이런 글은 인터넷에 널려있으니 이런걸 번역해 읽어라...... May 20, 2004 - While many people are fascinated by China's fabled economic miracle, few have examined the tremendous human cost of sustaining it. But a new book, A Survey of Chinese Peasants, has caught the attention of both the elites and the masses with its stories of suffering endured by 900 million farmers and its bold criticism of Beijing’s rural policies. Authors Chen Guidi and his wife Wu Chuntao discovered that despite much-acclaimed agrarian reforms and an economy growing at eight to nine per cent a year, many Chinese were still farming in primitive conditions, while others have tumbled back into poverty due to a crushing tax burden. A tragedy they witnessed the night of their own child’s birth four years ago moved them to write the book. In a hospital room next to theirs, a farmer was pounding the wall, crying out of control. His pregnant wife had been diagnosed with a birth complication and had been advised to deliver the baby in the hospital. But the family could not afford the hospital fees and stayed at home. When the midwife could not handle the bleeding during the labour, mother and baby were rushed to hospital, but it was too late. They both died. Determined to prevent such deaths and uncover the causes of persistent poverty in the countryside, Chen and Wu left their newborn to a neighbour’s care, and spent the next three years travelling to more than 50 counties, living with farmers and recording their stories. “We are originally children of peasants, and we spent our innocent childhood in the countryside,” wrote the couple, who live in Anhui, one of China’s largest agricultural provinces. “So it’s like in mother’s embrace again when we returned to those fields...” Even with deep attachment to rural areas, what they found still shocked them: “We observed unimaginable poverty and unthinkable evil, we saw unimaginable suffering and unthinkable helplessness, unimagined resistance with incomprehensible silence...,” they wrote in the book’s preface. Far beyond the glamorous skyscrapers of Beijing, Shanghai and other booming cities, the majority of Chinese who live in the vast countryside have gained little from the unprecedented material progress of the past two decades. The initial benefits from the rural reforms of the late 1970s have disappeared; the real income of farmers has dropped; production costs have been rising while prices for agricultural goods continue to decline; in most parts of China you can’t survive on farming alone. The ever-growing tax burden on the rural population is particularly worrisome. While average agricultural income grew 90 per cent between 1994 and 1997, rural tax burdens jumped by 800 per cent. In the past decade alone, as many as 360 taxes and fees have been imposed on peasants by all levels of government. In effect, the rural poor are subsidizing the urban rich. “One country with two systems” has long described mainland China’s relationship with Hong Kong, but it just as aptly sums up the divide between China's cities and its agricultural areas. Such segregation, put in place in the 1950s, was designed to sacrifice the countryside to promote urban industrialization. China’s home registration system, its food distribution structure, its wage regulation and its welfare system were all constructed toward this purpose, and it remains the same today. A recent government-sponsored study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has concluded that China’s urban-rural income gap has become one of the widest on Earth, maybe only slightly narrower than Zimbabwe’s. Yet, China is hailed globally as an economic success story while everyone knows Zimbabwe is a failed state. In their book, Chen and Wu produce compelling evidence of economic exploitation, political oppression and resistance by rural peasants. They document the case of a young farmer, Ding Zuoming, who in 1993 decided to take action when he found that one third of his annual income was being taxed away. Suspecting graft by the head of the village, Ding started a petition for an audit. Local security personnel, under the instruction of the village leaders, arrested him and beat him to death. Through extensive interviews, the authors carefully reconstruct the debates and decision-making, the progress and setbacks surrounding attempts at reform in Anhui and other large agricultural provinces since the early 1990s. They reveal for the first time a series of mistakes made by former President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Ronji. In some cases, top leaders were duped by scheming local officials, the book reveals. In one example, officials scavenged grain supplies from neighbouring counties to fill an empty storage barn Zhu was to visit, all to gloss over a failed food collection scheme. Afterwards, Zhu issued unattainable agricultural directives based on false realities. Survey exposes not only repeated failures of rural reform, but fundamental flaws, both economic and political, in the entire system. Every year throughout the 1990s, the central government announced measures to aid peasants, yet the burden on them continued to grow. It’s a vicious circle that has persisted for hundreds of years in Chinese history. The authors’ conclusion is clear: the “peasant question” is no longer just an economic problem.Unless the entire system is reformed, the crisis will deepen. The book became a bestseller, one of the most emotional discussion topics in China’s Internet chat-rooms. Then in March, prior to the opening of a new session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department suddenly prohibited further publicity. All media outlets in the mainland stopped reporting on it; a popular website that first published a portion of the book removed all content from its server; the book’s publisher, after selling out 150,000 copies in less than two months, has now stopped printing; and pirated copies of the book are now taking over the market. But the book has already had a profound impact. The party’s Document No. 1 on agriculture, released from 1982 to 1986 that guided the early stages of rural reforms, was re-issued in February, calling for higher incomes of peasants. Premier Wen Jiabao announced new subsidies to rural regions and a stage-by-stage elimination of agricultural taxes within five years. He stated, “The works related to the countryside, agriculture and peasants are the most important among all the important works.” If Wen really means what he says, he should have the courage to lift the media ban and distribute the book to all rural cadres who are assigned the task of increasing the income of 900 million peasants. Dr. Wenran Jiang grew up in China and spent five years on a farm in the early 1970s. He is a professor of political science at the University of Alberta. He is the only foreign academic who met with the authors of the book and interviewed them many times. This article originally appeared in the Edmonton Journal April 10, 2004.