[Reader-list] Economics and politics of Chinese rural life

[Rana Dasgupta]

The silent majority
Apr 7th 2005 | BEIHE VILLAGE, SHANDONG
 From The Economist print edition



A rare look inside a Chinese village

IN A country where 800m people, about 60% of the population, live in the 
countryside on an average income of less than a dollar a day, rural 
backwardness weighs heavily on the minds of China's leaders as they 
dream of joining the ranks of the world's leading economies. And in a 
country whose Communist Party came to power on the back of a peasant 
rebellion, distant memories of the vehemence of rural discontent arouse 
fears that unless something is done to make peasants happier, China will 
be plunged into turmoil. To assess China's future, it is crucial to 
understand the countryside. But it is not easy.

Despite China's increasing openness to prying foreign eyes, the dynamics 
of village life remain hidden away. Although the Chinese media report 
extensively on rural problems, foreign journalists require government 
approval to conduct interviews in the countryside (as indeed, in theory, 
they do for any off-base reporting in China). Foreign correspondents can 
often get away with conducting unauthorised interviews in the more 
cosmopolitan urban areas, but rural officials invoke the rules with far 
greater regularity, fearful that critical press reports could damage 
their careers. The presence in a village of any outsider asking 
sensitive questions can quickly arouse official attention and often 
results in detention, the confiscation of notes and other materials, and 
orders to leave the area immediately.

Your correspondent originally asked the government of Shandong province 
for permission to stay in a village he had visited with official 
approval in the 1980s, but was turned down. Instead, the authorities 
selected the village of Beihe in Zouping, a prosperous county that was 
designated by China in the late 1980s as an area (then almost the only 
one) open to American researchers to do fieldwork. It still delights in 
its propaganda role. Zouping's brochure calls the county “a window for 
the US and the whole world to get an understanding” of the countryside. 
Yan Shengqin, Beihe's party chief at the time, still proudly displays a 
framed picture of Jimmy Carter with an arm around Mr Yan's shoulders 
during a visit in 1997.

Beihe's 1,000 villagers enjoy a net income per head of around 5,000 yuan 
($600) a year—about 70% more than the national average and 40% more than 
the average for Zouping. It has more than 30 privately owned factories 
in activities from iron forging to furniture making. Peasants here say 
they would prefer to keep their rural-residence certificates, a relic of 
a once-rigid urban-rural apartheid system in China that barred peasants 
from moving to the cities. Now they are allowed to migrate more freely. 
But while the urban social-security system is in tatters, most 
country-dwellers are still entitled to farm (not to own) a small patch 
of land that can at least keep them from starving. Beihe's villagers 
prefer to stay put—unlike tens of millions of other peasants for whom 
even the insecurity and hardship of urban life is better than rural poverty.

Beihe's mobile-phone-owning peasants in their newly built courtyard 
homes with cable television and (in the case of at least 20 households) 
private cars may not be the best-placed people to give insights into the 
rural deprivation and injustice that have prompted a growing number of 
peasants to head to big cities in recent years to petition the 
authorities. (Even model Zouping had 603 such peasants in 2002 and 338 
in 2003, compared with none at the beginning of the decade, according to 
county records.) Even so, the village does illustrate how sweeping 
economic and political changes in the past quarter-century have made 
China's villages far more independent from higher authority. They have 
also become far more dependent for their success or failure on the 
abilities of their own local leaders. In Beihe, as in many of China's 
700,000 villages, ancient clans have played an important part in both of 
these changes.

The Zhang-Yan clans

The revival of village clannism is among the party's many worries about 
its grip on rural stability. In Beihe, more than half of the villagers 
share the surname Zhang. Among the rest, Yan is the biggest clan. The 
Yans and Zhangs live in distinct areas of the village. Yan Shengqin, the 
former party chief, happens to be one of the most senior within his 
clan's patrilineal hierarchy. It is to him, he says, that Yans turn to 
help sort out family disputes or officiate at weddings or funerals. Kim 
Falk, of America's Carnegie Mellon University, who spent 18 months in 
Beihe in the early 1990s, says relations between Zhangs and Yans 
appeared harmonious, as they do today. But it is easy to see how in 
other villages clan loyalties—as sometimes reported in the Chinese 
press—lead to bitter feuding between clans and struggles for control of 
village leadership jobs.


The dismantling of Chairman Mao's “people's communes” in the early 1980s 
allowed villages to re-emerge as independent economic units. Clans 
acquired a renewed interest in taking control. China's promotion of 
elections for the post of village head in the 1990s made it easier for 
them to do so. And more recent moves to have one person act as both 
village head and party chief have made it easier still.

Although Beihe began directly electing its village head a decade ago 
(and sure enough it was always Zhangs who won), the party chief, Mr Yan, 
was still the man in charge. This system of having separate elected and 
party-appointed leaders has caused widespread power struggles in 
villages, and nearly caused friction in Beihe. In 1999, a wealthy 
private businessman and member of a senior Zhang clan family, Zhang 
Fanggeng, was elected village head. Villagers knew that he had had a 
prickly relationship with Mr Yan. Some peasants who disliked Mr Yan had 
voted for Mr Zhang hoping that this would stir up a feud. “Some people 
said that within a month, there'd definitely be quite a show” between 
the two men, Mr Zhang later said in a report to higher officials.

Intervention from officials in Xidong township, to which Beihe belongs, 
as well as Mr Zhang's own common sense (struggling with the party is 
rarely a winning move), helped keep these tensions in check. Last year, 
the Shandong party leadership ordered that next time the province held 
village elections, ways should be found to ensure that the posts of 
party chief and village head be held by the same person in more than 80% 
of villages. Achieving this has involved allowing villagers for the 
first time to vote for the top party posts as well. The village party 
committee would still have the final say, but would generally pick the 
party member “recommended” by the most villagers as party chief. This 
person would also be appointed village leader. Last December in Beihe, 
Mr Zhang, who had conveniently joined the party, was a shoo-in for both 
jobs. His votes, tallied up in chalk on a garage door, are still on display.

The last collective

Now in full command of the village, Mr Zhang has the task of untangling 
one of the knottiest problems left by Mr Yan—the fate of Beihe's malt 
factory, whose dour concrete façade dominates the village skyline of 
closely clustered houses surrounded by an expanse of fields. Once the 
mainstay of the village's economy, the factory is idle. Of its more than 
200 workers, only its guard remains on duty. The village is hoping a 
private investor will take it off its hands, but it would take a 
courageous soul to do so with its 5m yuan of debt and a market for malt 
now dominated by bigger, better-quality producers.

The malt factory is the last relic of the collectively owned industrial 
complex that was once Beihe. As party chief, Mr Yan had used his 
networking skills and business acumen to follow the example of many 
villages around China in setting up enterprises that were owned and 
operated by the village. Mr Yan himself acted as manager of the malt 
factory. These were, in effect, state-owned enterprises and suffered the 
same problems—bloated workforces, inefficient management and a poor 
understanding of risk. As long as state-owned banks were willing to lend 
and local officials helped them secure markets, they could prosper. In 
Beihe they helped transform what had been a village of mud brick and 
thatch in the 1970s into a community of spacious concrete dwellings that 
many an urban resident would envy.

But tougher lending rules and fiercer competition in recent years have 
forced villages to close or privatise most of their collective 
businesses. This may mean Mr Zhang has a quieter time than Mr Yan (who 
though retired from village duties is now the general manager of a 
township fertiliser factory). Ms Falk says that in the early 1990s a 
constant stream of business delegations from around the country visited 
the malt factory. The road into the village thundered with malt-laden 
trucks. Now the village, like many others in China, has changed from 
conglomerate to real-estate dealer, trading on its one remaining 
commodity, its land.

With no more revenue from collective industries, the village's income is 
made up almost entirely of land rent paid by the privately owned 
factories. Beihe has recently decided to rent out a large tract of 
farmland to private investors to turn into a driving school and an 
auto-parts factory. The peasants who had used the land to grow wheat and 
corn are being compensated according to how much they would have earned 
from these crops. This is a meagre sum, it is true; but since they do 
not own the land and most of them have jobs in the private factories, 
they are not complaining. Millions of other peasants in China who have 
been turfed off the land in recent years by villages eager to profit 
from developers are far less happy.

Beihe's bet is that the success of private industry in the area will 
boost incomes and with it demand for cars. More car owners will mean 
more demand for driving schools such as the one being built in the 
village (in China, learner drivers are not allowed on roads). A rosy 
future, perhaps. If only Beihe were more typical.