A capitalist market in a Communist country

Press, 27 February 1986, Page 13

A capitalist market in a Communist country

By

JONATHAN MIRSKY

While China’s academicians split ideological hairs about the nature of ownership in an increasingly profit-oriented socialist system, the peasants are buying and selling land, sometimes to party officials. China’s constitution states the theoretical position clearly: the means of production — land, herds, ponds, much equipment, most factories — belongs to “the people.” All of them, as small groups, families, and individuals may have land for their sole use for 15 to 30 years. Land, it is stipulated, may not be sold, leased, or loaned, nor may individually contracted holdings be occupied by houses or graves, or even dug up to manufacture bricks.

But since 1979, when the Responsibility System first allocated contract land for individual use, a practice which has now spread to virtually 100 per cent of rural China, peasants have increasingly leased out their land, bequeathed it to their children, and built houses on it.

Now, according to the "Peasant Daily,” they are not only briskly buying and selling, they are even involving party and other officials in the sales, in the pre-Communist role of drafters of contracts and middlemen, and even as buyers. Oldfashioned rituals are reappearing, complete with witnesses, initialling ceremonies and banquets provided by the buyer. - “In short,” reports a shocked “Peasant Daily,” “land under public ownership has been dealt with as a privately owned commodity.” • What is worse, “those with dignified names” — officials — are Involved. Rather lamely, in a country where smugglers of antiques can be executed, the paper insists only that something must be done to “resolutely stop these practices.” In the meantime, the academic debate about ownership is lively but inconclusive, inevitable when theory and practice so clearly.

conflict. Throughout China officials concede privately that rural fury would erupt when land leases expire in 15 to 30 years if the Government reclaimed land on which peasants had expended labour and money. Two of the scholars wrestling with this thorny ideological and practical issue have recently suggested in the “Economic Daily” that in the present rapidly changing economic situation it will be necessary, too, to reform notions of land ownership. Socialist coun--tries clinging to received ideological wisdom on ownership, the experts concede, have experienced setbacks. “Ownership by the whole people, collective ownership, and individual ownership are no longer separate from one another?’ The academics would have received heavy punishment in Mao’s day for noting with approval that there has already emerged “a form of private economy which is capitalist to a certain degree,” for suggesting that 10 per cent of the economy could accommodate such enterprises, and that the authorities should signal this to the people. China’s peasants, of course, have already made this assumption. They recognise that apart from a few bleats of disapproval, such as the one in “Peasant Daily,” the party is unlikely to disturb land ownership in practice which so clearly enriches many peasants, even if it leaves others poor. There remain party members who believe that giving way on the question of land ownership strikes at the most fundamental accomplishments of the revolution. Such purists view with horror rural officials who condone .buying and selling the. means Of production and, worse still, An-, dulge in it themselves. If there is a reversal of Deng’s policies, which are already under attack, this will be treated as an ideological sin. (Copyright London Observer Service.)