(Mr. Ben Mah, author of America and China, America and the World, and America in the Age of Neoliberalism, is a frequent contributor to this website.)
Since the autumn of 2009, according to China’s State Commission of Disaster Relief, more than 16 million people in Southwest China are without adequate supply of drinking water. As a result of the drought, by May 2010, grain harvest has been reduced by 50 percent in the Province of Yunnan and the harvests of Guizhou, Sichuan, the Guangxi and the municipality of Chongqing are also experiencing shortfalls. The region might face a food shortage. The drought is so severe that it affects the prices of grains, fruits, tea and even flowers, the important agricultural products in the region.1.2.
Dust storms and drought as a result of desertification, deforestation, urban sprawl and overgrazing have increasingly been common in China in recent years. Evidently, Chinese peasants have lost the ability to work collectively to meet the challenge of natural disasters. The disasters were largely due to the fact that “water for irrigation mainly comes from rainfall; the shortage of rain has greatly affected planting,” according to the head of one village.2.
This is a shocking revelation, as China’s agricultural policy since the 1949 revolution has been of self-reliance with the peasants participating collectively in the vast irrigation projects. The main objective of this policy was to increase crop yield regardless of the weather conditions. The irrigation works accelerated at a great pace with the development of the communes since the late 50s. As a result, prior to China’s Reform, Chinese peasants, in addition to keeping up with normal chores of crop cultivation, undertook such tasks as land reclamations, flood control, and engaged in massive irrigation projects. Eighty thousand dams and other irrigations works were completed over a short period of time. The most famous of these projects was the Red Flag Trunk Canal with its 1500-km long distribution network in Lin County in North Honan Province. Consequently, the livelihood of Chinese peasants for the first time in China’s long history was not vulnerable to weather conditions and natural disasters. With the knowledge that they themselves were the beneficiaries of the fruit of their labor; the Chinese peasants greeted the capital construction project with great enthusiasm and have carried out the works all year round. Consequently, total irrigated cultivated lands have increased from a little over 18 percent in 1952 to more than 45 percent in 1979, the year before the Reform. China, after decades of intensive capital construction in the countryside, achieved self-sufficiency in food. Remarkably, China did not lose any arable lands prior to the Reform, as unremitting state support for agriculture and the preservation of farm acreage have been the national priority.3.
Unfortunately, since China’s Reform, with the policy of self-reliance being abandoned, China has continuously lost hundred of thousands of hectares of fertile farmlands every year to industrial and commercial uses in the process of urbanization. Moreover, with the restoration of capitalism and the dissolution of the communes, lands in the Chinese farming sector were subdivided into small plots which made mechanized agriculture impossible. Since China’s Reform and the launch of the initiative of Family Production Responsibility System, irrigated lands have declined; this was bought about by stopping all irrigation constructions, by neglecting the on-going maintenance of the existing dams and the drainage systems. Sadly, Chinese agriculture once again returned to the days of old China with harvests depending on weather with unpredictable outcomes.3.
Moreover, the dismantling of the communes also denied basic health care and educational opportunities for the vast majority of the people in the countryside. Many peasants found themselves in economic difficulty having to earn a living with a small plot of land, especially when the agricultural inputs continue to rise and with the prices of their outputs in decline. They have no choice but to abandon their lands and migrate to the coastal cities.
Meanwhile, after having copied the industrial farming from the West, China has increased the use of chemical fertilizers, resulting in environmental degradation, land deterioration and health hazard for China’s consumers.
Similarly, the Chinese cities, having adopted the U.S. style of urban development, also paid a heavy price in terms of social and environmental costs. Environmental issues such as air and water pollution and the supply of fresh water to agriculture will present major health problems as well as inadequate food supply to her ever increasing urban population.
Indeed, since the Reform, China’s urban population has increased by leaps and bounds. The problem of urbanization was compounded when China decided to emulate the American model which is based on “sprawl development, private automobile ownership and highly energy-consumptive practice.”4. This development model has turned China into a leading contributor to global warming with ozone pollution, which could reduce agricultural output by 10 percent or more. It is estimated that “China’s harvest will decrease 14-23 percent by 2050 due to climate changes.5.
As a result of rapid urbanization with heavy investments in the urban centers and the neglect of rural agricultural development, China has developed into a food deficit country in short order. Population growth in the city could put tremendous pressure on water, food, and pollution control. This could become a vicious cycle; urbanization will lead to further land expropriations and the shortage of water for agriculture, thereby aggravating China’s food security and social stability.
This is indeed a dismal prospect for the future of China, and is in sharp contrast to the version as presented by the Chinese leaders more than four decades ago. This was the version of China which called for “the ruralization (even, perhaps one day, the abolition) of cities…”6. The development of the commune envisages the urbanization of the countryside and the ruralization of the cities. “The commune will take over all local government organizations…Each commune will become an agro-industrial complex, running its own affairs, a small state on its own, but connected with all other communes by the bonds of cultural, economic, political and military unification.”7.
Consequently, under this decentralized process, the role of the cities and the communes will be reversed. Cities will no long play a role “as a centre of culture, a repository of science and art, a stronghold of institutions, the seat of government.”6.
The communes, on the other hand, “with its own foci of culture, communication, defense, education, its own factories, its own food production, and its own exchange markets, the commune becomes a cell, a flexible miniature of the whole State.”8
The commune is both “the city and countryside, trade market and production centre, with no distinction between peasant, worker, military, and white collar staff, no division between industrial, agricultural and intellectual labour.”8. Thus, China was determined not to build anymore cities and strived to escape the ultimate fate of many Western urban centers, where urban sprawl style development created traffic congestion, pollution, slums, poverty and overcrowding, which were omnipresent. China “will be one vast garden” in which the communes are endowed with parks, recreational facilities, hospitals, schools and supermarkets.8. By mid-1980s, China plans to have mechanization and electrification completed in all communes, and by 2001, the communes will be “the strong, stable food and industry unit of the country.”9.
Appropriately, 2001 was also the time set for China to complete its four modernizations as announced by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1975. The four modernizations comprised of agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology. The premier emphasized self-reliance as a means to propel China to the forefront of economic power by the dawn of the new millennium. Unfortunately, as a result of abandoning self-reliance and adopting the open door policy and the use of trade as the driver for Chinese economy, China, after more than 3 decades of development, is further away from reaching that goal.
Most alarmingly, since the Reform, China’s agricultural sector has experienced water shortage, as water has been diverted to the high growth exports sector. The shortage of water has a serious effect on crop production and is lowering of the peasants’ income.
As a result of the dismantling of the communes, the funds for capital construction and the purchase of new equipments were depleted as local enterprises were sold off and privatized and no longer able to generate any surplus. The lack of surplus placed agricultural modernization in jeopardy. This is sharply in contrast with the development strategy before the Reform when revenue from local industry together with steadily price reduction of agricultural equipments over the years has accelerated agricultural modernization in the countryside.
Another key feature of rural modernization during the commune period was the industrial development. From a modest beginning, small scale industries such as cement, fertilizer, steel, machinery and power stations which are all related to agriculture were developed. These rural industries trained local workers and used local materials to save transportation costs. The basic industries gradually expanded into food processing and other light manufacturing when local technical manpower were being trained and resources were available. Such rural industrialization has been dynamic and unprecedented in the history of global development, as it raised the technical know-how in China’s rural area to a new level and reduced polarization between the cities and the countryside as well as the need for urbanization. What is most remarkable is that China, after having rapidly developed her rural economy, was also able to achieve full employment in the cities as well as in the countryside. This demonstrates the importance of a thriving domestic economy where internal demand rather than exports is the key to the development of indigenous industries.3.
This is in sharp contrast to the period after the Reform, as China has experienced unemployment to the tune of tens of millions both in the cities and the rural areas. With the dismantling of the communes and privatization of the rural industries, as previously stated, hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants from the rural area had to migrate to coastal cities. They work in the “sweat shop” factories for meager wages. In the cities, these migrant workers and their families were unfairly discriminated against. Their children were denied basic educational opportunities in the cities, and the migrant workers have to work in the most miserable working condition with no health care and basic insurance when their occupations were the most hazardous.10. Polarization in the Chinese society will set the stage for the rise of social tension and instability. This is the ugly feature of China’s urbanization and Reform, and this occurred at the time when China’s GDP has grown at the extraordinary double digit rate.
Unfortunately, China’s double digit GDP growth of past 15 to 20 years has been achieved with over-investments in the urban area and total neglect of the agricultural sector. Over investments such as airports, highways, high-rise buildings, shopping centers on urban areas not only led to under-utilization but would eventually lead to a financial bubble. Such investments in many cases are unproductive, whereas investments in infrastructures related to agriculture is productive and a safeguard for China’s food security. Thus, as a result of the policy of reform, “Chinese agriculture will continue to deteriorate, because it desperately needs more investment.”3.
The deterioration in China’s agricultural sector once again raises the question of food self-sufficiency and this has been exacerbated with the conditions imposed on China’s WTO entry. Under the China WTO entry agreements, American subsidized agricultural products have flooded the Chinese market, and the Chinese peasants have suffered stiff competition, losing market shares and income. The loss of the incentive to farm on the part of Chinese peasants could have unthinkable consequences for China’s food supply.
Since the Reform, Chinese peasants have lost income to the tune of over 32 percent.3. The condition in China’s farming sector is so fragile and resources are so limited that it is no wonder that the Chinese peasants have lost their abilities to meet the challenge of natural disasters such as the drought of Southwest provinces in 2010. It is obvious that modernization of China could not be achieved without the modernization of China’s agriculture which could only succeed when China’s peasants are organized and work together as they did before the Reform.
Notes:
1. Chen, Jia and al: “Drought causing food prices to increase”, March 23, 2010 China Daily
2. Peng, Yining: “No crops, no money, no food as Yunnan waits for rainfall”, April 8, 2020 China Daily
3. Ching, Pao-yu: “How Sustainable is China’s Agriculture?” www.foodsov.org
4. Leslie Jacques: “China’s pollution nightmare is now everyone’s pollution nightmare”, March 19, 2008 Christian Science Monitor
5. Lin Shujuan: “China’s water deficit will create food shortage”, February 23, 2009 Agriculture and Environment
6. Han Suyin: “China in the year 2001”, P51 1967 Penguin Books
7. Ibid: P50
8. Ibid: P 52
9. Ibid: P 53
10. The Economist: “Invisible and heavy shackles”, May 8-14, 2010 The Economist
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