In the last few months, workers and farmers in China have staged large-scale protests over taxes and other economic conditions.
In March the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights reported that about 1,500 construction workers blocked roads in the Souther province of Guizhou complaining that retired workers had not received their state pensions for over a year. In central Hunan province, meanwhile, 500 protesters from a chemical factory demonstrated outside Communist party offices demanding to receive wages they were owed.
This month The Washington Post ran a lengthy story about an ongoing tug of war over taxes between farmers and the state.
Like many Communist countries, China experienced severe food shortages until it finally semi-liberalized food production by allowing farmers to keep and sell part of their produce in private markets.
With farm revenues declining as part of a general economic downturn in China, however, some Chinese farmers are unhappy about the rather heavy tax burden they have to bear.
One of the interesting things about this particular battle is the almost comical lengths to which repressive regimes carry censorship. In China, for example, a magazine produced a short handbook that merely compiled public statements and news stories from official newspapers about how much farmers could be taxed and on what forms of property they could be taxed.
Of course the government quickly banned this subversive book, and the official in charge of overseeing the magazine was promptly fired. Wouldn’t want the peasants keeping track of official statements.
Of course, the censors were already too late. When tax collectors tried to impose much higher levels of taxation, the result was more than 20,000 farmers rioting in mid-August in Jiangxi.
How bad are taxes for Chinese farmers? Officially they are pegged at no more than 5 percent of a farmer’s income, but in practice — as even the government concedes in official figures — they typically consumed in excess of 30 percent of a farmer’s revenue (said revenue being in the range of $100 to $200 per year).
Farmers have taken to pursuing extralegal means, such as riots and protests, because legal means often seem as likely to land a farmer in jail as extralegal means. In 1999, for example, a lawyer who represented 5,000 farmers in the northern province of Shaanxi was himself sentenced to five years in jail for daring to take on the farmer’s cause.
It is, of course, difficult to tell how widespread discontent with the ruling regime is, but clearly there are substantial minorities, especially in rural communities, disenchanted with the status quo (although they often assign all the blame for their troubles on provincial leaders rather than the national government).
Still, China may soon face the same alternatives that plagued the Soviet Union near the end. Liberalization of the economy has certainly produced results in terms of increasing incomes and gross domestic product, but simultaneously it has increased unrest and dissatisfaction (witness the relatively large and persistent Falun Gong and similar movements). With the Internet making inroads in China, capping the flow of information is exponentially more difficult for the China than it ever was for the Soviet Union. The day may be quickly approaching when China’s leaders have to choose between more liberalization and economic development or a crackdown on freedoms and a likely downturn in economic fortunes.
Source:
China: demos unpaid wages. The BBC, March 26, 2001.
Seeds of Revolt in China. John Pomfret, The Washington Post, May 8, 2001.