China’s Farmers

...the [Chinese] government has abolished agricultural taxes throughout most of China in the past year and is even paying a small subsidy to farmers...

"The agricultural tax will be exempted throughout the country next year," announced Premier Wen Jiabao at the National People's Congress in March 2005. Finally, the state media proclaimed, farmers can boost their incomes and build a decent life.

However, many farmers here remain unimpressed, as a relative decline in the prices for their crops in comparison to the cost of their daily needs makes life still more difficult. Indeed, the tax abolition appears to be a belated recognition of a new reality—farmers are moving off the land so quickly and Chinese agriculture is so moribund that such taxes don't serve any useful purpose anymore.

One of the deeper motives behind tax abolition is the Chinese Communist Party's alarm over the widening gap in income between the cities and countryside. This imbalance is immediately obvious wandering through a place like Wuyang—despite the new highway that runs near it, this is still a place where black-toothed men lug water from wells to Qing-era houses whose collapsed sections are covered by tin roofing, and where villagers, if they can afford a television, watch images of affluent Beijing youths falling in love via cell phone text messaging.

The potential of these imbalances to breed strife was shown in a bombshell of a book released in early 2004, as tax abolition was starting implementation. The book, [Will The Boat Sink The Water? The Life Of China's Peasants, by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao], is based on rural research conducted during 1998-2001, by which time unrest was intensifying across the countryside. It details the plight of peasants who were paying higher taxes than their entire incomes, who died due to their inability to pay medical expenses, and who rallied against arbitrary taxes levied on them by corrupt officials only to be beaten to death for their temerity.

...Mr. Guo is explaining the Chinese migrant phenomenon to me in the house of a friend who has also "gone off" and opened a restaurant in Shishi, a city on the coast of adjoining Fujian province. Mr. Guo clearly envies his friend's prosperity...

"My big hope is that I'll be able to make enough money by the time my son reaches 18 so that we can stay here at home together, and do business together, and not have to go far away to work. But to find that good life, and to build the highest house possible, we all have this dream: to go 'abroad' and make the most money."

The problem for peasants who want to match this formula for success, Mr. Guo says, is that "work is now extremely difficult to find in the cities. The economy has slowed down. I'm stuck here. The only place to go now is Shenzhen," the mother of all Chinese boomtowns, "but I don't know anyone there." Mr. Guo is one of many young peasants eating a new kind of bitterness—having grown used to a tough industrial life that carries possibilities, he can hardly return in peace to an even tougher agricultural life that spells a dead end.

When China's leaders announced the agricultural tax abolition, they were also acknowledging that the fundamentals of the Chinese economy have changed. According to the government's own statistics, the agricultural tax was contributing only 1% of state revenues by 2003. The economy has outgrown its traditional agricultural roots, and state leaders can afford to feel generous when relieving a marginalized and stagnant sector.

Meanwhile, the dynamic sectors of the economy, especially construction and export manufacturing, keep sucking in farmers. Over the past 25 years, this has created one of the greatest internal migration flows in Chinese history. Today, an estimated 100 million "floating" people identify themselves as farmers but spend most of the year working at more lucrative city jobs...

"Most farmers in this village are taking in around 300 yuan per month," [a farmer, surnamed Liu] says, echoing a figure heard in villages throughout the region. Since their gross income goes almost entirely for basic costs of farming and living, they only clear a net income of around 300 to 400 yuan per year, which made their old tax rates of about 100 yuan per year particularly onerous.

However, the elimination of these taxes "still doesn't help," Mr. Liu says, "because prices on everything are rising. A jin [equivalent to one pound] of fish used to cost three yuan—now it's five yuan. Even fruit is more expensive." He can sell 100 jin of rice for 80 yuan nowadays, whereas 10 years ago it would only fetch 40 yuan, but this increase still does not cover his costs, he says. When I bring up the new farm subsidy initiative, he scoffs. The subsidies only amount to 20 to 30 yuan per year, which is hardly effective, he says.

The most fundamental problem facing farmers, explains Mr. Liu, is also a very old one: Few have enough land to farm on. The average acreage per family in Dabodi Village is about one mu of land. A mu is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of an acre, or a little smaller than an Olympic-size swimming pool. This might be enough to feed and clothe one person depending on the crop, Mr. Liu say, but "it's hardly enough for a family of five or six to live on."

Despite the bleak picture Mr. Liu paints, it is still possible for Chinese farmers to eke out an existence off the land, as their forebears did for millennia under much worse conditions than those prevailing today. However, their concept of ganhuo—"to make a living"—has fundamentally changed. Even if young farmers enjoy better lives than their parents, they have had two decades of exposure and access to a wider world of livelihoods that have inevitably raised the standard of what is considered a life at all...

Thousands of migrant garment workers are now unemployed in [Shishi, a nondescript city on the Fujian coast], and the local opinion is that this is due to the U.S. and EU reimposing import quotas on Chinese textiles. The jobless congregate in a dark, dirty lane off 92 Road, the city's major avenue named after the seminal year when Deng Xiaoping jumpstarted economic reforms.

In his factory, [a migrant farmer from Yugan County in northern Jiangxi] worked 13-hour days sewing clothes seven days a week. This earned him 1,200 to 1,400 yuan ($148 to $173) per month, of which he mailed 1,000 yuan home to his parents, wife, and young son, who farm one mu of land.
...At the mention of taxes, however, he launches into a diatribe against corrupt officials. He is one of many Chinese his age who bitterly deride the government's supposedly reformist policies. A teenager who had stopped to listen to the migrant farmer's speech starts teasing the man, saying that that he was exaggerating how corrupt local officials are nowadays—"and anyway," the youth says, "[President] Hu Jintao cancelled taxes in the countryside last year, and it's a lot better than before."

The farmer from Yugan County has a particular grievance against the government, however. Last year, local officials confiscated a total of 18 mu of land that had been farmed by his extended family. "The district government said no one was there to farm it, so they just took it away! It's like I said—corruption has no end out in the countryside." The relatives who held the user rights to the 18 mu had, like him, been living "abroad" working in the factories for over a decade, and their children were doing the same. Except for his parents, no one, in fact, was there to work the land.

One fresh face in Shishi who offers a sense of rural opportunities is Huang Linsheng, a soft-spoken, 23-year-old migrant from Yudu, a town in southern Jiangxi. Until being laid off the previous week, he earned 2,000 to 2,600 yuan per month, and has been sending 600 yuan home per month. Now he is considering returning home permanently, far before his prime working years are over. He is homesick and tired of his 16-hour days in the factory, and anyway he has a clever scheme to make a living off the land. He and his parents are investigating how to cultivate ziyacai, a medicinal plant that is fetching high prices from pharmaceutical companies.

He is encouraged to return home to what he affirms is an "enriched countryside." The agricultural tax abolition, he says, is as important a factor in enriching the modern countryside as the money sent home by migrant workers. His work in the Shishi garment factories has allowed him and his family to save enough money to experiment with their ziyacai scheme, and on top of that, "my parents are saving 1,000 yuan per year since the tax relief began."

While tax relief partly motivates him to return to his roots, Mr. Huang is one of several migrant workers who offer insights into how the government continues to tax the peasantry in its "floating" form. One way it does so in Shishi, Mr. Huang says, is by requiring migrant farmers to pay 600 to 700 yuan a year for a "work and living permit." Another way is by fining farmers for having more than one child.

The farmer from Yugan County is anticipating his wife giving birth again soon: "There's nothing to be done about it—of course I'll pay the fine," he says. "What would I do, not raise a good family because of the government?" In some cases the fines reach 6,000 yuan, a huge sum but one that an increasing number of farmers are willing to pay in order to make life's ultimate investment.

The most ingenious method the government has devised of tapping into the new peasantry's pockets, however, is through the tax levied on house construction. As more migrant farmers direct their incomes toward building the modest dream homes they will settle in one day, officials are seizing on these most tangible symbols of the urban-to-rural cash stream—and taxing their construction to the tune of 30,000 yuan ($3,700).