Peasants Still Struggling in ‘Other China’

Gao Zhengbin has heard the stories being told about the wealthy peasants in more fertile parts of China.

Some peasants, it is said, are earning as much as 10,000 yuan a year ($3,125), which makes them the Chinese version of millionaires. For Gao, 46, who lives with his family in a cave on the side of a yellow-brown cliff, such a sum is beyond imagination.

“We have a feeling of envy,” he admitted recently. “We want to be rich, too.”

Gao and his village in the northern part of Shaanxi province are part of what might be called “the other China,” the substantial part of this nation that continues to conduct a tough, unending struggle for subsistence.

Over the last few years, attention has focused on the rapid economic advances made in some parts of the Chinese countryside. In rural areas near major cities like Peking and Shanghai, and in areas with access to rail lines, peasants have been buying color television sets, building new houses, diversifying crops and setting up township industries.

But many less fortunate parts of China are in danger of being left behind. For peasants in places like Mizhi county, happiness would be not a new Sony TV, but a good spring rain--one that might enable them to plant wheat this year instead of potatoes.

According to figures compiled by the United Nations, there are still about 100 million people in China who are unable to feed or clothe themselves--roughly a tenth of the population.

Many of these peasants live in what are known as the “revolutionary base,” the remote, often-mountainous terrain where in the 1920s and 1930s the Communist Party and the Red Army first gained a foothold.

The newspaper Economic Daily acknowledged not long ago that “life in these base areas has not changed much since liberation in 1949.” As China’s economy advances and as income differences widen, this continuing poverty is becoming an increasingly potent political issue within the Chinese Communist Party.

Of all the base areas, probably the best known is northern Shaanxi, the region near the Yellow River where Mao Tse-tung and other revolutionary leaders settled down for more than a decade after the Long March in 1935.

Northern Shaanxi is off the regular tourist path and not generally open to travel by foreigners. But a Times reporter and another American correspondent were recently given permission to travel through the area in order to study a U.N.-sponsored food program in Mizhi.

‘Ravaged by Poverty’

When American journalist Edgar Snow first visited Chinese Communist headquarters in northern Shaanxi, in 1936, the area had been ravaged by famine, disease and poverty.

“Here in Shaanxi, a peasant could own as much as 100 mou (16 acres) of land and yet be a poor man,” Snow said.

Now, half a century later, the mass starvation he described is no longer in evidence. At least to this important extent, the Communist regime seems to have solved China’s food problems.

Bubonic plague, which Snow reported to be endemic 50 years ago, has disappeared. So have the wealthy landowners who were blamed for profiteering at the expense of the peasants. But northern Shaanxi is still extremely poor and backward, particularly by comparison with other parts of rural China.

Children are no longer shoeless; they now wear thin plastic slippers. But many have sores on their heads, and some older children show signs of birth defects--victims, perhaps, of malnutrition in the last serious drought year of 1974, when, according to a local doctor, “lots of people ate grass instead of food and had swollen bellies.”

Old Superstitions

Old traditions and superstitions linger on. Families still pay big sums for a good bride and wedding feast. In Mizhi, Gao said, it cost him 1,000 yuan apiece ($310) for each of his two sons to get married.

On a tree outside a hospital in Yanan, the largest town in northern Shaanxi and once Communist Party headquarters, an anguished father has put up a handwritten sign bearing these words:

The weather is cloudy and the earth is getting dark,

my family has a sick son who is crying at night.

Passers-by please say something nice for him,

and when he wakes up tomorrow, he will be all right.

China has several other impoverished areas besides northern Shaanxi. Diplomats and international officials say poverty can be found in virtually every province of China, especially in rugged terrain where there are few roads and rail lines.

Of China’s 29 provinces, 10 are officially classified as economically less developed. They are the arid northwestern provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai, the southern provinces of Guizhou, Guangxi and Yunnan, and the ethnic-minority areas of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

Generally, Chinese rural areas are becoming more prosperous. According to Chinese statistics, 14% of all rural households had per-capita income below 200 yuan a year ($62.50) in 1984. In 1978, by comparison, 85% of all rural households had incomes below that.

Still, according to a report by the official New China News Agency early this year, there were 45 counties in China where per-capita income is below 100 yuan a year ($31.25). The average annual income for the 800 million peasants across the country in 1984 was 355 yuan ($111).

Infant Mortality Rates

Severe health problems are often associated with poverty. A spokesman for the Public Health Ministry acknowledged last summer that some border areas were still recording infant mortality rates above 100 in 1,000, among the highest in the world. In Henan, in Qinghai province, the rate is reported to be 146 per 1,000. For China as a whole, the infant mortality rate has dropped below 34 per 1,000, and in Peking it is below 12 per 1,000.

The persistence of extreme poverty in China during a period of rapid economic advances has begun to cause problems for the Communist Party. For more than three decades, children have been told in school about the stunning disparities between rich and poor under “the old society,” before the Communist takeover in 1949.

According to a bitter old Chinese proverb, “behind the vermilion gates meat and wine go to waste, while out on the road lie the bones of those frozen to death.”

The contrasts are not nearly so stark now, but Chinese officials admit that the differences in income between rich and poor have become much greater in the past few years.

According to Du Runsheng, director of the government’s Rural Policy Research Center, a typical high-income peasant in 1978 earned 1.9 times as much as a typical low-income peasant. But, by 1984, a rich peasant earned 2.6 times as much as a poor one.

Part of the System

To those in the Communist Party who favor reforms of China’s economic system, the greater differences in income are a good thing, a sign of progress.

The party leadership, headed by Deng Xiaoping, repeatedly attacks “egalitarian” thinking and favors “letting some people get rich ahead of others,” although lately it has added the qualification “through hard work,” an oblique concession that the party does not approve of making money through corruption.

“There are objective reasons for the creation of an income gap among individuals in the course of economic growth,” Du explained at a conference on rural China last December. “Such differences in income are inevitable because people differ in work skills and management ability.”

Over the last year, however, critics in the party have complained that China’s propaganda outlets have put too much emphasis on rich peasants and thus given a false picture of life in the countryside.

“The media have, for some time, exaggerated the number of 10,000-yuan-a-year ($3,125) households,” Chen Yun, a member of the Politburo’s five-man Standing Committee, said last September. “Actually, there are not that many. Our media’s reports are divorced from reality.”

Veiled Attack

The implicit suggestion of such critics is that the Deng leadership is ignoring the continuing plight of China’s poor. The attacks are beginning to have an effect. This spring, the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, required some revisions in the five-year economic plan proposed by Premier Zhao Ziyang because the legislators felt that the leadership’s blueprint did not put enough emphasis on problems of poverty.

To their critics, the party leaders respond that many areas continue to be poor simply because they are so remote. There is no way for these areas to develop quickly when they are so far from transportation and when the levels of education and technology there are so low, they say.

In addition, the Chinese regime defends itself by blaming the continuing poverty on the policies of the Cultural Revolution. “Because of the influence of leftist thinking, people in these areas did not have the freedom to promote production according to local conditions,” a commentary in the Economic Daily said.

Finally, the party has, of late, taken to attacking the concept of handouts for the poor.

“Too much stress has been placed on gratis handouts,” the party’s theoretical journal, Red Flag, said not long ago. “This money is spent on food and clothes, but not to develop production. Because it’s gratis, everyone fights for it without considering whether they really need it. Because it’s gratis, careful attention is not paid to how it’s spent. This gives rise to a dependency, a bottomless pit.”

Wheat From the U.N.

Officials in Mizhi have begun to obtain wheat from the U.N. World Food Program in order to feed the 176,000 people in the area. Per-capita income last year in Mizhi was about 188 yuan ($58.75).

Under the program, which is run by local officials, peasants are to receive wheat in exchange for planting trees, terracing hillside land and working on other projects aimed at controlling soil erosion. Mizhi is situated in what is known as the Loess Plateau, the huge area of northwestern China where problems of erosion are extremely serious.

“The work is very tiring,” Wang Zhijun, one of the cave-dwelling peasants, said. “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done.”

Nevertheless, the peasants keep on working, hoping that someday they will reach the levels of prosperity achieved elsewhere in China.

“Ten years ago, we suffered from starvation,” Gao Zhengbin said. “All the furniture in this cave has come since 1976. We believe in what the government is doing. We want to be rich as soon as possible.”