Peasant conflict and the local predatory state in the Chinese countryside

Abstract

Observing the growing number and intensity of peasant struggles in the Chinese countryside, examined here is why Chinese peasants protest against township government but not against the central state. It is argued that two decades of a neoliberal project, plus recent policy changes, have led to the formation of a split state, one divided between a‘benign’ centre and a‘predatory’ local apparatus. This split state has in turn shaped the contours of peasant conflict.

Notes

1 In contemporary China, the term ‘peasant’ usually refers to petty commodity producers who combine subsistence cultivation with selling crops and labour-power on the market.

2 Estimates put the size of this reserve army of labour at around 150 million, a growth pattern that was already becoming clear in the 1980s [Taylor, 1988.

3 For the significance of subsistence provision in rural China, particularly as embodied in the notion of a ‘family rice bowl’, see Croll 1982.

4 In the case of China, the term ‘local state’ can refer to any level of the government below the centre. Thus, it encompasses provincial, prefecture, county, township, or village governments. When this article talks about the local state joining forces with society against the township government, it refers to village-level government.

5 In China, there is a nested hierarchy of administration. Village officials are directly appointed by and responsible to township officials. Thus village governments come under the township governments.

6 Local cadres can raise initial capital for new enterprises through a variety of means. In the Pearl River Delta region of South China, for example, local cadres set up good social networks with their friends and kin living in Hong Kong or overseas, encouraging them either to enter joint ventures with local officials, or to undertake investment projects in their ancestral community. Cadres also offer incentives such as cheap rental and tax holidays, and ‘flexible’ enforcement of rules and regulations [Lin, 1997.

7 Cadres usually refer to government officials on government payrolls. Since the Chinese Communist Party is structurally interlocked with government, many cadres are also party members. During the Maoist era, this state/party overlap made local cadres very powerful players in the determination of grassroots policy and political affairs.

8 The central government has set up regulations on how budget revenues should be used.

9 The following account by Tawney 1932: 68] of ‘predation’ by the landlord class in 1930s China underlines the element of similarity: ‘In Kwangtung, it is stated, it is increasingly the practice for large blocks of land to be rented by well-to-do merchants, or even by companies especially formed for the purpose, and then to be sub-let piecemeal at a rack rent to peasant farmers. Elsewhere, a result of the growth of absentee ownership is the employment of agents, who relieve the landlord of the business of himself squeezing his tenants, browbeat the tenants by threats of eviction into paying more than they owe, and make money out of both by cheating the former and intimidating the latter … landlords combined to maintain an office which acts as an intermediary between them and their tenants, selecting the latter, seeing that rents are paid at the proper terms, setting in motion, when payments are in arrears, the machinery for eviction, and with the connivance of the authorities, actually detaining defaulters in a private prison and inflicting punishment on them.’

10 For the concept and history of the ‘development state’ in contexts other than Asia, see the contribution to this volume by Petras and Veltmeyer.

11 While local government in coastal regions can set up village and township enterprises to enrich themselves, local governments in inland regions or in regions far away from cities may not be able to do so. Thus local governments in poor regions are always in debt, and have to engage in predatory behavior in order to make ends meet.

12 For a similar kind of split perception operating at the rural grassroots in Burma/Myanmar, with an analogous invocation by peasants of central state authority against ‘malign’ local government, see the case study by Thawnghmung 2003.

13 It is obviously true that it was the neoliberal policies of the central government that laid the structural foundation of excessive tax collection and illegal land appropriation by local governments. Peasants, however, do not recognize this ‘far-off’ neoliberalism as the foundation of the misdeeds committed by the local predatory state. Instead, they tend to identify corruption and abuse of power by local officials as the main – or indeed only – problem.

14 Le Mons Walker 2006 accurately categorizes this process as one of ‘gangster capitalism’.

15 This pattern of protest and resistance has been noted by many observers, most recently by Hobsbawm 1997: 202], who observes that ‘people at the grassroots level confined their struggles to fighting those oppressors with whom they had immediate contact.’

16 This kind of appeal made by a dispossessed peasantry to a higher authority which, it is inferred, has itself been betrayed by illicit actions conducted at a local level, is also found elsewhere. In the case of pre-1917 Russia, for example, it involved peasants invoking the person of the Czar, while in Latin America there is a long tradition of dispossessed indigenous groups appealing to the monarch far away in the colonizing nation (Spain, Portugal).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alvin Y. So

I wish to thank Raju Das for his critical comments and suggestions that helped to clarify the arguments presented here.