‘Crab basket’

Press, 14 March 1984, Page 17

‘Crab basket’

China’s economy is “like a basket of crabs,” in which one small movement can affect everything. China’s leaders are using homely images such as this to drive home to officials that they must obey in detail the economic policies on which the country’s hopes for modernisation depend. The basket of crabs simile appears in a recent Party document demanding total co-operation in economic policies which, had they been advocated while Chairmam Mao was still alive, would have attracted charges of revisionism and counter-revolution. But individual enterprise is now the rage, particularly in the countryside, where peasants are being pressed to “get rich” by going down what used to be called “the capitalist road.” The basic policy, which has now reached 90 per cent of China’s 800 million peasants, is the Responsibility System, which permits individual families or small groups to agree individual production quotas with the State, and sell any surplus privately. Central Committee Document 1984 Number One, which is being discussed in every province in China, is designed to reassure peasants, who are now producing as much on their own as entire “brigades” did three or four years ago, that there will be no Maoist backlash. During the last three years some peasants, whose incomes have soared, have been criticised by local officials, and sometimes punished, for departing from the communal ideal of “everyone eating from the same pot.” Central Committee Number One, therefore, starts with “one unchangeable.” This is a guarantee that the Responsibility System will remain undisturbed, and that peasants can be certain that the essentially private land, orchards, ponds, or gardens on which they now rely, will be theirs for more than 15 years. To many Maoist, or “Leftists” as the Party’s code carefully puts it, this will sound perilously close tov the return to landowning, thd*

ultimate counter-revolutionary heresy. “Leftists” will be rattled as well by the third item in Central Committee Number One, which states that it is permitted for peasants to employ agricultural workers for wages during the busy seasons. In Party attacks on the old society, landless labourers were identified as the most exploited group in China. The Party is conceding in a series of speeches, broadcasts, and publications that not only is the communal vision a dead duck, but that the reason some peasants get rich faster than others is not that they are stronger or more industrious, but because they are cleverer, better-educated, or, most tellingly, have held administrative responsibility. Vice-Premier Wan Li tried to put a brave face on this in a r .cent speech. “It is all just a question of some people becoming well off before others, and cannot be exploitation.” Wan Li was depending on the Party’s contention that since classes have been abolished, exploitation, too, cannot exist. The voice of the Party, “People’s Daily,” made clear recently that China is depending on agriculture to fuel national productivity, which is intended to quadruple by the year 2000. Neither “Leftists,” the habit-ridden, nor the slothful will be allowed to get in the way, the paper declared. But in the economic crab-basket, it is not merely those with wrong ideas who provoke troublesome tremors. Rural officials now find themselves poorer than the peasants they have overseen for many years. An official who makes ?25 a month may buy his vegetables from a rich farmer making ten or twenty times more, who is watching his portable TV between customers. Some exasperated local officials have been shot recently for cornering the commodity market, speculation and misusing scarce transportation for private gain. This, “People’s Daily” underlines, is “getting rich in the wrong way.” (Copyright London Observer Service).