China’s Rising Rural Taxes Sowing Seeds of Discontent

Read Peng Biyun’s lips: No new taxes. The current levies on her family farm here in southern China are already so burdensome, Peng says, that she and her husband have refused to pay for the first time.

“They should come over and tell me face to face why I have to pay it,” Peng said, issuing a pointed challenge to the local authorities who have increased her tax bill every year without explaining where the money goes.

“We work hard from morning till night, digging with our hands and carrying loads on our shoulders, while the village officials just go to meeting rooms every day and have meetings,” she said.

Her complaint is a common one here in Mao Tse-tung’s home territory and across China’s vast countryside. It is the manifestation of a simmering discontent that has the Communist regime in Beijing increasingly worried.

Even as China gears up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Communist rule this fall, the central government is concerned that 800 million farmers--still the backbone of the nation--may spoil the party.

Anger over rising taxes and corruption already has sparked some rallies, including a recent demonstration that left one man dead. Other villagers have refused to pay, or even committed suicide in protest.

Fear of widening unrest has led Chinese President Jiang Zemin to proclaim order in the countryside to be one of Beijing’s top priorities this year--an ironic turn of events for a government originally founded on the notion of peasants rising up to overthrow the system.

“We must highlight and seize upon the all-encompassing matters of boosting farmers’ incomes and maintaining rural stability,” Jiang declared in a televised speech in late December.

China Has History of Peasant Uprisings

Chinese history is littered with examples of peasant-motivated revolts, including the famous Taiping and Boxer rebellions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Communist regime knows well that China’s farmers have long been a political wild card.

However, few analysts believe that any kind of massive, coordinated peasant uprising is in the offing. And generalizing on the feelings of millions of rural people is impossible.

But if the resentment in Xiangtan provides any guide to the mood of farmers nationwide, the government has, at best, a huge public-relations problem on its hands. At worst, it is a caldron of dissatisfaction that could boil over.

That such angry sentiments like Peng’s are simmering in Xiangtan, a county in Hunan province, is particularly telling. It was here that Mao was born in 1893, and here that the budding revolutionary launched an investigation into rural conditions in a 1927 report that helped galvanize the Communist cause.

“Down with the local tyrants and evil gentry!” Mao wrote, castigating the landowners who exploited their serf-like tenants. “All power to the peasant associations!”

These days, the “local tyrants” are the Communists themselves, or at least the low-level cadres who wield considerable authority over farmers’ lives.

Most significant is their power to tax, which in many cases has resulted in the officials’ own enrichment rather than the improvement of the communities. Farmers across Xiangtan complain vigorously about their taxes, unable to point to any tangible benefits.

There are fees for just about everything, it seems: for buying pigs, for selling pigs, to build a road, to tear out a road, on the land itself, on the right to water the land. The rates and their reasons vary from village to village. In some instances, no reasons are given, just lump-sum amounts listed as a “farming tax” or some other vague designation.

Farmer’s Family Pays in Rice and Fees

Chen Yunqiu, whose family has tilled the soil for generations, has dutifully handed over rice to the national government, which holds a monopoly on buying grain.

But the easygoing 50-year-old, whose annual income is less than $500, grows disgusted when asked about the 268 yuan (about $32) he must pay in “village and township fees” and “agricultural tax.”

Every year, Chen and his fellow rice farmers ask local officials to call a village meeting so they can find out exactly how the money is spent. Every year, the officials refuse.

“They don’t dare make the village expenses public,” Chen said, punctuating his point with a jab of his cigarette, held between gnarled knuckles.

Adding insult to injury, the village chief, who lives in the big house next door, is Chen’s own brother. “I ignore him now,” he said.

Chen estimates that about 80% of the villagers have refused to pay. “They came yesterday,” he told a recent visitor nonchalantly. “If most of the villagers won’t pay, I won’t pay either. I just want to wait and see.”

Some Protests Take Toll on Farmers

Despite their defiance, area farmers have not yet thought of mobilizing as a collective force, as Mao once exhorted his compatriots to do. But others have tried--and paid a price.

In the Hunanese town of Daolin, hundreds of farmers marched on their local government office last month, upset by the corruption they believed ran rampant in its halls.

The protest began after the death of one man--a farmer who reportedly poisoned himself rather than pay his taxes--and ended in the death of another when police dispersed the crowds with truncheons and tear gas. Nine people have been arrested, a human rights group reported.

Other violence has erupted in Hunan, although it is not clear whether they were related to economic unrest. A homemade bomb filled with nails ripped through a farmers market last week in the county town of Yizhang, on Hunan’s southern border, killing at least eight people.

On Jan. 17, a bomb exploded on a bus in the provincial capital of Changsha, injuring dozens of passengers. Hunan, like many parts of China, is plagued by high unemployment in its cities.

The countryside has not escaped the economic tightening hitting the rest of the nation. Farmers in Xiangtan say their incomes have remained flat even as their taxes have gone up.

But they acknowledge that they are dramatically better off now than 20 years ago, when the Communist leadership finally ended China’s inefficient commune system and allowed rural residents to lease their own plots of land.

Like many of his neighbors, Wang Fangyun, 50, has built a new house for his family.

Covered with the thin white tiles seen on houses everywhere in Xiangtan, Wang’s new home cost 100,000 yuan (about $12,100), most of which came from his savings. The rest he borrowed from relatives.

Though scuffed with dirt on the floor and walls, the interior is neat, with a dozen pairs of shoes piled in a corner and a few hard-backed, low-slung wooden chairs put out for guests. Light emanates from a single bulb dangling from the ceiling and entertainment from a black-and-white television.

It’s Pay Up or Face Consequences

Many of Wang’s fellow villagers have refused to fork over their taxes, he said. But Wang himself has paid up, about $120, all told.

“If you refuse to pay the money, the township government or the police will come to your house and confiscate your things, then sell them,” he said. “Some villagers have a very hard life and have almost nothing, so they’re not afraid of the government. But I have some belongings, so . . . I don’t want to fight them.”

He said it’s not clear how officials spend the tax money, adding that local officials always cite some rationale for the fees they impose--rising water prices or school improvements, for example.

Misuse of public funds was precisely one of the grievances Mao outlined in his 1927 report, “Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan.” To bring down the “privileged classes,” the organized farmers at the time often checked their landlords’ books to find out where the money went.

Such activity was “important not so much for recovering money as for publicizing the crimes of the local tyrants and evil gentry and for knocking them down from their . . . positions,” he wrote.

In words that might haunt some corrupt cadres today, Mao also described the execution of particularly wicked landowners.

Such a drastic measure has not occurred to Wang or, it seems, to other descendants of the peasants whom Mao lauded.

But the Great Helmsman remains one of Wang’s heroes, or at least a talisman of sorts. On the wall of Wang’s home hangs a washed-out poster of Mao with former Premier Chou En-lai with the inscription: “They can bring good fortune to all of China.”

Being the birthplace of Mao has not granted Xiangtan county any special advantages, Wang admits. So can Mao, dead now for 23 years, really bring luck to the entire country?

“He might,” said Wang.