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

THE PROBLEM OF THE RURAL– URBAN DIVIDE
US Congressmen reportedly do not have a passport, it would be hard
to find any Chinese officials from the upper middle rank up who have
never been abroad. According to one account (Li Ming 2004), expenditure
on overseas inspection tours by the Chinese authorities amounts
to US$30 billion per year. That would be enough to help 50 million
Chinese out of poverty or to pay for the education of 3 million children
from primary school to university.
Since the post-Mao reforms, the key function of the local governments
in rural China has been to get money out of the rural people and
to stop them from having more children. No wonder a phrase widely
spread among the farmers in Anhui during the late 1990s was: San cui
san hai (Three demands and three hazards). This refers to three
demands from the government – grain, cash and life, the last of which
refers to family planning – while the three hazards are fire, robbery and
government officials.
The situation had become so bad that the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao
leadership felt that something had to be done. This was indicated by
the People’s Daily, which published a commentary calling for an end to
the quasi-apartheid system, arguing that income gaps have to be
closed. The paper states that:
nine provinces and autonomous regions, plus the vast rural
areas under the jurisdiction of Chongqing Municipality, have
remained appallingly poor. This poverty belt, stretching from
Yunnan in the south to Xinjiang in the north, makes up more
than half of China’s land mass and it contains 285 million
people – a population bigger than that of the United States.
(People’s Daily 2004b)
This official acknowledgement refers mainly to the poverty-stricken
northwest areas, but not most of the central provinces.
It has been a hard task to persuade the Chinese elite policy makers
that it is morally wrong to have designed an economic development
plan driven by the aspirations of the urban Chinese citizens for the living
standard of the developed countries when the majority of the rural residents
in inland China are struggling to survive. Although there are
increasing numbers of urban poor, even these urban poor refuse to work
for the same wages and in the same conditions as rural migrant workers
– a clear indication of apartheid against the rural population.
Post-Mao reforms: myths versus reality
For a long time since the 1980s there has been a consensus among the
majority of the Chinese political and intelligentsia elite that the post-Mao
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