沉默的大多数－《经济学人》眼中的中国农民

灰鸦

The silent majority

Apr 7th 2005 | BEIHE VILLAGE, SHANDONG
From The Economist print edition


A rare look inside a Chinese village


IN A country where 800m people, about 60% of the population, live in the countryside on an average income of less than a dollar a day, rural backwardness weighs heavily on the minds of China's leaders as they dream of joining the ranks of the world's leading economies. And in a country whose Communist Party came to power on the back of a peasant rebellion, distant memories of the vehemence of rural discontent arouse fears that unless something is done to make peasants happier, China will be plunged into turmoil. To assess China's future, it is crucial to understand the countryside. But it is not easy.(要评估中国的未来，了解农村至关重要。当然，这不是件容易的事。)

Despite China's increasing openness to prying foreign eyes, the dynamics of village life remain hidden away. Although the Chinese media report extensively on rural problems, foreign journalists require government approval to conduct interviews in the countryside (as indeed, in theory, they do for any off-base reporting in China). Foreign correspondents can often get away with conducting unauthorised interviews in the more cosmopolitan urban areas, but rural officials invoke the rules with far greater regularity, fearful that critical press reports could damage their careers. The presence in a village of any outsider asking sensitive questions can quickly arouse official attention and often results in detention, the confiscation of notes and other materials, and orders to leave the area immediately.

Your correspondent originally asked the government of Shandong province for permission to stay in a village he had visited with official approval in the 1980s, but was turned down. Instead, the authorities selected the village of Beihe in Zouping, a prosperous county that was designated by China in the late 1980s as an area (then almost the only one) open to American researchers to do fieldwork. It still delights in its propaganda role. Zouping's brochure calls the county “a window for the US and the whole world to get an understanding” of the countryside. Yan Shengqin, Beihe's party chief at the time, still proudly displays a framed picture of Jimmy Carter with an arm around Mr Yan's shoulders during a visit in 1997.

Beihe's 1,000 villagers enjoy a net income per head of around 5,000 yuan ($600) a year—about 70% more than the national average and 40% more than the average for Zouping. It has more than 30 privately owned factories in activities from iron forging to furniture making. Peasants here say they would prefer to keep their rural-residence certificates, a relic of a once-rigid urban-rural apartheid system in China that barred peasants from moving to the cities. Now they are allowed to migrate more freely. But while the urban social-security system is in tatters, most country-dwellers are still entitled to farm (not to own) a small patch of land that can at least keep them from starving. Beihe's villagers prefer to stay put—unlike tens of millions of other peasants for whom even the insecurity and hardship of urban life is better than rural poverty.

Beihe's mobile-phone-owning peasants in their newly built courtyard homes with cable television and (in the case of at least 20 households) private cars may not be the best-placed people to give insights into the rural deprivation and injustice that have prompted a growing number of peasants to head to big cities in recent years to petition the authorities. (Even model Zouping had 603 such peasants in 2002 and 338 in 2003, compared with none at the beginning of the decade, according to county records.) Even so, the village does illustrate how sweeping economic and political changes in the past quarter-century have made China's villages far more independent from higher authority. They have also become far more dependent for their success or failure on the abilities of their own local leaders. (农村越来越独立于中央官员，却越来越依赖于地方领导)In Beihe, as in many of China's 700,000 villages, ancient clans have played an important part in both of these changes.

[ Last edited by 灰鸦 on 2005-4-9 at 23:32 ]

灰鸦

The Zhang-Yan clans
农村的政治
The revival of village clannism is among the party's many worries about its grip on rural stability. In Beihe, more than half of the villagers share the surname Zhang. Among the rest, Yan is the biggest clan. The Yans and Zhangs live in distinct areas of the village. Yan Shengqin, the former party chief, happens to be one of the most senior within his clan's patrilineal hierarchy. It is to him, he says, that Yans turn to help sort out family disputes or officiate at weddings or funerals. Kim Falk, of America's Carnegie Mellon University, who spent 18 months in Beihe in the early 1990s, says relations between Zhangs and Yans appeared harmonious, as they do today. But it is easy to see how in other villages clan loyalties—as sometimes reported in the Chinese press—lead to bitter feuding between clans and struggles for control of village leadership jobs.

The dismantling of Chairman Mao's “people's communes” in the early 1980s allowed villages to re-emerge as independent economic units. Clans acquired a renewed interest in taking control. China's promotion of elections for the post of village head in the 1990s made it easier for them to do so. And more recent moves to have one person act as both village head and party chief have made it easier still.

Although Beihe began directly electing its village head a decade ago (and sure enough it was always Zhangs who won), the party chief, Mr Yan, was still the man in charge. This system of having separate elected and party-appointed leaders has caused widespread power struggles in villages, and nearly caused friction in Beihe. In 1999, a wealthy private businessman and member of a senior Zhang clan family, Zhang Fanggeng, was elected village head. Villagers knew that he had had a prickly relationship with Mr Yan. Some peasants who disliked Mr Yan had voted for Mr Zhang hoping that this would stir up a feud. “Some people said that within a month, there'd definitely be quite a show” between the two men, Mr Zhang later said in a report to higher officials.

Intervention from officials in Xidong township, to which Beihe belongs, as well as Mr Zhang's own common sense (struggling with the party is rarely a winning move), helped keep these tensions in check. Last year, the Shandong party leadership ordered that next time the province held village elections, ways should be found to ensure that the posts of party chief and village head be held by the same person in more than 80% of villages. Achieving this has involved allowing villagers for the first time to vote for the top party posts as well. The village party committee would still have the final say, but would generally pick the party member “recommended” by the most villagers as party chief. This person would also be appointed village leader. (村长和村支书归于一人，并由村民选出)Last December in Beihe, Mr Zhang, who had conveniently joined the party, was a shoo-in for both jobs. His votes, tallied up in chalk on a garage door, are still on display.



The last collective
农村的经济状况
Now in full command of the village, Mr Zhang has the task of untangling one of the knottiest problems left by Mr Yan—the fate of Beihe's malt factory, whose dour concrete façade dominates the village skyline of closely clustered houses surrounded by an expanse of fields. Once the mainstay of the village's economy, the factory is idle. Of its more than 200 workers, only its guard remains on duty. The village is hoping a private investor will take it off its hands, but it would take a courageous soul to do so with its 5m yuan of debt and a market for malt now dominated by bigger, better-quality producers.

The malt factory is the last relic of the collectively owned industrial complex that was once Beihe. As party chief, Mr Yan had used his networking skills and business acumen to follow the example of many villages around China in setting up enterprises that were owned and operated by the village. Mr Yan himself acted as manager of the malt factory. These were, in effect, state-owned enterprises and suffered the same problems—bloated workforces, inefficient management and a poor understanding of risk. As long as state-owned banks were willing to lend and local officials helped them secure markets, they could prosper. In Beihe they helped transform what had been a village of mud brick and thatch in the 1970s into a community of spacious concrete dwellings that many an urban resident would envy (apart from the primitive lavatories).

But tougher lending rules and fiercer competition in recent years have forced villages to close or privatise most of their collective businesses. This may mean Mr Zhang has a quieter time than Mr Yan (who though retired from village duties is now the general manager of a township fertiliser factory). Ms Falk says that in the early 1990s a constant stream of business delegations from around the country visited the malt factory. The road into the village thundered with malt-laden trucks. Now the village, like many others in China, has changed from conglomerate to real-estate dealer, trading on its one remaining commodity, its land.

With no more revenue from collective industries, the village's income is made up almost entirely of land rent paid by the privately owned factories. Beihe has recently decided to rent out a large tract of farmland to private investors to turn into a driving school and an auto-parts factory. The peasants who had used the land to grow wheat and corn are being compensated according to how much they would have earned from these crops. This is a meagre sum, it is true; but since they do not own the land and most of them have jobs in the private factories, they are not complaining. Millions of other peasants in China who have been turfed off the land in recent years by villages eager to profit from developers are far less happy.

Beihe's bet is that the success of private industry in the area will boost incomes and with it demand for cars. More car owners will mean more demand for driving schools such as the one being built in the village (in China, learner drivers are not allowed on roads). A rosy future, perhaps. If only Beihe were more typical.只要北河现象具有广泛的代表性，也许会有光明的前景。

[ Last edited by 灰鸦 on 2005-4-9 at 23:11 ]

灰鸦

《经济学人》以山东北河作为标本，通过深入调查接触，向我们展示了中国农村政治和经济的粗线条。通过他们的眼睛，我们可以从另一个角度认识中国北方农村，与以往所见所闻不同的感受。
题目起得贴切，叫the Silent Majority,这个国度缺乏话语权的农民，难道不是沉默的大多数吗？

[ Last edited by 灰鸦 on 2005-4-9 at 23:35 ]

flics

楼主是不是订阅了《经济学人》，那个网站的内容好像是要用户名和密码才能进去的

灰鸦

不用呀.
the Economist(http://www.economist.com/)里面大多数文章都不需要注册就可以看的。
但标记有的文章则需要注册才能读阅。

[ Last edited by 灰鸦 on 2005-4-10 at 14:07 ]

cmjdddwang

没有翻译吗？！@@@#％^￥％&￥^#@^％￥％

小柠檬

单词不算太深，基本还能看明白。
这是外国人调查的中国农民问题，其角度跟观点都与国内有一定的区别。
能让我们从不同的一个角度跟出发点去看待这个非常棘手的热门话题。

灰鸦

我已经将一些重要的语句画出来了，部分文字也做了翻译。

单词多不懂的话，开着金山词霸看不就行。方便快捷。