Poor Harvests Spark Criticism : Peking’s Long Love Affair With Peasants Is Cooling

PEKING — In a development with important political implications for China, the long-running love affair between the nation’s 800 million peasants and the reform-minded regime of Deng Xiaoping is cooling off.

For the last two months, Chinese leaders have been caught up in a fundamental re-evaluation of their policies in the countryside, particularly their reliance on family farming, and have been voicing increasing concern over a second straight disappointing grain harvest.

At the same time, government officials and Communist Party newspapers have been criticizing peasants for persisting in some decidedly unrevolutionary practices.

“While achieving historical results, we have also observed certain undesirable trends in the countryside,” Vice Premier Wan Li told a special conference on rural policies here in November. “Some of them are rather serious. For example, feudal superstitions, mercenary marriage, extravagant weddings and funerals, gambling and economic crime, even certain evil practices that once were stamped out, have re-emerged.”

Income Growth Slows

The authorities acknowledge that the growth in peasant income has slowed and that increases will continue to be lower for the next few years. The thrust of their recent public statements is that agriculture is at a turning point and that the regime realizes that it can no longer rely on the policy of transferring land to the tiller.

Over the last seven years, Deng and his aides have broken up the rural communes established under the late Mao Tse-tung and have adopted what has been, by comparison with the Mao era, a hands-off policy toward the countryside. Peasants have been allowed to cultivate their own family plots and to keep at least part of what they grow.

Initially, this policy of tolerance toward the peasants produced an unprecedented spurt in farm production and peasant income. From 1980 through 1984, grain production shot up. The 1984 grain harvest of 407 million tons was the largest by any nation in the history of the world.

Lower Harvests

China’s successes of the early 1980s attracted world acclaim. But the harvests of the last two years have not come up to the 1984 levels, and now a consensus seems to have been reached among the leaders that the hands-off approach has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Chinese agricultural specialists and economists are arguing that new rural policies are needed to increase grain output. Communist Party officials, meanwhile, contend that peasants are not spending their new income wisely and have failed to develop a proper “socialist spiritual civilization.”

“The question is raised of whether or not prosperity means civilization,” People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, said recently. “After the problem of enough food and clothing is solved, shouldn’t rural life style reform be put on the agenda?”

Higher Output Sought

No one is advocating a return to the Maoist policies of collectivization. The consensus among Chinese leaders seems to be that grain output should be increased through more intensive farming and advanced agricultural techniques. There is talk at high levels, however, of trying to persuade peasant households to work together and to combine their small family plots.

“The peasants should be made to understand this: When one household finds it impossible to fulfill a task, it should unite with other households,” Du Runsheng, head of the Communist Party secretariat’s Rural Policy Research Center, said in an article that appeared recently in the party magazine Red Flag.

Du called on local authorities “to prevent the further carving up of land.”

Any turnabout in rural policies has profound political importance in China, where 80% of the people live in the countryside.

Reforms Pushed

Support from the peasants has been crucial to Deng and his aides as they seek to push the party to accept such reforms as a market-oriented economy and a stripped-down role for the military.

Hu Qili, who heads the party Secretariat, was asked two years ago about the possibility of unrest in the army as a result of Deng’s economic reforms, and he replied: “Most of our army men are of peasant origin. It is these men’s families who first have benefited from the relaxed rural policies. . . . The richer the peasants are, the more the livelihood of army men’s families will improve.”

The changes in the countryside date back to the record harvest of 1984. It was large enough so that in some areas peasants had difficulty selling surplus grain, and they had no place to store it.

Early in 1985, the regime responded by adopting new reforms that abolished many of the previous, state-set procurement quotas for grain and, at the same time, lifted price controls for other farm products, including fruit and vegetables.

Poor 1985 Harvest

The result was that many peasants stopped growing grain and devoted land to more profitable crops. The 1985 grain harvest plummeted to about 379 million tons, and the 1986 crop is estimated at 390 million tons, a figure that Chinese leaders acknowledge is disappointing.

“This year’s (1986) grain output is higher than last year’s but is still lower than expected,” Vice Premier Tian Jiyun told a conference of rural cadres recently.

He said that because of its large population and scarcity of arable land, “China will face a grain shortage, rather than a grain surplus, for a considerable time to come.”

A year ago, China officially blamed the reduced harvest on two factors: a series of natural disasters and a decline of about 4% in the acreage devoted to grain production.

Investment Insufficient

Last year, officials began to acknowledge another factor, one that Western agricultural experts had been discussing for several years: China has not been devoting enough money to agricultural investment, and in many areas the hands-off approach to the countryside has meant that irrigation, storage and other communal facilities have been neglected.

Although there were floods and droughts in China last year, the regime has not tried to blame its problems this time on natural disasters. Vice Premier Tian said in November that “the ability to withstand natural disasters is deplorable” because facilities have been allowed to age and agricultural technology and equipment are poor.

The second straight year of low harvests has also provoked a high-level re-examination of the “household responsibility system”--the policy under which Deng and his aides broke up the communes and let peasants cultivate their own family plots.

Gifts Called Wasteful

The household responsibility system, which dates to 1979, is now being attacked on two fronts. The first criticism is that although peasants have more income, the regime’s laissez faire approach permits them to waste their money in economically unproductive ways--on weddings, funerals and festival gifts, for example.

The Farmers’ Daily reported last fall that the price of a betrothal gift--traditionally given to the bride’s family--in the countryside is now “staggering,” from 2,000 yuan (about $540) up to, in at least one case, 18,000 yuan (more than $4,800).

“It has simply become a curse to the people in the rural community . . . and endangers long-term rural construction,” the newspaper said.

The regime is now conducting a massive nationwide campaign against extravagant weddings and funerals. Rural areas in Cangzhou county in Hebei province have even set up “marriage and funeral councils.”

According to the China Women’s News, these councils have helped divert the equivalent of more than $1 million from weddings and funerals to the purchase of farm tools, fertilizer and livestock. At a national conference in November, rural cadres were exhorted to “learn from the experience in Cangzhou.”

Organization Urged

The other recent criticism of the household responsibility system is that in the long run, it is an inefficient way to increase grain production.

The party newspaper Economic Daily said not long ago that “the limited, household-based operation is not suitable for mechanization.” It suggested that the answer is to begin organizing larger “family and cooperative farms” that can use machinery and scientific farming methods.”

For the moment, Chinese leaders say they will preserve the household responsibility system but will try to raise grain output through the spread of mechanization and agricultural technology.

Officials acknowledge that theoretically there is another way to increase grain harvests--to lift price controls and quotas on grain, just as they have for other farm products, so that the peasants will have the economic incentive to grow as much rice and wheat as possible.

Price Controls Debated

But they admit that this approach is politically unacceptable. In order to lift price controls on grain, China would either have to pay huge subsidies to keep grain prices at their current low levels in the cities or face the prospect of a massive political backlash, and perhaps urban riots, over increased prices for rice and bread.

“If the prices soar to an extent beyond the capacity of the consumers, it will easily lead to social turbulence,” Du, the party’s leading specialist on rural policy, told the conference in November.

The difficulties of the last two years have caused Western analysts to re-examine the common assumption that the reforms fostered by Deng in the countryside have been an unqualified success.

“A couple of years ago, people tended to say, ‘The (economic) battle’s won in the countryside, now let’s move on to the cities,’ ” said one Western diplomat specializing in agriculture. “But they have some very serious problems. Slow growth in agriculture is going to be the norm in China for a long time.”