China:
A Cauldron of Looming Conflict
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
Contributed to Bulatlat
Pao-yu Ching |
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.
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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
Carlito Parungo is
a freelance journalist and web designer. He is currently based in
Amsterdam.
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