lei and Ma were walking ahead of us): ‘The peasants were able to cope with last year’s levies, but I’m afraid this year’s will be too much for them. We are all getting worried.’ ‘Why?’ I asked in surprise. ‘Last year, the county required us to put 3,000 mu under tobacco. This year, they’ve increased it to 8,000 mu, just like that! It’s the same with cotton. If you think about it, 3,000 mu of tobacco plus 3,000 mu of cotton means everyone in the xiang pays Y120; if we have to grow nearly three times that amount, each peasant will be facing a bill for about Y350! Add to that the taxes which go into village and xiang funds, and it’s all too much.’ The Village Party Secretary’s words were enough to explain the indignation of the peasant woman I had spoken to. We all returned to the xiang government headquarters together in the jeep. Just outside the small town the road was steep and slippery after the rain. The jeep accelerated, skidded and stuck fast; there was nothing for it but to get out. The Party Secretary called some peasants over. They began to push the jeep up the road, the mud thrown up by the wheels spattering them all over. There were two stores by the roadside, and while this was going on I walked over to see what was on sale. The two stores were housed in a two-storey building: the left-hand store was shabby, but the right-hand one had tiled walls and windows with aluminium alloy frames and tinted glass, very ‘modern’ for a village where simple, single-storeyed houses were the norm. I asked the woman sitting on the left-hand doorstep washing vegetables how much it had cost to build. She told me that theirs had cost Y20,000–30,000, and the next-door one Y50,000–60,000. Just at that moment her husband came along pushing a bicycle, and we struck up a conversation. He was the village primary school teacher, earning Y160–170 per month. He had been employed by the villagers themselves and had his own contract land in the village, so his salary was much lower than that of a publicly employed primary teacher (who could expect Y300–400 monthly). He too complained of the local levies, which had risen from Y200–250 in former years to a current Y300. There were five of them in his family, and they had already paid an exorbitant Y1,600 in taxes and faced more to come. His entire year’s wages as a teacher was taken by the government. He had two sons and a daughter, which was two ‘excess births’ for which they had been fined Y12,000 payable over fourteen years, so that the annual payment on the fine was nearly Y1,000. It was hard to imagine how this middle-aged couple managed to bring up three children, still less build a house costing Y20,000–30,000, while labouring under such a debt burden. I could not help marvelling at the ability of the Chinese peasant to survive and adapt. I was just asking the man about the family income when the Party Secretary, who had by now changed out of his muddy clothes, came over and asked if I would care to come to his home. It was only then that I realised that the eye-catching building next door was his. He had built it the year before, and it was divided into the family living quarters, upstairs, and the downstairs shop, which sold everything from general goods to pesticides and fertilisers and was managed by his wife. I wondered how on earth a man who had been Village Party Secretary for a couple of years could afford to build a house costing Y50,000–60,000.

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By the time we got back to the xiang government offices, it was 2 p.m. We lunched, and then the head of the xiang militia arranged for a car to take us back to Xinyang County Town. From there, we left for Guangshan County. We travelled south on the NR312 through gently rolling country, the foothills of the Taihang mountain range. To the north, plains stretched as far as the eye could see—here we were at the southern tip of the Yellow and Huai river plains. Ma told me that the geography of the whole Xinyang area fell into three distinct parts: in the south were the mountains, in the middle, hills, and to the north, the plains. Five main tributaries flowed out of the Taihang Mountains, northward to join the Huai River. The mountain and hill country was prone to drought, while the plains flooded easily. Xinyang had historically suffered from both flood and drought, and had been a very backward region. In 1958 Chairman Mao issued a call to bring the Huai River under control, and the people of Xinyang had worked long and hard to build a reservoir at the head of each of the five tributaries. These measures had gone some way to halting the flood-drought cycle, but had not caused the Xinyang peasants’ hand-to-mouth existence to change in any fundamental respect. As Ma pointed out to me, it was hard to effect a radical cure for poverty which stemmed from adverse environmental conditions. Before Liberation, Xinyang had been one of a number of strongly revolutionary areas, almost all of which were extremely poor. He listed some famous rebels and revolutionaries who came from this and neighbouring counties. Since Ma was an economics professor, I asked him: ‘How is it possible to bring prosperity to the peasants of Xinyang?’ ‘That’s a question we’ve discussed many times,’ he responded. ‘It used to be thought that prosperity could only come through industry, so we put a lot of effort into that area, but our rural enterprises were just money down the drain, very few were profitable. Our leather-processing workshops, the paper-making factories and breweries were all highly polluting to the environment and gave low returns. Yet we all recognise that the peasants will never get rich through agriculture, because there are too many of them on too little land. Under the contract system, the smallholdings are tiny and the parcels of land scattered. Even if production is doubled on each person’s 1 or 2 mu, it will only make them a little less poor. Second, the returns on sales of agricultural sidelines are too low. Plus, in Xinyang, the environment is unfavourable to agriculture, with frequent floods and drought. When we talk about targets for economic development around here, we’re not talking about how to get rich quick, but how to escape poverty, how to ensure that the basic needs of the peasants are met and that they have a small surplus. ‘The key issues that our local officials really ought to be concentrating on are irrigation projects and better communications. The hill land is always prone to drought, even though the Huai tributaries mean there’s plenty of water. Similarly, the plains flood not just because there’s too much water but because of a lack of drainage works. Poor communications are an even more basic reason for economic backwardness in the hill areas. I became keenly aware of this when I did a two-year training stint as head of a Xinyang hill xiang. The problem is that irrigation works and roads require huge cash inputs, far more than the revenues available from the agricultural surplus. The old commune system could mobilise labour and materials on a grand scale, and with financial support from central government we built several large reservoirs and irrigation systems, from which some areas of Xinyang still benefit. We can’t organise big water conservancy projects like that any more. The basic problem nowadays is that local government is

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asking too much of our peasants, and the levies are increasing year by year. Practically speaking, taxes mop up almost all of their surplus. So how are the peasants supposed to make improvements to their farms? The officials don’t take grain and cash off the peasants in order to improve conditions for local agriculture—they do it to feather their own nests, or to set up prestige projects which enhance their reputation. Nowhere is this more disturbingly obvious than in the poorest areas. It is one of the key reasons for rural poverty and backwardness in Xinyang. The chief thing that’s needed around here is reform of local government. But that’s something that you can talk about all you want, but it won’t happen.’ I could not help concurring heartily with all that Ma was saying. At 5.30 that afternoon, the three of us made a quick trip to G County, in the centre of the Xinyang region. Since it was proving so difficult to carry out field research in the villages, the purpose of this trip was to interview some of Ma’s friends who worked in G county government, in particular the county head. Ma had told me something of this man—a politics graduate from Henan University in 1984, he had held several posts in Hubei and Henan provincial governments in the following eight years. In 1993 he had volunteered himself for a job at county level, and had been Deputy Party Secretary in G County before being promoted to county head. He was a bold man of action, but could also write—indeed, he had published some poems. Although he had left the academic life to become an official, he retained great respect for academics and enjoyed mixing with intelligent, educated people. Officials like him who were prepared to give you their considered opinion on important issues were thin on the ground in Xinyang. ‘Liu will have plenty to say to you on the subject of Xinyang’s peasants, agriculture, villages and local government cadres,’ was how Ma put it to me. On hearing that we had come to see the county head, the manager of the county office, a young man in his thirties, gave us a warm welcome. ‘Mr Liu left early this morning for a regional Party Committee meeting,’ he told us. ‘He’ll probably be back by about noon tomorrow. He’s asked me to look after you in the meantime.’ He called someone to take our suitcases to our rooms, and himself took us to the dining room for a meal. After eating we returned to the guesthouse for a rest, and I suggested to Ma that he take me to visit one of his friends. We therefore set off for the house of a Mr Zhang, the director of the county office of the CPPCC.14 We came to a long row of old-style, singlestorey houses, divided up into four or five courtyards, in one of which stood the house we were looking for. Ma’s friend had gone out to dinner, but his wife phoned to tell her husband of our arrival. Our host was a man in his forties, and had something of the middle school teacher about him. Ma explained the reason for our visit. The following were the main points of our discussion. The finances of G County and its xiangs, and the question of agricultural levies G County was a traditionally agricultural county with a population of 700,000–800,000 people and, as such, was poor. There was less than 1 mu of rice paddy per capita, or a bit more than 1 mu if you counted in the hill land and slopes. Even in xiangs where there was less pressure on the land, there were only 2 mu of arable land per capita, and this had to

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meet the basic needs of the peasants and was the main source of local government revenues. No wonder the peasants often felt that agricultural levies were a heavy burden. Yet government revenues were barely enough to meet everyday expenditure—this meant that cadres’ monthly salaries were often not paid on time. Education ate up a large part of the local government budget, and even so, the proportion of children enrolling in the county’s lower and higher middle schools was lower than it was during the period of the communes. Communes all used to have a higher middle school; now there were only a couple in the whole county. Many of the boys felt they would not get into higher middle school, and so preferred to drop out of lower middle school and get a labouring job like their fathers and brothers. Running local government and the management style of cadres ‘There are a number of problems associated with the way local government is run at the moment,’ said Zhang. ‘The departments employ too many people and they are not very effective.’ And he proceeded to tell me the same tale of self-serving and dishonest management which I had heard many times before. ‘At county level, cadres fall into four main groups: those working for the Party Committee, the county government, the local People’s Congress, and the CPPCC. Most of these cadres are so busy that their duties even consume their Sunday leisure time. And what are those duties? Hospitality work of all kinds, and coping with all sorts of inspections from provincial and regional governments. That’s what keeps county and xiang cadres busy. So they have no energy left for researching local problems or promoting the local economy. We know this has to stop, but how? This is what it’s like at all levels of local government in the interior, and nothing’s been done to change it. In recent years, because of the veto policy, we’ve had hordes of inspection teams descending on us from provincial and regional governments—you’ve just seen one group off and another arrives and each group has to be properly entertained. None of these teams care about real results—their work is just pure formalism. It’s a complete waste of our time and money, and it’s very damaging. I put it to Zhang that in counties which lacked the support of industry and commerce and where local government and the peasants competed for surplus farm income, the peasants’ tax burden was much higher than that levied on people in the coastal, developed regions, whether calculated in relative or absolute terms. In these circumstances, could he envisage collective protests from the peasants county-wide or even involving several counties? It seemed that, experienced local official though he was, this crucial question had never crossed his mind. For some time there was no response, and then he answered hesitantly, ‘No, no, surely not! Things are a long way from being as bad as that!’ I asked him what he based his judgement on. He thought, and then said: ‘It’s true the levies are very heavy, and the peasants complain bitterly about them. But they have enough to live on in G County and, indeed, in the whole of the Xinyang region. How well they eat is another matter, but at least they don’t go hungry, so they won’t rebel. I’m sure they won’t. The tax situation is different in each of the Xinyang counties, and even within each county. We’ve never done any statistical studies on the question, but taxes range from Y100 to Y500 per person per year. It’s possible that certain xiang

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may levy more than that but only on an occasional basis. The average would be Y200– 300. If these taxes were paid only from the families’ income from farm product sales, then they would be too heavy. ‘But in this county, most families have some non-agricultural income, mainly from outside jobs. If you add that income in, then most families can afford it. If they can’t, then they can appeal to the county, and they’ll deal with the problem. In our county, we’ve dealt with many such incidents. Integrated Social Control and the veto system impose constraints on county and xiang cadres, so they can’t just increase levies as they like. Collective protests have been limited to one or, at most, a few villages, and hardly ever involve a whole xiang. As for county-wide protests, that would really be serious for the officials, and I’m sure it would never happen.’ Zhang’s analysis was more or less consistent with the discussion of the previous evening. We talked till after 11 p.m., and then said goodnight and made our way back to the guesthouse.

One person can make or break a kingdom In the morning, Ma arranged a meeting for me at my guesthouse with the director of the County CPPCC, the deputy director of the County Organisational Department, the deputy secretary of the County Disciplinary Committee and the director of the County Policy Research Office. They respected Ma as their teacher, and he was about of their age and they also knew Lei, so this meant the conversation flowed easily, even though the topics of conversation were by no means easy. Local political corruption and disciplinary and supervisory system The supervisory system as it existed today, they told me, gave every appearance of being well structured. The Disciplinary Committee and the Supervisory Department, the People’s Congress and the collective responsibility system of the Party Committee all had monitoring roles. But in fact it was a complete scandal: these organisations were just there for decoration. Even if they had any functions, they were very limited. All local government powers resided in the Party Committee, and all power there was in the hands of the Party Secretary—that is, just one person. This had its advantages and disadvantages: it all depended on the integrity and competence of that person in each county and xiang. That person could make or break the prosperity of his domain. If they were a democratic sort of person, they would involve the whole Party Committee in the decision-making process; if not, then they could act like petty dictators. A person of integrity in this position could do a great deal of good for the people; on the other hand, there was nothing to check someone who was out to feather their own nest. ‘Implementing the rule of law’ nowadays really means imposing rule by officials or, to be more precise, rule by one person. The Deputy Secretary of the County Disciplinary Committee said that if the two bodies with responsibility for discipline and supervision could be independent of local government at each level, and have their own vertical management structure, then they could carry out their functions more effectively. Most cadres involved in monitoring were

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of the same opinion, he added. They asked my opinion, and I responded that the real problem was whether or not central government would be willing to adopt such a proposal. Then again, who would monitor corruption within monitoring bodies which had the power to override their local Party Committee and government? They felt that ‘monitoring by the masses’ would be most effective, and defined this as a Mao Zedong-style mass movement, and use of the ‘Four Great Freedoms’.15 They agreed that you could not instigate mass action on a regular basis, but you could not put a stop to it altogether either. The Four Great Freedoms could also lead to abuses, but you could not do without them completely. This type of eclecticism was common throughout Henan, among cadres, ordinary people and even intellectuals. I responded that mass action might be able to root out the official corruption so loathed by ordinary people, but it could not establish honest effective government in its place. Besides, its destructive effect on the economy and social stability was something we had all witnessed. In the present state of tension between cadres and the people, it was likely to lead to a complete breakdown of the social order. ‘How else can political corruption be eliminated?’ asked the director of the County Policy Research Office. ‘Theoretically,’ I replied, ‘only by means of democracy and the rule of law. Sun Yat Sen was first to expound the theory of political democracy in China. He defined two kinds of government: rule by officials and rule by the people, depending on who holds the power. Centralised and decentralised power is still rule by officials, and whether or not this is a good thing, in Sun Yat Sen’s view, depended on the officials. Officials of ability and integrity can bring great benefits to the people, but when they die, those benefits die with them. Corrupt and incompetent officials, on the other hand, can bring disasters on the people from which they cannot escape. This is exactly the same as the situation you’ve described. If Sun Yat Sen were to come back today he would assuredly recognise our present political system as “rule by officials”. Although some cadres are outstanding and extremely dedicated, the level of abuses in the system as a whole is too high. Corruption, overmanning and formalism are none of them new, which is why Sun Yat Sen worked to establish a democratic system of “rule by the people”. The key question is whether a generation of people can make a free choice of political system. Government by officials goes back thousands of years and is deeply entrenched; but even the best official only rules on behalf of the people, rather than allowing the people to rule themselves. As for the people—by this I mean the broad mass of the peasantry working their contracted land—they either put up with problems or appeal to a higher authority to come and sort it out for them. They have neither the inclination nor the ability to cooperate, to unite or to rule themselves. The one won’t let anyone else take the reins of power, the other is unable to take the reins of power. What are we to do? This is a question we have been asking since the May Fourth Movement,16 and we still have no answer. In spite of all my research, I have to admit that I have not succeeded in finding an effective solution. It’s clear that, with the direction in which political reform is proceeding, rule by officials has run its course, and democracy and rule by law is the way forward, but how to implement it is a much more difficult matter.’

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The carve-up of power between local government and the regional offices of central government This is an issue, they told me, which had been discussed for many years without being resolved. Local government bodies and local branches of central government bodies were supposed to link up and co-operate, but in fact there was endless wrangling and very little real co-operation. They fought over any profitable work, but with any work that was less than profitable they shifted the responsibility on to someone else. This was the situation in a nutshell, although of course it was more complex than that. I pressed them on what precisely the wrangling was about but they were vague on this. People who lived within the system rarely gave much thought to what it consisted of and how it operated. I had long wanted to carry out extensive research into this problem but, as always, getting permission to do field research was the major difficulty. I gave my four companions my views on the subject. There were three main aspects of relations between local government bodies and local branches of central government bodies: the first was demarcation of power between the centre and the regions. If central government’s local offices were pre-eminent in the regions and used their power to get involved in local business, then the desired goal of national unity was achieved. If, on the other hand, the opposite was true, then regional organisations were able to use their authority to regulate local affairs for themselves. China was such a big country with so many regional differences. Strong regional governments could act in accordance with specific local conditions. However, there were two advantages to a strongly centralised government: government decrees could be applied nationwide and national resources could be mustered when carrying out major projects. The disadvantages were that weak regional government tended to be lacklustre, indeed sometimes appeared to be moribund; and when centralised policy was applied to the specific circumstances of the differing regions, the results were often purely cosmetic changes, reality being tailored to the policies rather than the other way around. What was needed was real collaboration between local government bodies and local offices of central government bodies, thus making best use of the energies of both. As for the wrangling, maybe it was due to unclear, legalistic demarcation of the rights and responsibility of all parties. Nor were the powers of each level of local government clearly defined. China was too big, and there was a multiplicity of layers of local government: provincial, city (regional), county and xiang. Then there were the Village Committees. When Deng Xiaoping launched the reform movement in the 1980s, his central task was delegation of powers to local level. But the distribution of powers to the different levels of government had never been clearly set down in law. As a result, powers which brought advantages were sometimes retained by top-level government, while responsibilities were pushed down to a lower level. At the lowest levels—xiangs and villages—government had no rights, only responsibilities. Public security, banking, taxation, commerce and electricity offices in the xiangs were simply branches of their county counterparts, and the xiang government had no power over them at all. Some counties had simply cut every one of the more lucrative departments out of xiang government. The latter had to support themselves from the revenues of what remained to them.

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Finally, we came to the question of the relationship of all these bodies with the ordinary people. Whatever the division of powers, it still added up to control by officialdom and not by the people. Any decentralisation of powers merely increased the power of the former. In the absence of effective monitoring, despotism at all levels resulted. This was the root cause of corruption. Faced with rampant graft, some people advocated re-centralisation of power, others, delegating powers directly to the mass of the people. Here we returned to the question we had begun with: would cadres ever give up their privileges? Would the people, especially the great mass of those peasants who lacked any democratic tradition, ever be capable of exercising their democratic rights? In the afternoon, Ma, Lei and I were received by Mr Liu, the county head who had just returned from Xinyang City. The reception room for guests was bigger than usual, and the decor was ornate. The waitresses were unusually young and pretty, and their manners most attentive. Liu said that he was happy to talk freely and confidently with me about matters of mutual interest, not as an official but as a friend and fellow intellectual. He expressed the opinion that the current explosion of corruption at all levels of government was due to certain officials having too much power, and a lack of democratic monitoring procedures. It was rooted in the current political system and therefore extremely difficult to eradicate. There was also a philosophical basis to this corruption—that of materialism. I found this assertion rather startling, and asked him to explain further. He said that no matter how materialism was defined in the philosophy textbooks, it now meant to people the fetishisation of objects and money. Since everything now revolved around money, how could officials be expected willingly to embrace poverty and to sustain their faith in serving the people? His evaluation of the Get Rich Project was succinct, to say the least: ‘A total waste of time and money!’ Liu was also a published poet, and had a novel opinion on women and poetry: ‘Without women, there’s no poetry. Women are the muse of poets—you have to understand this relationship in order to appreciate poetry.’ He continued in this vein, citing Chinese classical poetry in support of his argument, to the general applause of his listeners, and there was no more of the promised discussion around rural society and local government. Before we parted, I asked Ma to fix another time when we could have a discussion, but Liu said he was too busy with meetings to be able to spare any time in the next three or four days. He excused himself and hastened away. I had already spent a few days in Xinyang and time was getting short. The cold weather was approaching fast, and after Xinyang I still had to visit Yiyang County in western Henan for the final part of my research. If Liu would support my field research within his domain, however, then by staying an extra three or four days here I could kill two birds with one stone. On the way back to the guesthouse, I discussed with Lei and Ma the likelihood of being allowed by Liu to do field research in the villages within his domain here. In Ma’s opinion this would present some difficulty since what local officials most feared was reporters and researchers running off to talk to the peasants. As we talked it began to rain again, which seemed to clinch the argument against staying. I therefore decided to return immediately to the Xinyang Party School. That was the best place to engage local functionaries in discussion.

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‘Can’t find a law that fits’ I had spent so many years doing research that it seemed to have become almost a professional addiction: I needed to unearth every scrap of interesting information from the memories of anyone with whom I was in contact. I looked on everyone’s head as a sort of library, except that it was much easier to get information out of them than out of a real library, and the material they afforded me was more vivid and more abundant. That morning at the hostel, I had a visit from a Mr H, a teacher at the Party School in S County. Mr H was originally from S County, so I asked him to tell me about its past and present. The resulting conversation was extremely interesting. ‘S County in Xinyang region is one of the biggest counties in China in terms of population—over 1,400,000,’ he began. There are only three out of Henan’s 110 counties with a population of over a million—S, Deng and Xincai counties—indeed it might be the biggest in all of China. S County is bounded in the south by the Dabie mountain range and in the north by the Huai River. Depending where you are in the county, therefore, the topography is either flat, hilly or mountainous. There are four xiangs in the Huai river plain, five in the mountains to the south, and twenty-four in the central hilly area—a total of thirty-three. The crop pattern is one season of wheat and one of rice. The rice harvest is the main one, the wheat is subsidiary. The average per capita arable land is between one and two mu, although in the hilly areas there are big discrepancies between the figures and reality. In some areas, several mu of mountainous or sloping land may count as one mu.’ (This seemed to be a universal phenomenon, one which dated back some considerable time. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the number of mu was habitually calculated according to the crop yield. Thus, a mu in China is a very elastic unit of land measurement. Author’s note) H then told me something of the village structure, housing and the agricultural levies. ‘Many villages in S County are completely enclosed within protective moats and walls, so that they are effectively fortified villages. S County lies on the border between Henan and Anhui Provinces and, before Liberation, the area was infested by robbers and bandits so the peasants built these fortifications to protect themselves. Many of them didn’t necessarily enclose the whole village, they often protected just the dwellings of a single clan. When the robbers struck, it was always the wealth of the landlords that they were after. It was only the landlords who could afford to fortify their houses, employ sentries and arm them. The moats would have one bridge which linked them to the outside world. They had three functions: they were used for protection, for fish breeding and for irrigation. After Liberation, their defensive functions were no longer needed, but they were still useful for fish breeding and irrigation. That’s why some have survived until now, although with the increase in population and improvements in communication many have been filled in or levelled for building on. About 4 kilometres north of Chenji Town, you can still see a very fine rampart, surrounding what used to be the Li estate before 1949. The village is surrounded by two circular moats, and the earthen walls and houses within are in excellent condition. They have now been preserved as part of the province’s cultural heritage. If you’re interested, I can take you there.’ I wanted to be clear about whether the chief aim of these fortifications was to protect the whole village or just the landlord because this, in turn, raised an even more important question: when faced with calamity, was the normal reaction of the Chinese peasantry to

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put their own families first, or for the village to take united action? Did such unity ever extend beyond the village boundary? How did the peasants resolve that most problematic yet most vital of human needs? Did their old pattern of behaviour still subsist today? Talking to H aroused in me a strong desire to go and do some research in S County. As regards village housing, H told me: ‘S County has always been extremely poor. Before Liberation, a very few landlords had old-style, woodframed, brick and tile houses but the majority of villagers, including rich peasants and even small landlords, lived in adobe and thatched homes. People still lived in these up until the mid-1980s, then there was a building boom, but most of the new houses were still adobe and thatch. Only a few were new-style brick and tile. The new adobe and thatch houses were really no different at all from the old ones, except that they were more spacious. Some had walls around them, and these were of adobe, like the house walls. In the early 1990s, there was a gradual changeover to single-storey brick and tile houses, and at the same time much more expensive two-storey houses began to make an appearance. Only a very few business people and local bigwigs are able to afford these, and they tend to be built in the town or on either side of the highway, so there are quite a few to be seen on the roads around Gushi County, but almost none in the villages. If you want to build a small brick and tile house, you need to get a job in town to earn some money; it is almost impossible to build one purely out of one’s farm income.’ In H’s estimate, between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of the villagers in the thirty-three xiangs that made up S County lived in houses of adobe and thatch—a revealing sign of their poverty. H gave three reasons for this penury: one was historical—that is, the families had always been poor. Another was frequent natural disasters, especially near the Huai River, which flooded whenever it rained. The two big floods in 1968 and 1991 had affected the whole county, and numerous homes were destroyed. It was due to these adverse natural conditions that local peasants were more concerned about eating than the houses in which they lived. ‘Better to eat up all you’ve got than let it be swept away in the floods’, was the philosophy in this flood-prone region. If you had to rebuild, it was much cheaper to rebuild in adobe and thatch. Finally, the agricultural levies were too heavy. In Xinyang the peasants complained about heavy taxation, but the situation was much worse in S County, where each peasant could expect to pay between Y300 and Y500 a year. ‘I swear to you I’m not lying,’ said H. After the costs have been taken off, most of the crop yield goes to the government.’ Most of the fit and able, therefore, have to get jobs in town. I asked him to give me an example from his family. ‘I still have an uncle living in my home village,’ he told me. ‘He is 73 years old, and has one daughter and six sons. The daughter married a peasant with a good head for business; he buys chickens’ eggs cheap from the peasants and resells them in the towns, as well as doing other business. So they are well off. In 1985, they built a two-roomed brick and tile single-storey house, then, ten years later, with their savings, pulled it down and built a two-storeyed house with three rooms downstairs and two upstairs, costing about Y20,000–30,000. Of the six sons, five have married and set up their own homes, and the youngest still lives with his parents. So they have six separate homes, and these are still of adobe and thatch. The third eldest son lives purely from farming, the others all have other jobs as well: the eldest is a carpenter, the second a driver, the fourth has a job in Shanghai and the last two in Wuhan. So they all have non-farming incomes, but they still can’t afford to build themselves a brick and tile house. Last year I went back for the

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Spring Festival and asked them why they didn’t build a new house, and they said, “We have enough to do to fill our bellies, and where would we get the money for a new house?” There are four of them at home, and their average yearly tax bill overall is over Y1,700. Working in town for eight months means one person can bring home Y2,000– Y3,000 after expenses, providing they know what they’re doing. My uncle has six sons— they’re bright lads, and strong too—if they live like this, imagine how the rest of the villagers live.’ I then asked him about his family history. ‘My grandparents are from Anhui Province and my grandfather inherited 40 mu of arable land from his father, so they were not badly off (they also lived in a moated village). They had six children and my father was the second son. The uncle I mentioned was the third. In 1944 and 1945, the Guomindang forcibly conscripted ablebodied men from their village into the army, and my father and his brother just happened to be of conscription age. To escape the draft, they got someone to blind them in one eye (using the red-hot needle from a kerosene lamp to pierce the eyeball) but they didn’t know that even one-eyed men couldn’t escape the horror of the press gang. Well, through the good auspices of a relative, they fled to S County and got themselves taken on as a landlord’s hired hands. After Liberation came land reform, and they each got land and a house. So they married, settled down here and had children. In my family, the four of us got 16 mu under land reform, plus some ponds and a bamboo grove, so we were not badly off. But things started to get dramatically worse for the villagers with the Great Leap Forward in 1958.’ He then told me about how the Xinyang Affair had affected his village. ‘Between the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1959, there was a great famine. In my village only about sixty of the 130 inhabitants survived. People were so hungry they grubbed up every last bit of weed, leaf and bark to eat. Things got so bad that people were reduced to cannibalism. In one family in the village, the man had already died of starvation. The woman and two children aged about 6 and 3 were left. They were so weak they could hardly get out of bed. The mother searched everywhere for weeds to eat, without success. Then she found the body of a dead child in a field, and took it home to cook. Later on, seeing that her younger child was dying, she killed him and cooked him too. ‘Then her father came to visit; the mother happened to be out. He asked his granddaughter, “Where’s your little brother?” ‘“In the pot,” she said. ‘The grandfather was so shocked he carried the little girl back home with him. The mother died of hunger shortly afterwards. There are lots of stories of tragedies like this from that time. ‘In 1958, the summer harvest was quite good in S County, but the autumn crop was much less since large numbers of rural men and women had been transferred to work in the iron- and steel-smelting furnaces. The key problem was that almost all the autumn harvest was compulsorily purchased by the local government. At that time commune and brigade cadres in the Xinyang region often made extravagant claims when they submitted their production figures. It was perfectly obvious that the per mu yield was only 200–300 catties, but they reported it as 1,000, or even several thousand. So when the provincial government based their compulsory grain purchase on the inflated figures, there wasn’t enough even if all the grain was taken. It was about September or October of 1958 that the communes were set up. With everyone eating communally, the family cooking pots

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were taken away to be smelted down in the blast furnaces. The communal kitchens in S County ran out of food to cook in a couple of months, but the cadres had hoarded some grain. These cadres couldn’t eat by day, but at night they would shut themselves away on the pretext of holding a meeting or being on duty, and eat then. Sometimes they’d offer some food to the heads of the production teams too. Then they’d take what was left home to their wives and kids. So during the famine there were very few cases of death from starvation among production brigade cadres and their families. My father-in-law was the brigade grain stores manager, and my mother’s elder brother was the head of the production brigade, so out of the whole family of six, no one died. My father at that time was head of a production team and got some food from the brigade, so out of his family of four, no one died either. My uncle was just an ordinary peasant. At the beginning he came to our house for food, but in the end we didn’t have enough to eat ourselves. He had three children, and two of them starved to death. ‘Young women will tell you that from the end of 1958 for a whole year, they didn’t have a period once. Couples didn’t have sex, either. That’s what happens when you’re starving—you don’t have the energy or the inclination to get up to stuff like that. ‘Up until the spring and summer of 1959, you were lucky to find weeds and grain husks to eat. To prepare the husks, you started by stir-frying them, then you pounded them in a pestle. You sieved them and then mixed them with salt and water to make pancakes. Of course, pancakes like this were pretty hard to get down and even harder to shit out. You had to dig the shit out of your arse with the handle of a spoon. We were all bent double doing it—it was nothing to be ashamed of. If you didn’t, and it got impacted, then you died. ‘In 1958 and 1959, there were no natural disasters in the Xinyang region. The six months of great famine had wholly human causes. It took until just before the summer harvest in 1959 for central government to find out what was happening here. Then they sent work teams to investigate, and emergency grain supplies, so that there were fewer deaths from starvation—but the famine was by no means over. Very little winter wheat had been planted at the end of 1958, both because there wasn’t enough seed and because people were too weak to do the sowing. Also some of the wheat seedlings were pulled up for food. The basic problem remained because the summer harvest was so poor and there wasn’t much emergency grain. It wasn’t until the autumn harvest of 1959—which was mainly sweet potatoes—that the famine began to pass. ‘It wasn’t just starvation the peasants had to cope with, it was also the cadres of People’s Communes. The communes were set up at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, and the peasants suffered even more at the hands of the commune and production brigade cadres. It was all wildly inflated targets back then, and the provincial government put pressure on the regional government, and so on down through the county, the commune and the production brigade. The orders got ever more draconian on their way down through the Party structure, until the production brigade cadres were forcing the peasants to do this and do that, and even the slightest disobedience was punished. In my brigade, there was a deputy Party Secretary called Wang Kaiting, nicknamed Goon, who decided that some peasants were “lazybones”. He thought up an amazing variety of ways to punish them: he would grab them by the hair and push them up against the wall, which he called “pulling pots”; or a gang of roughnecks would stand around a “lazybones” and push him to and fro between them, and that was called “frying

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yellow beans”; if they strung him up, that was called “duck floating on water”; and so on. More than twenty “lazybones” died at the hands of the Goon. The head of another production brigade nearby, a man called Thickhead Yan, was responsible for nearly as many deaths. In 1960, Liu Shaoqi came to Xinyang to promote his “Moving Stones” campaign which was supposed to mean dismissing petty dictators from their posts in the production brigades. After this had been going on for a while, a little ditty began to go the rounds: ‘Stoney, Stoney, don’t you fear. Whatever you did, keep doing it here.’ In other words, the whole campaign was having no effect at all. However, in all fairness it has to be said that most of these local cadres wouldn’t have turned into petty despots if it hadn’t been for the fantastically exaggerated demands being made on them from on high, which they in turn were passing on down the line. If there were problems, it rebounded on them, so they weren’t too pleased with things either. In the end, people were happy because Wang the Goon was demoted to being head of a production team and in 1992, after decollectivisation, he died of cancer of the tongue. In his last years he fell on hard times, and died a miserable death. The villagers all said it served him right.’ The power of rural clans and Village Party Committee cadres H said: ‘Cadres trained by the County Party School are generally cadres of xiang government auxiliary Ke grade or below, or Village Party Secretaries or village heads. Over the many years that I have taught in the Party School, my main contact has been with village cadres. So I know them pretty well. As I see it, since the Household Responsibility System for land was established, it has become more and more difficult for the xiang government to find able cadres to appoint as Village Party Secretaries. That’s because there are very few people willing to undertake this kind of drudgery on very low pay. Since decollectivisation, everyone’s been busy on their own fields. Village cadres still have to till their own land and they get very little paid leave. Towards the end of the 1980s, there was a gradual increase in the number of people going off to get jobs in town, and even fewer people of ability were willing to stay home and take on the thankless task of being Village Party Secretary or head. However, there has been a clear change since 1992: you get quite a few people competing for these jobs now, because they’ve discovered the many advantages they bring with them. First, the annual salary has risen to between Y 1,000 and Y2,000 (there are differences between the villages). Second, most village cadres don’t have to pay for their food, drink and cigarettes out of their own pockets. When officials come from the xiang, they eat with them; they get invited to village wedding and funeral feasts. At a rough calculation, they get alcohol and cigarettes worth up to Y5,000 annually. Third, each village’s annual target for births is set at xiang level, but the responsibility for implementation falls to the Village Party Secretary, who gains considerable benefits thereby, by agreeing to cover up an excess birth on payment of a bribe, for example. Then, Village Party Secretaries and heads can often wriggle out of paying all or part of their agricultural levies by reallocating the dues among other villagers, and this basically amounts to a big pay rise. Finally, there are other advantages, and they vary depending on the cadre and the circumstances. They can take a little more land, in a better position, to build their house on; if they have an extra birth, they can avoid a big fine, and so on and so on. One way or another, it’s easy enough to bump up their annual income to Y2,000–3,000, or even more in the case of the

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more corrupt. From my knowledge of them over the years, I’d guess their annual income is around Y3,000. ‘As a Party School teacher, I have a lot to do with both xiang government cadres and village cadres; people come to me for help to get a Village Party Secretary job. They hope that I’ll be able to pull strings. Because of the competition for these jobs, xiang government officials can expect a kickback of up to Y5,000 to “secure” the post. I can’t really tell you quite how widespread this practice is, nor whether the money goes into xiang extra-budget funds or into the cadres’ pockets. It’s only been going on for a couple of years, and of course it’s done very much on the quiet. We’re not in a position to ask questions. ‘What kind of people get the job of Village Party Secretary or village head? My impression is they fall into three categories. There are the ones who get the job through clan influence, especially if they’re supported by a big clan; whereas in the past someone from a single family could get the job because their class background was good, that doesn’t work now. Then there are the ones who have friends in xiang or county government, who can pull strings for them. Third, there are the ones who have proven ability and get the job via the normal work route. There are only a few of them in S County. Cadres like this aren’t in it for themselves; all they want is the respect of the ordinary people. But it’s rather doubtful that they can continue to exist in the current social climate.’ We talked until midday. I had learned much of great interest from Mr H, things I had never heard about before, like moated villages, cannibalism and kickbacks to secure a job. The tale he told of local government in his region seemed to represent in microcosm the evolution of rural government countrywide. What was most worrying was the tendency to revert to traditional practices. At seven in the evening, I had arranged to meet Mr Huang, xiang Party Secretary from X County, in the guesthouse. Huang was in his forties, of peasant stock, a college graduate who had been a teacher in xiang and county middle schools, and had then transferred to a job in the County Propaganda Department. In 1988, he had become head of a xiang, and was promoted to Party Secretary in 1992. His xiang was in the Dabie Mountains and was part of X County. Ma, the Party School director, when doing his stint in X County to gain practical experience in 1991–2, had worked with Huang, and they had become good friends. Knowing that he was an intelligent man, Ma had specially recommended that he come and see me. We talked mainly about democracy and the rule of law in rural areas, but also touched on broader issues. Huang told me that in recent years the state had passed a large number of laws and statutes, many of which had had a direct impact on the countryside and the people who lived in it. His feeling was that these laws were not geared to the actual circumstances of Chinese peasants, especially those living in the interior. Not that the laws lagged behind reality—rather the opposite, they were too advanced to be implemented properly. ‘You can’t do things according to the law, and yet there is no law to support what you have to do,’ he went on. ‘I’ve always felt that the upper echelons of government, those who make all these laws, have no idea how things work at the grassroots. No one’s in any doubt that we should implement socialist democracy and the rule of law. The problem lies in the fact that this is a gradual process, which has to happen step by step, in an orderly fashion. Our legislators, however, take the view that the faster we go, the better, and they’ve

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pushed ahead too fast. It’s inevitable that they keep hitting a brick wall. In 1958, we all thought we’d get to communism in one leap, and what happened? We landed up in a terrible mess. It was a lesson that huge numbers of people paid for with their lives. And all because some people got it into their heads that in order to do anything well we had to do it quickly. Very few people considered whether the real situation merited everincreasing speed. If you drive an old car too fast, you’re bound to have problems. But the lessons of 1958 look like they’ve been clean forgotten.’ In Huang’s opinion, legislators should take account of regional differences in China’s rural areas, and of the backwardness of the peasants, especially in the interior. If you just charged blindly ahead, then you got laws which made China look good, especially in international eyes—really advanced, just like them—but which in practice no one would use. There was a real contradiction between the backward peasantry and radical new legislation. The peasants had been enslaved for thousands of years. There was all this talk about giving them democracy, but they basically did not know how to exercise their democratic rights. Take the Village Committee elections: those under 40 or so had at least some education, but the older they were, the more ignorant. Many of the older ones were wholly or functionally illiterate, so they had to get someone else to write the name of the person they wanted to vote for. The majority of these villagers were not interested in these elections. As a result, votes could be rigged by those out to make personal gain. In recent years, people had received some popular education about the law, so they now knew a bit about it. But their view of democracy was that it meant they could do what they wanted, and no one could stop them. In general, they had no interest in voting on issues which in their eyes did not immediately affect their own or their family’s interests, and were unable or unwilling to exercise their democratic rights. ‘Just to give you an example,’ Huang continued, ‘there have been a lot of newspaper reports recently which accuse local cadres of using rough and ready management methods and fleecing honest peasants, but the truth is that we are obliged to carry out the tasks assigned to us by our superiors—collecting grain levies and taxes and carrying out abortions—and these are obviously going to make us unpopular. But after all, the peasants till the land, why shouldn’t they pay taxes? They always have done. Most of them do, but one or two won’t cough up. One particular man really goes out of his way to wind you up about it: he’ll dig the money out of his pocket and wave it in front of our faces before telling us that there’s no way he’s going to pay a bunch of filth like us. Another hasn’t paid any taxes at all between 1990 and 1996. His excuse is he can’t pay until the kids are grown up. We’ve tried to bring him to book, and we’ve searched through all the statutes, but the only law we can find that applies is one on “resisting taxation”. I went to the County Procuratorate, but the chief procurator asked me: “Has he resisted violently?” I said: “It hasn’t got to that point.” He said: “Well, if he’s not been violent, then it’s not ‘resisting taxation’.” Without support from the law, all we can do if we want them to pay is to go to their homes and force it out of them. The only State Council regulation which we could find applies to cadres. It says we mustn’t use force when making tax collections. So what are we cadres supposed to do? ‘Management of the mountain forests is a big headache, too,’ he continued. ‘Where I come from, it’s the Dabie mountain range, and each village has its own bit of forest. There are two neighbouring villages—let’s call them A and B–A has about 10,000 mu of commercially productive forest, B Village has much less, only 2,000–3,000 mu. B

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villagers keep going to A Village’s forest to steal timber, and once they were caught. The A villagers mete out their own local punishments for this kind of theft: they make the offenders lug the timber they’ve chopped down to the Village Committee, plus they get fined Y100 per tree they’ve felled and get put in the local clink until the fine is paid off. The thing is that what they’re doing is against the law, because only the police are allowed to lock people up. On this particular occasion, the person they caught happened to be the nephew of the Party Secretary of B Village. The Party Secretary said to his opposite number in A Village: “Even to beat a dog you have to check out who’s the owner!” and the two secretaries had such a row that I was called in. One said: “Stealing timber is illegal,” and the riposte from the other was: “Citizens’ arrests are against the law.” I couldn’t settle the dispute and it went to the County Procuratorate. You wouldn’t believe it but they decided to arrest the A Village Party Secretary and the head of their forestry protection team. When I heard about it, I rushed over there and asked the chief procurator to reconsider. “Look at how local forestry enterprises actually run,” I said. “If you arrest A Village Party Secretary, the two villages will come to blows, someone may get killed, and who wants to be responsible for something as major as that?” Well, then, the County Procuratorate decided that the arrested man should be released, that B Village should pay the fine, and everything settled down once more. The thing is, in rural areas you just can’t apply the law to every situation. Forestry management is very hard work, plenty of theft goes on, and it’s perfectly possible for all of a village’s timber to be felled illegally. No village which has gone to the trouble of planting the trees wants to see all the timber stolen by someone else and so some of them have just stripped their mountainsides of what was perfectly good forest, and left the land bare. If you want to stop theft, you’ve got to catch the thief. And in the unlikely event that you catch someone at it, you’re supposed to report it to the only people who have the power to make an arrest, the police—the law may seem progressive but it’s impractical and full of holes. In fact, in villages with substantial forests, the Village Committees normally organise forestry protection teams, and mete out their own punishment to offenders. It may seem primitive, but it does work.’ Huang then addressed me: ‘Professor Cao, I’ve heard you lecture twice, and to me you’re a scholar, a man who’s not afraid to speak out and tell things as they really are, so I’m going to be very frank with you. In my eight years in local government enforcing family planning measures and collecting taxes, I’ve arrested people, taken away their cattle, demolished their houses and done hundreds of illegal things. According to the law, I deserve a twenty-year sentence at the very least. To be honest, if you only acted according to the law as it stands, nothing would get done; you would have to break the law to implement the tasks that are delegated to us by our superiors.’ On the subject of agricultural levies, Huang told me that in his xiang, the average net per capita income was Y1,030. Levies therefore should be Y50, in line with the State Council stipulation that levies should not exceed 5 per cent of the annual per capita income. Thus, if a village had 800 souls, the levies would be Y40,000. The village and xiang budgets would take half each, so the Village Committee would have Y20,000 at its disposal. If the village employed six cadres, on an average annual salary of Y2,000 each, that would total Y12,000. The family planning work that the director of the Village Women’s Affairs had to do was hard, so she had to be paid—say, Y1,000 a year. Then the eight heads of the Villagers’ Groups would get about Y300 each, or a total of Y2,400.

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Salaries as a whole, therefore, would come to about Y15,400. Where was the Village Committee supposed to get the Y4,000–5,000 to pay for support for needy families, office running expenses, cadres’ business travel, newspapers and periodicals, entertainment of local dignitaries, maintenance work on the village primary school? ‘What are we to do?’ he said. ‘Our villages and xiang have no collective enterprises, so we have to charge the peasants more than we’re supposed to, just to survive. In fact, last year the average per capita levy was Y180. This included the agricultural tax, Y10 per person, and the farm produce tax, Y20. The village and xiang budgets take Y50, and then on top of that there were funds for items like building a middle school, refurbishment of the xiang health centre and highway repairs. The xiang government set this figure for the villages, but each Village Committee has to push it up a bit, otherwise they wouldn’t have enough in their budget. Because some families just can’t or won’t pay even the agricultural tax, other families have to make up the grain tax they should have paid. In other words, each village’s levies are slightly different, but last year they averaged more than Y200 per head over the whole xiang. In a poor county like ours, the county budget is largely funded by the agricultural tax and the farm produce tax. The former is fixed and can’t be increased, but the farm produce tax is very variable and could be used to bump up county revenues. However, it’s almost impossible to calculate how much each individual family owes on their produce—we just don’t have the manpower to do accurate figures and collect it. So the county fixes its annual revenue needs, and collecting in the levies is then delegated to the xiangs, the villages and the households. The produce tax has now become just another part of the per capita levy due. Our xiang was ordered to collect only Y10,000 on this tax in 1992, but it’s been increasing every year since then. The county arbitrarily fixed the figure at Y520,000 this year, and I was so worried, I went to plead our case with the county head. I asked him how come the farm produce tax had increased to Y520,000 just between 1992 and 1996, and asked if he could make a special case for us. But his reply was: “Your xiang’s tax was always calculated too low, which let you off lightly. If you collected what was really due on this tax, it would be much more than Y520,000!” I did not let it go at that. I said: “I don’t think the county collects as much tax from industry and commerce as it ought to.” Then he got angry. He told me our xiang could fix our own produce tax next year, he’d have nothing to do with it. So, you see, the State Council might have fixed the amount the local government takes from the agricultural levy, but the levies have gone up nevertheless. What are we cadres supposed to do?! What law can we use in our work? ‘County and xiang government, especially xiang government, is the focus of rural society. We are dealing with both government departments above us and hundreds of thousands of individual peasant households beneath. So we are the foundation, the indispensable bedrock on which all local government rests. Yet we are powerless to respond to conditions in our own xiang, we’re only there to carry out orders from above, whether or not they are appropriate to local circumstances. And when things go wrong, we get the blame both from our superiors and from the peasants. It’s a thankless job. This year has been really bad for me! Some villagers went to the city and provincial governments to accuse me of raising too much money from them. I got a terrible telling off from the County Party Secretary: “Why are you raising funds?” he said. “You’re just making more trouble for me.” Of course I told him what had been going on. The xiang health clinic was built at the end of the 1950s. It’s become very decrepit and has got to

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the point where it needs to be demolished. Two years ago we asked the provincial health department to come and inspect it. They said, “We’ll allocate you Y80,000, but you’ve got to think of ways of raising the remaining Y240,000. According to provincial government rules we can only issue funds in a ratio of 1:3.” I said, “But we’re a very poor xiang, can you give us a bit more than that?” After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, it was agreed that the funding ratio would be 1:1, or Y150,000 each. Only we had to find our portion first, before they would give us their half. We have no xiang enterprises, so I had to raise the money directly from the peasants—at a rate of about Y5 per head. The population of the xiang is 27,000, so that gave us Y135,000, and we collected the remainder from the xiang budget, and rebuilt the clinic. ‘Then there were road maintenance and refurbishment of old school buildings which were also requested by the county. Two years ago, the county drew up a plan to get all children into lower middle school. That meant we had twenty-seven classes in the three year-grades of our lower middle school, but the classrooms were only big enough for half of them, so each child could only study for half of each day. The County Party Secretary passed a motion requiring us to complete a new school building within two years—but it was up to us to raise the money for it. The per capita levy for that project was Y30–40. Also, we were supposed to build a tarmac road between the xiang and the county town— a huge investment project. This was included in the county development plan but our xiang had to supply the men, money and materials. This meant a per capita levy of around Y30 per year over several years. We got ordered to carry out these three projects by the county. We couldn’t not do it, nor could we just print the money, so we had to raise it from the peasants, and last year they had to pay up about Y70 per head in total. Most of the peasants understand we have to raise money for projects. What they hate is when that money goes to line the cadres’ own pockets. Of course, that does sometimes happen, but I can vouch for the fact that every bit of those Y70 went on the three projects they were intended for. Y70 was a bit steep, I’ll admit that, and it’s understandable they grumbled, but the projects were completed and the peasants benefited from them. ‘The complaints would have been forgotten if it hadn’t been for a few riff-raff stirring up trouble. One of them was a nasty piece of work, a man who hasn’t paid any taxes since 1991, has forced his brother’s wife to go and live with him, and connived at his son’s rape of several village girls. Another, whose father received a criminal conviction a few years ago, has had it in for the xiang government since then. On the pretext of “pleading the cause of the ordinary people”, these two found the documents which stipulated that the levies shouldn’t exceed 5 per cent of the previous year’s income, then they got a few score families involved and drew up a list of charges against the xiang government which they presented to the provincial government. The regional Party Committee Administrative Office was instructed to settle the matter and they ruled that the Y70 levy was illegal. They ordered us to hold an inquiry and present a report. In fact, under the rules, we didn’t have the right to raise those funds, so last year’s funds were raised illegally. But the funds were for projects which we had been instructed to carry out by the county, and we had been given a deadline for completion. All that work I’ve put in over the last eight years, and now I’m condemned as a law-breaker. I’ve thought and thought and I can’t see any way out. All I want to do is find a place to sit down and have a good cry!’ (At that point he struck the table with his fist, overcome with emotion.)

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‘The way things are at present, we can’t do our job at all without breaking the law. Every project needs funding and people to carry it out, and so agricultural levies always have to go up. It’s all very well for people in coastal areas to say you need industry and commerce to get rich, but in this poor, mountainous area how are we supposed to develop industry and commerce? We have no funding, no technology and no skilled workers. And things like improving road communications cost a lot more up here. There’s just no way forward for us. And all these laws make our work even more difficult. Our superiors make the laws, and they assign us tasks, but we can’t carry out those tasks if we obey the laws. We’re supposed to stop the peasants having excess births, but there’s no law we can use against them if they go ahead anyway. There’s no law to stop villagers stealing each other’s timber either. When central government passes national laws, they no doubt have good intentions, but the problems arise because there is a huge discrepancy between their policies and legislation on the one hand, and the reality of rural life on the other. The law doesn’t help us do our jobs, but in the end our appraisals are based on how well we’ve fulfilled our tasks. The peasants are not in the habit of being either law-abiding or democratic, so the law doesn’t control them, but it does control what we do. At every turn, we’re contravening the law; if it goes on like this, one day the most basic level of rural government in China might just collapse. I’m not being alarmist! ‘And one more thing: if local government disintegrates, it will bring down with it the whole superstructure which it’s supporting. There’s a general consensus at the moment that senior officials are good and speak for the ordinary people, who in their turn are all perfectly obedient, and that xiang and village cadres are almost all corrupt petty despots, out to fleece the local people. If it was only the locals who thought this way, it would be understandable, because we’re the ones who collect their taxes and force them to have abortions. But our superiors think this way too, which is unbelievable, because we’re only doing what they tell us to do. Of course there’s corruption, but you can bet it exists above as well as below county level. Why do they have us do the work, but still not trust us? I’ve wracked my brains but I still can’t figure it out. And it’s not just me, it’s every cadre I come into contact with who has the slightest ability to think for himself. Some even take the view that since people at every level think we’re corrupt, what’s the point in being honest? Rural cadres are human beings too, they’re neither better nor worse than anyone else. If they receive encouragement and support, they might turn into something better, but if they’re always being blamed for everything from people who don’t trust them, it’s perfectly possible that they’ll go to the bad. It’s this atmosphere of suspicion and distrust which itself is a contributory cause of good people becoming corrupt!’ Our meeting had lasted until midnight, and had largely consisted of this astonishingly candid and emotional outpouring by Huang about the difficulties he faced as xiang Party Secretary in the Dabie Mountains. I listened to him attentively and took detailed notes. In doing so, I was concerned to judge not the correctness or otherwise of the views and feelings he had shared with me, but how sincere he was in them. The conclusion I came to was that the opinions he was expressing were indeed shared universally by all officials at this level of local government.

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The county head talks about controlling the officials In the afternoon of the next day, I was driven to E County to pay a visit to the county head. E County was 300 li from Xinyang City, and I arrived at about 4 p.m. Xinyang was built on the banks of the Huai River, a location which brought with it both benefits and drawbacks. The flood defences which had been built up over the years had had the effect of gradually raising the river bed. By now, the whole city was lower than the level of the Huai River, which gave the appearance of being suspended above the land. This autumn, there had been several days of continuous rain. The swollen waters had flooded the land on either side to a depth of several metres, and 200,000 mu of wheat seedlings had drowned. The county was currently in the throes of trying to drain the land and salvage the crops, so that it was really not the best moment to be interviewing the county head. The latter was, indeed, clearly harassed by his workload. He could not see us until 6 p.m., when his meeting finished, and then we had just sat down when two xiang heads came in to beg him to organise drainage for their 100,000 mu of wheat which had been flooded. The county head gave orders for all departmental heads to be in the meeting room at 8 p.m. to discuss flood drainage work, but he had scarcely sorted this when a xiang head came in asking to be allocated some water pumps. The county head apologised: ‘It’s frantically busy. I’ll get the Office Manager to organise your accommodation and a meal, and I’ll come and see you as soon as I get a moment’ We went with the manager to the county guesthouse (now converted to a hotel), deposited our luggage and repaired to one of the private dining rooms to eat. At around seven o’clock, the county head rushed in. He looked a little tipsy, and explained that he had been attending a reception for officials from the Provincial Party Organisational Department, who had come to make their annual cadre assessment visit. Ma, my guide and an old friend of the county head, introduced the two of us in suitably flattering terms and expressed the hope that we could have a serious conversation. The county head responded by saying that his job allowed him very little time for reading or conversation, especially in the present circumstances. Like a good host, he offered us wine and said he would stay a short while; and he promised that next time we could spend as much time talking to him as we wanted. I, however, did not have the time to wait until ‘next time’, and pressed ahead with the questions I wished to raise with him. I quoted to him the comments of a certain Ming dynasty writer, Gu Yanwu, to the effect that in the Song and Ming dynasties, high-ranking officials had a great deal of power, while county magistrates had very little. Additionally, while the former had relatively light responsibilities and were wont to issue orders left, right and centre, the latter were weighed down with tasks and desperate to climb up the promotion ladder. One of Gu’s proposals was to reduce the number of officials in charge of other officials, or, put in modern management terms, to reduce the number of layers of bureaucracy. His second suggestion was to give county officials more power to do their jobs and carry out their responsibilities, showing them a degree of trust and respect. The county head replied: ‘It’s still the same as in the Song and Ming dynasties, in that central government, provincial and city officials still look down on county and xiang cadres. They don’t trust them, and they regard them as incompetent and corrupt. If you’re

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a junior official, you get bullied and blamed by everybody; you have many grievances but no one to complain to. This is really detrimental to the development of local government power. It’s got to the point where the reputation of local officials as a whole is at stake. I can’t talk about the whole country, this is just my impression of Xinyang City and the nine counties. The one I know most about is E County, and the situation here is that you very rarely get cadres who are extremely good or extremely bad, but most fall somewhere in the middle. At one extreme, you get cadres of integrity who dedicate their lives to improving the lot of the people and to promoting the prospects of our nation. There are few enough of those in city, county and xiang government—they’re really rare birds. At the other extreme, you get cliques of cadres whose whole aim is to feather their own nests through bribery and corruption—but there are very few of those too. There’s an old saying, ‘Really unrighteous behaviour will certainly lead to self-destruction.’ The odd misdemeanour is all right, but how long can you go on doing it? Most local officials fall somewhere in the middle, and under the present system of recruitment and employment of officials it’s the trends among the ones in the middle which are a cause for concern. ‘The majority of local officials just want two things: to protect their jobs, and to get promotion. Under the current system, the job prospects of the lower ranks are all in the hands of a small minority of senior officials, so the others run around at their beck and call, keeping an eye on the boss’s mood and doing what they think the boss wants. They scarcely bother to question the orders that come down from on high, they don’t even ask whether the targets are achievable or not, they just go ahead and tick them off the list whether they are appropriate to the circumstances or not. In the process, they have to build in a bit extra, to cover themselves, and so they pile on the pressure when they delegate to the cadres below them—province to city, city to county and so on, right down to the individual peasants. If the provincial government sets a target at 100, that’s become 150, or even 200 by the time it’s reached the villagers. The provincial government sets the electricity price at Y0.5 per kWh but the peasants get asked to pay Y1 or more. Unfortunately, even if the peasants refuse to pay and lodge a complaint, it’s the county and xiang officials they’re complaining about. Mostly power is in the hands of officials much higher up the line, usually just one person. This system can only work if that person is someone of both ability and integrity, and if their powers and responsibilities are equally balanced. But people like this have always been few and far between, and now, with the growth of the market economy and everyone out to get rich and enjoy the good things of life, they are rarer still. When mediocre officials who lack self-discipline hog all the power to themselves and delegate the responsibilities to their juniors, you’re asking for trouble. There’s all this talk of the rule of law now, but the laws we have are not adequate to control either officials or the people. So you get a situation where we have laws which are not complied with.’ We talked about the system under which cadres are posted away from their home village which, in the county head’s view, had both advantages and disadvantages: on the plus side, they were not a prey to local loyalties; on the minus side, the result was that xiang and county officials had just got to know a place when they were moved on to another appointment. This was the cause of many short-sighted actions by local officials. We returned again to the topic of the political system and ways of checking the powers of local officialdom. ‘In my view,’ he said, ‘the former is the cause of the problems with

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the latter. It’s easy enough to deal with one bad apple, but extremely difficult to carry out reform throughout the entire system of local government. Economic reform and liberalisation which bring economic development benefit both officials and people, the treasury prospers and everything works out well. So everyone is happy about economic reform. But political reform is very different; even such measures as downsizing organisations mean an end to the expectations of a job for life, the “iron rice bowls”, of an awful lot of officials. And transforming our system of government from one where we officials are answerable to the top brass into one where cadres are responsible to the people they govern—well, that is certain to arouse stiff resistance from within officialdom itself. Traditionally, the system in China was for officials to control the people, senior officials to control their juniors, and the emperor to exercise overall control. Introducing democracy sounds easy, but putting it into practice is very difficult. When I was at university, I believed that democratisation was the direction in which political reform ought to go, but now I’m an official myself, I’m profoundly aware of the indestructibility of China’s political traditions. I really have no idea how we should go about implementing workable and appropriate political reforms. Besides, the current financial system has problems too. Local governments having to manage their own finances independently is all very well for the developed, coastal economies, but it is detrimental in the interior of China, especially to those agricultural counties which lack processing and service industries. We just can’t do it! ‘Take the nine Xinyang counties, for example. We have to rely on agriculture to provide our funding. The farming economy is weak and still dependent on the forces of nature. We get four or five days of rain here, and even if it’s not heavy rain a third of the county’s wheat crop is under water. But large-scale flood defence work which could protect next year’s crop is expensive, and the returns on agriculture are small. One bad harvest, and peasants who’ve just got to the point of being able to feed and clothe themselves are poor again. If the heavens are kind, they get a good harvest, but then that’s no good for the farmers either. This year’s market prices for wheat and rice were around 20 per cent lower than last year’s, which mopped up almost all their profit margin. Then again, there’s too little land per person, so the output will always be very limited. Local government and the peasants fight over the proceeds, and the peasants don’t get the modest subsidy that the farmers on the coast do. The peasants say the levies are too heavy, and the local government says it’s too poor to pay salaries—neither side is happy. Education takes over half the budget of a xiang in Xinyang; the figure is 30–40 per cent for a county. This new obligation to provide nine years’ compulsory education has hit us very hard. Sometimes the teachers get paid but we can’t pay the cadres. It’s hard to get cadres whose salaries are paid by the local government to perform well, because they’re not getting paid properly and many of them survive by doing business on their own account. It’s all part and parcel of the deterioration in cadre management at the local level.’ The county head concluded by saying: ‘Ma talked to me last time we met about the St Matthew effect—that is, “unto every one that hath shall be given…but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”. That’s what it’s like between the coast and the interior, the rich and the poor areas. E County is already poor: we get more natural disasters. The coast is wealthy and they get even more funds, and government policies go in their favour. But China is still China, and as Deng Xiaoping said, we

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should get rich together. What we poor counties want is for central government to take over funding primary and middle school education, and to increase investment in agricultural construction projects. Only in this way will we be able to climb out of poverty.’ It was nearly eight o’clock and the county head got up to say goodbye. He still had to attend a reception nearby and then rush off to a meeting to arrange the next day’s flood drainage work. As he was going, he again urged me to stay a few more days, so that he could spend more time talking to me after the pace of work had calmed down. I had to decline but was greatly appreciative of his kindness. Although our talk had been brief it had added both in quantity and in depth to my knowledge of how local government was run. Although the head of E County had left the academic life to become an official, he was indeed, as Ma had said, a man of integrity and discrimination.

Visiting the old lady at Dongjia Huts When the floods hit E County, cadres and villagers all pitched in to fight the waters and protect the winter wheat. I did not feel happy about demanding interviews from people who were so busy, and I would not have anyone to take me around, but I also could not afford to wait here in the meantime. At eight in the morning, I determined to go to G County. Ma had told me that G County was one of the biggest in Henan, with a population of over 1,400,000. I was interested in it for two reasons. One was that I had been told that the agricultural levies of G County were the heaviest among all the Xinyang counties and I wanted to know how the peasants were coping. Such a visit could not be official, it would have to be done on the quiet. Second, the area still had a number of fortified villages built before Liberation and equipped with moats and ramparts to defend them against bandits. I felt these defended villages could give me some important pointers as to the structure of Chinese society at the grassroots. Visiting them could be done openly. G County lay 50–60 kilometres south east of E County, and could normally be reached in 45 minutes by car by crossing the E Bridge over the Huai River. However, in just one night the surging river waters had risen another couple of metres, completely submerging several hundred metres of the bridge approach on the southern side and making it impassable. We therefore had to drive round in a great westward loop via Xi County, and arrived in G County at half past twelve midday. In the car, Ma and I had decided not to bother the county officials but to go direct to the Party School. The teachers there had an in-depth knowledge both of the local cadres and of the peasants. They were therefore in possession of a great wealth of information which would aid my research. If they would take me to some villages, it would save a lot of trouble. The G County Party School consisted of a couple of run-down single-storey buildings, containing a dozen or so rooms, within a small courtyard. Two of the rooms were offices, there were five or six classrooms and a meeting room, and the teachers lived in the remaining rooms. There were four or five heads and deputy heads of school and seven or eight ordinary teachers. The county only allocated a small fixed sum to support the local Party School. As this was scarcely enough to enable it to survive, they had to come up with ideas for raising the extra funds themselves if they wanted to improve teaching conditions and teachers’ benefits. However, there was a source through which they could

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supplement their income, and this came from running special courses jointly with the regional Party Schools for county and xiang cadres. The trend towards better education for officials was making it increasingly important for the latter to have formal educational qualifications if they wanted to protect their jobs and rise through the ranks. The school’s funding difficulties were therefore considerably alleviated by the fees they received as a result of running classes and awarding diplomas. As it happened, a diploma course was just finishing at G County Party School today, and the students, from the county industry and commerce taxation department, were crowded into the school dining hall where they were hosting a dinner for the school heads and teachers. When they saw Ma bring me in, they invited us to join them and put us in the seats of honour. It was clear that they held Ma in great respect and this, in turn, meant that I was accepted. At three in the afternoon, the school deputy head took us to visit a fortified village. ‘There are a large number of moated and walled villages in G County,’ he told us, ‘but few are in a good state of preservation. In the fifty years since Liberation, many of the village moats have been filled in and either built on or turned into fields. Those that remain are used as fish ponds and don’t look like they used to in the old days. Originally, such villages were found mainly in the border area of Henan and Anhui Provinces, where historically lawlessness was rife. In the decades before Liberation, there was a great deal of banditry in the region—the “bandits” were mostly starving peasants from this or neighbouring counties. The area swarmed with thieves every time there was a flood or a drought or if the crops were destroyed by pests. Anyone prosperous enough to have land, money and grain dug moats and erected ramparts and barricaded themselves in, because on the plains there were no natural defences like mountains and rivers.’ And the deputy head suggested we go and have a look at Dongjia Huts in nearby Quanhe xiang which, in his view, had a very well-preserved moat. We first drove to Quanhe xiang, where we picked up the xiang head (an ex-student of the school deputy head’s) who took us on to Dabaqiao Village. The road went from bad to worse; the highway from the county town to the xiang government had been hardsurfaced some years before—this most penurious of xiang governments had been obliged to purchase a couple of Santana saloons and had had to ‘modernise’ the local roads for their benefit. ‘Most of the top local cadres travel by car nowadays,’ Ma told me. ‘So roads to the county town from the xiangs have been tarmacked.’ The road from Quanhe xiang to Dabaqiao, however, although categorised as a highway, had not been hardsurfaced for lack of money. Several days of steady rain and the passage of vehicles (mainly tractors) had turned it into a muddy pond, through which the cars found it difficult to make headway. We were unable to drive right into the village, so our driver stopped on the road: Dongjia Huts were a few hundred metres off on the east side of the road. The xiang head borrowed a couple of pairs of rubber boots from a house at the roadside and asked the owner, a woman of about 60, and her son to take us there. He and the school deputy head sat down to wait for us in the house, as there were only two pairs of boots. The Dongjia Huts formed a rectangular-shaped island surrounded on all sides by a moat of the same shape, which was 6 or 7 metres wide. The road entered the compound from the south. There were five houses: on the west side stood three adobe and thatch dwellings, while on the east side stood a three-roomed brick and tile house and another adobe hut. The owner of the brick and tile house, a descendant of the Dong family, had

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lived all her 61 years here. Ma told her why we were here, and she was happy to answer my questions and show us around. Her grandfather, she told me, had built the hamlet in the 1930s or 1940s. It was a time of great unrest, and banditry was rife in the area. Families with money gradually either moved to the safety of the cities or fortified their houses with moats or walls. Pointing to a ruined wall just visible beside the stockade at the edge of the village, she told me that that was the original earthen wall, which had been nearly 2 metres tall. There had also been adobe watchtowers at each of the four corners of the settlement, and these had been manned by hired hands armed with guns. These had been abandoned. The four adobe huts dated from before Liberation, had long since fallen into disrepair and now served only for storage. She lived in the brick and tile house, which had been re-built in the 1970s. Why, I asked her, if her forebears had been wealthy, had they built in adobe instead of brick? She said she had no idea whether they had been rich or not. By the time it got to her father’s generation, most of the family, by dint of studying and passing exams, had managed to get city jobs. Most walled compounds in this area, she continued, were similar to Dongjia Huts: few were brickbuilt and even fewer were of more than one storey. The exceptions were landlords with several thousand mu of land. We walked around all the ramparts and I discovered a long, low building at the rear. This contained pens for cows, pigs and poultry, and currently housed one pig and some chickens. Opposite this was a small vegetable garden, about 0.3 mu in size, and there were fish in the moat. Clearly, such fortified compounds had in the past been completely self-supporting. I had been under the impression that it was mainly villages which were fortified, but the old lady told me that in the majority of cases it was almost always the dwellings of a single big family which were defended in this way, as in the case of Dongjia Huts. What did this phenomenon tell us? I had discovered a number of complete villages that were fortified, on a previous visit to Wuyang County, and these tended to be single-surname villages: that is, all the residents were of the same clan. Just as the May Fourth Movement scholars had pointed out, rural China appeared to be a typical clanbased society, rather than villages and village-based society forming communities as described by the German sociologist Tonnies.17 If villagers had been conscious of belonging to such a community, then they would have united in the face of the growing threat from robbers and bandits, and in that case, moats and ramparts would have been expanded to fortify whole villages. But the Chinese peasants’ community consciousness was limited to members of the same clan and encompassed, at most, a single-clan village. Even in the face of a common danger, it was rare for more than a single clan or village to unite voluntarily to defend itself. It was worth researchers investing considerable effort to explore the implications of this for the modernisation of rural social relationships and the implementation of village self-government, democracy and the rule of law countrywide. When we had finished visiting the fortifications, the old lady invited us back to her house for a cup of tea, and this gave me chance to take a look at her house from the inside. The middle room was a kitchen/sitting room with, on one side, the bedroom, mainly occupied by the ancestral bed, and on the other, a Buddhist shrine. On the walls of this room hung a picture of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and the table held two incense burners, a wooden temple ‘drum’ for accompanying the recitation of prayers and a string of beads. ‘Are you a practising Buddhist?’ I asked her.

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‘Yes, indeed,’ she replied, ‘I’m a vegetarian and I read the scriptures.’ She listed four Buddhist classics which she was able to read, and took out of a drawer a book yellowed with age. I opened it at the ‘Heart Sutra’ and asked if she could understand what it said. ‘I know the characters so I can read it aloud, but I can’t understand the meaning. Can you understand it, sir?’ When I replied that I knew a little of what it was about, her old face lit up with a smile of surprise and delight, and she insisted I explain the Heart Sutra to her. At that point, we heard the car horn in the distance—the driver had come to pick me up. I looked at my watch and realised it was already a quarter to six. On a rainy day like today it got dark early, and the road back would be muddy. I gave my apologies to my hostess and explained that I had to leave. But she begged me to explain just a short piece to her, or even just say a few words about it. Looking at the imploring expression on the face of this lonely old woman, I gave in and began to explain a few sentences to her. Although the language of the Heart Sutra is simple, it contains complex layers of meaning, and I could see that she did not understand the relationship between heart and outward appearance. I suddenly saw a rose in full bloom outside the house. This served me as a metaphor, and from there I progressed in gradual stages to the concept of disengagement from the world. She listened in rapt attention as comprehension dawned. Twenty minutes passed and the horn sounded again. This time I had to go. She reluctantly bade me farewell, clasped my hand and asked: ‘When will you come back?’ As we left, I turned to see her waving goodbye and was seized with a desire to go back and finish explaining the Heart Sutra to her, but Ma hurried me away. We went back to the house by the side of the main road and returned the rubber boots. The two men living here happened to be the nephews of the old lady of Dongjia Huts. They had a four-roomed, brick and concrete-built single-storey house which had been divided into two when the brothers married. I took the opportunity of asking them how much they earned. The younger one said there were three of them in his house, but they only had two people’s worth of contract land, a mu per head, because their child was only a year old. This amount of land was enough to feed them, but to earn money you had to get a job in town. People from around here had begun to leave in search of paid work at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. He had first gone to Beijing for a year or so, along with others from here, but had not succeeded in earning any money. His trip, however, had shown him a bit of the world, and he then went south to Guangzhou and worked there for two or three years. He had saved Y20,000 and on his return had bought a small minibus, which he used as a taxi. This had earned him a bit more money at first but not now; as there were a lot of cars around here now, competition was fierce. Indicating a half-completed house over the road, he said he had originally planned to build another house and let his brother’s family have these two rooms, but had run out of money. They had a colour TV and a programme-controlled telephone, which you needed as a taxi driver. He was sitting idle at home this year, until he found himself a new job. He was 25 years old and had completed lower middle school, he told me. He saw no future in staying in the village and just being a farmer. On the return journey, I was careful to take a look at the roadside villages, and noticed half a dozen moated hamlets like Dongjia Huts, although their state of preservation was not as good. In some of them, the moats had been filled in so that the dwellings within and without were all of a piece. I also realised that, in this area, old-style adobe homes

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formed a significant proportion of village housing. The xiang head who was with us said that before the 1970s all the houses were without exception built of adobe, with the better ones being tiled and the others straw-thatched. Brick and tile houses only appeared little by little after the mid-1970s. Up until the 1990s, it was a tiny minority of families who had made money in business who had two-storey houses, most of them situated on the highway. Back at the xiang government offices, it was already past seven o’clock and the xiang head insisted that we should eat with him. The deputy head of the Party School deferred to me, and I said: ‘If you like, but just something simple like a bowl of noodles.’ To my surprise, a little while later the cook from the xiang canteen brought out half a dozen dishes of food and two bottles of spirits. During our meal, the conversation turned again to the Dongjia Huts, and the xiang head told me that an ancestor of the old lady who lived there had been a landlord, but he was not sure how much land he had owned. Her grandfather had built the huts, which were thatched as was usual then in moated villages. He had had two sons, and the elder was her father. Before Liberation, the father had succeeded in passing his exams and had found a job in Nanjing, where he married and had two sons and two daughters. In 1946, when he was just 36, he had returned to his estates, to divide up the family property or possibly to get some money. On the return journey to Nanjing, the boat capsized and he drowned. His widow was unable to support her four children in Nanjing and was obliged to send the two girls back to Dongjia Huts. After the fall of Nanjing, she fled with the two boys to Taiwan, but the two girls had to stay put and were looked after by the estate hired hands. Later the elder daughter married the son of one of the hired hands and remained at Dongjia Huts. A few years ago, said the xiang head, their brothers had paid them a visit and, rumour had it, had given them a substantial amount of money. Both brothers were US-educated and had been professors in Taiwan universities, though both were now retired. Strange that children of the same family had such different fates. There probably lay the answer as to why the old lady had converted to Buddhism. That night, Ma and I stayed at the G County Party Committee guesthouse. It was a four-storey building and had recently been upgraded to the standard of a three-star hotel. Room prices ranged from Y80 to Y310. Ma and I went for a room in the middle price range—at Y150. Ma told me that in the poor counties, it was always the Party guesthouse which was the county’s most modern hotel—a fact which somehow made abundantly clear the skewed nature of local officialdom’s understanding of and aspirations for modernisation.

Purchasing favour or reciprocating hospitality? The only arrangement I had today was a meeting with the Party School teachers in the afternoon. The morning I spent looking through G County records from the Ming dynasty in the hopes of finding out more about the daily lives of the local peasantry—clothing, diet, housing, travel, the sort of details normally ignored and left unrecorded by historians. The annals were in three volumes, and in the form of concise notes. Though they were not what I was looking for, some comments on officials caught my attention. The following excerpt gives a flavour:

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In the Qin dynasty, the hereditary system for county and provincial officials was abolished and replaced with a system where central government appointed officials. As a result local officials often regarded their appointments as temporary and had no interest in making improvements. Without the hereditary system…it will be impossible to attain the levels of prosperity of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties.18 In my view there was a great deal of historical continuity between China’s imperial past and the present day, and so it behoved us to examine how local government worked then. For example, what notice was taken of public opinion? In the Han and Tang dynasties, folk songs were seen as an expression of the people’s views on the merits or otherwise of local governors, and these songs were officially collected and recorded. Later on, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, ordinary people were permitted to lodge complaints against local government to a higher authority. Such appeals were, of course, subject to numerous constraints, and it cannot be said that either system ever really worked. In Confucian political theory, imperial power obeyed divine will which, moreover, accorded with popular feelings. However, political thinkers did not take this idea one step further and give formal, institutional expression to the people’s will, nor did they employ it when deciding on local government appointments. There was a great gulf between ‘peoplebased’ rule and rule by the people, i.e. democracy. We were now in the 1990s and although in theory we had crossed that divide, in practice the same difficulties still existed. Even if, at the most basic level of local government, the administrative village, there was ‘villagers’ autonomy’, in practice the village ‘boss’ was appointed from above, and villagers still had recourse only to folk songs and appeals to make their opinions heard. Today’s officials decorate themselves with false achievements. They do a great deal on paper, but very little in reality; they are harsh to ordinary people and deceive their superiors, in order to please them; they lead a luxurious and dissipated life while their people live in misery and the state declines. Such was the fierce denunciation by the writer of the G County Records against the governor of his era. Such an accusation would still hit home if transposed to modern times. How was it possible for the type of official graft endemic to ancient feudal despotism to re-emerge in a similar form today when every aspect of local government had undergone such radical changes? Of course, corruption nowadays was by no means as widespread or grave as then, but modern trends were nonetheless worrying. In my analysis there were many other ways in which modern politics and government in China were in direct line of descent from the imperial rule of the past. We hastened to introduce new concepts and systems, yet tradition persisted as stubbornly in subverting them. The continuing strength of tradition in China was a phenomenon that no student of modern China could ignore. At our afternoon meeting with the Party School teachers, we talked about the way in which local people evaluated their cadres. They divided them into three categories: those to whom you paid a bit of extra money on the side, and they did the job for you; those to whom you paid extra money and who didn’t do the job for you; and

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those who wouldn’t accept your extra money but didn’t do the work for you either. According to the teachers, the first type were welcomed, the second hated, and the last category also disliked. I suggested that if the criterion was whether or not the cadres took their money and did the work for them, then a fourth category—those who did not accept the extra money but did the work for them anyway—ought to be added; but this met with the response that cadres like this no longer existed in this day and age. My belief was that, looked at through the eyes of a modern political scientist, the purchase of favour from those with power was a classic case of government corruption. An anthropologist, however, might perceive it as a natural manifestation within government of patterns of behaviour—‘doing favours’ and ‘exchange of courtesies’—which were still prevalent in rural society. Villagers knew perfectly well in principle that it was their own contributions which paid local officials’ salaries. But these obligatory contributions were not understood by them as taxation in the modern sense, which brought with it certain rights. The fact that the fourth category of cadre, who worked for people without accepting extra money, did not exist was proof of the fact that rural people lacked a real awareness of what modern taxation meant. In general, the Chinese, when faced as individuals or families with insurmountable difficulties, would regard these as a private matter, to be resolved by having recourse to private social networks. The way in which they traditionally invoked this social support was by entertaining or giving gifts. Where this mode of behaviour persisted, it was hard for local officials to uphold the law and behave with correctness and impartiality. The crisis of faith and government corruption One of the teachers made the point that among local cadres there were many who had abandoned Marxism-Leninism for Buddhism. They were frequently to be found burning joss sticks, praying in temples and practising divination. ‘Last year,’ he said, ‘when I went to a temple, there were several hundred cars parked outside. I reckon that the majority belonged to local officials from this or neighbouring counties. Apparently the bodhisattva from that temple is known as especially efficacious. If local officials are Buddhist and care chiefly about their career and money, then where does that leave local government?’ ‘The pervasiveness of corruption at every level of Party and government has to be related to this loss of faith in Marxism-Leninism,’ added the deputy director. ‘The banner of Mao Zedong Thought has fallen, but the banner of reform has not yet been raised. If you let some people get rich, then those with power will always be in the front line. It’s not feasible to expect the majority of cadres to help the masses get rich and live in penury themselves. One of the chief motives for the competition for official posts is the desire for privilege and private gain. Widespread corruption has become a reason for agnosticism, and it is this very scepticism which has exacerbated corruption and makes it very difficult to eliminate.’ Mr Zhang, the school’s deputy head, had an intimate knowledge of his xiang, having been xiang head and Party Secretary in G County between 1988 and 1992, so when the meeting concluded the two of us continued our discussion alone. ‘My xiang,’ he told me, ‘was in the valley of the Shi River, a tributary of the Huai. It has a population of 30,000 and an arable land area of 28,000 mu, giving each person less

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than a mu each (not including the semi-barren flood plain). It’s one of G County’s smaller xiangs. Up until the mid-1980s, all village houses were still of adobe. There were two types of houses: those with thatched and those with tiled roofs, and each generally had three rooms. It’s only in the last six or so years that villagers have gradually begun to build brick and tile houses, and these still only comprise 20–30 per cent of village dwellings.’ He had no precise figures, so this was just a guess. There were still almost no two-storey buildings in the xiang. ‘In terms of consumption, the peasants’ priorities are: one, food, two, clothing, and three, saving up to marry and build a house. It takes a lifetime of savings to build a single-storey, three-roomed house. The basic needs of the peasants have at least been met, and consumer items like watches, sewing machines, fans, radios and bicycles are pretty common now. About half the households have black-and-white TVs, but very few have colour. “Basic needs” as far as most of the peasants are concerned just means having enough to eat and warm clothing to wear: meat and vegetable consumption is low, generally confined to national holidays. Most of the time, they don’t have stir-fried dishes. I reckon that a family wouldn’t get through more than half to one catty of cooking oil per month. The standard of living has risen since decollectivisation of land, but life is still hard. With an average one mu per head and two crops per year, they still can’t make more than Y500–600 from each mu. Grain prices fell this year, so their income has fallen with it. They can only just get enough to eat without the income from a migrant worker in the family.’ With regard to the xiang government expenditure, he told me that it consisted of four main items: cadres’ salaries—say, 100 cadres on Y5,000 per year, a total of Y500,000; primary and middle school teachers’ salaries—say, 150 teachers on Y5,000 a year, so Y750,000; expenses associated with running the government offices, Y250,000 on transport and communications alone (even the smallest, poorest xiang has at least three cars, one for government departments, one for the Family Planning Office and one for the police, and there’s petrol, drivers’ salaries and other expenses to be paid, in total Y150,000); then each xiang will have five mobile phones, costing Y15,000 per year each, or Y75,000 altogether; and other travel and communications items will come to Y25,000, making a grand total of Y250,000. Fourth, there’s what goes on entertaining, at least Y200,000 annually for a xiang government. If you add all that up, it comes to Y1,700,000. This is a very rough estimate, and it will go over that figure if, for example, your bosses make you order a lot of newspapers and periodicals, which could cost several tens of thousands of yuan per year. And take education: the budget is hardly enough to cover salaries, and school buildings maintenance and teaching equipment costs a lot more than that. Education normally takes about 60 per cent of the xiang budget. The revenues of a poor xiang or county which relies on levies from farming is really not enough, and it’s common both for cadres not to get their wages on time, and for peasants to feel the levies are excessive.’ He sighed and said: ‘G County xiangs are almost all on subsistence budgets—where can they get the money to carry out any projects? Any new work has to be levied from the villagers, until the levies they have to pay become unendurable. And we, in the meantime, are kept frantically busy in endless meetings and other pointless activities, till we don’t know whether we’re coming or going.’

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At this point, Mr Wang, the head of the County Organisational Department, came in to invite us to dine at the guesthouse. We could hardly turn down such a generous invitation, so we had to break off our discussion, and arranged with Zhang to resume it again the next morning. Before coming to G County, I had agreed with Ma that there was no need to bother local government officials, we would just stick to interviewing Party School teachers and get them to take us to a couple of villages before we returned to Xinyang. But as Ma’s ex-students, the local cadres saw it as their natural duty to help us in whatever way possible. Wang was a good friend of Ma’s and had somehow got wind of our arrival, hence the personal invitation. The converted former county guesthouse had a dozen or so private dining rooms, each of which was fully occupied tonight. The County Organisational Department had booked three of them. In one Ma and I (and a further seven or eight other people) were to have dinner, and in the other two, cadres from the Regional Party Committee Organisational Department, here on an inspection visit, were being wined and dined. Wang circulated between his three sets of guests. Lavish entertainment was all part of the job for a local official in the interior of China. The food and drink circulated freely, and drinking games were played amid a general hubbub. As the dinner drew to a close, one of the teachers came to invite Ma and me to the karaoke. The County Agricultural Bank was also hosting three dinners for the Party School heads and teachers, and a side room had been booked next to the dance hall for after the dinner—there would be singing and dancing for everyone. This would give me the chance to get a taste of nightlife in a county town in the interior of China. The dance hall, on the third floor, was one of the service industries run by the County Food Supplies Department. The dance floor was 40 to 50 square metres and there was a row of small side rooms, crowded with people, running down both sides, together with seven or eight larger private rooms. One of the teachers, a Mr Wang, took us to our room, which was already full of people. There were three or four of the teachers (the heads and some of the older teachers had gone home after dinner), two or three of the bank staff and five hostesses. I could neither sing nor dance, but I was ‘assigned’ a girl anyway and we began to chat. She told me that a large private room went for Y300 a night, and songs were included in that. A hostess cost Y60 per night, of which Y40 went to the girl herself. The girls often got tips as well, but it was up to the client. The number of hostesses on any one evening here ranged from ten to thirty. Some of the girls had been here a long time, others came and went. The girls would earn Y1,000–2,000 a month (the average monthly wage of an office worker in this county was Y300). Most of the hostesses came from out of county and province; she herself was from Fuyang County, Anhui Province, and was the main source of cash income for her family. This was all she could do, she said, as she had only done lower middle school and had no skills and, besides, the money was good. ‘This is a young woman’s job,’ I said. ‘You won’t be able to do it for long, what will you do afterwards?’ ‘After my brother has graduated, I’d like to do a few more years to save money, then go home and set up a little shop or something—but who knows what will happen?’ ‘What sort of people come here for the evening?’ I asked.

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‘Cadres, business people and their friends,’ she said. ‘People don’t come here unless they’ve money or power.’ By the time Ma and I got back to the guesthouse it was midnight. My head was full of things like doing favours, social connections, entertainment expenses, legal rights and the tax burden on the peasants. I had always felt that they were closely connected in some way, but I still found it difficult to explain clearly quite how the connection worked.

Borrowing money to make tax payments Early in the morning, Ma and I were woken by a knock at the door. Zhang, the deputy head of the Party School, and two teachers had come to invite us to breakfast. The people of China’s interior were extraordinarily friendly people. As we breakfasted, we continued our conversation of the previous afternoon. With the degree of familiarity and trust that had grown up between us, I was able to broach some sensitive topics. I first asked Zhang to tell me about the G County levies in recent years, and then about the annual level of xiang and village expenditure on hospitality. The agricultural levies imposed on the peasants ‘G County has a population of 1,400,000, the biggest in the province,’ he began. ‘It’s also a nationally classified poor county, with more than 1.2 million engaged in agriculture. It has 33 xiang and 598 administrative villages. We basically have no commercial enterprises to speak of either at xiang or village level. The peasants’ annual income comes mainly from tilling their land, although a proportion have some income from outside jobs. We have no reliable statistics on what proportion—I really don’t know myself, but my guess would be in the region of 30–50 per cent. Even if you did some investigation, it would be hard to establish accurately. What we can say for sure is that the poor counties are the ones in which agriculture is predominant and where there’s very little industry and commerce. The peasants’ non-agricultural income comes largely from jobs in the city; if that is added to their normal income from crop cultivation and animal husbandry, then you get an annual net income figure of no more than Y800 per capita, though all the xiangs and villages report that figure as higher. When we assess whether peasant levies are heavy or light, we have to consider not only how much they’re paying annually but, even more important, what percentage that is of their net annual income. ‘Last summer, I went to one xiang to review Party development work there; I dropped in on a few peasant families and found out a bit more about the burden of agricultural levies. One peasant told me that there were four people in his family and they paid Y1,584 a year—that’s Y396 per person. In another village I was told a family of five were paying Y2,150, or Y430 each. The peasant who told me that said he’s borrowed from a credit co-operative to pay the government. If they don’t pay up in time, they get their food grain expropriated, or even their houses pulled down. I asked him how common it was for people to borrow in order to pay their dues, and he told me that in his village most people were doing as he was. It’s a really desperate state of affairs…no better than the unbridled cruelty of officials in the bad old imperial days. That day I went back to the xiang government offices with a heavy heart, and there I happened to bump

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into the xiang head and Party Secretary. They are my ex-students and I’ve always got on well with them, so I just asked them straight up: “Why is the tax burden so heavy? If each person is paying Y400 a year, that’s nearly half their hard-earned income that the government is taking off them.” ‘To my surprise, the Party Secretary’s first reaction was to deny it. “Who pays that much in levies?” he said. “It’s only Y200–300 in our xiang.” They were silent for a moment, then the xiang head added: “We need a new school building, and we’ve got road repairs. Our electrical transformers and cabling are all worn out and need replacing. All these public works cost money, and it can only come from the peasants.” ‘I said to them: “Well you’d better go about it a bit more slowly, spread it out over a couple of years, don’t bite off more than you can chew. The peasants just can’t take any more. Many great projects, like the Great Wall or the Grand Canal, were historically carried out in a good cause. But because they were done at such great human cost, they eventually led to uprisings.” ‘The xiang head’s response was: “It’s not that serious! But we’re a poor xiang, we’re very, very backward compared to other xiangs, we’ve really got to catch up. Otherwise, when we’re assessed by the county, how will we explain ourselves?” ‘I was at a loss to know what to say to this. ‘The levies are different every year in each county and xiang,’ Zhang went on. ‘In this county this year, they will be between Y200 and Y400. This is a huge proportion of the peasants’ income and it means that local government is taking everything they’ve got from the farm, apart from their food grain. But the county and xiangs still don’t think it’s enough for their budget. Central government issues instructions about limiting the levies year after year, but it doesn’t happen. One of the reasons is the explosion in numbers of government employees since the reforms; another is that those with power will use it to force their way into the ranks of the newly wealthy. Another reason is that the poorer the xiang or county, the faster they want to catch up. They’re doing too many projects too fast. If things go on like this, the peasantry may be pushed beyond endurance.’ Village and xiang hospitality expenditure Zhang told me: The County Party School mainly has dealings with xiang and village cadres. I’ve worked in xiang government a number of years and I can make a reasonable guess at how much they’ve been spending on entertainment in recent years: around Y20,000 per village, and Y100,000 per xiang, or Y3.3 million for all the xiangs of G County. There are about 600 administrative villages here so they spent a total of about Y12 million. Add the two figures together and you get Y15.3 million. The population of the county is 1,200,000, so each man, woman and child is paying about Y13 towards local government hospitality. That’s no small sum. As for how much all the different county departments are spending on the same thing, I really couldn’t begin to guess. I wondered why hospitality continued to take such a large chunk of government budgets. Zhang said: ‘One reason is that that’s our way of treating our guests in these parts. We like to wine and dine them, the more generously the better. It’s all part of doing your job well as an official, offering hospitality and using official funds to do it. Another reason is that the number of inspections and assessments they have to contend with is increasing rapidly. These visits were originally intended to promote good work, but now

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they’ve become sort of hospitality contests. The inspection teams almost seem to be assessing not the work itself but the standard of entertainment. If that’s the state of affairs, there’s no way expenditure is going to drop off.’ After breakfast I suggested to Zhang that perhaps he could take us around a couple of villages and find me some peasants to talk to. Ideally, I would like to choose three villages according to their level of development—a developed one, an average one and a poor one. The Party School head’s face fell, and he appeared at a loss for a reply. I therefore at once withdrew my suggestion and decided to go straight back to Xinyang. A little later Zhang explained it to me this way: ‘You’ve come a long way to do this sociological research, and it behoves us to help and support you in every possible way. The problem is that if our superiors get to hear about it, they’ll tell us that the rule is reporters and academics can only come and do research at the local level after obtaining prior approval from the county organisational and propaganda departments, and being taken around by someone from those departments. Taking you to see moated villages, of course, is no problem at all, but allowing you to carry out research would cause a lot of trouble.’ He was clearly speaking the truth, and I understood completely. In Chinese rural society, access to the facts of a situation and the mood of a community were wholly at the behest of local authorities. Yet this access was a prerequisite for the study of rural society, and the denial of it was the biggest problem facing Chinese academics today. At 9 a.m., Ma and I got a lift back to Xinyang in the car taking County Party School exam papers to the regional Party School. From G to Xinyang was around 300 li, it was raining and the driving was slow. I struck up a conversation with the teacher who had the exam papers. He told me that all the village heads and Party Secretaries in the county were his students. Over the last years, he had visited almost all the villages, so I put some questions to him. Among other things he told me a bit more about the question of hospitality expenditure. Between 1992 and 1994, L Village in B xiang was spending Y30,000–40,000 annually and the peasants complained to the county government. At the end of 1994, a 32-year-old upper middle school-educated ex-army man took over as Village Party Secretary. He was an honest man, and he ruled that for all visitors from senior departments, the limit should be one bowl of rice and one of meat or vegetables per person. The result was that in 1995 hospitality expenditure dropped from Y40,000 to Y5,000. Since that man had taken office, the peasants had only paid the regulation 5 per cent of their income to the xiang. This was not at all to the liking of the xiang government, lest other villages should follow suit, but the villagers themselves thought the world of him. ‘The man once said to me: “So long as they’ll let me do this job, I’ll take my orders from central government. If they don’t let me, then I’ll just go and get a job as a migrant worker. It’s really no big deal!” The highest-spending village is one on the outskirts of the county town. They got through Y100,000 in 1995, and I got that figure from the Village Party Secretary himself. It’s a prosperous village with a number of businesses, but just because of its proximity to the town, it’s convenient for xiang and county cadres and gets a lot of visitors. Obviously, entertaining so many people is expensive and puts a huge strain on resources.’ I got up early the next morning, to the sound of the rain which had accompanied my entire visit to Xinyang so far. Before leaving there were two further things I wanted to do: get Ma to find me a couple of teachers who hailed from the villages and who could

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take me to their homes so that I could collect more case studies; and go to the regional Party School and interview some xiang heads and Party Secretaries on matters of mutual interest. I put this to Ma over breakfast. He said: ‘The whole regional Party School is on holiday at the moment. The students have all completed their courses and went back to their jobs the day before yesterday. The school’s administrative workers have all gone off on a trip to the Three Gorges (last year the school organised a trip for all the teachers, which upset the administrators, so this is by way of making it up to them) so the teachers won’t be coming in at all.’ No wonder the school seemed so echoingly empty. I decided to go back to Kaifeng. There were no direct bus or train services, so I would go first Zhengzhou on the train that left Xinyang at 3 p.m.

An episode at Zhengzhou station The train to Kaifeng left Zhengzhou at 9.30 a.m., arriving at 11.30. I had called my friend Meng, inviting him to lunch with me at the Henan University guesthouse, where we could discuss the last stage of my trip: the visit to M, N and K counties along the Luo River. K County was situated along its upper reaches and was the home of Yue Liang, one of the university lecturers. He could therefore supply us with a number of useful contacts. In addition, Meng had friends in N and M counties, which would smooth my path. The Luo and the Yi Rivers joined at Luoyang, and flowed into the Yellow River at Gongyi. The Luo-Yi rivers occupied a position in the evolution of Chinese culture equivalent in importance to that of the Jing-Wei and Fen rivers, and in a certain sense it could be said that the Yellow River culture was nurtured by its three great tributaries. My visit to the area would therefore further enable me to trace the roots of that culture. Meng brought me two bits of bad news: Yue Liang could not get out of his teaching commitments to take me to K County, and Meng’s N County friend was actually on a six-month course at Zhengzhou Party School. Luckily, he had liaised with the Deputy Party Secretary of M County, who was expecting me. This time I was to travel alone, as no one was able to accompany me. Meng, Tang and Xu had treated me with an old-fashioned courtesy typical of this most hospitable of regions, and had been genuinely apologetic at not being able to accompany me. While waiting at Zhengzhou station at nine o’clock, something happened to me which it is worth recounting. By the door of the station waiting hall, there was a row of shoeshine stands. ‘Shine your shoes, sir, Y1 a pair, very cheap,’ the shoeshine boys and girls intoned. In all the months of my travels, I had not applied any polish to my shoes. I had bought my ticket and still had half an hour to wait for the train. This was the first time that I could remember ever having had my shoes polished, but it would serve to while away the time. The shoeshine boy was 16 or 17 years old, and I surmised that he was a peasant lad who had dropped out of lower middle school to earn some money in the big city. As he polished away I mused to myself that it must have been hard leaving school to work, and that Y1 was too little. It would not hurt to give him a bit more. In three or four minutes he declared the job done, and said to me: ‘Yesterday I polished a young lady’s shoes and she gave me Y38. Shoe polish is really expensive to buy.’ He was obviously hinting I should

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give him a bit extra, so I got out all the change I had in my pocket— Y8–and gave it to him. As the starting price was Y1, I thought that this was plenty and expected delighted thanks. However, his face darkened and he rejected my offering curtly. ‘You crazy? That’s nowhere near enough!’ I was taken aback, but kept my temper and asked: ‘So how much do you want?’ ‘That’s up to you,’ he replied. I was at a loss as to what to do. It was not so much a question of money, it was how to reconcile the little fraudster in front of me into whose trap I had fallen with the pity I had felt for him earlier. At this point, a boy of about 14 turned up. ‘Give him at least Y20,’ he advised me. At this point I suddenly realised they were all in this together, a bunch of petty street criminals rather than peasant lads deserving of my sympathy. I decided to cut my losses and without further argument gave him Y20. Now it was their turn to be amazed—they had obviously expected more protest. They took the money, and I asked them to sit down. They complied, and I smiled at them and said: ‘Isn’t that a bit of a rip-off—Y20 for three or four minutes’ work?’ The boy who had cleaned my shoes replied: ‘Yes, it’s not too cool, but what can I do? My mother’s sick and needs medicine.’ ‘I think you’re using that as an excuse,’ I challenged him. He looked embarrassed and said nothing. ‘Have you finished school,’ I asked. ‘No, the fees were too much, we couldn’t pay, I dropped out.’ ‘And you’ve just been to primary?’ I asked the other one. ‘Yes, we couldn’t afford lower middle school.’ ‘That’s another excuse. You just didn’t want to go to school, did you?’ They admitted that I was right. They had not wanted to stay at school. But it was true that school fees kept going up, and they really could not afford it. They assured me they were telling the truth. They came from a place about 20 kilometres from Zhengzhou, their families had less than 0.8 mu per head and the levies were very heavy. All the boys dropped out of school unless they were doing really well. I asked them how much tax their families were paying, and the older boy said: ‘The levy was 128 catties of wheat per person after this harvest, and if you add in other payments, we had to pay over Y200 each. All our income goes to the cadres. If you didn’t get a job in town, you couldn’t feed yourself, let alone go to school. Those cadres are a bunch of thieves.’ His eyes flitted from side to side as he spoke, and I saw he was looking for new customers. I gave him another Y5 ‘to make up for lost business’ and a cigarette. He patted his pockets for matches, and so I gave him a lighter too. My ‘generosity’ must have stirred something in the hearts of these new young ‘outlaws’ because the younger one suddenly said to me in a low voice: ‘Sir, you’re a good man. The station is full of people out to fleece travellers—you must be very careful!’ I asked them how travellers got ripped off, but they exchanged glances and would not tell me. With the advent of reforms in China, an ever-increasing tide of migrant workers was sweeping into the cities. Each railway station and port had its own underground community, and amidst this sea of humanity, human wolves prowled, on the lookout for the chance to fleece the hapless and find an outlet for their base passions in this strange world. Around the outskirts of the cities, new ‘shanty towns’ were growing up. They

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were the first port of call for large numbers of peasants coming to the city, and they were stinking holes. It was indeed true that in such places the true nature of society was beginning to be revealed.

The final stage of my trip—the Luo River I arrived at Luoyang City at four o’clock, and got on a bus for M County, where I arrived at 5.30 p.m. I hurried through the rain to M County Party Committee offices, which were already shrouded almost entirely in darkness. There was not a soul to be seen, so I then went to the county government offices to look for the deputy county head, Mr D. There someone advised me I should find him in the guesthouse canteen. Out into the rain again, and over to the guesthouse, where I duly found him eating dinner and was invited to join him. D told me that they had been expecting me, but that Meng’s friend, Mr W, the deputy Party Secretary, was away until tomorrow afternoon. He himself would arrange my accommodation, and tomorrow morning I could either rest or else his secretary would take me to look around. Alone in the guesthouse that evening, I thought of my wife and daughter, and put through a call to Shanghai to tell them of my progress. The next day it was raining again. The two sweatshirts I had brought with me were by no means adequate to keep out the winter chill. At nine in the morning, D sent his secretary, a young man called Zhang, to take me to the County Records Office. The director of this office, an impressively well-read man in his sixties, gave me a warm welcome. M County was situated between the Qin Mountains in the east, and the Luo River in the west. The county town had been built during the Northern Wei dynasty, so was at least 1,500 years old. There were three types of topography: flat, hilly and mountainous. The river plain had flooded almost every year in the last half century, while the hills and mountains suffered from drought in equal measure, and sometimes drought and flooding occurred in the same year. The flooding had less serious consequences than the drought. The frequency of the droughts meant that M County was on the national list of poor counties, as indeed were most of the counties on the Yi and Luo river plains. If the drought was bad, then both people and livestock in the hills and mountains were short of water. In 1991, the director had been to do some socialist propaganda in a xiang where the drought was particularly bad, and had taken the villagers to fetch water rations for themselves and their beasts from a reservoir a dozen or so li away. But soon the reservoir water ran out too, and they had to go even further afield for water. The hillsides were largely denuded of vegetation, and every scrap of land, whether flat or hilly, was under cultivation. When it rained, it flooded and large quantities of soil were washed away; if the rains did not come, then there was drought. Degradation of local environmental conditions and the shortage of water were the main factors which had curtailed development in the region. The only solution to these problems, in the director’s opinion, lay in large-scale water conservation projects and reafforestation of much of the hill area. But the first would require huge investment—and where would that come from? And the second would mean that large numbers of people had to leave the land—and where would they go?

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The origins of the people of M County According to local villagers, they had migrated here from Hongdong County in Shanxi Province at the beginning of the Ming dynasty. In order to compile the county records, the director and his colleagues had collected a dozen or so clan records from all the xiangs, all of which tended to prove this account. He himself had done some research in Hongdong County, and had found that there was a Ming government office in charge of emigration from there, sending people far and wide—to three districts (zhou), five prefectures and fifty-two counties. It was such a long time ago that the only thing the locals knew was that their ancestors had migrated here from Hongdong County in Shanxi. According to the records, the population of M County had historically remained steady at 160,000 to 180,00, rising to 200,000 after the establishment of the Republic in 1911. It was impossible to tell how accurate the old population statistics were, and when they had compiled the records they only had old material to work from. The current population, however, was in excess of 500,000. Yiyang County was made up of nineteen xiangs, about 350 administrative villages and 1,700 or 1,800 natural villages. The varied topography of the region meant that there was a great disparity in the size of the villages. The smallest, usually in the mountains, were known as ‘three-family villages’, while the largest, the river plain villages, might have a population of 6,000 or so. As regards clan structure, there were very few single-surname villages, and these were mostly in the mountains. Mixed-surname villages were also rare, with the majority being dominant-surname villages: in these the majority of the population shared a couple of surnames, and the remainder had assorted surnames. In general, the dominant surnames were the families who were longest established here and could trace their origins back to the early Ming dynasty, but there were exceptions to this rule. Families might flourish or decline over the generations, so minority surnames in a village could become dominant over time, and by the same token it was not unusual for dominant surnames to die out. Miscellaneous surnames in a dominant-surname village would have arrived by one of four main routes: families seeking refuge with relatives and friends in the village; sons-in-law settling with the bride’s family and later resuming their birth surname; pedlars and craftsmen settling in the village (barbers, tailors, carpenters, etc.); and hired hands who worked for the landlord before 1949, and were allocated land in the village after Liberation. Finally, another major reason why villages had families with miscellaneous surnames was that people dispersed from post-Liberation water conservation project areas had settled here. The poverty of the local peasants, he told me, was reflected in their housing and diet: most lived on cereals and just had enough to eat. In general, the annual harvest would feed a family in a good year, although a few went short or had a small surplus. If there was a drought and the harvest failed, then they always needed emergency rations from the government. The river plain peasants were basically self-sufficient in grain but the hill villagers were still dependent on food aid. Another difference was that the main food grain in the lowlands was wheat, but in the highlands it was sweet potatoes, and a crop of these only added up to half a year’s food supply. The same differences applied in housing: ‘On the river plains, we began to see brick and tile single-storey houses (what you called “first-generation housing”) at the end of the 1970s, and in the 1980s they were being built everywhere. That stage is now basically completed; you still see a few adobe houses, but apart from those lived in by a few

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elderly people, the rest are used for livestock or for storing firewood. In the 1990s, a few villagers started building two-storey houses, or “second-generation housing”. These are usually built beside the highway and double as shops or other business premises. On the uplands, the whole process started later. About half have now moved into brick and tile houses, the other half have adobe and tiled houses, and a few still live in cave dwellings. To build a brick and tile house, they need to have a migrant worker’s income—it’s almost impossible for them to improve their housing if they’re dependent on the proceeds of their farm only. As for two-storey houses, an ordinary one would cost at least Y30,000– 40,000. As a rule, only trade and industry bosses have these.’ My informant then told me about crops: in M County, the summer crop was wheat, the autumn crops, sweet potatoes and maize—a crop sequence handed down over many centuries. In 1986, a new Party Secretary had come to M County and had put enormous efforts into promoting the cultivation of tobacco and apples, tobacco in particular. Every xiang had to push them, every village had to grow them—the county laid down the acreage to be given over in each village, and this in turn was allocated to the households. No doubt he had the right motives, since in general the returns from tobacco and apples were greater than those from traditional crops, and the county and xiang governments could levy a farm produce tax on them and increase their income, thereby benefiting both people and government. The problem was that as soon as everyone started to grow tobacco and apples, the market prices began to slide. This year, the best apples were going for no more than Y0.4–Y0.5 per catty, and no one wanted the less good ones at all. The peasants made nothing, and the trees took up valuable contracted land. Apparently many had now been chopped up for firewood. The cultivation of tobacco and the curing of the leaves required a certain input of labour and technology. If a family could not provide these, then the leaves were unlikely to be up to the required standard. In that case, they would not sell, and a lot of labour was wasted. Besides, the acreage and revenue targets were apportioned to each xiang and village, and taxes were levied based on those figures, no matter whether the peasants grew the tobacco or not, or how much, or whether they could sell their product—all of which caused great hardship. So the campaign to enrich the peasants was actually bankrupting them, and many appeals to the provincial government during these years were against the enforced planting policy. Our meeting had left a deep impression on me: the depth of this man’s knowledge of his county, and his willingness to speak candidly convinced me of the truth of his account. He had given me much useful background information on the ecology of the YiLuo river basins, the life of the peasantry and local government. This was a region, centred around ancient Luoyang, which had been the very cradle of Chinese civilisation; now it was facing an environmental crisis of the utmost gravity. How were its inhabitants going to lift themselves out of poverty? It was a question that urgently needed answering. During lunch, the Deputy Party Secretary, a man in his fifties, came in search of me. He apologised profusely for not being able to get away—a visit by the city family planning inspection team was keeping him fully occupied. I explained the reason for my visit and my research plans, and again stressed that my only object was academic research and would not be detrimental either to M County or to him personally. He smiled: ‘You came as Meng’s friend. He’s talked to me many times on the phone—he thinks very highly of you as a person and as a scholar. A friend of his is a friend of mine,

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‘I’m not in the slightest bit worried.’ He would give me the use of his car while I was here, and his secretary, Mr Zhao, would be seconded to accompany me. Any problems, just let me know,’ he concluded, and sounded as if he meant it. At 1 p.m., I set off for L Town with Zhao, a straight-talking and well-educated young man of 30, and the driver, an ex-army man of about 40. L Town was situated on the Luo river plain, 30–40 li west of the county town. We passed by fields of wheat, showing healthy growth after the recent rain, and arrived at about 2.30 p.m. The Town Party Secretary had gone off to the villages on family planning business, and I was received by a Mr Ma, the town head with specific responsibility for agriculture. L town, he told me, had jurisdiction over twenty-nine administrative villages, and 126 natural villages, and had a total population of 52,819, or 12,020 families. It had the second largest population in the county. The arable land area was 68,470 mu, of which 15,600 mu was irrigated, and the rest was hill land where crop yield depended on the weather. (Each village had an average of ninety-five families, or 400 people, and the land per capita was 1.3 mu.) The town head stressed that there was a big difference between the per mu yield on the river plain and the uplands. In a normal year, they could expect to get 700 catties per mu of wheat, or as much as 800 catties of maize, from the irrigated land along the river, but only half that from hill land. In other words, one mu of the former was worth two of the latter. The villagers’ average annual income, he told me, was reported as Y792 this year. I pressed him: ‘I know that all over Henan, these figures get exaggerated as village reports to xiang and xiang reports to county government. Does that happen here?’ He was silent for a moment, and then said: ‘Well…it’s inevitable, really.’ ‘You must know a great deal about the local agriculture, since you’re in charge—in your view, what’s the real income figure?’ ‘That is extremely hard to calculate accurately,’ he replied. ‘Decollectivisation means that all the families manage their own plots, and they all plant different crops. I would put their farm income at roughly Y400–500 per person per year. But we’ve had three years of drought, that’s six harvests, of which five have to varying degrees been poor, two of them very poor indeed. In those years the per capita farm income would be more like Y400– and that’s the truth. Their non-agricultural income is even harder to work out: it varies from family to family, and between river plain and hill villages. Hill folk live in remote communities, they’ve looked after the land for generations and that’s all they know how to do. They have very few contacts that would be useful to them in the world outside, so fewer of them go off to get jobs in the city. And very few of our villagers have set up businesses. So our per capita income figure this year was pretty random.’ ‘So on what basis did you report it as Y792?’ I pursued. ‘Well, we just added a percentage to last year’s figures, and reported that.’ I was taken aback at his reply, and said: ‘But the acreage and the yield don’t go up, so why are you falsifying the figures?’ He smiled sadly: ‘It’s very simple. In the past five or six years, we’ve had four new xiang town Party Secretaries. The outgoing one is not likely to want to report the same income figures as when he took over. He needs to show he’s achieved something, so he uses the income figures. Between 8 and 10 per cent has been added to them every year, so from Y500 five or six years ago, they’re now nearly Y800. The reality, however, is that with three years of drought, incomes have fallen to about Y400 per head.’

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‘This inflation of income figures, it must have some connection with wanting to bump up xiang and village government budgets?’ I asked. ‘It’s mainly to make the Party Secretary look good,’ he said. Though what you said is true too. We’re limited in the levies we can impose by the 5 per cent rule. But if we raise our income figures from Y500 to Y800, we can levy Y2 million instead of Y1,250,000, which makes a big difference to a poor xiang government like ours. The thing is, the 5 per cent rule isn’t half as logical as it seems. Why? Because a wealth-poverty divide is beginning to appear. Roughly speaking, there are three main types of peasants: those who are purely peasants, those who work on the land and have seasonal jobs in the city, and a minority who own businesses. There are big differences in income, particularly between the first and the third category. The poor find it much harder to pay the levies than do the rich.’ The new rich ‘The truth is that those who are reliant just on the land are lucky if they can meet their basic needs, and the migrant workers don’t make a lot of money either,’ Ma told me. ‘Conditions are not bad for riverside farmers but they have less than a mu per head. Hill farmers have more land but it’s poor and the crops are vulnerable to drought. Really the only people who are making money are the private entrepreneurs. We don’t have any xiang or village collective enterprises, just a few private businesses—according to this year’s figures, twenty-seven brick and tile factories, twenty-nine concrete building blocks factories, a dozen small chemical plants making sulphuric acid, a score of flour mills, two workshops making cardboard cartons, two making bonemeal. There are dozens of building companies and a few small shops and restaurants. A lot have grown up here in the last decade, but they’re small, poorly equipped, under-funded and give low returns. Since most don’t keep proper accounts, it’s hard to estimate their real profit-and-loss situation, although of course you can tell the ones that are really going under or raking it in. At a rough guess, only thirty to fifty of them are making more than Y50,000 profit annually. Our biggest private enterprise has assets of Y5 million. The owner is a 56-yearold man with only primary schooling—he was in at the beginning, he’s got a good head for business, and now he’s known all over the county. He set up a sulphuric acid plant ten years ago, kept expanding and got support from the county. Last year he paid Y1 million in profit tax, and this year he invested Y6 million (Y3 million of his own, and the rest borrowed). He’s about to build a county electricity generating plant and the county government and the bank are actively backing him. He’s a local People’s Congress representative, and is honoured as an “advanced urban worker” and a “peasant entrepreneur”.’ ‘How do the peasants feel about the new rich?’ I asked. ‘They think it’s good,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t they, if someone’s bright and can make money? What the peasants resent is people in positions of authority using their power for private gain.’

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‘Formalism’ and making wild claims ‘We really need to carry out some basic water conservancy projects,’ Ma continued. ‘It’s quite simple: the frequent droughts are a major factor in holding back the development of the county. In recent years, the county government has organised teams of peasants every winter slack season either on the river plain or up in the hills. But all they’re doing is tinkering—a ditch here, a channel there, it’s a total waste of time and money and the peasants complain bitterly about it. It sounds great when the xiang governments make their annual reports—so many people put to work, so many cubic metres dug—but it brings no real economic benefit. There’s an awful lot of “formalism” and wild boasting goes on around here.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘There are many reasons,’ he answered. ‘It’s partly to do with the way cadres’ work is appraised, partly because high targets are set by the county and above, and also because cadres are transferred frequently. Our local officials only feel themselves responsible to those above them—if they don’t finish the job, they make up the figures when they submit their reports. Because they’re always being transferred, there’s no continuity. Everybody knows that putting form before the substance of their work is wrong—but everybody does it.’ Discontent in the villages Ma said with some emotion that he had never met anyone doing rural research at the grassroots before. ‘You talk straight to us and you listen. I’m going to be frank with you about what’s worrying me. There’s a generalised discontent in the villages at the moment, and there are two important groups of people who are especially disaffected— ex-soldiers and those who had failed to complete middle school.’ He then told me a little story. Not long ago he had gone to a meeting of an independent group called the Old Soldiers’ Association. There were twenty or thirty people there, all of them demobilised in recent years and now back in their villages. Ma had been a soldier himself and was on good terms with the founder members of the group, which was why he was invited. The meeting had been extremely lively, with much angry talk, and a whole variety of complaints were raised. ‘What about?’ I asked. Ma felt unable to tell me, but I suggested to him that their dissatisfaction might have stemmed from the contrast between the education they received in the army and the ideas they had formed there, and the current reality they faced in the villages. They now found that there were few openings for them in local government, where offices were already heavily overstaffed, and in local state enterprises, which were all in recession. Peasants worked hard for little return and were heavily taxed, hence the strong desire of the young to use the army and study as a route out of farming. Now they found this avenue for advancement blocked. The poorer and more backward the area they came from, the greater their desire to escape but the fewer the opportunities available. I reflected that clear-headed cadres like Ma were by no means uncommon in local government; however, unfortunately they were forced into acting in ways which they

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deprecated by the administrative system in which they found themselves. They were perfectly aware that this was wrong, yet they accepted it unconditionally. This gulf between thinking and behaviour indicated to me the need for systemic reforms in the way government was currently run. We talked until 6 p.m. Zhao and the driver were waiting outside to take me back to the county town. I suggested that the town head might put me up for the night. That way we could carry on talking, and the next day I could get a chance to meet with some of the exsoldiers and middle school drop-outs. Ma agreed, but in the event we had to leave. Zhao told me that W, his boss, had phoned several times asking me to hurry back for dinner. ‘Come back tomorrow if you like,’ he said. After dinner I took the opportunity of putting a few questions to Wu about city and county government. Luoyang city government had jurisdiction over nine counties, he told me, and had a total population of 6,100,000. Counties to the south were the poorest ones. Last year, average per capita income was Y790 in Yiyang County, but only about Y400 in the hill areas. Yiyang was a county with a variety of terrain—both hilly and flat—and had suffered drought for several years now. In many xiangs the villagers were not even producing enough food for their own consumption. The environment in the poorer areas was generally degraded, which made it difficult for the people to pull themselves out of poverty. When they did, the slightest drought wiped out their gains and returned them to poverty again. All local government efforts in recent years had been concentrated on meeting the basic needs of the peasants. The solution lay in building basic crop irrigation projects—new ones were started every year—but the results were disappointing. Most of the bigger irrigation projects dated from the era of collectivisation. Some people said that collectivisation had made the peasants less keen to work. But on the other hand, the labour it provided had been a very effective way to build large-scale irrigation projects jointly with other xiangs and counties. Since the peasants had taken on tilling their own land individually, it had been difficult to organise construction—each family and village guarded their own individual interests and refused to collaborate. All counties faced the same problem, he emphasised.

How the hill folk lived At 8.30 in the morning, I braved the swirling sleet and set off by car to L xiang, still accompanied by C. Arriving at 9.45, we were met by the xiang head and the director of the xiang People’s Congress, and they began with an introduction: L xiang covered sixteen administrative villages and forty-eight natural villages, eleven of which were in the river valley and thirty-seven on hill land. The total xiang population was 26,000, and there were 33,000 mu of arable land, of which 9,000 mu were irrigable. The reported annual income per capita last year had been Y700, although in reality it was not even Y600. ‘Reporting income figures gives us a lot of trouble every year,’ said the xiang head. ‘They always get inflated by the local governments. Everybody does it. It’s an open secret.’ There were no collective enterprises at any level in the xiang, just a few small, unprofitable, privately run businesses, like flour mills for example. Most of the peasants’ income came from traditional crop cultivation and stock-raising. In a good year, hill

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villagers’ incomes were similar to those of river valley peasants. In the hills they had more land but the yield was lower; by the river, it was the other way round. By the river, arable land per capita was on average less than a mu—it varied from 0.6 to 1.2 mu, though that would include some hill land too. The conversation turned to the difficulties of getting the peasants to co-operate in building irrigation projects. During the communes, and especially under the slogan ‘Agriculture must learn from Dazhai’, great efforts had been put into building large numbers of Three Guarantee Fields (that is, protected against both flood and drought) both in the river basin and in the uplands. In those days, there was clear leadership, both land and labour were collectivised, and projects were easy to organise. The peasants were motivated and cadres knew what they were doing. Then came the introduction of the Household Contract Responsibility System. Of course, the effect of this system on boosting the peasants’ morale and freeing surplus labour from the land could not be overestimated, but it had its downside: large areas of arable land were continually being carved up into small plots and re-contracted to different users, in an attempt to adjust land allocation to changing numbers in the village families. Some village residents’ groups did this every three to five years, while in others it was every six or seven years. In the hill areas, there were three types of land: ridge land which lay along the hill tops, sloping land and valley bottom land. Valley bottom land was the best for cultivation, then ridge land, and sloping land was the worst. Valley bottom land was the flat land at the bottom of a hill; it was formed into little terraces, and these were what the hill folk called ‘life-saver fields’. What they most feared was drought, and the valley bottom land was more drought-resistant than ridge and sloping fields, although because it was down in a valley it was prone to being washed away by flooding. Now that the fields were tilled individually, all three types of land had to be parcelled out to each person. The land in one valley bottom could be divided between hundreds of families—and would then be redivided every few years. In these circumstances, no one wanted to invest labour and materials in flood protection work—not that this could be carried out by individual peasants anyway. When there were flash floods in the mountains, the valley bottom land was washed away and many ‘life-saver fields’ had been lost since decollectivisation, in this and other xiangs too. ‘Central and provincial government want us to extend the contract period on land,’ he went on. ‘A few years ago, they said they want it to be a fixed term of thirty years. They mean well, but it would be very difficult to carry out. Family sizes are always changing, with marriages, births and deaths, and half a dozen years makes a big difference. When a residents’ group has a certain number of families that have expanded, especially when they’re cadres, then there’s pressure to re-allocate, and there’s no way the xiang can stop them. It all makes it very difficult to build water conservancy systems—though we all know that drought is what’s holding back development around here. County regulations state that every able-bodied villager has to provide thirty days of voluntary work on local water conservancy work every year, during the winter slack season. But what are the results? A complete waste of people’s time and money. That’s partly down to the peasants, but it’s even more because of the way local cadres organise it. Every winter, the xiang or county calls a big meeting and grand-sounding projects are drawn up, with workers being sent here and there all over the xiang. It all sounds very creditable, but there are no real effects in terms of environmental improvements, and it sometimes even

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makes matters worse. That’s the fault of the cadres. As for the peasants, they can’t see beyond their own village, their residents’ group, even their own household. They can’t be bothered with any water conservancy project which isn’t in their own direct interests, and if it takes up some of their land, they’ll be against it—they might even destroy it on the quiet. ‘That’s one main reason why projects never become fully operational even after they’ve been finished. What we desperately need to do is raise peasants’ awareness of the need to invest in the land, especially in the environmentally degraded hill areas. It’s been suggested that we should divide the land into two: land given to families for feeding themselves, with tenure fixed at thirty years, and land reserved for flexible use, the area of which is adjusted in line with changes in the local population. That might work where there’s a bit more land, but in our xiang it’s only a bit over a mu per capita, and that’s barely enough to meet the basic needs of the peasants, with none left over for flexible land use. So I really don’t know how we’re going to get them on the road to prosperity.’ Local government interference with the peasants’ right to manage their own land ‘The main crops in this region have always been grain—wheat in the summer, with autumn crops of maize and sweet potatoes. Economically speaking, the returns are very low, but from the family’s point of view, there’s a reason for planting the traditional crops: we can’t just blame it on their feudal mentality, backwardness or lack of business acumen. Having enough to eat is always the first priority. Provincial government wants to make agriculture more profitable, so they want the peasants to grow cash crops. Of course, that’s what’s needed if we’re to develop the socialist market economy—the question is how it’s to be done. Every year we get new directives on what cash crops to grow. According to the plan, we’re supposed to have 38 per cent of our arable land planted with cash crops: 5,000 mu of orchards (mainly apples), 5,000 of tobacco, and 2,500 of vegetables under glass. What do we do? We just pass on the directives down the line, we’ve no other option. If the peasants don’t want to grow those crops, then we use our administrative powers to make them. As the Get Rich Project people in the provincial government put it, you ‘force them to get rich’. The only thing is, compulsion tends to produce a lot of complaints, and has the opposite effect to what we want. Take apples, for example. If you turn wheat fields over to apples, it’s three or four years before you get a return on your investment. So what are the peasants supposed to eat during that time? And how are they to pay the grain levy? They have so little land, it’s all planted to food crops, and even then they might go short if there’s a flood or drought. Under duress, the peasants have planted a few apple trees, and this year they bore fruit. But the apple price has dropped to Y0.4 per catty of the best quality, with the less good going for Y0.1 or not selling at all. You can’t live off apples. Not surprising, then, that many of the peasants chopped the trees up for firewood. And the butt of their fury was, of course, us local cadres. ‘As for tobacco, it’s never been grown in this county, so we don’t have any skills and experience in growing and curing. And there are two other problems we hadn’t anticipated: one is the rapid decrease in fertility of the soil when you grow tobacco—it’s

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only good for two seasons, the third season you can’t grow it any more; the other is we don’t have the pesticides to control the pests. This has caused endless complaints. ‘Growing vegetables under glass requires a high level of investment and technology, and good irrigation; there are very few peasants around here who can supply all of that. Besides, when you want to sell the vegetables, you’ve got to have good road communications to get them to market, or be near a city. ‘Of course, we local cadres know all that, but if we tell the provincial government, they call us conservatives. So we’re all acting under duress, not just the peasants. They put in complaints about the way we handle our work, but it’s not our fault.’ I asked him if he thought the promotion of cash crops had anything to do with the desire to increase government funding. ‘Of course,’ he replied. The agricultural tax has been fixed fairly low, we have little industry so revenues from taxes on industry and commerce are low too. But government expenditure is constantly increasing, so taxes on cash crops could come in very useful. I don’t know how the county budget works out, but in our xiang revenues last year came to Y1.1 million, half of which came from the tobacco tax. It’s much the same in other xiangs. The county depends on the tobacco tax too, to cover its education expenditure, so I was told by a friend of mine in the County Tax Department the other day. But tobacco tax revenues have been down this year—the peasants say they don’t make any money from it, so they don’t plant it. We’re far from reaching our target acreage of 5,000 mu. So we’re all in a quandary.’ We continued our discussions after lunch, and the conversation turned to the lack of xiang funds. ‘This year,’ said the xiang head, ‘the xiang budget plan only received Y708,000, of which Y258,000 came from the agricultural tax, Y300,000 from taxes on industry and farm products and Y150,000 from the tobacco tax (out of a planned Y650,000). Education expenditure is Y880,000 annually—so that means almost all our revenues went on that. Education is a heavy burden for a poor xiang like us. In order to reduce pressure on our budget, we’ve tried as far as possible to pay employees from nonbudget income. This means cutting off departments connected with farming and making them fund themselves. Recently, we’ve done this with the departments of farming enterprise and animal husbandry, and the Office of Justice. This year and next, the departments of agricultural machinery, agricultural technology and water conservancy will go too. The other thing is to re-allocate some of our staff to the Family Planning Office and the Land Management Office. These two departments can levy fines, and they can use funds from fines to support themselves. They’re quite well off, they can afford to employ a lot of people and pay Y60,000 into the xiang budget too, which goes towards maintaining our fleet of four government vehicles, and they contribute to our hospitality expenses too.’ The director of the xiang People’s Congress was from a hill village nearby. His wife farmed their land in the village, and he himself went home to help in the busy season, so his family were a good example of how hill folk lived and worked. ‘There are five of us,’ he began. ‘My mother is 77, I’m 43, my wife is 40, my oldest son is 18 and has worked with his mother on the farm since he finished lower middle school. My youngest son is 17 and still at lower middle school. So the family has two full-time workers and 7 mu altogether. Of that, 0.7 mu is valley bottom land and the rest is ridge and sloping land.

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Less than one-tenth of the village land is valley bottom land, and we draw lots for it. I was lucky—I got quite a good bit.’ Land, yields and natural disasters ‘In a normal year, you can get 300–400 catties of wheat, 400 of maize and 1,000–2,000 of sweet potatoes from a mu of hilltop or sloping land. Valley bottom land will give you between 500 and 700 catties of wheat, 500–600 of maize and 2,000 or more of sweet potatoes. We had six mu of wheat this year, and harvested around 2,000 catties, of which we had to pay 300 catties in grain tax. This autumn we planted two mu of maize, one of sweet potatoes and four of soya beans. The maize failed with the flood, and we only got some for seeds from the soya beans, but luckily we got 1,500 catties of sweet potatoes. In 1990 it was a good year, 1991 was OK although the autumn crops were slightly damaged by flood and pests, so the harvest was down by about 20 per cent, and 1992 was also all right. But between 1993 and 1995 we had three years of continuous drought, and 1995 was so bad that we harvested only 500–600 catties of wheat from six mu. The beans and maize from the autumn harvest gave us almost nothing, so we only harvested 1,000 catties or so of sweet potatoes. However, this year has been good: the summer harvest was even better than in 1990. A normal summer harvest will feed us for the whole year, then we can sell the autumn crop, but when there’s a flood or drought, we’re lucky to get enough from both harvests put together. In the case of a serious natural disaster, we have to depend on government food aid, or find some other way of surviving.’ Daily diet ‘Breakfast is noodle soup made from maize flour or wheat flour, and sweet potatoes, except in the busy season or on holidays when we have steamed buns as well. We don’t normally have any meat or vegetable dishes, unless they’re home-grown vegetables like radish or Chinese cabbage. Lunch is noodles, made either from sweet potato flour or wheat flour. In the slack season we eat sweet potato noodles with steamed buns; in the busy season, we have just wheat flour noodles. We only have vegetables in season. The peasants around here grow radish or Chinese cabbage, mainly for pickling, they don’t ever buy any vegetables. Dinner is the same as breakfast. So, as a general rule, we eat a combination of wheat, maize and sweet potato products, and you can judge how well off someone is by the proportion of wheat in their diet. ‘Oil-seed rape is grown around here, but not much because the yield is low. The oil consumption of the five of us is less than 10 catties per year, and that includes lard too. Most of that gets consumed on holidays, or when we have guests and serve some fried dishes or oil cakes. We eat about 20–40 catties of meat per year as a family, mostly over the Spring Festival. Other than that, we only eat meat when we have guests.’ Clothing and housing ‘The biggest changes since decollectivisation have been first in what the peasants wear, then in their housing. What they eat on a daily basis has hardly changed, except that the consumption of wheat has risen a little. Up until the 1970s, peasant women’s work

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normally included spinning and weaving cloth for their families, and making and mending their clothes and shoes. After decollectivisation, this began to decline, until by the 1990s there were only a few old-style looms in the village. Now only a few local girls follow the old custom of weaving cloth and making their own bedding when they get married. Most peasants dress just like townsfolk now, it’s cheap to buy clothing and it lasts longer. Anyway, with the young men leaving to take jobs in town, all the farm work falls on the women and they don’t have time for spinning and weaving. ‘Until the 1970s, everyone lived in adobe houses. Brick and tile houses really took off in the 1980s, and now just over a half the population live in brick houses. A three-roomed house will set you back Y10,000–12,000 or, with an outhouse and a courtyard wall, about Y15,000–20,000. The peasants keep costs down by using the old adobe house as an outhouse, and doing without a wall. Mostly families build a new house when the son is getting married, but this makes marrying an expensive business: Y10,000 for the wedding, Y20,000 for the new house. You can’t do it without a migrant worker’s wages. ‘A peasant family’s income comes from their crops, their livestock and from migrant labour. The crop yield is sufficient to feed them in a good year; then most families keep one pig—they can only keep more than that if they’re rich enough to have some surplus grain, or money to buy animal feed. Animal rearing methods are still very traditional: they mainly feed them coarse fodder, like potato plant leaves, and very little processed pig feed. If the pig weighs in at 150 to 200 catties, they can make Y500–700 when it goes for slaughter and this is their chief source of cash income. The peasants may tell you that they don’t make money out of a pig, but really it’s like a little piggy bank for them, they keep putting in bits of money and they get a nice fat sum out of it when they sell. ‘The hill folk keep cattle too, and use them for pulling the plough on hilly fields, sloping fields and other odd bits of land that need an ox-drawn plough. A very few peasants keep cows and sell their calves; most have poultry. Half a dozen chickens are very useful, especially in the hills, where they can’t go out and buy meat if they have visitors but they can cook some eggs for them. A lot of families buy their oil, salt, soya sauce and vinegar out of the money they make from their chickens and eggs. ‘Getting a job in town during the agricultural slack season has gradually become more common in recent years, more so among the river plain people than among the hill folk. The migrant workers get jobs as brickies on construction sites, or in the transport business, either in Luoyang and Xian—that’s the furthest they would go—or in towns nearer to home. It’s largely the young men who go, the parents only let the girls go if they know there’s someone they can trust to keep an eye on them. A migrant worker can bring home Y1,500–2,000 from six to eight months’ work, and that way they can save enough to build a new home.’ It was five o’clock and time to go. My informant insisted on walking with me to the exit, and let slip one last piece of interesting information. It concerned the way the provincial and city government family planning inspections were run: ‘Before they arrive,’ he said, ‘the county mobilises a reception committee which is divided into four teams: the Intelligence Team, the Hospitality Team, the Reports Team and the Gifts Team. The Intelligence Team has to find out in advance what the going rate for entertaining is—it’s different every time. They have to find out the names of the inspectors, and their itinerary. The Hospitality Team organises their board and lodging, and entertainment. The Report Team prepares all reports and other data which they will

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need. The Gifts Team is in charge of buying top-quality food, cigarettes and liquor, as well as other gifts and money, for the inspectors. The counties are in competition with each other so the going rate increases every year. In the last couple of years, gifts of money have been included too. I don’t know how much the county gives them, but the xiang gave ordinary team members Y500 each this year, and the head of the team got Y2,000. The provincial and city governments send inspection teams to the county three times a year and it costs around Y100,000 a time; we get inspected four or five times a year and we spend Y20,000 each time they come. The costs are appalling, and that’s just the family planning inspection visits… I wasn’t sure if I should tell you all this, and when you write your research report, you mustn’t say I told you!’ I reassured him that all interviews were absolutely confidential, and expressed my gratitude for his honesty and support. As we drove back through the rain and snow, I scarcely knew what to think. I was deeply perturbed by what he had said, and even more so by his obvious fear in telling me, and yet his story had a ring of familiarity. This poverty-stricken hill region already groaned under the pressure of over-population; to the peasants’ struggle for existence was now added the burden of supporting a greedy, ineffectual local government structure. Province, city, county, xiang, the whole monstrous edifice brought to mind the image of a car stuck fast in the mire, gulping fuel, wearing out the engine parts, its wheels spinning round fruitlessly, going nowhere.

The bullying brothers I had had plans, while in Yiyang County, to visit three villages: one in the river plain, one in the foothills and one in the mountains. However, when I discussed this with Zhao, he looked embarrassed. The roads to the villages, he said, would be impassable because of the recent rain. It would be much better to invite a Village Party Secretary and village head to my hotel where I could interview them in comfort, and they would answer any questions I wanted. To this I had to acquiesce. That afternoon, Zhao and the driver brought four people to see me: a Village Party Secretary, a village head and a village accountant from L xiang, and someone from the xiang Electricity Office. Rural clan and family interests and the power of village government The Village Party Secretary told me: ‘The Village Committee is chiefly responsible for carrying out instructions from the xiang government. But to do the job, you need the backing of powerful local families. I’m in the position of having a job without the muscle—if I want to do anything I have to get other people’s agreement first.’ ‘But you’re the Village Party Secretary,’ I said. ‘Who else in the village do you have to worry about?’ The driver answered for him: ‘The big bully in the village, that’s who. He may be Party Secretary, but he still has to reckon with the local tyrant.’ It transpired that they were referring to a Mr Z, former Village Party Secretary, and one of four brothers. The one had the political clout, and the other three supplied the physical support. They made a formidable combination, and had held sway over the village for ten years or so. A couple of years ago, the incoming xiang Party Secretary had

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dismissed this man, but still no one in the village dared to offend him or his brothers and their influence was as great as before, especially since they still had supporters at xiang and county level. I pressed the group for details of the Z family’s misdemeanours, and after some discussion they gave me four instances. The first was the misappropriation of Y20,000 of ‘arable land use compensation money’, money which had been paid to the village by central government in 1996, when the Zhengzhou-Lushi county highway which bisected the xiang was built, as it had taken up a dozen mu of village land. Then, the brothers had taken 4 mu of the village’s best land to build their homes, which was 2.5 mu more than they should have. They behaved like thugs: Mr Z himself was known to have raped as many as a dozen women and girls in his time in office, and none of them had yet dared to make a complaint. And his management style had been brutal. If the villagers were in the slightest bit remiss in delivering the grain levies, they would get a severe beating. ‘The Village Committee mainly consists of the Secretary, the village head and the accountant,’ I objected. ‘With the three of you working together and the number of villagers you’ve got, you could overrule any tyrant.’ (This was one of the bigger villages, an administrative as well as a natural village, with 500 households, and 2,500 inhabitants. The biggest surnames were the Cs and the Zs, and the remainder of the population shared half a dozen other surnames. The former Village Committee were mainly Zs, but the present Secretary and accountant were Cs, while the village head was a Z.) The Secretary sighed: ‘Our problem in the village is that we can never agree on anything—not even those of us in the same clan. It’s only your immediate family you can rely on to help you. Ask them’—he indicated his companions—‘if you don’t believe me.’ The village head and the accountant looked at each other in silence. We talked on until six o’clock, when my guide, Zhao, took us all back to the county guesthouse to eat. A lively dinner ensued, with copious alcohol, until by nine o’clock our little group of four from the village were completely drunk. There was nothing for it but for Zhao to get them into the room next to mine to sleep it off. ‘These village cadres are a pretty ignorant lot,’ he told me when he came back alone to my room. ‘They’re only good at eating and drinking, they don’t use their brains, and you won’t get any sense out of them. You’re better off asking me—I’ve been seven years in my job and I know a good deal about xiang and village government.’ Government and self-government in the villages ‘The villagers never asked for Village Committees,’ he told me. ‘As far as the peasants are concerned it would be much better if government interfered less—the less the better. So the committees were set up by the xiang government, and we also set them their tasks—enforcing family planning and collecting tax levies. The peasants want more children and lower taxes. The local government, on the other hand, want to see one child per family and an increase in cash and grain levies—and the committees were set up to make that happen. The result of all this is that the Villagers’ Committee, the Village Party Secretary and the village head are all chosen for their willingness to obey government orders. Even if there were democratic village elections, those people elected wouldn’t necessarily want the job—it’s hard work, poorly paid, and you get the blame for everything.’

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Friction between villagers and the cadres ‘There’s a lot of friction between villagers and the cadres at the moment, and there have been a number of complaints lodged with the county or city government—twenty-nine from our villages up to September this year,’ Zhao said. ‘It’s mainly to do with the tax burden and public order issues, although family planning, directives on crop planting and other issues feature as well. Family planning is complicated: everybody accepts that it’s necessary because of pressure on available land, and that it’s national policy. The peasants don’t even object to the fines. What they do mind is when people pull strings to avoid paying excess birth fines, when the fines are too heavy, and when the policy is implemented brutally. And, of course, when it affects them personally and they have a baby girl, they still want a boy. That’s their traditional way of thinking—it’s not the same as the way townsfolk think.’ ‘Crime in the countryside has definitely been getting worse, not better,’ he continued. ‘Central government cracked down all over the country at the beginning of this year, and our county arrested quite a few people, so the situation improved a bit until the last couple of months, but now theft and robbery is on the increase again. Cracking down doesn’t really get at the root of the problem. I’m not sure what would—better political education? But no one pays any attention to ideology any more. Now there’s far more to tempt everyone, and even Party cadres are not immune. Those with power use it to feather their own nests; those without power still want to get rich quick, so frequently resort to thieving.’ We continued talking until three in the morning about such sensitive issues as official corruption and the tax burden on the peasants. Zhao and I had become good friends after three days and nights in each other’s company, and he had taught me a lot. Nevertheless, the first thing he said to me when we got up at eight the next morning, was: ‘What I said last night was just between me and you—it absolutely mustn’t go any further.’

Fighting for ‘poor county’ status At nine o’clock, Zhao took me to visit the County Welfare Office, where its director, a man of 52, gave us a warm welcome. He had been in post for six years. Prior to that, he had been in the army, had worked in a rural general store, and at one time had headed the commune militia. In 1988 he had been xiang Party Secretary and before moving to the County Welfare Office had been its head of water conservancy. For a man who came from peasant stock, this represented a smooth career progression; in M County, most of the 600 or so county and xiang cadres of auxiliary Ke grade and above were not only exarmy but also college graduates. The definition of a poor county, and how the Welfare Office worked ‘In 1989, Yiyang County was designated by Henan provincial government as one where the level of poverty was a cause for concern. The difference between this and a county fully classified as poor is that the former is considered not have to have reached the latter’s level of poverty and so does not receive the full measure of support from the provincial government. In that year, our county set up the Social Welfare Office. It used

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to be run by the head of Civil Administration but then I was transferred here to take it on. I have six people working for me, and we don’t have separate offices in each xiang—the work is done by the xiang head or deputy head. Then in 1992 and 1993 there was a serious drought around here, and there was a huge increase in poverty among the peasants, so that in 1994 the county was put on the national list of poor counties. Luoyang City government has jurisdiction over nine counties: our county and one other are nationally classified poor counties, and five more are on the list of provincial poor counties. The whole province of Henan has 110 counties, and thirty of them are classified as poor, mainly in the west and south of the province.’ Advantages of being on the national list of poor counties ‘You can get up to Y12 million in low interest loans for a maximum of five years (but in practice they normally want it back after three), and these can be used to benefit any farming or industrial activity in the county. You can also get grants of Y800,000 a year for specific projects from the provincial and city governments. The intention is that these grants should be used for road repairs, irrigation, hydroelectricity projects and so on. Finally, we should get preferential treatment like reduced taxes—but that hasn’t happened yet.’ Real poverty and ‘reported’ poverty figures in Yiyang County’s nineteen xiangs ‘Not all xiangs in a “poor” county are in the poor category, nor are all villages in a “poor” xiang: in M County the figure is thirteen xiangs and seventy-two villages (116,000 people). The criteria for poverty is an annual average income of less than Y530 per person. Last year, the County Party Committee would only allow us to report eight xiangs as “poor”.’ My interest was aroused by this curious discrepancy in reporting figures, so I asked: ‘As a general rule, is the number of poor xiangs in the county under- or over-reported?’ ‘In general, the more poverty you report the better,’ he answered. ‘Local governments fight to get classified as poor, because of the financial advantages it brings.’ ‘So why, when Yiyang County clearly has thirteen poor xiangs, does it only report eight of them?’ ‘Because county government officials have put in huge efforts over the last few years, but there’s been no, or very little, change in poverty figures. That doesn’t reflect very well on them—it looks better if they can report reduced levels of poverty!’ (A book on modern management I had read recently defined the modernisation of management concisely as ‘making it mathematical’. A precondition for ‘mathematical management’ was accurate statistics, but in China, statistics were more often than not distorted at the whim of local officials to further their career. Clearly, this was more of a political than a management problem.)

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How people live in a poor mountain village ‘About 30 per cent of Yiyang County lies in the mountains. I went to one administrative village on an inspection visit last month, so I can tell you what poverty in a mountain village really means. The village is about 20 kilometres from the Luo river valley, and in fine weather you can just about make the journey in a three-wheeler or a small jeep. Six or seven natural villages belong to the administrative village—that’s a total of about 200 families, or 500–600 people. These villagers used to belong to another administrative unit, but the head and Party Secretary were from a different village. The villagers were often treated unfairly, and eventually they were allowed to set up on their own. Village cadres taking sides is a common reason for villages to split off. The resulting units are small—often no more than seven to ten hamlets. Ninety per cent of the 200–odd families live in cave dwellings. These are usually 3 metres in width and go back anything up to 8 metres. They’re very dark inside—they got electricity just a few years ago. The villagers mostly make their own furniture—a long bench, a small chair, a bed, a low table for eating at, a chest for keeping clothes in, and a desk for the child to do his or her homework at. They have no electrical appliances apart from the electric light. Most families have a flat area outside the cave which is enclosed by a mud wall—that’s where they have their kitchen, with a cooker made of mud bricks and with two burners. The cave is normally just one big room and the whole family live together. Any girls in the family get a separate bed when they grow up.’ Diet ‘Breakfast is maize porridge with pieces of sweet potato. There’s a shortage of water in the particular village I went to, so it’s hard to grow vegetables. When it rains, there’s water in the valley bottom, but when it’s dry, they have to rely on water from a few wells. If there’s a drought then the well water dries up too, and they have to get water every day from a small reservoir a few li away. Water is the main thing they’re short of in the mountains. Lunch is a couple of bowls of wheat flour gruel, and they sometimes add vegetables which they’ve grown in the valley bottom fields. Dinner is a soup made of millet or maize, with some steamed buns, called man in these parts. Buns made of sweet potato flour are called “black buns”; if they’re of cornflour, they’re “yellow buns”, and the wheat flour buns are called “white buns”. And of course, they also use a mixture of flours. Wheat, maize, sweet potatoes and millet are the main crops in the mountains. You can tell how rich or poor the villagers are by the proportion of wheat in their diet: it’s only 35–40 per cent in the mountains, while in the river valley villages, the majority of the diet is made up of wheat products, and they use maize and sweet potatoes just to vary the monotony of the diet. Of course, that’s in a normal year. The summer wheat harvest is pretty reliable, but the autumn maize crop will fail if there’s a drought. Sweet potatoes are more drought-resistant, and mountain folk rely on them in lean years. ‘A family of five would get through 10–20 catties of cooking oil per year, most of which they consume on special occasions. They don’t normally have stir-fried food; and they only buy meat on holidays–1 or 2 catties for minor holidays, between 5 and 10

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catties at the Spring Festival. Every family keeps chickens. They keep the eggs for when they have guests, or for the old folk.’ Mountain villagers’ cash income ‘They have three main sources of cash income: cash crops like peanuts, soya beans, sweet potatoes or tobacco. Then there’s livestock—I would guess that 60–70 per cent of villagers keep a pig—they have no surplus grain to feed them so the pigs eat coarse fodder like grass and straw. They don’t think of their pig as a money-earner, it’s more a way of putting a bit by. They can get Y400–500 from selling it at the end of the year, which is a significant source of ready cash for a mountain family. About the same number of villagers keep an ox, mainly to pull the plough, and a very few of them raise a calf to sell. The third way they earn money is through getting labouring jobs—this has gradually increased in the last seven or eight years until now over half the families have a migrant worker’s income. Mostly the workers get a job in a local town or city, some go to Xian, but almost none go to coastal cities. Most of the jobs are in the building industry, and the peasants go off in the slack season and come back here for planting and harvest. How long they go for, and how much they earn, I couldn’t really tell you—I haven’t looked into it. ‘Water conservancy is the key to alleviating poverty around here. In mountain villages, if there’s heavy rain it washes away the food crops in the valley bottom, and if there’s a drought crops fail on the ridges and sloping fields. Our county needs to ensure that everyone has enough to eat—until the basic needs of the peasants are met, it makes no sense to talk of “getting rich”. And the only way to stop people falling back into poverty again is to invest heavily in the basic irrigation infrastructure. What we have now dates from the era of collectivisation. Collectivisation undoubtedly had problems, but it was a very good way to get irrigation works built. With decollectivisation, the problem has got worse by the day: extra welfare loans are spent on road-building or setting up xiang and village enterprises, and we don’t invest enough in water. Work has mainly been limited to provision of drinking water, or village hydro-electric projects. No doubt the county government has its reasons for using welfare loans in this way, but the problem is that when they set up enterprises in villages where the conditions are not right, they almost always fail, and it’s a complete waste of money. ‘The second problem is that the water conservancy projects which are carried out are of no real benefit. Each villager has to supply thirty days of volunteer work per year for water projects, but the results are negligible. The cadres do it to please their superiors (and they’re subject to numerous inspections) and the peasants do it very half-heartedly. Since decollectivisation, if it doesn’t benefit their own land they’re not interested. If this problem isn’t solved, and the peasants continue to be reliant on good weather, then one big flood or drought will bring back poverty to large areas of this county. It’s like that here, and it’s like that in all the other Luoyang counties too.’ After lunch, we set off for some hill villages in the Xionger mountain range between the Yi and the Luo rivers. We followed the Luo River in a south-westerly direction until we reached the intersection of the Ying-Yi Highway, after which we turned east and arrived in the Xionger Mountains. This was a bare, treeless expanse of mountains and valleys, in which every visible bit of ground had been carved up into fields on the ridges,

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on the slopes and in the valley bottom. Only within the roadside villages were there a few sparsely planted trees. Winter wheat shoots could be seen in the patch-work of terraced plots, offering a small sign of life amid this great yellow desolation. As we passed by, we could see the peasants cutting the sweet potatoes they had just harvested into slices and laying them out on the ground to dry. There were three counties in and around the Luo river valley, I was told: Lushi, Luoning and Yiyang. The Yi river valley had two counties, Yichuan and Song. And these five counties were spread over the bare Xionger Mountains and gullies which separated the two river valleys. A prey to drought and floods though they were, the peasants could generally rely on a summer wheat crop of some sort, and an autumn sweet potato crop. The autumn maize, however, often failed altogether. A population of several million peasants scraped a bare living from this parched and barren land. Yet it had once been one of the cradles of China’s agrarian culture, supporting that great capital of ancient civilisation, Luoyang. I imagined how the mountains then must have been covered in forest, the alluvial plains with lush pasture. When did the gradual degradation of the environment begin? I speculated that the very existence of Luoyang must have been one of the reasons, demanding as it did vast quantities of timber for use as building materials, fuel and funeral caskets. The introduction of maize and sweet potatoes from the middle period of the Ming dynasty onwards made it possible to turn the mountain slopes into cultivated land, enabling the peasants to survive. Yet this aridity, combined with the ever-increasing population, had also helped to force the peasants into poverty. I suddenly felt very sad. Could these treeless wastes be restored to fertility by building large-scale irrigation works? It seemed extremely unlikely. Was reafforestation the answer? In that case, where would the millions of peasants go? The figure given for people living in absolute poverty in China (that is, on an income of Y530 or less per year) was 60 million. Their penury was largely related to environmental causes—the hardest kind to tackle. The government had declared that by the year 2000 this absolute poverty would be eliminated. In my view, this target was clearly unattainable—although no doubt the usual series of official statistics would report success.

‘Cadre visits are a waste of petrol’ It was time for me to begin my journey back to Kaifeng, and two senior cadres came to say goodbye. ‘Please don’t use Yiyang County’s real name when you write up your research report,’ the Deputy County Party Secretary begged me. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’ I stressed once again that the data I had gathered was for academic purposes only, and I would not be using it to make a report to their superiors. Nevertheless, I would avoid using names of people and places. Zhao and the driver were to drive me from Yiyang to Luoyang. They were sorry to see me go and told me how much our friendship over the last few days had meant to them; I believed them—they had no reason to flatter me now that I was hurrying off home. As we drove, the conversation turned to the system under which cadres were posted away from their home region, and frequently transferred from job to job. ‘Ten out of Yiyang’s twelve Standing Committee members are from a different county,’ they told

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me. ‘So are four of the eight people who worked as the county heads.’ It was the same in other counties. Being posted away and subjected to frequent job transfers meant that they cared more about their career prospects than for real economic development in the area. Cadres might move from one county to another, but their wives and children did not follow them. As a result, their home lives were anything but normal. Many county cadres made huge efforts to settle their families in the city, in the hopes that one day they would be able to get a post there and join them. Xiang cadres did the same in the county town. The local saying went, ‘Cadre visits are a waste of petrol.’ Cadres nowadays were constantly getting themselves driven off to town to see their families. My driver had been driving them around for years, and knew exactly what was going on. I asked how these cadres managed to get themselves a house in town—did the government provide one for them? ‘No, they fix it up for themselves,’ was the answer. ‘Where do they get the money from, on their meagre salaries?’ I pursued. ‘They make sure they get given one. All the main xiang officials have their little love nest in town. They pull strings to get a bit of land, and they know the right people in the building industry. They just need to say they want it, and it happens. Of course, they pay a token small amount for it.’ I had no doubt that this was a common phenomenon all across China. The driver was in his late forties, an ex-soldier and Party member of many years’ standing. He was not a talkative man, but his words were carefully chosen and worth listening to. ‘People think that driving top county officials around is a plum job,’ he said. ‘But the trouble is, you see too much. I keep telling myself to be like the Three Monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I keep my own counsel, I don’t even tell my wife and children the things I’ve seen.’ He lapsed into silence, and then sighed: ‘I’ve seen them all, apart from central government officials. There are lots of things that other people don’t know about but people like drivers and secretaries can’t help knowing. I’ve seen too much all these years, I don’t want to see any more, but it’s hard to avoid it. It’s part of my job’. ‘But central government has been tackling corruption,’ I said. ‘Surely that must have had some effect?’ ‘It’s become a way of life,’ he answered. ‘They can’t catch everybody. Some practices have been exposed, but they still go on. Officials protect each other.’ This sense of crisis, of the inevitability of local government corruption, and of pessimism about tackling it was a theme which ran through all levels of Henan society. From Luoyang, I took a coach to Kaifeng, and arrived at the Kaifeng Party School at eight o’clock in the evening.

Back from the northern Chinese plains My journey was at an end. Today I was to bid farewell to those friends from Henan University and the Kaifeng Party School to whom I owed so much. I had been wholly reliant on their support in my quest to establish the facts about the society in which we lived. These facts never presented themselves as neutral in China: they were always coloured, indeed distorted, by the personal interests and feelings of those who

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participated in them. All sorts of doors would have been open to me if I had chosen to pursue my research via the official route, but they would not have led me to the truth. Only skilful use of a network of personal contacts had allowed me to do that. There were, of course, limitations to carrying out one’s research in this way: one could not ensure that one ended up in the desired place, or had obtained all of the research material systematically. And encroaching on the domains of local mandarins had to be done with care, or one would bring down trouble on the heads of oneself and one’s friends. However, it was the only way to undertake this kind of research in a private capacity. I had been asked to give a final talk at the Kaifeng Party School, and this I did in the morning. The thrust of my argument was that there were two mutually opposed but nevertheless complementary approaches to take when studying the process and direction of change in our society. One could study society from the outside in and from the top down, or one could examine it from the inside out and from the bottom up. The first approach meant employing the experience of modernisation in Western society and the theories developed therefrom. Such theories had been espoused hitherto by most Chinese sociologists to guide not just their thinking but also the targets which they set for modernisation. In the West, these theories had been born out of practice, but in China, as in all non-Western countries, they had evolved before the practice—that is to say, they had determined it. Radical thought in China had been rooted in this process. Without it, there would have been no reform movement. It had given a clear direction to our future as a nation, but the danger was that relying wholly on Western concepts to analyse Chinese society could lead one to misinterpret both China’s past and its present. There was a similar difference in the relationship between the economic base and political philosophy: modern society in the West had arisen spontaneously from its economic base, while in a developing country like China, the Marxist maxim that the superstructure of society was determined by its economic base had to be turned on its head in order to grasp its significance. The process of modernisation in China had arisen out of ideology, and had been imposed from the top down through a process of political reform. By overcoming numerous obstacles the ‘modernisation’ (at least nominal) of Chinese intellectuals and politicians had been achieved over the last century or so. If we compared ourselves with a hundred years ago, we could see clear differences. Our political and legal systems, at least formally, were also almost completely modernised. In material terms at least, a part of China was entering the global economy. Especially with the reforms of the last two decades, we appeared to have left tradition far behind us. To the optimists, the twenty-first century beckoned a welcome. It was a deep concern with precisely this optimism which had driven me to look at the same process of the transformation of Chinese society from another angle—from the inside out, and from the bottom up. If the top-down approach stressed what China ought to be, then the focus of my research would be on what it really was. It was clear that the modernisation process was proceeding at an uneven rate, due to China’s huge population and geographical size. There was a disparity not just in per capita income but, more profoundly, in differing social attitudes and behaviour. Looking from the outside in could tell us how near we were to being modernised; looking from the inside out showed us how little we had moved from our starting point. In the interior of China, progress still consisted in mere slogans, and achieving the reality was going to be a long, hard slog.

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The government was making great efforts to promote economic progress in those small towns and villages of China’s interior where the modernisation process had hitherto advanced most slowly and with the greatest difficulty. Measures to promote economic advances continually came down from on high, and it was the duty of local government to implement them. Yet traditional attitudes and ways of behaving were still deeply rooted within rural society and local officialdom. Actively percolating upward, they affected the way our economic, political and legal systems operated, causing a distortion of the aims of the architects of reform. It was important to make a cool-headed study of the way these reforms were being skewed, because this pointed to the direction in which society was really moving. The northern plains were the ideal place to examine China from the inside looking out and from the bottom up, which was why I had come to carry out my research here. My months of work had led me to focus on two main issues: the way the peasants lived under the Household Responsibility System for land, and the relationship between local government and the peasants. Chinese peasants under the land contract system China’s peasants were notoriously disunited. (Whether this was a trait peculiar to the Chinese or applicable to peasants the world over, I had not researched enough to be able to judge.) The collectives and the commune system under Mao were not a voluntary movement, but had been imposed on them from above. The Household Responsibility System was not a new form of organisation devised by the reformers and arising out of the collectives, nor was it an innovation dreamed up by the peasants. Instead, it was merely a reversion to a traditional mode of agriculture based on family smallholdings. However, there was still an objective need for collaboration between these smallholders—production and marketing problems, irrigation projects and the greedy ways of local officialdom demanded it. In traditional rural society where ties of kinship and friendship were still strong, some of the old forms of co-operation persisted, but only in a very narrow sense, typically limited to an exchange of labour during the busy season, help at weddings and funerals, and the giving and receiving of loans. There was a vast gap between these sporadic personal interactions and permanent contractual collaboration, in the modern sense, undertaken between equals. Peasant smallholders had to deal the vagaries of the climate, the fluctuations of the market, and the unregulated demands, not to say bullying, of local officialdom. Traditional forms of co-operation could not solve these problems, and might even aggravate them. Their only way forward was to develop a sense of common interest, and to organise on this basis. This involved mutual negotiation, the drawing up of regulations, the election of a leader, the setting up of an organisation to implement mutually agreed decisions and the establishment of procedures for evaluation of results. This kind of contractual co-operation bound its signatories into a system which was fundamentally innovative in nature, and was the basic requirement of a self-governing community. In a certain sense, it could be said to be a key factor in the modernisation in China’s peasantry, in modernising their way of thinking and their way of dealing with each other. Without it, they could not hope to break free of tradition.

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Throughout my field work in Henan I had been on the lookout for this kind of spontaneous organisation on the part of the peasants, and for the ability to govern themselves of which it was an expression, because I saw it as crucial to their development. I had to confess to being disappointed. The kind of mutual aid I had witnessed in the Henan countryside had been utterly traditional in nature. When, under pressure, they had to collaborate in a bigger way, they reverted to traditional modes of behaviour: they used family or clan links to resolve business problems, or expected a ‘good’ official to intervene on their behalf. It was absolutely true, as had once been observed by a famous scholar, Liang Shuming, that they lacked both the will and the ability to negotiate on the basis of equality. However, a solution to this problem had to be found. Who would undertake the Herculean task of importing new forms and principles of organisation into the Chinese countryside? Local government and its officials? We had already done that once, and the experiment had been a proven failure. A band of volunteers from among China’s educated elite? At the present time, we were unlikely to find such volunteers in the necessary numbers. It seemed that we had to approach the issue from a different angle. We had to accept that: (1) the fact that the peasants were unable spontaneously to organise did not mean that they did not need or could not undertake such collaboration; (2) the failure of collectivisation under the planned economy did not imply that new forms of co-operation under the contract system would also fail; (3) the Chinese Communist Party, in its self-appointed role as moderniser, had both the ability and the duty to drive this process forward. I put it to my listeners that it was incumbent on all those concerned with progress in the countryside, especially the educated, to recognise the importance of the peasants working together again. I made five proposals: central and provincial government should set up specialist colleges offering training courses on rural co-operation; model units should be set up in rural areas, to educate the peasants by example; organisations responsible for promoting new forms of co-operation should receive local government funding, but should operate independently; there should be a national publication dealing with rural co-operation; the main tenet of the new co-operative movement should be to support the peasants while allowing them to stand on their own feet. Before my readers condemn these as the dreams of a madman, let me say that I have given them long and careful consideration. I would go so far as to assert that if China’s peasants do not develop an ability to organise and govern themselves, then they will forever remain traditional smallholders, even if they do build themselves two-storeyed houses and wear Western suits. Without real change, this numerically most important stratum of society will forever remain economically backward, occupying the lowest position in society, and impotent in the face of natural disasters and official corruption alike. Fine words about democracy, the rule of law and modernisation of the countryside will remain just that—empty slogans. Real progress, on the other hand, will require a revolution in their way of life more profound than any they have yet undertaken, and needs to be supported by a corresponding process of enlightenment in their thinking.

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Local government In my capacity as an academic, dependent on personal contacts, I had faced almost insuperable difficulties in carrying out in-depth research into how local government really operated. I had concentrated on xiang and village levels primarily, and county government secondarily, with just a brief look at provincial and city organisation. My research had convinced me that the reforms had brought about profound changes in local government, changes which in content and direction were at variance with the way the process of national modernisation had been designed to proceed. It behoved those in charge of the modernisation of Chinese government to lay great stress on solving the problems which had arisen as a result. What worried me most was the yawning gap between the people and their local government. Local officials were placing themselves above the society in which they lived, and this was leading to an increase in bureaucracy and privilege. The phenomenon whereby officials sought to feather their own nests through their jobs was a manifestation of this. A local folk saying, ‘In the 1950s and 1960s, cadres and people were like fish in water; in the 1980s, it was oil and water; and in the 1990s, fire and water’, alluded to the process whereby cadres had started by serving the people, then began to fleece them and were now making their lives utterly miserable. Some people blamed the problem of corruption on individual cadres who had been infected by Western-style individualism or hedonism. Others said the problem lay wholly with the political system, and with the lack of effective supervision by central government. In my view, both these propositions only touched the surface of the problem. The root cause of the divorce between government and people at the local level was likely to be far deeper than that. If the economic base of a political system was primary production—that is, agriculture, especially the small peasant economy—then there was an inherent tendency for the government to be despotic. A political system with its main economic base in commerce and industry, on the other hand, might be able to take a democratic form. But transforming despotism into democracy would only be possible when the economic base changed from agriculture to industry. As regards China, there were two things one could say with certainty: one was that China was still in the process of transition from an agriculture-based economy to one based on industry—a process that was far from complete. The second was that the agricultural economy of China’s interior was proportionately far bigger than the economy of the developed coastal region. That is to say that there existed an objective economic reason for the gap between government, especially rural local government, and its people. In my view, the main aim of the series of political movements launched by Mao Zedong between 1949 and his death was to counter the natural tendency for those with political power to be divorced from and to assume a position above the rest of society. He had made a heroic attempt to hold this in check by wielding his considerable personal authority and by mobilising the masses. He had failed, but even that failure still gives us much to think about. The great challenge which now faced China’s body politic was to find a truly effective way to achieve what Mao had failed to achieve. Historically, politics in China had been based on precisely that system of bureaucracy and privilege whereby the rulers occupied a position far above those they ruled. By trying to reverse this trend with the Cultural Revolution, Mao had tried, as the Chinese expression goes, to ‘push a

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balloon under the water’, but it had proved too high a price for society to pay. Superimposing the whole edifice of Western-style democracy on a feudal, traditional society still based on the small peasant economy could not bring real improvement either—as had been shown by the high levels of corruption and abuse of privilege in the many Third World countries which had followed this route. In view, therefore, of the failure of both Mao’s mass movements and Western-style democracy, it was incumbent on all of our political thinkers to search for an effective third way. Local government revenues and expenditure: avoiding over-taxing the peasants Any local government Finance Office had to solve three problems: pay the salaries of its employees, enable them to run their offices, and carry out the work. All three functions were interdependent, with the ultimate objective being to boost local economic development, maintain social stability and promote social welfare. In practice, things often went wrong: employees were not properly paid, too much money was wasted on ostentatious improvements to local government facilities—offices, guest houses, cars, karaoke clubs, etc.—and public works were undertaken only in order to enhance official reputations. This phenomenon was not limited to the interior, it operated nationwide, but the consequences were far more serious here than on the coast, where public revenues came largely from commerce and industry. In the interior, ever-increasing public expenditure was funded almost entirely by the peasants. The proceeds of agriculture were thus shared between two opposing camps: on the one hand peasant smallholders, on the other the local government that held sway over them and claimed their surplus product in taxes. And it was the latter who determined how the cake was to be cut. Where the government’s primary source of revenue, levies, was insufficient, they created a secondary income source by charging fees, and where those did not suffice, a tertiary source, the imposition of fines. It was discontent with this system that was the root cause of the recent wave of appeals to city and provincial government. Local government at any level needed to adopt the principle of measuring its expenditure by its receipts. There were two ways of preventing excessive tax demands by government, including the Village Committee, and protecting the producers’ interests: reducing levies to a single, long-term land tax, calculated at 10 per cent of the per mu yield; and allowing the peasants to refuse to pay any tax demand which exceeded 10 per cent. These two provisions should have the force of law. The revenues would then be shared out proportionally between levels of government. This would oblige them to cut their suit according to their cloth—it would entail administrative reforms like cutting staff, ideally by two-thirds, and at least by a half. Teaching and support staff would also have to be trimmed. Most of all, government running costs, especially hospitality expenses, should be cut to the minimum. Finally, the system of recruitment, appraisal and promotion of cadres needed reform. Villagers should be able to vote for and recall xiang and village cadres, and every citizen should be given the right at least to appraise and recall county officials. With these conclusions, I ended my talk. To conclude my visit, I invited first my Party School friends and then my colleagues from Henan University to dine with me, as a way

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of saying thank you and goodbye. Then at eleven o’clock at night, they took me to Kaifeng railway station, and I got on the night express to Shanghai. My departure marked the end of my field research in Henan. I could not help feeling, nonetheless, that in spite of my best efforts, numerous questions remained unanswered.

Notes

Introduction: A Chinese ethnography of rural state and society 1 See Stig Thøgersen, ‘Reconstructing Society: Liang Shuming and the Rural Reconstruction Movement in Shandong’, in Kjeld Eric Brødsgaard and David Strand (eds) Reconstructing Twentieth-Century China: State Control, Civil Society and National Identity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998):139–62. 2 Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 3 This draws on the idea of the state being composed of an image and of the actual practice of its multiple parts developed by state-in-society theorists and anthropologists of the state. See, for example, Joel S.Migdal, Atul Kohli and Vivienne Shue, State Power and Social Forces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Joel S.Migdal, State in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Akhil Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22 (May 1995):375–402. 4 Jean Oi, ‘Fiscal Reform and the Economic Foundations of Local State Corporatism in China’, World Politics, 45 (1992): 99–126; Christine P.W.Wong, ‘Fiscal Reform and Local Industrialization: The Problems of Sequencing Reform in Post-Mao China’, Modern China, 18 (1992):197–227. 5 Zuo Xuejin, ‘China’s Fiscal Decentralisation and the Financing of Local Services in Poor Townships’, IDS Bulletin, 28, 1 (1997):80–91. 6 Naila Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Gender and Development Thought (London: Verso, 1994):146. 7 For more on the cultural model of modernisation see Vanessa L.Fong, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One Child Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 8 Amartya Sen, ‘Poor, Relatively Speaking’, Oxford Economic Papers, 35 (1983): 153–69. 9 See also Rachel Murphy, How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10 Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State (Stanford University Press, 1988):54–71. 11 See Björn Alpermann, ‘The Post-Election Administration of Chinese Villages’, The China Journal, 46 (2001):45–67; Jonathan Unger, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 2002):218–22. 12 See also Maria Edin, Market Forces and Communist Power: Local Political Institutions and Economic Development (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2000). 13 See also Peng Yali, ‘The Politics of Tobacco: Relations between Farmers and Local Governments in China’s Southwest’, The China Journal, 36 (1996):67–82. 14 Francesca Bray, The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986):203–9; Hill Gates, China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Kenneth

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Pomeranz, ‘Beyond the East-West Binary: Resituating Development Paths in the Eighteenth Century World’, Journal of Asian Studies, 61, 2 (May 2002):539–90. 15 See Penelope Franks, ‘From Peasant to Entrepreneur in Italy and Japan’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 22 (July 1995):699–709. 16 See Stig Thøgerson, pp. 147–8, 158. 17 Wu Bin, Sustainable Development in Rural China: Farmer Innovation and SelfOrganization in Marginal Areas (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 18 Lily Lee Tsai, ‘Cadres, Temples, Lineage Institutions and Governance in Rural China’, The China Journal, 48 (July 2002):1–27. 19 Andrew B.Kipnis, Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self and Subculture in a North China Village (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 1997); Mayfair Yang, Gifts, Favors and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Ming-Cheng M.Lo and Eileen M.Otis, ‘Guanxi Civility: Processes, Potentials, and Contingencies’, Politics and Society, 31, 1 (March 2003):131–62. 20 See Lo and Otis, p. 147. 21 This point is made by Lo and Otis, p. 134.

China along the Yellow River 1 An ‘administrative village’ comprises either a few small ‘natural villages’ adjacent to each other, or a single large natural village, under one village committee. Trans. 2 A catty is approximately 0.5 kg. Trans. 3 A li is approximately 0.5 km. Trans. 4

(town) is a unit of local government under county jurisdiction. Both towns and (xiangs) include not just an urban area but also the surrounding countryside, and both have villages under their jurisdiction. Where the author refers to a specific , we have used ‘town’ as the translation. Where, however, he has referred in general to ‘xiang and town government/cadres/enterprises’, we have sometimes shortened this in translation to ‘xiang government, etc.’ Trans. 5 I.e. integrating control of issues connected with local law and order and social stability to counter, for example, activities such as the Fa Lun Gong. Trans. 6 See note 4. Trans. 7 Childless and infirm old persons who are guaranteed food, clothing, medical care, housing and burial expenses by the local government. Trans. 8 Where a one-tenth tithe went to the emperor. Trans. 9 ‘Formalism’, i.e. emphasising form over substance, making changes which are purely cosmetic in nature, was attacked by Mao Zedong in ‘Against Bookishness’, written in 1930. Trans. 10 The system was introduced on an experimental basis between 1960 and 1962, then abolished by Mao Zedong. Three Freedoms: a plot of land allocated for private use, a free market and personal responsibility for profit and losses; One Contract: fixed farm output quotas for individual households. Trans. 11 1959–61. Trans. 12 Under this system, the children might share the same first character of their given name (normally two characters) with their siblings, and with cousins from their father’s brothers’ families. Trans. 13 That is, the local government collects a portion of the peasants’ cotton/tobacco at the state price, then sells it at the inflated market price. If the peasants refuse to grow and sell these

Notes

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crops to them, the local government then demands from the peasants the difference between the state price and the market price in cash. Trans. 14 CPPCC, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. See the following definitions. Trans.

The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is a patriotic united front organization of the Chinese people, serving as a key mechanism for multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and a major manifestation of socialist democracy. (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004– 03/02/content_311087.htm) The CPPCC is mostly composed of non-Party professional people and the small rump parties which survived the revolution, [and] also has its own contingent of communist delegates. It acts…as a sounding board for public opinion and its members carry out ‘investigations’ into issues of concern…[such] as ‘increasing farmers’ income, social security, medical care and environmental protection’. (John Gittings, Guardian Unlimited World Despatch, 5 March 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,662245,0 0.html) 15 I.e. freedom of verbal and written expression. Trans. 16 1911. Trans. 17 Ferdinand Tonnies, 1855–1936. Trans. 18 The Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) was preceded by the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, whose dates are estimated to be (Xia) 2205–1766 BC, (Shang) 1766–1121 BC and (Zhou) 1121– 221 BC. Trans.

Appendix

English translations agricultural levies, the tax burden on the peasants Agricultural Machinery Station Agricultural Technology Station Animal Husbandry Station auxiliary Chu grade cadres auxiliary Ke grade cadres brick and tile houses cadres being posted away from their home village catty, approx. 0.5 kg central plains [NB synonymous in this book with northern plains (Trans.)] city (regional) Civil Administration Office civil society Commercial Office compulsory grain purchase connections, networking (personal), social networks County, county town decollectivisation/distribution of land to individual families/households Disciplinary Committee

Original Chinese

Appendix

214

doing favours effluent charges emperor’s grain levy excess births Family Planning Office farm [and forestry] produce tax formalism Get Rich Project grain spirits, local liquor grain station Household (Contract) Responsibility System for land joint stock co-operative Land Management Station leave the village to get a job as a labourer or factory worker li, approx. 0.5 km life-saver fields lodge [formal] complaint to the provincial or city government/to a higher level militia miscellaneous surnames modes/methods of production mu, 0.067 hectare nationally classified poor county/on the national list of poor counties northern plains cf. central plains Office for Integrated Social Control

Appendix

215

Office of Finance Office of Justice Office of Public Security Organisational Quotas Office Party Regional Committee paulownia tree popular education about the law principal Ke grade cadres processing and service industries Procuratorate Provincial Party Organisational Department Regional Party Committee ridge land, sloping land and valley bottom land Rural Economic Management Station Supervisory Department Tax Office town (administrative unit under a county, having jurisdiction over a number of villages, cf. xiang) upper/lower river flats veto system village collective enterprise Village Party Secretary Villagers’ Committee (short for Villagers’ Autonomous Committee) Villagers’ Group walking tractor Water Conservancy Office

Appendix

216

wheat buns work as a small trader xiang (administrative unit under a county, having jurisdiction over a number of villages, cf. town) xiang and village budget/funds xiang and village collective enterprise/township and village collective enterprise (TVE) xiang militia xianggu mushrooms

Index

abortion 51, 56, 64, 67, 106, 139, 189 adobe 29, 34, 61, 123, 124, 127, 146, 170, 182, 183, 200, 202, 206, 216, 227 agricultural: busy season 65, 72, 79, 81, 167, 170; levies (see also tax burden on the peasants) 22, 23, 32, 50–1, 52, 60, 65, 66, 77, 87, 98–9, 106, 111, 113, 131, 137, 149, 150, 157, 158, 165, 168, 171, 172, 176, 181, 183, 187, 189, 190, 191, 197, 198, 206–7, 209, 213, 219, 224, 230; sidelines 38, 46, 163, 174 anti-gambling laws 52 Anyang 54, 57–8 apple: orchard 49, 53; trees 22, 23, 49, 50–1, 224 auxiliary Chu grade 30, 31 auxiliary Ke grade 30–1, 115, 186, 230 Banqiao Reservoir 152 blood ties (see also kinship) 135 brick kilns 116, 119, 127 Buddhist 201, 205 building: boom 71; materials 61 bureaucracy 67, 68 cadre: and people relations 32, 44, 48, 128, 137, 164, 165; Assessment Targets 115 cadres posted away from home 45, 196, 235–6 cannibalism 184, 187 cash crops 37, 46–7, 50–1, 224 chemical plant 80, 83–4, chestnut: trees 36; wood shavings 26, 28, 36 chimney 63 civil society 135

Index

218

clan 47, 56, 78, 134–5, 153, 168–9, 187, 200–1, 215, 229; consciousness 33, 78, 153, 200–1; records 25, 32, 134–5, 153, 169 coastal provinces 130, 133 communes 45, 46–7, 79, 80, 92, 98, 120, 147, 150, 152, 154, 174, 175, 184, 231 company plus peasant model 91 compensation for medical accident 64 concrete 34, 59 connections (guanxi) 108, 154, 157–8, 208 contract land 22, 38, 53, 62, 74–5, 77, 103, 169, 170, 178, 201 corn cobs 63 corruption 20, 22, 23, 44, 53, 57, 131, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161, 163, 177, 178, 180, 193, 195, 204– 5, 230, 236 cotton 22–3, 50, 78; deposit 53 credit 64; cooperative 42, 100, 168, 209 crop: mix 71; yield 19, 165, 167, 181, 183, 218 cropping patterns 66, 181 Cultural Revolution 133 Dabie Mountains 165, 181, 187, 189, 194 dance hostesses 140–2, 207–8 Dancing Secretary 115 Dazhai 152, 222 decollectivisation 59, 61, 121, 152, 169, 186, 206, 218, 226, 234 democracy 109, 135, 157, 158, 162, 178, 188, 196, 204 Deng Xiaoping 53 dirty films 52 divorce 51 doctor 53 Dongbatou Dyke 115, 143 drinking games 160, 207 Dual Field System 44, 148 education expenditure 110, 175, 197, 206 effluent 69, 93 elderly 107 environmental crisis 217 excess births 32, 51, 66, 97, 105–6, 115, 136, 168, 172, 187, 193 Eye: Goddess 60, 63; problems 60, 63 factory: brick 34; caustic soda 65; dyes 83; fertiliser 62;

Index

219

electric cable 89; glass 26; glove 80–3; knitting 120; nylon thread 34; paint 112; paper 76, 91–2; plastics 26, 27, 91, 92; shoe 34, 36; straw hat 65; wainscoting 112 family planning 30, 57, 60, 66, 95, 96, 98, 105, 106, 115, 136, 138, 190, 206, 217, 230 Fanzhuang village 70 farm produce tax 52, 53, 191, 216 Feixiang 58, 63 fertiliser 23, 26, 34, 37, 62, 71, 78, 85–6, 162 field research methods 63 finishing press (gloves) 81, 90 Five Guarantee families 98, 103, 126 flood relief committee 123 floods 115, 116, 121, 124, 152, 167, 173, 174, 183, 194, 224 food aid 226 forest 189, 190 forestry 45, 95, 132; Farm 45, 127 formalism 118, 176, 178, 220 fortified villages (see also moated villages) 181, 198 Four Great Freedoms 177–8 Four Great Modernisations 19 friendship 20, 40, 72, 79, 157, 162 funerals 72, 77, 103, 186 Ganges 143 gap between rich and poor (see also wealth-poverty divide) 75, 99, 170 genealogical records 78 General Guan Gong 60 Get Rich Project 22, 24, 25, 27, 34, 36, 39, 44, 47, 114, 180 gift-giving 114, 158, 162, 228 Gongyi 84 grain: spirits 84, 85, 114, 128, 137; stores 28, 29–30, Grand Canal 209 Great Leap Forward 130, 184, 185 Great Wall 209 Guanyin 201 Guomindang 165, 183 Han dynasty 203 haulage business (see also transport business) 71, 76, 87, 127 Heart Sutra 201

Index

220

Hebei 58, 126 Hobbes, Thomas 164 Hongdong County 134, 215 hospitality expenditure 106, 208, 210–1 hotels 24, 57, 68 house: brick and tile 43, 170, 171, 182, 200, 206, 216, 227; mansion-style 61; old-style 43, 61, 168, 170, 175, 182, 202; sleeve-style 58, 62 house-building 59, 60–1, 72, 146 Household Contract Responsibility System 33, 39, 45, 49, 70, 75, 86, 88, 120, 127, 134, 148, 152, 161, 222, 238 housing, brick-built 26, 29, 34, 61, 127, 170, 200 Huai River 69, 159, 165, 173, 181, 183, 194 Huiji River 69, 71, 93 irrigation 19, 54, 62–3, 71, 78, 86, 144, 148, 152, 157, 174, 182, 221, 222, 224, 231, 234 job transfers of officials 38, 117 joint stock partnerships 55, 56 Kaifeng 20, 41, 42, 54–5, 117, 157, 212; City 44, 45, 49, 69, 75, 131, 134, 142; County 44–5, 49, 69, 75, 131, 134, 142; Shoe Factory 133 kickbacks 57 kinship (see also blood ties) 20, 40, 47, 72, 79, 109, 134–5, 153, 157, 162 labour contractor 75, 76 labouring jobs 43, 53, 55, 71, 118, 127, 162, 163, 165, 167, 175 land: disputes 45, 107, 126, 137–8; per capita 19, 25, 29, 32, 37, 89, 125, 127, 144, 147, 150, 163, 165, 175, 222; sloping 181, 222, 225; valley bottom 222 large-scale farming 41, 86 leather goods 80–1, 84, 89, 90, 92, 102 life-saver fields 222 Liu Shaoqi 186 Liudian 112, 115, 122 livestock 37, 51, 66, 71, 90–1, 92, 146, 233 lotus 24–5 Luo River 20 Luoyang 42–3 maize 19, 23, 29, 33, 34, 50–1, 54, 58, 62, 64, 66, 146–7, 152, 153, 223; introduction to China 235 Mao Zedong 53; Thought 205

Index

221

marriage 102, 107 Marxism-Leninism 205 May Fourth Movement 178 mechanisation 19, 73, 78 migrant labour 65, 66, 227 militia 70, 168, 171, 173, 231 millet 58, 62, 85 Ming dynasty 60, 181, 194, 215, 235 moated villages 187, 199, 202, 210 modernisation 18, 31, 41, 58, 87, 97, 159, 201, 203, 232, 237 Nanyang 149 Napoleonic Code 137 National Plan 91 nepotism 96 new rich 47, 219 nightlife in a county town 139–142, 207 Nile 143 Northern Wei dynasty 214 nuclear family 40, 153, 162 Opium War 156 Ouchi village 24, 33, 37 paulownia trees 50 peanuts 19 peasants: appeals 45; beliefs 60, 166, 176; diet 33, 59, 62, 76, 86, 146–7, 171, 207, 216, 226, 233; dissatisfaction 150, 162; feudal outlook 46, 166, 176; protests 113, 166, 176; satisfaction 66, 150; uprisings 164, 166, 176 per mu yield 19, 33, 36, 41, 62, 71, 147, 184, 206, 218, 223 perks of the job 120, 131, 138–9 pesticides 23, 26, 51, 52, 71, 78, 85, 153 piece work 36, 81 pigeons 62 pig-rearing 28, 29, 33, 34, 37, 167, 227, 233 planning permission 57 pollution 69, 93 poor county 159, 208, 214, 231–2 poultry farm 34, 36, 90 principal Chu grade 30, 31 principal Ke grade 30–1 Procuratorate 189, 190 production: brigade 74, 79, 152, 184, 185, 186; team 49, 70, 184, 185

Index

222

prostitute 47, 52 public security 80, 140 150, 157, 179 Qin dynasty 69, 203 Qing dynasty 23, 164, 181 Red Flag Irrigation Canal 148 registration (residential) 42, 74, 75 rice 54, 152, 175, 181, 197 Revolution of 1911 156 ridge land 222, 225 road-building 52, 97, 138, 155 rule of law 108–9, 156, 158, 177, 188 Ruzhou County 41–3 school: fees 65, 66, 213; middle 42, 49, 53, 55, 58–9, 65, 70, 81, 92, 107, 110, 112, 125, 168, 175, 176, 189, 191, 192, 213; primary 58, 110, 151, 170, 172, 190, 213 science associations 63 Separating Agent 83 sewing machines 81 sex services 140, 142 Shang dynasty 203 shanty towns 214 share-ownership cooperative 93 shoeshine stands 212 social status 59 Song dynasty 164, 195 soot 63 sorghum 85, 124, 146–7 spent mushroom compost 28 spinning and weaving 226–7 Spring and Autumn Period 69 St Matthew effect 197 sterilisation 64 Sun Yat Sen 178 superstition 152, 154 sweet potatoes 33, 34, 49, 53, 62, 66, 85, 185, 216, 223, 233, 234; introduction to China 235 Taikang 22, 49 Tang dynasty 203 tax burden on the peasants (also see agricultural levies) 98, 162, 171, 172, 176, 208, 209 taxation 23, 98, 205 taxes 23, 37, 48, 50, 77, 96, 99, 158, 165, 166, 172, 176, 189, 217, 224 television 40, 41, 65, 82; black-and-white 37, 72, 80, 206; colour 24, 35, 37, 59, 112, 201, 206

Index

223

temples 25, 60, 153, 205 thatch 146, 170, 182, 183, 200, 202, 206 three-family villages 215 Three Freedoms and One Contract system 152; Three Guarantee Fields 222 Tonnies, Ferdinand 200 Toynbee, Arnold 157 tractor: four-wheeled 37, 71, 76, 127–8, 150; walking 123, 153 tradition 18, 31, 204 transport business (see also haulage business) 42 urban upgrading 57, 69 Village: Committee (see also Villagers’ Autonomous Committee) 65, 86, 87, 148, 149, 153, 179, 188, 190, 191; layout 29, 60; Model of Prosperity 32; Party Secretary’s salary 28, 78, 137, 186–7, 190; rules 60; Villagers’ Autonomous Committee (see also Village Committee) 33; Group 24, 38–9, 68, 127, 128, 144, 168, 190 volunteer labour 72 voting 38–9, 188 water: conservancy 100–01, 147, 152, 174, 223, 225, 231, 234; table 62 wealth-poverty divide (see also gap between rich and poor) 32, 219 weddings 65, 72, 77, 180, 227 Welfare Office well-boring 62, 86, 87, 101 wheat 22–3, 33, 46, 50–1, 52, 53, 62, 66, 73, 77, 85, 113, 116, 118, 121, 125, 127, 146–7, 152, 181, 185, 194, 197, 198, 213, 216, 217, 223, 233, 234 World Bank 101 Wulizhai 72, 78 Wuyang 21, 23, 27, 30, 32, 38, 40, 41 xianggu mushroom cultivation 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 36, 38 Xinyang Affair 147, 149, 164, 184 Yellow River 54, 112, 115, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 129, 134, 137, 143–4, 164 Yellow River/Huai Hai Flood Control Project 101 Yiyang 181 Yuanzhuang village 32, 37 Zhaizhuang village Zhengzhou 20, 21, 30, 42, 43, 73, 74, 164, 212

Index

Zhonghang village 65 Zhongwangzhuang village 123 Zhou dynasty 203 Zhumadian 141, 144–5, 148, 152, 160, 164

224