Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

THE PROBLEM OF THE RURAL– URBAN DIVIDE
I don’t see it, so it doesn’t exist
As for the majority of the rural Chinese, they are assumed to belong
properly to another class. The case of Yang Shanlu is typical of those in
rural China, and his life is taken for granted as a normal for a Chinese
peasant. Yang has 3.3 mu of land to farm and his costs in 2000 came to a
total of 997.5 RMB (made up of: seeding 67.5, insecticide 20, fertilizer 190,
electricity for irritation 140, rent of a buffalo 500, mechanical harvesting
80). He harvested 1,815 kilo of rice earning a total of 1,488.30 RMB, at the
government set price of 0.82 RMB a kilo, plus a canola crop income of
400 RMB. Taking away the capital input and 365.2 RBM state tax, there
he was left with only 525.6 RMB. The net per capita annual income of the
family of four who worked on the land for a whole year was 131.4 RMB.
On top of that the village accountant came to demand 120 RMB for irrigation
ditch costs, 68.85 for building an electric irrigation station, 22.95
for irrigation infrastructure repair, 54 for road maintenance, levies that
totalled 301.18 RBM (Chen and Chun 2004).
During his briefing to the media at the National People’s Congress
meeting in 2001, Premier Zhu Rongji declared that the state would
change the rural tax system from collecting fees to a unified tax. Zhu said
he would only impose a tax of about 50 billion RMB instead of the
current 120 billion on rural residents. In order to compensate the local
governments for the loss of income, the central government would
subsidize the poorer province with a total of 20 to 30 billion RBM. In fact,
as Li Changping (2002) convincingly shows, the real financial expenditure
of the local governments came to more than 700 billion RBM and
about 70 per cent to 80 per cent of that is raised as taxes and levies from
the rural residents. Premier Zhu was either blissfully ignorant of the
facts or simply pretended that the problem did not exist.
The rural–urban divide: values and attitudes
A journalist named Mang Bisheng was once approached by a rural
woman of about 40 who was looking for someone to gao zhuang (to
lodge a complaint). She knelt down crying in front of Mang (kneeling
in front of someone is an age-old symbolic gesture of humiliation and
appeal for addressing injustice). Mang asked to see a written account
of her complaint. The woman, shaking, first took out from a paper
wrap something like sinew. It was some tendon that her village head
and gangs had taken out of the woman’s feet to stop her from travelling
to seek justice. Mang was deeply moved and tried to help her to
get justice. However, after several attempts, not only was he unable to
do anything but he also lost her written document (Mang 2004).
One reader from the Renmin wang e-media chatroom asks a rhetorical
question: As we urban residents talk about buying cars and about
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