The squeeze on China’s peasants

Chen Guioi and Wu Chuntao
Will the Boat Sink the Water?
The Life of China’s Peasants
PublicAffairs, 2006
229 pages $25

Review by PETRINO DeLEO

GLOWING REPORTS of China’s explosive growth continue to fill the business press, but so do stories of the increasing disparity of wealth and the social upheaval that’s taking place as the nation’s peasantry is left behind. Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants provides a window on their plight. The authors, reporters by trade, traveled for three years to document accounts of abuse by local officials running peasant towns and villages.

First published in China in late 2003, the book became an instant best-seller. Its initial print run sold out, and 250,000 copies flew off the shelves before the state banned the book. Since then, an estimated 10 million copies have been sold on the black market.
The anecdotes read like mafia tales. Corrupt local leaders subject impoverished peasants to excessive taxation. In one town, for example, couples wanting to get married were forced to pay the cost of the marriage certificate (including a fee for the paper), fees for a letter of authorization, for the notary, for physicals for the bride and groom, for deposits for commitment to the one-child family, for family planning and for a deferred pregnancy, for a commitment to “mutual devotion,” for a “golden wedding,” plus taxes for the wedding banquet, for pig killing, for environment hazards, and for a donation to the “Happy Children’s Center.” If a couple complains about any of this, they could be subject to a “bad attitude” tax.

When embattled peasants report such corruption to officials at the municipal or regional level, the complaints fall on deaf ears, and the peasants face fierce punishments. Retribution includes additional fines, harassment, trumped-up charges and prison sentences, torture, and even murder. All this has occurred in spite of mandates from Beijing to lower the peasants’ tax burdens and an attempt to move from a system of taxation to one of fees.

Details of the corruption are staggering. According to China’s National Statistics Bureau, the yearly spending on government officials dining at the public’s expense is between 800 million and 1 billion yuan—enough to build the Three Gorges Dam twice over.

The strongest sections of the book wrap a three-decade narrative of rebellions around a history of land collectivization. In the process, the countryside was transformed from one of 130 million individual peasant households to 52,781 people’s communes.
China’s governmental structure—layers of bureaucracy paralleled by layers of Communist Part cadre—help explain how the state has exerted an iron grip over the rural areas. Moreover, the book helps explain how taxation of the peasants helped underwrite massive investment within China’s urban cores—the precondition for the expansion that continues to this day.