Comments on Anderlini's report on the December land privatization manifestos (Jamil Anderlini: “Losing the countryside: a restive peasantry calls on Beijing for land rights,” Financial Times, February 19 2008)
(Revised Feb 29)
These are just some knee-jerk reactions. This new linkage between disgruntled peasants and liberal intellectuals, backed by certain capitalist interests (real estate developers, for one), and Western journalists' representations of this linkage as a spontaneous emergence from "civil society" against "communism" (i.e. CCP rule), are important events. To understand them, we also need to address the Chinese party-state's own recent promotion of experimental privatization of rural land in four pilot municipalities (the topic of China Left Review's forthcoming first issue), and the place of this policy initiative within a series of Chinese debates about privatization going back at least to 1992, in which Western-trained liberal intellectuals and American think tanks like the Cato Institute have played a prominent role. The only reason the party-state didn't privatize land earlier is that wiser (not necessary "leftist") elements of the party leadership realized that sudden nationwide privatization of land was one the factors that threw Russia and other post-socialist countries into chaos, and that, throughout the developing world, the ability to buy and sell land has been a major factor in the growth of desperate, potentially unstabilizing sub-proletarian classes. I hope eventually to deal more systematically with reports such as Anderlini's in a bigger project addressing this web of debates and social realities as a whole.
Anderlini writes:
“separate groups of peasant farmers in four remote parts of the country published very similar statements on the internet claiming to have seized their collectively owned land from the state and unilaterally privatised it.”
Here Anderlini implies that the “peasant farmers” wrote these statements, but later he says that they were written by one intellectual, among a group of 10 urban intellectual “organizers,” backed by capitalist interests (he mentions real estate development companies in particular), who spread their propaganda among peasants in 20 provinces for 2 years. I find it interesting that they have adopted the traditionally leftist strategy of going to villages, finding active elements, and imparting them with a theoretical frame to articulate their desires and mobilize a popular movement. Only, as opposed to leftist mobilization, these liberals mobilized the “property” or “individualist” tendency in peasant society. {I’m referring to two things here: 1) Marx’s analysis of the 19th century Russian peasant commune (obschina) as containing both “property” and “collective” elements, which could lead it toward either disintegration in the face of capitalist expansion, or integration into a communist revolution (not to be confused with the state capitalist collectivization of agriculture eventually led by Stalin - see Marx’s 1881 manuscripts in Late Marx and the Russian Road, edited by Teodor Shanin); 2) Wang Xiaoyi’s analysis of “the paradox of Xiaogang village,” that is, if Xiaogang villagers were so “individualist” that they couldn’t stand the Commune system and risked their lives to decollectivize, how did they manage to cooperate and sacrifice their individual interests to organize and carry out this movement? If they were “collectivist” enough to carry out this movement, why weren’t they willing to cooperate in farming? He concluded that Chinese peasant society contains both collectivist and individualist tendencies, and the individualist tendency happened to be stronger in Xiaogang at that point, but the collectivist tendency was still there to serve as a resource for collective mobilization (“Xiaogangcun de beilun,” Sannong Zhongguo 1 (2003): 151-154).}
“The country's Communist constitution stipulates that all rural land is owned by the state, which leases it to individuals to use on a 30-year contract basis but can take it back with relative impunity.” later: “the documents [the peasants] signed violate the Chinese constitution and at least three laws stipulating that all land in China is owned by the state.”
Anderlini is wrong here (for reasons I'll get to below, I'm tempted to say he's flat-out lying). The English translation of China's constitution is online here:http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html
Article 10 reads:
Land in the cities is owned by the state. Land in the rural andsuburban areas is owned by collectives except for those portions whichbelong to the state in accordance with the law; house sites andprivate plots of cropland and hilly land are also owned bycollectives. {But note:} The state may in the public interest take over land forits use in accordance with the law.
Also relevant is article 9:
Mineral resources, waters, forests, mountains, grassland, unreclaimedland, beaches and other natural resources are owned by the state, thatis, by the whole people, with the exception of the forests, mountains,grassland, unreclaimed land and beaches that are owned by collectivesin accordance with the law.
So the constitution makes clear that farmland, rural house sites, and certain other rural land is not owned by thestate but by "collectives." It doesn't explain exactly what "collective" means, though. It means either administrative villages (cun) or villager teams (cunmin xiaozu, consisting of several households). A political sociologist I talked to says that national policy is vague about this, so in some parts of China the team is regarded as the owner, but he thinks that village ownership is more common.
Policy is clear, however, that the villager committee is the only entity with authority to make changesin land arrangements, so in practice the villager committee (formally autonomous and democratically elected by all adult villagers, but often informally controlled by the township CCP committee) acts as the owner, so villagers and villager teams do often lack the institutional power to act asowners, and that's why they resort to "rightful resistance" - extra-institutional protest on the basis of "central policy."
Another thing the constitution is vague about is this: "The state mayin the public interest take over land for its use in accordance withthe law." What is the law, and where is it written? I assume thismeans the state is supposed compensate villagers for the land itrepossesses, but how is the form and amount of compensation supposedto be determined? And is the state required to get permission from thevillager committee, or can it take it even if the committee says no(like the "right of imminent domain" in the US)?
Another mistake is that land is leased to households, not individuals.
These are not a minor details; they're central to Anderlini's ideology. He assumes that because China is “Communist” (i.e. ruled by a party that calls itself Communist), then everything’s owned by the state, and he can only understand conflicts in such a country as conflicts between the all-powerful state and the individual, in particular as the individual's assertion of his right to own private property. Like the famous photograph of the man standing before the tank in 1989, such a grand vision has no place for a legal framework of village ownership and household use-rights periodically reallocated according to the ratio of land to villagers, and the experience of conflicts between subsistence-oriented villages and development companies working in cahoots with township officials - working according to the market logic Anderlini so champions.
This kind of journalistic sloppiness makes me have doubts about the whole report. When “the state” (usually township officials) “takes it back,” it doesn’t do so with “impunity,” exactly. At least “according to the law” (as the constitution ambiguously puts it, and as Anderlini himself mentions), the state is supposed to compensate the villagers, and I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to get permission from the villager committee as well, which is formally independent from the state and democratically elected by all adult villagers who chose to vote. {Like elections in “democratic” societies, i.e. multi-party systems, this formal independence and “grassroots democracy” are far from ideal and vary from village to village. As many political sociologists, such as He Xuefeng and Tong Zhihui point out, the main forces working against the improvement of democratic local self-government are not the institutional formalities so much as a set a of broader social problems they call “China’s rural problem” (sannong wenti). They follow Karl Polanyi and Wen Tiejun in interpreting these problems as resulting from the destruction of traditional peasant communities by the twin pressures of China’s Maoist industrialization strategy (based on collectivized peasant labor as a source for primary capital accumulation, instead of the Western strategy of colonial plunder) and the post-Mao marketization of social relations (see Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 39(4) and forthcoming issue on the central China school). For one thing, as anyone who’s been to the Chinese countryside in the past few years knows, most of the talented and able-bodied villagers between the ages of 15 and 55 are off working in the cities most of the year, if they ever come back at all, and the people who stay in the villages often have difficulty organizing public affairs outside narrow social networks. But I’m getting side-tracked. All this is just to say that Anderlini is both wrong and misleading. Most rural land is formally owned by villagers, not the state, and state appropriation of villager-owned land is supposed to be negotiated with committees democratically elected by villagers and formally independent from the state and the CCP. These formalities may often be severely compromised - villager committees, for instance are often controlled by the same township officials who want to appropriate the land, so the villagers really have no say in the matter – but at least these formalities give peasants a legal basis for appealing to higher levels of the state (what O’Brien and Li call “rightful resistance”), and sometimes getting a better settlement than they would have gotten otherwise. Similar situations happen in the US in cases “imminent domain.” The main difference is that peasants appeal in the name of their village or villager team as collective owner, rather than individually. How would the legal formality of individual ownership improve peasants’ bargaining power over the present legal formality of collective ownership by several households? If anything, privatization would weaken their bargaining power: if the government takes my land but not my neighbors’, how can I get anyone to cooperate with me in appealing for compensation?}
“its calls for privatisation of all rural land were a clear rejection of the current regime.”
That’s definitely an overstatement, considering that central leaders have been debating whether to privatize land for over a decade, and the regime is now promoting experiments in de facto rural land privatization. As Anderlini himself says further down: “Land privatisation […] has high-level support from some reform-minded sections of the Communist party[.]” Again, these statements make sense only in Anderlini’s ideology, where “communism” implies state ownership, and calls for privatization are “a clear rejection” of “communism.”
“In words that could have come from the mouth of Mao Zedong, one declaration [said: ‘] Only when you protect the rights of the masses and help the masses to develop can you be called the government."”
The term “develop” is new, and is very much tied up with a different ideology in which privatization is a key step on the road of development (and “self-development”)
“They say they are acting out of a conviction that many of the problems faced by China's peasants stem from the current land ownership system.”
Do they really believe that, I wonder? If so, it’s pure formalism. As it is, groups of several households own land collectively. When officials sell it to developers, peasants appeal to higher levels on the basis of this legal formality, and sometimes they get more compensation, sometimes they don’t. How would anything be changed if the formality was changed from collective to individual ownership? If anything, peasants’ bargaining power would be weakened. Furthermore, don’t most people who advocate privatization also advocate urbanization, and want peasants to sell their land and move to the city? Privatization may help in that way, by adding a new monetary incentive (at least that’s the government’s main reason for advocating de facto privatization), but I don’t see how that will solve peasants’ problems, except that they will stop being peasants’ problems and start being proletarian (or sub-proletarian) problems.
Probably the most important passage of A's report:
“These activists have some powerful supporters, including prominent developers who have called publicly for privatisation of rural land – a move they argue would help cool soaring property prices in the cities by vastly expanding the land supply while granting rural citizens the same security urban dwellers now enjoy.”
While helping the developers make lots of easy money, incidentally, and depriving peasants of any legal justification for asking for compensation or land. If they sell it an get paid the market price (however low), then they have been treated fairly and legally, and their subsistence becomes a personal problem. And what is this “security urban dwellers now enjoy”? I don’t know enough details about this. But I thought that peasants were beginning to get better social security packages than urbanites, whose security is tied to employment and income. If you can't find secure employment, which requires cultural capital that most peasants lack, then you basically get no social security, except for 200-300 yuan a month, right? Whereas in the countryside, the state is increasing its subsidies for education and health care, at least, whereas the cost of these is rising in the cities.
“This de facto privatization [of urban housing] has led to an explosion in personal wealth and was instrumental in the creation of an urban middle class.”
What total nonsense! As if privatization of public goods created anything new. The new “wealth” is just paper, and the people who get rich from buying and selling it are simply taking from the public resource pool. (Wen Tiejun discussed this in “Deconstructing Modernization.")
“Peasant farmers are allowed to own their homes but not their land, so they are unable to use it as collateral for loans. Advocates of reform say this exacerbates the looming wealth gap between cities and the countryside, where land is virtually worthless.”
If it’s worthless, why do developers want it so bad? If peasants can use land as collateral, then it will be even more certain to be taken from them, only now it will be legally sanctioned. Since the previous passage explained that “wealth” comes from privatization, we can see how rural land privatization will create “wealth” in the countryside: a collective resource, land, will go from being “worthless” on paper to “wealth” on paper. And after peasants sell it to developers, the developers and other “middle class” investors who buy and sell whatever the developers build there will become wealthier, thus bringing more wealth to the countryside and mitigating the urban-rural wealth gap. Brilliant!
“Some government scholars say a shortage of arable land in China would be exacerbated if peasants were allowed to sell at will to developers. But activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing and argue that privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more efficient farms.”
“But activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing” – so what? If privatization will exacerbate this problem, how does the fact that this problem already exists change anything? That’s not even an argument!
“privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more efficient farms” – 1) why is privatization a precondition to larger and more efficient farms? Even in China today we could point to collectively owned larger and more efficient farms, such as the one in Nanjie; 2) “efficiency” here refers to productivity per labor hour, not productivity per acre or per unit of energy; small-scale intensive farming is both more efficient per acre and per unit of energy, and more ecologically sustainable (see, for instance, Smallholders, Householders by Robert Netting); 3) Anderlini has neglected to mention the more important part of such arguments against privatization: what will happen to all these ex-peasants, considering that the market could absorb only about 1/10 of China's current "surplus rural labor power" even in a best-case scenario of sustained growth, depending largely on global demand for exports that now seems to be falling for good (to say nothing of the ecological problems such sustained growth would exacerbate)? (He does mention this below in a quotation from Wen Tiejun, but he doesn’t respond to Wen’s argument.)
“The power to reclassify rural land as industrial or urban lies with government officials, who derive much of their official revenues (not to mention illicit personal income) from selling reclassified land.”
This is an important problem, but how will privatization solve it?
“Advocates of privatisation acknowledge that the majority of local officials across the country are unlikely to support the loss of such a large source of revenue and this entrenched interest is probably the biggest obstacle to the government agreeing to such a reform.”
I wonder if the central government also sees this as the main obstacle to privatization.
“He says privatisation in urban areas has given the middle class a bigger say in the way the country is run and points to a recent wave of peaceful demonstrations in cities such as Xiamen and Shanghai, in which citizens took to the streets over specific issues that directly affected their property prices – a proposed chemical plant in a densely populated part of Xiamen and a proposed extension of Shanghai's magnetic levitation train through the city centre – and in each case managed to convince the government to revise its plans. "If the people were given land they would have the power to speak out and it would help bring democracy to China," says the activist."
More ideological nonsense - the assumption that property and individualism goes hand in hand with “democracy." Peasants already do the same sort of thing all the time, and I don’t see how individual ownership will make it more likely to happen or succeed. Going back to Wang Xiaoyi’s theory, it seems that privatization of land would strengthen the individualist tendency and weaken the collectivist tendency (and its basis in the idea of common ownership of village resources), thus weakening peasants’ ability to organize such protest movements.
Zhang Sanmin (Shaanxi “peasant farmer and activist”) says: "What I know is that it was the communal land system that killed more than 30m people in the Great Leap Forward and it is the current system that is causing so much suffering today and must be changed[.]”
It wasn’t the communal land system, but rather a number of other factors (most important in Sichuan, according to Chris Bramall, being the speed at which major institutional changes were made (within a few months), and poor planning in general (in some cases, lack of planning), including transferring too many people out of agriculture into heavy industry, and then lack of communication (in some cases caused by selfish officials, more generally due simply to the rapidity of institutional change) once the famine began. Once the wrinkles were smoothed out, most of the institutional changes made during the GLF were kept, and, according to Bramall, contributed to improving per capita quality of life (life expectancy, etc.) about as quickly as possible under the conditions of embargo and arms race with both the US and USSR empires (see his In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan since 1931). A few related comments on the report cited in A's report above (Mure Dickie and Jamil Anderlini: “Double challenge to Beijing orthodoxy,” Financial Times, December 26, 2007):
the authors write:
“Former Nanjing university professor Guo Quan on Wednesday claimed his “New Democracy party” enjoyed widespread backing for its goal of ending Communist “one-party dictatorship” and introducing multi-party elections. “We must join the global trend,” Mr Guo said. “China must move toward a democratic system.””
How could he say this publicly without getting arrested? Is this more evidence of the Hu—Wen administration’s apparent preference for liberalism over leftism? (I wrote a blog entry about this last summer)
Note the discursive power of “joining the global trend” (doubtless “与全球接轨”)
“Separately, farmers in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Shaanxi, Jiangsu and the city of Tianjin have announced on the internet that they have reclaimed collective land from the government and redistributed it.”
According to A's report above (among others) it was a group of 10 intellectuals, and mainly one in particular, who wrote these manifestos. One report said that the peasant whose name was presented as the other of one manifesto turned out to be illiterate. But my impression is that the peasants did agree with the manifestos, as much as they understood them. {Note that, to the extent that peasants have embraced this “mobilizing frame,” this is a break from the pattern of “rightful resistance” described by Li and O’Brien, where peasants appeal to central policy to justify their rebellion against local “corrupt officials.” Of course such a break from the state’s framework is a necessary starting point for the formation of a new political subjectivity, but in this case the break falls right into the market logic that really calls the shots in China, and which the CCP has been promoting anyway, albeit with some reservations and debate. So I think the authors are wrong to say that this movement (or this discursive move) threatens CCP rule. To what extend does CCP power depend on control of rural land (most of which, at least in theory and usually in practice, belongs to villagers, not the CCP)? Of course there is also the question of hegemony and spectacle, that is, of who has the right to make such discursive innovations (it should have come from CCP fiat, not dissident intellectuals or peasants or, scarier still, a coalition of intellectuals and peasants!). So, on the one hand, we have marketization as a tendency determining both state policy-making and popular movements, and, on the other hand, we have the unstable ground of CCP hegemony – the CCP’s need to represent itself as the leader, rather than a servant of the market or dissident intellectuals and peasants.}
“one of the main sources of unrest in China in recent years has been the seizure of land that is then sold to developers who often work with officials to make huge profits.”
Finally, a rational kernel
“This month’s land claims break new ground by appearing to be co-ordinated across widely separated regions of the country and by being based on presumed individual property rights.”
I think they’re right about this
“The announcement of the new party and the land claims follows the release last month by a provincial government adviser, Wang Zhaojun, of a sweeping open letter indicting the nation’s entire political system.”
Is there any connection between these land disputes and Guo Quan’s “party”? (and how many people support this party?) Sounds like none.
But one connection is pretty clear: between Anderlini, the Financial Times, and a series of "news reports" putting the words of American imperialist think-tanks like the Cato Institute and the Rural Development Institute into the mouths of Chinese peasants. Search Lexis-Nexis and you'll find dozens of such reports and commentaries stretching back for decades, until they shade into positive reports about "land reform" and "rural development" programs designed by such think-tanks in conjunction with the CIA to combat anti-imperialist peasant movements in Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere since at least the 1960s. Only four days after FT published this Feb 19 report by Anderlini, the South China Morning Post published "On Solid Ground: Beijing's landmark edict on land rights for the vast rural population is a powerful signal for change" by Li Ping, "head of the Beijing Representative Office and a staff attorney with the Seattle-based Rural Development Institute (http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork.html), which contributed to the recent Cato Institute policy paper 'Securing Land Rights for Chinese Farmers." At least this report recognized that the Chinese party-state is not so entirely at odds with such pro-privatization "dissidents" as Anderlini claims. But both contribute to a decades long stream of ideology pumped out and reproduced with American state support by think-tanks, news media, "embedded" intellectuals advisers to the Chinese party-state, and "dissident" intellectual advisers to China's disgruntled peasants. So, I'm beginning to wonder: these mistakes that I've pointed out in Anderlini's report (about what China's constitution says about land ownership, about who actually wrote these privatization manifestos, about whether privatization will help peasants to hold onto their land in the face of state-supported capitalist expropriation, etc.) - were these honest mistakes, or was he paid to make them?
John Gulick Says:
Mar 1 6:35 amThanks for all the hard and intelligent work you put into this. When I stumbled across the FT piece, I was apopleptic -- not to put too fine a point on it!!! -- but lacked the time, energy, and knowledge to script an appropriate critique, and you have done so thoroughly and brilliantly. It is a great relief to see this. The gist of the issue is that the FT, in solidarity if not cahoots with the usual suspects inside and outside the PRC, has put forward the property rights/self-regulating market package as a solution to the PRC's "agrarian problem," and more insidiously implied that this dovetails with the incipient desires and aims of China's rural masses... a complete and concoted fabrication. You discursively and materially bust apart the hoax so nicely... thanks!!!