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

THE PROBLEM OF THE RURAL– URBAN DIVIDE
to make significant sacrifices, including imprisonment or even death.
They are regarded as ‘heroes’ by the villagers, who would even protect
them by fighting with the police or by raiding local government offices.
However, the villagers are very careful not to have any overt organization
and therefore do not have any written records of their meetings or
memberships. At one stage, representatives from different villages even
held meetings in the capital city of Hunan, and in a January 2003 the 27
representatives there called for the establishment of a Nongmin xiehui
(Peasant association). 2
Whenever the villagers have some grievance they go to these representatives
rather than any state-authorized organizations. What is
ironic is that the ultimate authority on which this kind of resistance
relies is the central government of the CCP. These informal and quasiunofficial
organizations resort to central government documents,
published laws and regulations to justify their resistance to taxes and
levies, and their actions against corrupted local officials (O’Brien 2002).
These representatives have also developed clever ways of organizing
their activities. One is to set up a loudspeaker in a market place to
broadcast the central government documents that mandate reductions
in tax burdens and laws against corruptions.
Theirs is not the passive daily resistance of the weak, but resistance
organized along the lines of upholding the laws and regulations of the
state and of the party. According to Yu, the state has been losing its
control at grassroots level and if appropriate policies are not taken hei
shili (black forces: local ruffians and scoundrels) will take over by infiltrating
the existing local governments, or new organizations would
adopt measures such as kidnapping and blackmailing. It appears that
the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao leadership took Yu’s report seriously. One
year after the report of 2003 the central government started abolishing all
agricultural taxes, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.
Conclusion: the state and the countryside
It is unlikely there will be any large-scale nongmin qiyi (peasant
uprising) in contemporary China. However, Maoist radicalism has left
its legacy. One aspect of that legacy, as Yu’s study shows, is that the
rural people have become politically more conscious and more active.
Currently, migration to urban areas is acting as a safety valve. Without
it, resistance would have been more intensive and extensive. Another
aspect of the Maoist legacy is that some (though not many) of the
urban elite who are now in their fifties, having lived and worked in
rural China, are ready to speak on behalf of the rural poor. Chen and
Chun are actually following in the footsteps of a few educated Chinese
in the Mao era who began to look into the life of the most disadvan-
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