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China news tagged with: peseants (15)

• This Wormwood Is Sweet to Farmers and the Malarial – Howard French

  

  From The New York Times, via A Glimpse of the World:

  Every five days, a country market converges in a horn-honking, pig-squealing clamor on the old arching stone bridge that spans the river coursing through here.

  For as long as anyone can remember, the biggest crop in this valley has been the corn that grows tall and thick by the river’s edge. But in the last two years, a new crop, qinghao, or sweet wormwood, has been crowned king, driven by a desperate need in the tropical world for new malaria treatments.

  The rugged valleys and steep gorges along the Apeng River, in central China, have long been a metaphor for idyllic remoteness. Even China’s dazzling economic takeoff had done little to change that, until the World Health Organization approved a malaria treatment using artemisinin, the active ingredient of the qinghao plant, in 2001.

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  • August 13, 2005 11:28 PM

• The “Beggars’ Village” That Wants to Stand Up – Guan Jun

  

  From The Southern Weekend, via Press Interpreter:

  Other than the movement of the shade in the courtyard, time in this village seems to have come to standstill and become entirely meaningless.

  Primitive mud houses and modern tile houses are crowded together by the dry river bed; at the entrance to the village old men squat together smoking cigarettes, while aimless young men sit on the steps of their homes. Xiao Zhai village is like an orphan abandoned in the deep recesses of a mountain, with only a narrow and beat up dirt road to show that it hasn’t completely lost touch with modern civilization.

  When this reporter first arrived in Xiao Zhai village and began walking around, he noticed a young man with thick near-sighted glasses following his every move. This somewhat disheveled young man had a dirty face and stains on his clothes, but something about his expression distinguished him from everyone else in the village. As soon as the young man heard that the reporter had come to do interviews, he enthusiastically invited the reporter to his home, as if he had a lot on his mind he wanted to talk about.

  –Translated by Peijin Chen

  Original article not online.

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  • August 13, 2005 11:16 PM

• Peter S. Goodman: Rural Poor Aren’t Sharing In Spoils of China’s Changes

  

  On The Washington Post, Peter Goodman wrote: Costs of Goods Rise, Standard of Living Falls.

  The China that Wang Huazhong glimpses on television is in the midst of an amazing transformation. In cities he has never visited, skyscrapers tower over highways choked with cars, and people jam glass-fronted malls buying up jewelry and luggage simply to pass the time.

  Here in his village in the country’s northwest, Wang sees the same desiccated landscape that has changed little in his 46 years. A rutted dirt track winds through treeless mountains to the county seat 30 miles away, the outermost boundary of his experience. Watermelon plants emerge reluctantly from chalky soil, waiting for rain that may never come. A wood stove occupies his mud floor, painting his walls with soot.

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  • July 12, 2005 9:55 AM

• Farmers to be free from agriculture taxes

  

  From Xinhua:

  800 million farmers are expected to be exempted from agriculture tax in 2005, said Finance Minister Jin Renqing Tuesday in his report to an on-going meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on the first five months’ national fiscal revenue and expenditure situation.

  “To date, China has lately exempted 19 provinces, including Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China, from agriculture tax, plus last year’s eight provinces, the country’s 27 provinces will no longer pay agriculture tax this year,” Jin said when reporting to the 16th session of the 10th NPC Standing Committee, China’s top legislature, which opened Sunday.

  In China’s remaining four provinces that are still being charged of the agriculture tax, the tax will be revoked in 217 counties and cities, Jin said.

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  • June 30, 2005 6:22 AM

• David Cowhig: Yu Jianrong’s Writing on Rural Associations

  

  On the same issue of rural associations, China analyst David Cowhig introduced another China scholar’s work. Here is the email from David:

  Yu Jianrong of CASS also says that peasants organizing themselves to represent their own interests is the only way they will be able to solve their problems. Yu suggests that China should let the township level be self governing and make the county the lowest level of the PRC government system.

  Yu’s article “Why I Propose Recreating the Rural Associations” is in Chinese.

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  • June 23, 2005 7:43 PM

• Central News Agency: “Virginity Verification” Required for Land Compensation

  

  From The Central News Agency, via The Epoch Times:

  An odd regulation in Beichan village, Dazu county, Chongqing province, China, now requires emigrant women laborers to have a medical exam for “virginity verification” if they desire to receive compensation for land requisition. Five unmarried women are at their wits-end with this regulation now in place.

  As reported by Chongqing Evening News, Luo Wenhua, head of the second commune of Beichan village, held a meeting in early May among commune members to discuss the compensation plan for land requisition. In regards to the issue of unmarried women receiving compensation for land requisition, Luo demanded that Tan Shuying and four other unmarried women come back from their work outside town in order to have the “virginity verification” done. The medical results of the verification would determine whether they would get compensation.

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  • June 8, 2005 6:16 PM

• David Cowhig: Can Google measure PRC policymaker worries about uppity peasants?

  

  China analyst David Cowhig shared the following observation with CDT :

  Peasant unrest has grabbed more attention in China over the last few years. I have noticed a common useage — such and such a policy is a “tranquilizer pill for the peasants”. I have seen it applied to the higher grain prices over the past year, to the policies pushed by Party and State Council Document No. 1 of 2004 and other policies. Google actually found 448 unique hits for “tranquilizer pill” and “peasants” when not adjacent and 126 hits when they are adjacent. Adjacent would be nongmin dingxinwan (entered in characters) meaning peasant tranquilizer pill, while nonadjacent would capture hits for adjacent plus other non-adjacent formulations such as nongmin chixia dingxinwan peasant eats a tranquilizer pill.

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  • April 15, 2005 9:50 PM

• Economist: The silent majority – A rare look inside a Chinese village

  

  From Economist.com:

  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.

  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.

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  • April 9, 2005 8:30 AM

• Elaine Kurtenbach: China Says More Support Needed for Farmers

  

  From Ap, via Yahoo! News:

  China has more than enough grain reserves to cover its immediate needs, but farmers need more help if the country is to ensure future food supplies, officials said Sunday.

  The communist government has long viewed food self-sufficiency as a matter of national security and worries about feeding its population of 1.3 billion people.

  “Judging from current figures, I think that in the near future there won’t be any problem in the food supply,” Duan Yingbi, deputy director of the Chinese Cabinet’s Central Leading Group for Rural Work, told reporters during the annual meeting of China’s parliament, which has made boosting support for farmers a priority.

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  • March 6, 2005 9:25 AM

• People’s Daily: China’s 730 million farmers to pay no agricultural taxes

  

  From People’s Daily Online:

  About 730 million Chinese farmers are expected to benefit from the agricultural tax exemption this year,as 26 of its 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions have announced a termination of all agricultural taxes, said an official with the Ministry of Agriculture.

  Fan Xiaojian, vice agriculture minister of China, made the remarks at a working conference held Friday and Saturday in east China’s Shandong Province. He said that the exemption will release about 730 million farmers from taxes totaling more than 20 billion yuan (about 2.41 billion US dollars).

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  • February 28, 2005 8:21 AM

• A small town official’s diary provides a unique view of political reform

  

  From China Elections & Governance, prepared by Manfred Elfstrom:

  A writer who dubs himself Xiang Tianxiao (“Laughing at Heaven”) has written a very personal account of grassroots democracy entitled A Township Cadre’s Journal of Appealing to the Government. The account, written, as the title suggests, in the form of a diary, revolves around elections held in the author’s hometown, where he works as a low- ranking official. It reflects both the new pressures faced by township administrations and old, persistent patterns of corruption.

  The atmosphere in rural China is tense, at least for officials, in Xiang Tianxiao’s journal. In the past, being a cadre meant enjoying a certain level of respect, plenty of eating and drinking, and the occasional bribe. Now, the ranks of officialdom are being reduced as a result of financial constraints imposed by the central government’s rollback of onerous peasant taxes (a main source of revenue for local governments). For those officials who stay on, someone is always looking over their shoulders, criticizing their mistakes and lowering their salaries. Elections for various offices are a part of this heightened supervision.

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  • January 31, 2005 12:32 PM

• People’s Daily: Central authorities’ policies set to further reinforce rural work, raise overall agricultural production capacity

  

  From the People’s Daily Online:

  Chinese central authorities publicize on Monday a set of ideas set forth by the Communist Party of China (CPC) central Committee and the State Council, or the central government, on further strengthening the work in rural areas and raise overall agricultural production capacity.

  The ideas adopted by the CPC Central Committee are aimed at the improvement of agricultural infrastructure, faster progress in agro-science and technology, and increased overall capacity of agricultural production as a major, urgent strategic task for the country at present and in a period to come, which have to practically be done well.

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  • January 31, 2005 8:22 AM

• A Watershed Role for Farmers

  

  From the Los Angeles Times: “Ge Quanxiao is no revolutionary. The 58-year-old farmer is an upstanding member of his community, a father of two. But if you push reasonable people too far, he warns, they’re forced to do desperate things.

  The government in Beijing is pushing a lot of reasonable people to the wall these days, especially here in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, where three parallel rivers course their way to the sea. Ravenous for energy to feed a booming economy, China plans to build more than 100 dams in this area, including a couple of dozen that would surpass Washington state’s 550-foot-high Grand Coulee dam and one that would be the tallest in the world. ”

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  • January 16, 2005 4:22 PM

• Farmers Being Moved Aside by China’s Real Estate Boom

  

  Jim Yardley just published this article on the New York Times: “For five months, Gao Lading and other angry farmers had occupied the walled compound of the Communist Party’s village office. They had pitched tents, eaten rice and sweet potatoes, and waited.

  It was a sit-in born of desperation. Officials from the nearby city of Yulin had seized land that had been part of the village since imperial times. The farmers had protested for nearly two years before finally seizing the village government’s seat of power. ”

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  • December 7, 2004 11:25 PM

• Violence Taints Religion’s Solace for China’s Poor

  

  From today’s New York Times:

  China’s growing material wealth has eluded the countryside, home to two-thirds of its population. But there is a bull market in sects and cults competing for souls. That has alarmed the authorities, who seem uncertain whether the spread of religion or its systematic repression does more to turn peasants against Communist rule.

  The demise of Communist ideology has left a void, and it is being filled by religion. The country today has more church-going Protestants than Europe, according to several foreign estimates. Buddhism has become popular among the social elite. Beijing college students wait hours for a pew during Christmas services in the capital’s 100 packed churches.

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  • November 25, 2004 1:15 PM

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