2004-06-15

China Business Weekly

Chinese peasant boatman Wu Xuesheng loves the sound of screeching tyres, coughing engines and blaring horns.

The sound of traffic jams is a sweet melody to me," the weather-beaten, 50-year-old said.

"They mean more freight gets moved off the roads and on to our boats. They mean I earn more."

Not that he needs the cash.

Like seven-tenths of his village of Wujiazui -- the unlikely shippers of choice for moving goods along eastern China -- Wu is a millionaire, albeit in local currency.

At a time when China is trying to raise rural incomes and bridge a widening rift between wealthy urbanites and toiling peasants, the 800 natives of Wujiazui each earn about 70,000 yuan (US$8,434) a year -- nearly 17.5 times the national average.

Their villas, flat-screen televisions and broadband Internet access in this rural part of Jiangsu Province stand out like bamboo shoots among the rolling fields.

Wujiazui is one of the more stark beneficiaries of the country's rapacious demand for goods -- and the vessels that transport them -- which the annual 8-per-cent-plus economic growth is generating.

Local officials and villagers put their success down to hard work, luck and "liberated thought."

Academics suggest the reason is simple: Nobody else had their tradition of boat building.

"Very few villages make boats in Jiangsu," said Zeng Zungu, a professor at Nanjing University.

"They were able to use this technological expertise to their advantage when traffic along the Yangtze River began to boom."

With just 0.01 hectares of land per person, far less than the average in China, and the village perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking a lake connected to the Yangtze River, the villagers turned to the only resource -- of which there was an abundance of -- water.

The tiny lakeside community of 203 households started out in the early 1980s ferrying sand, rocks and other materials up and down the mighty Yangtze River in ships once used for fishing.

"We started out making wooden boats," said Liu Qianjun, assistant to the village head.

"When they could no longer take the strain, we moved up to steel-hulled boats and we've not looked back since."

The Yangtze River has long been a major artery for merchandise in China, a use that exploded in the 1990s with economic reforms that enriched those quick enough to grasp the opportunity.

"It was Deng (Xiaoping) that really gave us the boost we needed," Liu said.

He was seated under an enormous red banner that had the words "Hold high the flag of Deng Xiaoping theory."

Deng, the late paramount leader, who coined the now-famous phrase "to get rich is glorious," is revered within the community for launching economic reforms in the 1980s.

The government likes to crow about rare success stories like Wujiazui. But with millions of surplus labourers in rural areas expected to be off their land in the coming years, government leaders are worried about the spectre of an ever-widening rich-poor divide.

More than 700 million people live in China's countryside. The nation's population is over 1.3 billion.

Even around Wujiazui, it is obvious their money and entrepreneurial spirit has not trickled down to other villages.

Crumbling farm houses and ill-dressed people line the rough track leading up to the former settlement where Wujiazui villagers used to live before decamping to somewhere more befitting their new-found wealth.

Indeed, Wujiazui's wealth is ubiquitous. Many residents last year moved out of already large villas into still more luxurious houses bristling with oversized sofas and double-glazed windows.

"Life used to be so difficult for us here," said 26-year-old Wu Baihua.

"We hardly even had shoes in which to go to school."

A casual glance at the feet of people in nearby villages shows that remains the case for many other rural residents.

However, village officials prefer to play down the local economic development out of consideration for the less fortunate.

"There's no such thing. This is what you get after 20 years of hard work," said village head Sun Xianming, 41.

"Our success should encourage others."

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Chinese peasants shoulder less fees in 2003

2004-04-11

Xinhua

Each Chinese peasant paid 20 yuan (2.41 US dollars) less fees on average in 2003 than in the previous year, statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture show.

The figure was released at the national conference on malpractice correction held in Chengdu, capital of southwest China 's Sichuan Province.

Through trimming rural taxes and fees, China lightened the load of its peasants to the tune of 64.8 billion yuan (7.81 billion US dollars), said Li Zhilun, director of the State Council Office for Correcting Malpractice.

Meanwhile, the government has been rigorous in punishing any official derelict duty as regards rural taxes, and punished three municipal and 30 county-level officials for this reason last year, Li said.

The central government has decided to take several measures to reduce peasants' burden, including issuing allowances directly to the major grain-growing households and cutting the agricultural tax rate. It was important for governments at various levels to carry out these measures without mistakes, said Vice Minister of Agriculture Liu Jian.

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Villagers call for greater supervision

2004-03-31 06:50

An attempted suicide earlier this month in Zhaijia Town of Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province, has exposed a debt-ridden town government to public scrutiny and, at the same time, put the issue of village committee transparency in the spotlight.

On March 3, a peasant woman surnamed Xing, 44, tried to kill herself by swallowing toxic pesticide after again failing to receive the money owed to her family by the Zhaijia township government.

After five days in intensive care in a Shenyang hospital, Xing's health improved. But the mental anguish remained.

In July, Xing's husband was sent to prison after he, in an act of desperation, sprayed petrol over the then township magistrate.

Xing said officials of the township, which is in Shenyang's Tiexi New District,borrowed 80,000 yuan (US$9,600) in the summer of 1997 from her family, saying they lacked money for local development projects.

They promised to return the cash in a fortnight, with favourable interest. However, seven years have passed and despite hundreds of visits by the couple to get their money back, the answer is still "no."

Xing and her husband have accumulated about 100,000 yuan (US$12,000) over the past decade by planting vegetables before they lent the money to the local government.

Since her husband was sent to jail, Xing has had to support the family and a teenage son alone. The last time she attempted to get the family savings back, Xing learnt that the township government was deep in debt to the tune of 58 million yuan (US$7 million). Unfortunately, Xing's family is not alone in the township, which oversees 11 villages.

Du Xidong, a newly appointed government director for the town, says the debt has been burdening the area for 10 years. During the past decade, leaders of the township government have been changed twice.

"An investigation has started into the debt issue and the money borrowed from individual villagers needs to be returned step by step," Du says.

Transparency urged

As part of their push to get their money back, local farmers have been calling for more administrative transparency.

Caojia Village has dismissed its former leader due to his muddling in village committee accounts.

Officials with the Tiexi New District government have started investigating the town's debt problem.

Although farmers are now able to elect village leaders, there is no real mechanism to supervise them.

A national co-ordination group working for villagers' self-governance has pledged to give farmers more of a say in decision-making processes and is encouraging voters to actively keep an eye on the people they have selected.

While democratic elections have been established, the creation and implementation of democratic decision-making processes, management and supervision still lags far behind, says Zhang Mingliang, director of the Department of Construction of Grass-roots Government and Community at the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

The group, jointly established in June by several ministries and institutions, has focused on promoting grassroots democracy and supervising the actions of village leaders.

It has promised to enhance the supervision of village committees and inspect more village self-governing processes this year.

"The elected leaders risk losing their posts if they do not properly represent their people," Zhang says.

According to Li Xueju, minister of civil affairs, Chinese farmers have shown great enthusiasm in performing their political rights, with an average turnout of above 90 per cent in village committee elections.

Direct elections have been taking place since 1998 in China. According to statistics from the National Statistics Administration in 2003, China has a rural population of 768 million, accounting for 59.47 per cent of the whole population.

According to the law concerning the elections, members of village committees and the administrative organization of a village are elected by all eligible voters among candidates they nominated. Once in office, the village head is accountable for the villagers and their well-being.

In Fubao Village of Kunming, capital of Southwest China's Yunnan Province, for example, rules and regulations surrounding the responsibilities of the village committee and the rights of the village congress are publicized.

The village's balance sheet and other important information are posted regularly on an announcement board.

"All major affairs of our village should be submitted to congress for discussion," says Yang Ming, head of Fubao Village. "And everything decided should be in consultation with the villagers."

In Fubao, congress of villagers meets on a regular basis. Every six months, the work of village officials is evaluated and reported to the congress. Their wages are determined by the outcome of the assessment.

"Chinese farmers' awareness of democracy is amazingly strong," says Yang Ni, an official with the Yunnan Civil Affairs Bureau.

A village in Yunnan dismissed all of its village committee members in accordance with legal procedures in 2002.

"The exercise of autonomy in Chinese villages will undoubtedly boost the development of democracy at grass-roots levels," Yang said.

Since the end of 2000, the Yunnan provincial government has been co-operating with several institutions from the United States, Norway and Denmark to teach village, town and county officials about elections. More than 900 people have so far received training.