Posted on 08/26/2006 7:18:57 AM PDT by Clive
Under scrutiny, the economic triumph of China turns out to be a journalistic fantasy, built on statistics unrelated to the lives of most Chinese. It's a great story, certified by photos of that gleaming metropolis, Shanghai. Everybody seems to agree that the Chinese prosper by making cheap products they sell to the West. Journalists, drunk on their own enthusiasm, sometimes envision China economically overtaking the U.S.
But rural China, where two-thirds of the population live, remains dirt poor -- poorer than the poorest region most people in the West have ever seen. This reality, rather than export figures, stands as the central economic fact of China today.
Much Chinese land is hard to cultivate, but the most crippling problems of farmers are political. They suffer under government-created corruption that reaches up deviously and unknowably through several levels of bureaucracy. Peasants, far from being committed to their traditional way of life, are so demoralized that they can only dream of escaping to a city. There they'll be regarded as yokels and exploited. Nevertheless, they may be able to eat regularly.
These bleak truths emerge clearly in Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China's Peasants (PublicAffairs Publishing), by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, a book with its own remarkable history. In China two years ago, the original edition, An Investigation of the Chinese Peasantry, sold 250,000 copies and even got a good review in the People's Daily. But the censors, whose fear makes them unpredictable, banned it. The authors, a husband and wife team, have been harassed (at one point a crowd threw rocks at their house) but their views have spread; apparently about 10 million bootlegged copies are now in print.
Chen and Wu, both from peasant families, spent three years studying rural life in Anhui, an inland province of 60.7 million people in southeast China and the setting for The Good Earth, the 1931 novel that helped Pearl Buck win the Nobel Prize. Chen and Wu describe how civil servants enrich themselves in the agricultural villages, starving the peasants with taxes or fines and sometimes beating them to death if they make an organized protest or even ask for an accounting of the village's finances. Those who know some European history will recognize the structure of oppression in contemporary China. It's called feudalism. The Communist Party acts the way the Church and the monarchs acted in medieval Europe. The party, secure in the belief that peasants are so stupid they won't object, gets richer while letting the poor stay poor. Beijing has responded by setting up an Office for the Relief of the Peasant Burden, which George Orwell might have invented. It provides excellent new opportunities for robbing the poor.
Today, under China's perverse form of capitalism, the status of the peasants continues to decline. Bureaucrats have run amok, reproducing like rabbits. They infest the land. John Pomfret of the Washington Post, in his excellent introduction to Will the Boat Sink the Water?, says that in 1979 China had 2.2 million bureaucrats, most of them working in the countryside; today it has 10 million.
The rural misery of the 21st century follows directly on the methods of Mao Zedong. Almost everyone was fooled, in some way, by the pro-Mao propaganda that poured out of China for decades. Journalists, for instance, tended to agree that he was (however vile his methods) an agrarian reformer. He wasn't. He did not redistribute the land or liberate the peasants. His henchmen dominated the countryside like an occupying army. They stole the crops of the peasants and killed anyone who resisted. They took away the people's food and sent it to Eastern Europe, where it purchased arms and prestige for Mao. China became a major aid-giving nation while letting its own people die of starvation by the millions.
The message of Chen and Wu unfortunately reaches us in a stiff and cliche-ridden version by Zhu Hong. We have to peer through the screen of translation to glimpse the style of the authors. What could have been a deeply absorbing and memorable book has appeared instead as a work many readers will find tiresome and difficult. Still, with patience, it's a moving document.
Chen and Wu make rural China sound like a hideous parody of communist dreams. In 1875 Karl Marx defined social justice as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" The new China has redefined the formula: From each whatever he can't hide, to each according to whatever he can grab.
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Socialism is the survival of Feudalism into the modern age. It's true in Europe, and it's more starkly true in China.
The state owns all of the land.
Actually, the only difference between these two statements is the wording. They both mean the same thing.
It is an excellent article made all the more worthy by the above quote. Bureaucrats -- the bane of the common man's existence. Give a small minded person power over his neighbors and you have created a monster regardless of location. This is true in some degree in all socialist countries, including here to a far, far lesser degree.
Feudalism is not just a form of oppression. It is a very good social system when there is a lack of stability. You pay homage to the stronger individuals who protect you in exchange for loyalty and services. Your superiors pay homage to the higher rank and you have people below you. On top there is one leader called king or otherwise.
The whole society is organized such way in a very efficient, personalized manner. Everybody has his place, barbarians/plunderers are kept away and the civilization can be built.
Free marketization, extreme individualism, falling apart of families and local communities, invasion of alien tribes, moral decay, collapse of government, civil wars, erosion of culture all lead to the feudalization.
Feudalism is a natural defense mechanism and the root of civilization.
Socialism is slavery by government(China).. its exactly the same in URP and Canada too.. Because democracy is Mob Rule.. and socialism is a form of Mob Rule..
Not unlike Liberal Party rule in Canada.
Less than one percent of their population. I wonder how this compares with the U.S.A.
IOW, they have a sort of caste system. And just as in other countries, that system has the effect of drastically reducing the economic potential of the country. Just as conservatives in the US can only dream of the economic potential which would be unleashed if only we could get "the inner city" fully integrated into the American economy.Conservatives dream of that; "liberals" rely on the intractability of the problem as a political opportunity.
Those who know more European history will know that feudalism is a slapdash catch-all category for a society based on personal pledges and loyalty. It's a really contentious concept, see the talk archives for wiki's Feudalism Page where a couple of historians try to set things straight.
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