Back to ‘youth farms’ for China’s unemployed

Press, 27 August 1979, Page 16

Back to ‘youth farms’ for China’s unemployed

By 1

DENNIS BLOODWORTH

in Singapore

Faced with mounting pressure to provide work in monstrously overcrowded cities, Peking’s leaders are risking renewed unrest, possibly even violence, by reimposing Mao’s detested policy whereby millions of educated youths were obliged to “volunteer” to go “down to the country” and labour indefinitely on China’s farms and frontiers. In 1957 Mao, offended by the urban intellectual’s ignorance of the rude realities of the pigsty and anxious to reverse the “blind flow” of jobseekers from the villages to the towns, called for an exodus which, by 1976, had some 17 million young and no-longer-so-young’ Chinese toiling among the peasantry in distant “people’:s communes.” Some settled down, but often the exiles found themselves overworked and underpaid, hungry and homesick, and resented by hosts who regarded them as useless layabouts. Many slipped back to their familiar city streets, where their illegal status as “black” non-residents without jobs or ration cards forced them into crime, prostitution and the black market. At the end of last year the Government, keen to mobilise educated manpower, promised to phase out the system, and a national conference ruled that the migration should stop. But it did not say when. In consequence, there were ominous demonstrations, and in February thousands of impatient “rusticated” youths who had returned home to Shanghai for Chinese New Year went on the rampage, smashing trains and disrupting rail traffic, refusing to leave and demanding work in a conurbation already

bulging with people out of work. But, given 20 million unemployed — most of them in towns that account for fewer than 200 million of the total population — the Government has reversed its decision. The official press last week confirmed earlier hints from senior party cadres that the “down to the country” movement must continue. To avoid “overburdening” the farming communes with unskilled labour, young people leaving school would in future be despatched to border areas, where “large tracts of arable land are waiting to be opened up,” or to State-run ranches, fisheries and special “youth farms.” In Manchuria all truants in towns have been ordered back at once to their rural labours, and city authorities have been banned from giving even temporary jobs to school-leavers. Shanghai has “persuaded” its absentees to return to work in the mines of north-west China. An enforced exodus is not Peking’s only answer to the problem. Solutions range from exporting labour (China has just contracted to supply workers to an Italian engineering concern), to a system whereby fathers can retire early to yield their jobs to their sons, receiving a housing grant if they then move out into the country altogether. The Government is planning to reduce the daunting unemployment figures by finding work for 7,500,000 by the end of this year, opening up opportunities for them to form “collectively owned enterprises” in “commerce and service trades.” A Peking economist has recommended that they should be “permitted to form their own little

co-operatives” and that “individual labour” should not be entirely abolished.

Strip away the jargon, and a pattern familiar to the West emerges. Urban “collectively owned enterprises” are profitsharing partnerships, and “individual labour” means a man in business for himself. At Shenyang railway station in Manchuria, an enthusiastic team of 400 school graduates, organised to carry luggage and sell hot tea and cold drinks, has already shown the way by accumulating about $30,000 in five months, while paying a basic factory wage to each member. The new enterprises are “superior to those run by the State because they are flexible and efficient,” the "People’s Daily” coolly remarks. Moreover, adds a Communist commentator elsewhere, what one may now look forward to are “the little conveniences and services Chinese cities like Peking used to enjoy” — the night snack stalls that appeared in the streets after the stores closed, the door-to-door knifesharpener, the mobile vegetable and fruit vans. Much of this sounds ideologically profane, but there is no explosion of righteous wrath. The enterprising young are already exploiting the opportunities for private gain presented by the tourists, and there are 34 mobile teams of photographers in Peking alone — including a group of seven which makes nearly $lOOO a month. At the other end of the scale, a syndicate of former capitalists in Shanghai, who were recently redeemed as patriotic “national bourgeoisie” and had their confiscated assets returned to them, have set up a profitable construction company after raising money from subscribers. — 0.F.N.5., Copyright.