There is no doubt that the government is focusing on raising internal demand and cash flow, especially in the countryside.

During a recent trip to the Sichuan countryside in the Daba mountains me and my colleague were approached by a few local governmental officials. They asked us to assist them with implementing a microlending project for rural women in their county. They were following government directives, they said, to improve the rural economy by encouraging a potential but unused labor force (the women) to go into business.

However, they immediately lost interest when we explained how the innovative model of direct lending through the internet (Kiva or Wokai) worked. They knew that the government would definitely lose to much control if they allowed such direct contacts between lender and entrepreneurs. They were not even interested in the details of the scheme.

It will be interesting to observe how the Chinese government will handle greater enterpreneurical freedom in the countryside without losing political control. Will they dare to give up some of their preoccupation with control?

It‘s not often that I find a positive development concerning the living standards of Chinese farmers. But this time I found something very interesting. Traveling to Inner Mongolia in April I visited a farmers’ association which is not completely organized by the Communist Party. It is the “Potato Association” in the Inner Mongolian County of Wulate Middle Banner. What is so special about it?

Farmers in that area usually sell their potatoes to a factory through a middleman who arranges everything concerning the business transactions between the farmers and the factory. In the past, this middleman was able to lower the prices of potatoes immensely by negotiating with farmers individually. This has changed when the farmers, encouraged by an NGO, decided to form an association which fixes prices for their members. A middleman cannot lower the prices any more at will because farmers cooperate in the negotiating process.

The head of the association is elected (!) by the farmers. Moreover, farmers in that village are not forced to join the association, which is usually the case with groups in rural China. Farmers can decide by themselves if they want to join or not. In China, this is indeed unusual.

Many farmers have in fact joined because they profit greatly in many ways. The situation in that village actually reminded me of the old song: El pueblo unido jamás será vencido (“The people united will never be defeated”).

Now, the farmers get a better price for their potatoes. They have opened up in other ways, for example they founded a performing arts group where they preserve traditional music and dances (picture above). They have plans to do the food-processing themselves by opening a potato chip factory thus making more profits.

And all of this was not initiated nor is it run by the Communist Party which usually controls everything. I was greatly impressed. Hopefully, this development will continue.

When receptive officials, for instance, champion popular demands to execute laws and policies that have been ignored elsewhere in the hierarchy, unexpected alliances often emerge and simple dominant-subordinate distinctions break down. On these occasions, popular resistance operates partly within (yet in tension with) official norms; it depends on a degree of accommodation with a structure of power, the deft use of prevailing cultural conventions, and an affirmation – sometimes sincere, sometimes strategic – of existing channels of inclusion.

Some of the findings:

• Up to 300 million people are drinking contaminated water every day
• 190 million people are suffering from water-related illnesses each year
• One third of the length of all China’s rivers, 75% of its major lakes and 25% of all its coastal waters are highly polluted
• Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhoea due to polluted water each year
• Nearly 70% of the rural population has no access to safe sanitation
• An estimated 27% of the landmass of China is becoming desertified

The Guardian: Dust, waste and dirty water: the deadly price of China’s miracle.

Dozens of officials will be punished by Communist Party discipline commissions but their cases will not go to court. So much for “rule of law” in China.

Although the central government has tried to strictly control any reporting related to the slave labour scandal, the news that hardly anybody will be prosecuted has led to an outburst of criticism among victims and on the internet.

Howard W. French in the New York Times: Beijing’s Lack of Penalties in Labor Cases Stirs Outrage.

China Herald: Contaminated imports from the US and Europe.

The mainland has witnessed an increase in violence in recent years as aggrieved parties seek justice by taking matters into their own hands.

(South China Morning Post, 5 July 2007: Revenge attacks and poor safety measures kill hundreds of people each year.)

This is one of the results of a dysfunctional judicial system.

More from the same article:

Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang told a national conference on rural law and order yesterday that local cadres must try their utmost to defuse social crises and mediate disputes so that rural residents “would have no grudges and live happily and contentedly”. [...] Specifically, cadres would be asked to report on fugitives who were on the run, local triads, criminal gangs who engaged in human trafficking and the abduction of women and children.

That’s nice for a start, isn’t it. Why not ask cadres to report on criminals? I mean, how could cadres know they should do this if they’re not asked?

The conference highlighted the leadership’s fears that chaos and crime could erupt in rural areas where police control is weak.

Beijing engineered the removal of nearly a third of a World Bank report on pollution in China because of concerns that findings on premature deaths could provoke “social unrest”.

This is what Richard McGregor writes in the Financial Times, 2 July 2007: 750,000 a year killed by Chinese pollution.

Why exactly was this information excised from the published World Bank Report? Because “it was, in the words of an adviser involved in the study, ‘too sensitive and could cause social unrest’”, as reported in a Financial Times editorial? Or “because of concerns that the methodology was unreliable” – because the information “could cause misunderstanding” – because publishing it would have made the report “too thick”? (The article by Richard McGregor quotes Guo Xiaomin, a retired State Environment Protection Agency official who co-ordinated the Chinese research team for the report, as saying these 3 things.)

EastSouthWestNorth/Zonaeuropa, not surprisingly, has a lot of interesting things to say about the numbers:

You cannot compare the mortality rates of the present China against a China without pollution. The latter does not exist objectively. Therefore, you have to make some assumptions (e.g. compare mortality rates in high pollution cities versus low pollution ones), but these assumptions are tenuous. For example, the high pollution cities are the economically developed urban agglomerations while the lower pollution cities are economically undeveloped cities in the backlands. Are you sure that they would have the same mortality rates if pollution does not exist? Have you thought about the impact due to differences in income, diet, nutrition, health care services, etc?

It is thus fairly well possible that there were problems with the methodology – and that publishing those numbers would have caused “misunderstanding”. You have to wonder, though, if misunderstanding was prevented by not publishing them; more importantly, you have to wonder what kind of misunderstanding including them in the report would have caused. Does anybody think that pollution is not a serious problem in China? Does anybody think that it is not detrimental to the health of lots of Chinese people?

Moreover, the numbers have been published, even though not as part of that World Bank report; and the World Bank seems to be planning to release the complete findings of their study “soon”.

Apart from this, the published report does state that “the total cost of air and water pollution in China is about 5.8 percent of GDP” and that “China’s poor are disproportionately affected by the environmental health burden”. In this context, is the “750,000 deaths” estimate really more than a detail? And how much sense does it make for the international press (cf. links in the EastSouthWestNorth article) to focus on this instead on what has been published in the report?

Qinghai is a Chinese province often overlooked because its famous neighbors Tibet, Sichuan and Xinjiang draw most of the attention. This is a pity since the high plateau around Qinghai Lake with an average elevation of 3000 meters above sea level, boasts some of the most beautiful landscapes and cultural treasures of China.

Coming from Hong Kong on a visit to several rural development projects in the area, I was stunned by the scenery and almost perplexed by the clearness of the air. “Working here,” my friend Li Xue and I told our colleagues from Qinghai, “must be wonderful”. On the contrary, the driver of our minivan said. He and his two colleagues from a local development aid department, who accompanied us during the trip, had become numb and indifferent to the landscape. After years of driving from one poor mountain village to the next, 260 days a year, trying to help the peasants and herdsmen who are struggling to survive, things have become less romantic.

There is a common saying among people from Qinghai that the province is so poor, they didn’t even get SARS. Having met many farmers and nomads living in the southern reaches of Qinghai Lake, I was ready to believe this was true. The poorer people among the rural population earn less than 700 yuan (about €70) per person annually.

Somewhere in the high grasslands of the Amne Machin Mountain Range, the delegates of a Tibetan village met us for a talk on development work in their village. The meeting took place in a tent commonly used as the official gathering point for all the villagers, who live quite far apart from each other on the lower mountain slopes. Light rain was falling outside and the red flower pattern of the tarpaulin tinted everyone present in a rosy color. It gave even the fiercest looking herdsman with long hair and flashing eyes a friendly air. People, in fact, were affable and the atmosphere laden with curiosity on both sides.

Tibetans in this high altitude make a living by raising yaks and goats. The women rise at 4:30 in the morning to milk the cows until the men go off with the animals to the grazing places. Not everybody has enough animals to make a living. Besides, overgrazing and the intrusion of rodents into the pasture soil have put the grassland in constant jeopardy of extinction, giving way to desert sands. The poorer families earn some extra money by making bricks or searching for Chinese medical herbs on remote mountain slopes. Life is hard where snow falls in every season.

Some time ago, my aid agency provided the villagers with solar panels. These devices were made to generate and store enough electric energy to power a light bulb for a week or a TV for three days. Li Xue and I were curious to see how electricity had changed people’s lives. Surprisingly, it was the TV that made the biggest difference to them. “Before,” said one of the men, “we thought that everybody in the world lived like us. Now we know, people out there live a very different life”.

In order to be able to watch TV the people from the village would rather do without the light from a naked light bulb for several nights than miss the entertainment. But watching TV was more than just fun for them. From the TV program they learned that life can be better, easier, more comfortable and more interesting than their’s. And change is what they wanted.

I, who grew up acquiring an unfavorable attitude towards rampant economic growth in general and watching TV uncritically in particular, felt uncomfortable while listening to the views of the Tibetan villagers on modernization. Shouldn’t they rather cherish a life of no pollution and reliable social structures? But Li Xue reminded me of a Buddhist story: “Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream. One said to the other, ‘I wish I were a fish. They are so happy.’ The other replied, ‘How do you know whether fish are happy or not? You’re not a fish.’ The first said, ‘But you are not me, so how do you know whether or not I know how fish feel?’”

Modernization is in fact making many inroads into the Tibetan culture. Those families who were better off came to prefer motorcycles to horses when tending their livestock or going into town. Why, I asked, would a machine, consuming expensive fuel and emitting contaminated exhaust fumes be better than a friendly animal? This was, of course, a strange question to them. Motorcycles, people assured me, would not get sick or tired. They would not eat the precious grass needed for yaks and goats. Besides, I was told, Qinghai was so vast and people were so few that air pollution would never become a real problem here.

This I doubted, remembering the smoldering factories at the capital Xining veiling the city in a haze of smog that slowly drifted into the mountains around. Do the people of the grassland really want this? Looking at it from a certain viewpoint: yes. There can be no uncertainty about the fact that Tibetan herdsmen want and ought to have their share of modernization, which makes their lives more comfortable and gives them access to the world outside. So, some villagers now dream of owning a car in the future, protecting them from the biting winds when they have to travel during the long Qinghai winter.

While we were still chatting and waiting for the drizzle outside to end, the ingredients of a traditional Tibetan meal were brought in: mutton, bread, zampas and yak-milk yoghurt. A three year old girl in a traditional purple silk robe kept reaching for my small MP3 recorder on the table, strong adult arms prevented her each time from taking away this alluring device, which seemed to have come from another world. How long, I wondered, will this girl still live in the ways of her ancestors? Her parents, at least, wanted a different life for her. All of the villagers we asked said that they were dreaming of a life in the cities. They hoped that their children could go to school and would not have to continue with the harsh lives of their parents: “eating the wind and drinking the rain”. Who am I to judge?

Regarding the kidnapping of about 1,000 children in Shanxi province, the Chinese central government has announced a policy, not on how to punish the ruthless kiln owners and the perfunctory local officials and police, but on how to censor the related news and save the face of the party and the government.

China Digital Times has published a translation of a notice released by one of the government’s main propaganda offices.

Local media have been banned from publishing their own report, they can only use what Xinhua (the so-called “news agency”) provides, according to Fons Tuinstra over at China Herald. The Party-Which-Is-Always-Right has obviously decided that those behind the slave trade are the bad guys and should be punished severely.

It is obvious, however, that high-ranking local Communist cadres have been involved in the whole thing for years; and it’s very unlikely that the central government found out only recently about widespread slavery in China.

Western media seem happy to oblige and tell their audiences that “the Chinese government” is now cracking down on private entrepreneurs and local Communist cadres who have been found not to adhere to ethical standards. The police is described as hunting down the slaveholders – and the fact that this police has looked the other way for years and is generally acting on orders from the Communist Party isn’t mentioned in a single sentence.