The Communist Party's No1 Document on agriculture, released from 1982 to 1986, made a comeback this week. It calls for increasing peasants' income and reversing the trend of widening disparity between urban and rural areas.
While the leadership's renewed attention to the deepening rural crisis may be music to the ears of the poor, many people are in tears and feel outraged after reading a recently published investigation on Chinese peasants, Zhongguo Nongmin Diaocha.
The authors, Chen Guidi and his wife Wu Chuntao, are both award-winning literary writers with a reputation for voicing the sorrows of the rural poor. Born into peasant families themselves, the couple has a keen interest in China's rural development.
When they discovered that, after years of celebrated agrarian reforms, many remote villages were still farming in primitive conditions and others had again fallen into extreme poverty because of heavy tax burdens, they became concerned. When Ms Wu was pregnant with her first child four years ago, she witnessed a peasant woman and her unborn child die from a birth complication diagnosed before delivery. Both lives could have been saved had the family been able to afford a small fee to deliver the baby in hospital.
Driven by a mission to prevent such deaths from occurring again and determined to uncover the root causes of persistent poverty in the countryside, the couple left their newborn in a neighbour's care and endured three years of personal and financial hardship to complete this groundbreaking 460-page report. What they found shocked them even more: 'We observed unimaginable poverty and unthinkable evil, we saw unimaginable suffering and unthinkable helplessness, unimagined resistance with incomprehensible silence, and have been moved beyond imagination by unbelievable tragedy.'
The authors reveal with convincing evidence that the benefits which peasants gained from previous reforms have now largely disappeared; that in the past decade rural tax burdens have increased 4-5 times, with as many as 360 various fees imposed by all levels of government; that a farmer has to pay three times more taxes than a city resident even though his annual income is only one-sixth that of an urban dweller; and that China's modernisation drive has produced another 'one country with two systems' - one that segregates urban centres from agricultural areas, with the prosperity of the former realised at the expense of the latter.
