This became apparent in the first village we visited, called Kuquan (Crying Springs), on the road from Xian to Yanan, deep in Shaanxi province. It seemed a prosperous place; the corn had just been harvested and was drying along the roadside, a riot of autumnal yellow orange. We were greeted by an elderly woman named Sung Aiying, who ran a little store–canned goods, rice, toys and candy. She lived in a room behind the store with her latest purchase, a black-and-white television set (about $50). Her favorite program was “Beijing/New York.” She especially liked the kitchen appliances in America. “I hope we can have that sort of development here soon,” she said–although life wasn’t so bad, she quickly added. Four families in the village, including her own, were building new homes.
There are perhaps 900 million peasants in China. They are living better now than rural people ever have in Chinese history, but not nearly so well as the more than 100 million who are riding the economic boom in the coastal provinces. The disparity is a source of some concern to the government, which has been desperately seeking ways to reduce the “burdens” (usually local taxes) imposed on the peasants.
But the agricultural reforms Deng introduced with spectacular success more than a decade ago now seem to be bumping up against the limits of the possible. Agricultural yields have stagnated in recent years and peasant incomes are, generally, stagnating with them. The government has been hoping that the development of “township enterprises” would bring greater prosperity–and these new businesses have done well, in some areas. in others, the consequences have been unpredictable, and often bizarre. Some townships have reverted to a form of feudalism, their leaders more warlords than entrepreneurs. Often, the local leader will use his guanxi (Pull) to get a bank loan, put members of his family on the payroll and milk the enterprise for their benefit, exploiting the workers. Indeed, over the past year, there have been sporadic rebellions against corrupt local leaders, as well as alarming intertownship battles. In Gansu province, men from one village marched on another whose new “enterprise,” a chemical plant, was poisoning the river–a pitched battle was fought, two people were killed. Last spring there were dozens of clashes throughout the country when peasants were paid with I.O.U.s (“empty notes,” they are called) for the crops they were required to raise for the state; in some areas, the money had already been loaned to, and lost by, the local warlord–or speculated away in the national real-estate frenzy. “We should abolish this confusing system,” says Deng Yiming, an agriculture expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “and let the market decide.”
Mr. Deng was talking about the requirement that peasants sell part of their crop to the government–but he could easily have been talking about township enterprises as well. Both are halfway measures, a step away from Mao’s old rural collectives, toward capitalism…but with a Confucian twist: the peasant’s fate remains in the hands of higher authorities, specifically his village leader. With the demise of totalitarianism in China, these local authorities have assumed–or perhaps, resumed–great power.
I watched the last episode of “Beijing/New York” in a cave in Yanan. It was a nice cave, with a new color TV–and the village was a mythic one, home to the Communist Party leadership in the 1930s, after the Long March. Here, the revolution still lived; the local authorities even adhered to family-planning policy. Lei Zhifu, whose family’s cave it was, had been dandled on Chairman Mao’s knee as a child. He watched the program in horror. He gasped when the characters cursed each other; a daughter called her father something that couldn’t be printed in this magazine. “Well, it’s clear that America has taken the capitalist road,” he said afterward. But what of China? He wasn’t sure. He seemed confused, perhaps disgusted. “Things change,” he said.
