logobossshoppe

China hands don't like to miss the next big thing. These days many foreign Sinologists are consumed by speculation that the Chinese Communist Party is on its last legs. The hard times in the Chinese countryside will get harder, so the theory goes, which will lead to a peasant rebellion, and the party--swept up in the chaos of revolution--will go the way of past dynasties. It's true that conditions in much of China's countryside are poor--and getting worse. But, as a former Chinese official familiar with the rural heartland, I don't think revolution is in the air.Make no mistake: rural China faces a crisis. Today the amount of money that farmers have left after paying taxes and local fees is not enough to purchase seeds and fertilizer for the next planting. Farm incomes have shrunk, while production costs have skyrocketed. The countryside's basic infrastructure is a shambles, with education, health care and other public services existing in name only. Whereas 85 percent of rural children attended high school in the early 1980s, now the same percentage drop out during the first nine years of school. In the past the critically ill died in hospitals; today they die at home. Small-scale farms are failing, and they are pulling down millions of Chinese peasants with them.Part of the problem is that the weight of the state rests more heavily on the countryside. China's farmers fork over almost three times the taxes paid by people in the nation's bustling urban centers. And Beijing often seems oblivious as to the best way to address this mounting crisis. What funding has been funneled to the countryside usually gets devoured by local officials, never reaching the people who need it most.But Beijing need not fear a peasant army storming the gates. First, who would lead the revolution? In imperial China, rural society was governed by scholar-officials. When the people's interests were trampled on, it was these elites who would spearhead a rebellion. Today, however, the countryside's best and brightest have already moved to the cities. Peasants still talk about Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, the famed leaders of China's first widespread peasant rebellion, in 209 B.C. But today's Chen or Wu is living along China's booming eastern seaboard, building new, modern skylines.What is also seldom appreciated by foreign China experts is that the peasants--for all their trials and heartaches--don't even blame the party. Unlike 100 years ago, today most farmers believe that the state is fundamentally good and, if given enough time, will be able to solve the problems facing rural China. If peasants point their fingers at anyone, it is at local officials or a handful of corrupt cadres who they believe--probably rightly--are on the take. But by and large the party still has the people's faith and support.The countryside, however, is Beijing's No. 1 headache. The nightmare scenario for the party would be if the rural crisis were somehow to migrate to the cities. Think about it in terms of numbers: China has more than 900 million peasants, and this number climbs each year by about 11 million. Although the rural work force numbers more than 450 million, 100 million farmers are all that is necessary to meet the countryside's labor needs. If the living standards in rural areas do not improve soon, the cities could collapse under an avalanche of migrating farmhands. Today about 8 million folks from the countryside drift into China's cities every year. It is not farfetched to imagine that number at 30 million, 50 million, or more. Although raising the quality of life for China's peasantry is usually considered an economic problem, I believe it could become Beijing's most pressing political challenge.Prime Minister Zhu Rongji says the thing he thinks about night and day is how to save China's farmers. But since the prime minister is also preparing to retire from public life, let's hope he's not the only Chinese leader wise enough to see the next big thing.