People's Democracy

CPI(M) CC Delegation’s Visit to People’s Republic of China - IV

Transforming Rural China Visit to Modern Socialist Villages

Delegation at the Asia's highest waterfall, the Huangguoshu.

Sitaram Yechury

AT our request, once again, we were taken to one of the relatively less developed areas to see the levels of development and the living conditions there. The delegation spent two days in Guiyang capital city of Guizhou province in China’s south west region. As stated earlier, the per capita income here is 1/10th of that in Shanghai province. In terms of natural beauty, however, this is one of the spectacular areas in China with wondrous mountainous formations and spectacular waterfalls. Given this terrain, land for agricultural operations is very difficult to come by. A local saying goes as follows, “it doesn’t go more than three days without raining and you wont find more than a square meter of flat land”. 

Apart from visiting the natural landscape and the Huangguoshu waterfalls (the highest in Asia) the delegation had the opportunity to visit two villages in this province’s interior. Of the fiftyfive ethnic minority communities that exist in China, (the fiftysixth ethnic group being the overwhelming predominant Hans) fortyeight inhabit this province. The first village that we visited, Yinzhai, is predominantly inhabited by the Buyi ethnic minority who welcomed us in the traditional style of blowing trumpets and in colourful dresses which appeared astonishingly similar to the customs followed by some of the tribes in India. 

China has today embarked on a countrywide project of creating what they call “socialist villages”. We also visited another village called Mydong of the cluster of fourteen villages in this area. Following the dismantling of the earlier commune system the Chinese state adopted the family contract system. The land is owned by the government in China and given on contract to every family for an average period of 50 years. The Yinzhai village has a total of 1263 families with the average family size being close to four. Ethnic minorities in China need not follow the single child norm. There is no family that has no land and the average holding is 4.3 mu (15 mu equals one hectare). Normal agricultural operations are done through bullocks and male buffaloes. However, the villagers told us that nowadays “steel buffaloes” i.e. tractors are in use. The tractors are collective property of the village run on diesel which costs four yuan per litre. (one yuan equals Rs. 5.8 ). For using the machine the farmer, the local government and the provincial government share a third of the cost. Farmers are provided with a three hundred yuan per year per family as subsidy. The entire land is fully irrigated by a canal system from the river Yinzhai from which the village gets its name. The Guizhou provincial governments spent 6.5 million yuans to build the dam which stores the water. 

The irrigation systems are managed by the elected village communities. The village committee is elected every five years. It consists of five members of which two are women. Each committee member gets 25 yuan as stipend per month. As some thing similar to our panchayats, the entire village gathers periodically to decide about the crop pattern for the current season, the land use etc. The elected committee functions as the administrative unit. Alongside there are party units and committees in every village. Invariably, the elected village committees consist of party leaders. Between the provincial government and the villages committee are county governments similar to our district administrations. The local, the county and the provincial governments share the expenses for building the infrastructure. 

We were informed that there were no agricultural taxes since they have all been abolished recently. Similarly, there are no irrigation taxes. Loans are provided to farmers by local cooperative institutions and the banks at an annual rate of interest of 0.55 per cent. Electricity charges are 0.43 yuan per unit. From what we could see the major part of the fertilizer use is organic. The little inorganic chemical fertilizers are bought by individual farmers. We found no wage labour being employed by any family. On an average we found that the annual income from agriculture is around 9000 yuan per capita. 

The average productivity for paddy in these villages was 800 kg per mu. This is probably one of the highest yield rates in the world. Readers will recall that though China has a substantially larger land area than India, it has less arable land, given its geographical conditions. (104.2 million hector in 2005 compared to India’s 120.2 in 2004-05.) Yet, China’s agricultural production is much higher at 484 million tonnes (2005) than that of India at 204.6 (2004-05). 

However, the major production in these villages is of rapeseed, plums and vegetables. There is a rapeseed oil mill for a cluster of four villages where the farmers carry their produce to be converted into oil. The marketing of their produce is done by cooperatives whose representatives come to each village to collect the produce. From what we could see, there is minimal or zero trading margin in all these market operations. For instance, the price received by the farmer when his paddy is picked up by the representative of the cooperative was 1.6 yuan per kg. If it is sold in the form of rice after the milling process (again each cluster of four villages has a rice mill) it is sold by the farmer for 2.5 yuan a kg. In the local shops run by the cooperatives in the village the price of rice is 3 yuan per kg. Every village has a health clinic with 2-3 doctors. The hospital facility is never beyond a distance of ten kms. All over China there is free and compulsory education for nine years i.e. till the secondary stage. Children enter school at the age of 6 and till the age of 15 they are provided for by the state. All villages have both primary and secondary village schools. 

While this was our experience in visiting these villages in a relatively backward province of China, this is not to suggest that the conditions of life in rural China are universally of the same levels. The very fact that the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a path to achieve the objective of harmonious socialist development which they describe as the second long march itself suggests that an arduous and long struggle to bridge income inequalities, abolish unemployment and provide a secure and prosperous levels of livelihood is presently on.