With 200 demonstrations every day
A noted China scholar, Prof. Pao Yu Ching, says that China has lost “its socialist elements,” with its currently overheated economy about to burst. “China becoming a superpower is nothing but U.S. propaganda,” she says.
By Carlito Parungo
AMSTERDAM – It is April 2001 and the people of Ta-ching are restive. Located in northern China, Ta-ching is witness to a series of demonstrations being launched by its 700,000 workers, almost half of whom were summarily laid off from their jobs.
The workers are incensed at the factory owners who fired many workers without even any compensation – and at the government ignored their plight and cries for justice.
Perhaps out of sheer desperation, some disgruntled workers and supporters have resorted to radical action: they place a bomb at the local government office. The bomb explodes, killing the mayor, the deputy mayor, the local Party secretary, and nine others, including accidentally three workers who took part in the incident.
The government responds by sending some 50,000 Army soldiers who then encircle the factories and “restore peace.” To the soldiers’ surprise, it is they who are encircled by the workers and the local people. The people of Ta-ching are geared for a fight.
Eight months later the impasse would be resolved, with the government and factory owners forced to pay the workers higher separation pay.
Widespread
“Most probably you never heard of the Ta-ching incident in the news, did you?”
Pao Yu Ching, a retired professor emeritus of Marygrove College in MIchigan, U.S., and a well-known China scholar, posed this question to her audience during a lecture she gave last Sept. 10 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The lecture was sponsored by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) and was attended by a “multi-national” audience, some even coming from Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
Professor Ching currently lives in Taichung, Taiwan.
She said many of such incidents were never reported before despite their newsworthiness. But of late, Ching observed that media people in China have no choice but to report on the peasant uprisings and workers’ strikes and demonstrations because of their increasing frequency and scope.
“Mass actions in China now average 70,000-80,000 a year,” said Ching. “That means that every day not fewer than 200 demonstrations are taking place all over the country.”
Workers’ and peasants’ grievances are long, asserted Ching. “For the workers, these are massive retrenchment and high rate of unemployment, unpaid back wages, absence of housing benefits, decreasing pension (or the lack of it), and other economic issues confronting them.”
In the countryside, the peasants’ main issue is their continuing displacement as a result of widespread landgrabbing and unemployment, added Ching.
The situation of the workers and peasants is really terrible these days, lamented Ching, who has gone to China twice this year. “To an outsider, China is one country that is on its way to becoming a developed country. That couldn’t be farther from the truth, and judging from the widespread dissatisfaction of its toiling people, China may soon find itself in deep trouble,” Ching averred.
Goodbye, communes…
Ching described the Chinese people’s growing impoverishment and discontent as resulting from the series of reforms that the Deng clique instituted immediately after its successful power grab in 1979.
She explained: “The first policy was to break up the communes, producing individual peasants again. Deng succeeded in implementing this by increasing the purchasing price of rice, wheat, corn, and other agricultural products by 20 percent and another 50 percent if a peasant was selling above quota.”
“Until 1984, or five years after the policy was put in place, peasant income was climbing by 15 percent a year,” added Ching. “So the peasants were happy. They were even exclaiming that it was a good policy because they were doing better now that their income was increasing.”
That proved to be short-lived and unsustainable, however. In the succeeding years, the increase in income slowed down from 5 percent to 1 percent. From 1997 up to now, with the total farm output remaining the same, the purchasing price of agricultural products has even gone down by 30 percent.
With the high taxes imposed on their income, many peasants became bankrupt and were eventually forced to find jobs in the cities. With little to do in the rural villages, Ching said, 100 million peasants are now working in the cities.
Ching thought of Deng’s policy a “smart” one because “it was easier to do reforms in agriculture than in industry.” She added: “By dissolving the communes, Deng practically broke up the basic alliance of the workers and peasants.”
And the “iron rice bowl,” too
Deng moved on to implement the so-called economic structure reform in 1985 and labor reform in 1986.
The economic structure reform was a key change in the industry, Ching said. “In the past, state-owned enterprises did not have any calculation of profit or loss. If there was profit, it went to the state; if there was a loss, the enterprise would get a subsidy. This was the only way the state could plan the economy. If it wanted to develop heavy industry, more money would flow to it, even if it was not making money. There was no calculation of profit or loss. There was no reason to do that.”
With the introduction of the profit-and-loss concept, however, investment priorities favored those enterprises that were making profits. Ching added that managers, whose salaries and benefits were raised tremendously, were also given blanket authority to sell or lease out state assets that were performing poorly. This resulted in millions of workers losing their iron rice bowl or permanent employment that until then was guaranteed under a socialist state.
Aside from being retrenched as a result of bankruptcy, workers would be fired by the managers even with the flimsiest of reasons. Instead of hiring workers for permanent tenure, managers would also avail of contract workers. This, according to Ching, is what the 1986 labor reform introduced.
However, the implementation of the labor reform met rough sailing because of the strong resistance by the workers. Faced with the prospect of losing their iron rice bowl, the workers initially succeeded in frustrating the attempt of the state to apply this policy to state enterprises at that time.
In the course of time, however, Ching said the state managed to weather out this resistance by selling out state assets, at giveaway prices, to people who had connections. There have also been many cases of managers taking the profitable part of state enterprises and setting up other companies, thus forcing state enterprises to bankruptcy and displacing workers, Ching said.
Since the middle of 1990, Ching said more that 10 million workers have lost their jobs as a result of Deng’s labor reforms.
Good life
“If one goes to China today and sees all those high-rise buildings, he will immediately think that prosperity is everywhere,” Ching said. “In the supermarket, he will find everything and may conclude that people are really having a good life. Yes, in fact some people do have a good life…a very good life.”
After June 4, 1989 (the Tiananmen uprising), Ching said the government made a conscious decision to “bribe” the intellectuals and those occupying high government positions by making them partake of the good life.
But, she said, this has only increased the gap between the haves and have-nots, a situation that a recent report of China’s official news agency Xinhua acknowledged as “provoking alarm.”
“The most affluent one-fifth of China’s population earns 50 percent of total income, with the bottom one-fifth taking home only 4.7 percent,” the Xinhua reported. “The income gap, which has exceeded reasonable limits, exhibits a further widening trend. If it continues this way for a long time, the phenomenon may give rise to various sorts of social instability.”
Ching: “But the super-rich live extremely well. And what they earn are from legal sources.” What is not visible, according to Ching, is the income coming from corruption especially in the government and in the remaining state enterprises.
“There is a joke in China that if you line up all government officials and kill the even numbers, say 2, 4, 6, etc., that means the same number of guilty ones will go free,” Ching said in jest.
On the other hand, Ching said, the workers earn an average of 600 yuan renminbi (US$ 74) a month, or sometimes it can go up to 1,000 yuan. Yet they also don’t enjoy any housing benefits or health care, she added.
Aside from living the hard life, workers and peasants have to face police brutality, which Ching described as 10 times worse than in Taiwan where she is lives.
“I remember a story shared to me about the two Chinese girls who were on their way home. One was not carrying a proper ID for her bicycle and the police decided to arrest her. When seen again, the girl was dead and said to have been raped before being killed. The town was in uproar and demanded that those involved be punished. But instead of arresting the guilty policemen, the police hierarchy found someone else, a poor man, and bought his life from his family for 10,000 yuan.”
According to Ching, life in the countryside is no better because the new bureaucrats are far worse than the old-time landlords. She said they have more power today and are more abusive.
“There was a case of peasants who organized themselves to question the exorbitant taxes being imposed on them. They elected 12 people to represent them in asking the management to check the books and where the taxes were being spent. Instead of being heard, three of the peasants were beaten to death. Just like that.”
Many peasants used to take the train to Beijing to seek redress, thinking the central government would do something about police brutality and landgrabbing as well. But Ching said there have been cases that some peasants failed to reach Beijing because they had been kidnapped along the way.
She said that the ruling Communist Party has practically stopped recruiting members among the workers and peasants, adding it is now the intelligentsia that is lured into it because of the many perks attached to being a Party member.
Ching was also surprised that many of today’s generation of youth and students are not even aware of the revolutionary tradition of their elders
The Party’s work among the masses has been reduced to organizing guided tours to some historical places that were visited by Mao during his time, for example Yenan, in order for it to have a semblance of being a communist party, Ching said.
“In fact, to many average Chinese I spoke with during my visits there, the ruling Communist Party is everything but communist,” Ching said. “And if you ask me, today’s China has totally lost all its socialist elements of any kind,” she added.
Big capitalist power?
To the question whether China is set to become the next capitalist powerhouse, Ching’s answer was a big no. She enumerated six reasons why China would not develop capitalism successfully:
China’s agriculture is backward. It is not modernized. Agricultural reform did not succeed. Irrigation is gone. The forest is in terrible shape. Farmers did not want to give up their land. All this added up and failed to attract capital to invest in agriculture.
There is a small internal market because the salary of workers and the income of peasants are kept to a minimum. Ninety percent of factories have overcapacity.
China is using exports to create employment and income. The U.S. is the biggest importer. It is borrowing money from China to buy from China.
China depends on import of technology and of parts.
China gave up so much to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO). The service industry was given up. The computer, medical, and other industries were opened up. By 2010 foreign banks will be just like national banks. Of the top 1,000 banks, China has 16. Of these, 15 are already controlled by foreign banks. Bank of America and Royal Bank of Scotland are investing billions of dollars to take over local banks.
In the last 25 years, China’s environment and natural resources have been severely damaged. The country is over-utilizing its own resources. Water is now very scarce and there is even shortage in oil.
Ching concluded that the growth of capitalism in China is not sustainable. “China becoming a superpower is nothing but U.S. propaganda. In fact, the Chinese economy is overheated. It is due to burst some time.”
With the increasing number of working people realizing the betrayal of the Deng clique, Ching said that China is in for interesting times. She said the efforts of some people there to study and do something about the current situation in the country are encouraging.
Ching expressed her wish that someday all the scattered mass actions in the country take a more organized form and gain more success, just like the Ta-ching uprising.
Anyway, to end the Ta-ching story…
To celebrate their victories, the workers erect a memorial in honor of their three co-workers who died earlier and the four others who were arrested and executed for the bomb explosion. These fallen workers may be criminals in the eyes of the Chinese government, but for the Ta-ching workers they are martyrs who died for their cause. (Bulatlat.com)
Carlito Parungo is a freelance journalist and web designer. He is currently based in Amsterdam.
