Bestseller exposes social powderkeg in rural China —No-holds-barred book blows the lid on shocking injustices against the country's 900 million peasants
Straits Times | 21 feb by Chua Chin Hon http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/asia/story/0,4386,236301,00.html BEIJING - Like any hot-blooded youth, peasant Ding Zuoming thought he would prevail because he had the truth on his side. So when corrupt village officials tried to levy illegal and exorbitant taxes and fees on the residents of Luying village in eastern Anhui province, he rallied his fellow peasants and demanded an audit. He paid for that mistake with his life. The village chief ordered his arrest and the local police beat him up so badly that he died in a hospital the following day. The incident happened on Feb 21, 1993. Mr Ding was the first farmer to be beaten to death for protesting against unfair taxes and fees, though he was hardly the last one, according to a new book chronicling the 'unimaginable poverty and hardship' of farmers in Anhui. Nearly 11 years after his death, the account of his fate is sending shock waves through many Chinese cities where the book, An Investigation Of Chinese Farmers, has become an unlikely best-seller. At least 100,000 copies have been sold, and its entire content is available online. While scholarly works on rural issues have been widely available for years, none has had the mass market appeal of the book by Anhui writers Chen Guidi and his wife Wu Chuntao. Their book, at turns emotional, at turns strident, but mostly brimming with anger at the injustice inflicted against the country's 900 million peasants, touched a raw nerve among urban Chinese readers, many of whom are disengaged from the plight of the rural areas and are fed a constant diet of rosy reports from state TV. Aside from corruption and police brutality, the book, the result of an extensive three-year study, also details how already impoverished villages were dragged further into debt by officials trying to score political points with vanity projects. When inspection tours by top leaders from the central government threatened to blow the lid off their puffed-up reports, local officials orchestrated elaborate schemes to fool them. The book described one such scam in May 1998, when then premier Zhu Rongji visited Anhui's Nanling county to check on the government's grain procurement programme. He was shown fully stocked granaries that had taken officials four days and nights to fill with grain from other counties, because no one wanted to tell the tough-talking premier the truth: that the programme had failed and that many of Nanling's granaries sat empty. Observers were surprised that the book named the villages, counties and officials involved, many of whom are still in power. More disturbingly, the authors said in interviews and webchats here that they had pulled their punches, and what they witnessed was much worse in reality. The couple wrote: 'Those who have not left the big cities think the whole of China is like Beijing or Shanghai. 'We want to say that we have seen unimaginable poverty, unimaginable evil, unimaginable suffering and desperation, unimaginable resistance and silence.' The book casts a harsh and timely spotlight on the multitude of problems in China's rural heartland, which experts fear could lead to social unrest as legislators gear up for the annual legislative session next month. A key debate will be on the 150-billion-yuan (S$30.6-billion) budget to raise farmers' incomes and improve the agricultural sector. The authors and several other experts have argued for years that lowering the tax and fee burdens of peasants will not work without corresponding measures to boost their incomes, which are now at least three to four times lower than those of their urban counterparts. Central government efforts to reduce their tax burden have been hobbled by systemic corruption and non-compliance among local officials who exploit loopholes and a lack of supervision to enrich themselves. Authors Chen and Wu wrote: 'What we are facing is not just an agricultural problem... It is simply the biggest social problem facing the new Chinese leadership. 'We should not forget the farmlands just because we now have sparkling new cities. 'If the 900 million peasants in China do not become well-off, all optimistic economic forecasts are irrelevant.' (the book is at http://finance.sina.com.cn/guest147.shtml for you Chinese readers!) ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/
