Enforced confinement of farmers may precipitate the fall of the Chinese government

On January 30, 2008, the Chinese government printed a new opinion article concerning Chinese farmers in People's Daily, a newspaper managed by the Communist Party of China. Such an opinion piece is rare and provides direct information on the policies and views of the Party. It stresses the importance of increasing the quality of life for farmers so they will actually farm; as of recent times, many farmers of China are reluctant to do so. Although the Communist Party has promulgated this sentiment, they have not proposed any steps to improve farmer's quality of life.

History of the issue

For nearly four thousand years, the emperors of China realized farmers' crucial importance to the social stability. Those who work in the fields of rural China with traditional tools have always comprised the majority of the Chinese population; currently, two thirds of Chinese citizens are still farmers. When an emperor ignored the farmers, he lost his power. Since 206 BCE, every regime change in China has been caused by farmer revolts - from when Qin Shi Huang (and his terracotta army) came into power up until Mao's communist revolution in 1949.

Since Mao's death and the subsequent "open and reform" policy of the 1980s, China has been transitioning from Mao's communism to the new "market economy," a market system familiarly dubbed as "Chinese socialism." In spite of the progress made in cities, the rural areas of China remain much as they were 50 years ago. Consequently, most of the farmers of China are still poor. As the urban population becomes richer, farmers are actually become poorer. In today's China, to say someone is a farmer almost equivalently signifies that this person is uneducated and poor.

The main restriction on a farmer's freedom comes from the "household registration" system, which dates back about three thousand years to the Zhou Dynasty. A revised system was established in 1958 during the "great leap forward" with the main purpose of prohibiting the migration of people. Every household has been classified as a "rural" or an "urban" household. Furthermore, the only way for farmers to become legally part of the "urban population" is to go to a college in the city; however, they face tough competition because there are unequal quotas for "rural students" and "urban students."

Unlike the urban population, farmers have no minimum wage, no education nor any medical stipend. Most farmers cannot obtain a decent education. After high school (although many of them cannot even afford high school), they either work in the fields or local factories (to produce the cheap goods you see at Wal-Mart), or flee to towns and cities to acquire temporary jobs - such as construction - that are "too menial" for city residents. From the day a farmer is born, he faces heavy discrimination.

The current initiative

The injustice of this policy is clear. Policymakers have been trying to decrease the level of discrimination that the average farmer endures, because a immediate and sustained mass migration from rural areas to cities might damage the local rural communities and therefore destroy the economy, the current hierarchical system is difficult to change. In order to alleviate this problem, some villages are testing local self-governance and migration limits are gradually being lifted.

Another major problem for the rural population is their lack of financial capital. Farmers do not own any land, so they cannot mortgage, rent nor sell their land. They also have little financial credibility; hence, borrowing, and thereby increasing productivity is unfortunately unlikely.

The question of whether land should be privatized is a hot debate in China, and the government's take on this problem is unclear. Currently, the government must approve every real estate transaction; the selling of farmland is under the strict control of the local government. The government is in fact deciding the fate of people's lands - often farmers will lose their land with hardly any compensation, for most of the money paid for the land is snatched by village officials. Most of these land buyouts are for factories and include the condition of hiring local laborers. Ironically, the people who buy the land often employ those farmers who lose it.

The third pertinent problem faced by Chinese farmers is the lack of basic facilities in rural areas. Many Chinese villages do not have roads. Most schools and hospitals are in poor conditions and the standard of living is almost identical to that of their ancestors generations ago. Such deficiency is a direct result of the government's policy of concentrating on developing industry. The government focuses its resources on cities with large industrial output, while the countryside - with its little productivity - is neglected. Of course, farmers would prefer to live in the better-maintained cities, but their movement is regulated by the household registration policy, which forces them to remain in neglected villages.

The solution to all of these problems calls for the removal of the centrally planned economy. All three aforementioned problems are in fact the result of the prohibition of the free flow of capital and labor. The Chinese government realizes that trapping farmers within the countryside is not a smart way to maintain their happiness. The emerging question is how reforms should be paced. If initiatives are implemented to quickly, China may lose too much of its huge farming population; if changes occur too slowly, farmers will lose faith in the government. The Chinese government must act wisely, because the fate of 900 million farmers will affect not only the magnitude of gubernatorial political power, but also potentially the life of every human citizen of the world.