Product Description

The Chinese Economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the fifteenth century.

Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi undertook a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants in one of the poorest provinces, Anhui, asking the question: have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors? The result is a brilliant narrative of life among the poor, a vivid portrait of the petty dictators that run China's villages and counties, and the consequences of their bullying despotism on the people they administer.

Told principally through four dramatic narratives, Will the Boat Sink the Water? gives voice to the unheard masses and looks beneath the gloss of the new China to find the truth about its vast population of rural poor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #722254 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-23
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
What's most surprising about this exposé of the Chinese government's brutal treatment of the peasantry is not that it was banned in China, but that it got past the censors in the first place. The authors—a husband and wife team who have received major awards—recount how, in the poor province of Anhui, greedy local officials impose illegal taxes on the already impoverished peasantry and cover their tracks through double-bookkeeping. Outraged peasants risk their freedom and sometimes their lives by complaining up the command chain or making the long and costly trip to Beijing, but for the most part the central government's proclamations against excessive taxation don't effectively filter back to the local level. The authors criticize the central government for its own heavy taxation and underrepresentation of the peasantry, though in much more measured tones than they fault the local officials. "Could it be that our system itself is a toxic pool and whoever enters is poisoned by it?" they ask. As Westerners look toward China as the world's next superpower, this book is a reminder that the country's 900 million peasants often get lost in the glitter of Shanghai's Tiffany's. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
"A revolution is not a dinner party," Mao Zedong wrote back in 1927, in a famous report on the condition of peasants in China's Hunan province. Eight decades later, two Chinese journalists have shown that the Chinese revolution is, in fact, a dinner party -- one that rural Communist Party chiefs are enjoying at the expense of China's peasants.

To explore how the bulk of China's population, which lives in rural areas, has been faring during the country's miraculous spurt of economic growth, the husband-and-wife team of Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi traveled to 50 villages in Wu's impoverished home province of Anhui. The answer: not well. Local Communist Party chiefs have been enriching themselves by raiding village treasuries and imposing all sorts of taxes on rural Chinese, who still make up two-thirds of China's population. Citizens protest at their own peril; those who challenge local officials risk arrest or physical attack.

Scant surprise, then, that this exposé created a sensation in China. It sold an estimated 150,000 copies, plus 10 million more in black-market editions (at least according to its U.S. publisher). You might expect the government to have been galvanized into action by such a book, and it was, after a fashion. After initially allowing circulation of the book, Beijing recognized the volume's explosive impact, changed gears and banned it, thus continuing a tradition of pretending problems don't exist or blaming them on the messengers.

Yet the crisis in China's countryside is real, and Chen and Wu's superb shoe-leather reporting puts real faces to it. They introduce martyrs such as Ding Zuoming. Inspired in 1993 by the party's new policies limiting agricultural taxes to no more than 5 percent of a person's income from the previous year, Ding noted that people in his village were paying five times that limit. He challenged the village party boss over such exploitation, but got nowhere and appealed to higher-level party officials. He was then summoned to the local security office, where he was beaten to death.

The book also describes villains such as Zhang Guiquan, a deputy village chief who organized the murder of the members of an audit committee, and Gao Xuewen, who ordered the arrest of more than half of the 100 people in his village. They had protested when he struck an elderly woman who had questioned the government's double taxation of her house.

The problems of corruption and exploitation extend beyond these local tyrants, encompassing township, county and provincial officials who are too frightened, lazy or corrupt to do anything about them. As the Chinese saying goes, "Heaven is high and the emperor far away." The villagers of Anhui have been encouraged to question local authority by Beijing's pronouncements about rooting out corruption and pursuing grievances through the courts. But enlisting Beijing's help against a corrupt local party apparatus is difficult -- and in the meantime, the peasants remain vulnerable to retribution from vengeful local officials.

The plight of China's peasants isn't new, of course. They have never fared well, despite Mao's rhetoric about their centrality to his theory of revolution. The communist leader's "Great Leap Forward" (as his disastrous economic program of the late 1950s and early '60s was known) sapped the countryside of capital and even of farm implements for the sake of greater industrial production; it caused a famine that took the lives of an estimated 30 million Chinese. Later, the Cultural Revolution saddled peasants with people from the cities, whom the regime sent "down" to the countryside to learn new, proper values. And the current era of economic reform has layered on new rural bureaucrats and taxes while booming cities such as Shenzhen prosper.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao claim to be worried about inequality between China's wealthy coastal areas and its largely rural interior provinces. In March, Wen said rural taxes would be eliminated and promised that spending on rural areas would rise. If Hu and Wen really wanted to stop corruption from stifling growth in the countryside, they'd assign this book to party cadres instead of banning it.

Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
China's 900 million peasants continue to toil under a feudalistic system even as the nation enjoys economic prosperity built, in part, at their expense. The authors, husband-and-wife Chinese journalists, spent three years in Wu's home province of Anhui to uncover the poverty of peasants betrayed by Mao's revolution and bullied by petty bureaucrats, their labor exploited and their voices stifled. This expose was banned by the Chinese government, and the journalists were sued for libel by government officials. Drawing on interviews with villagers, the authors offer intimate portraits of the struggles of peasants that read with the ease and familiarity of stories but carry the urgency of news reports of lives about which little has been written. A local peasant who complains of taxing and accounting irregularities that rob the village is killed; peasants resist a corrupt deputy village chief who appropriates their land and public funds. Readers interested in the unseen and unreported lives of Chinese peasants will appreciate this revealing book. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

"The Revolution is a Dinner Party"

John Pomfret writes in his introduction to this book that when he was in college in the late 1970s, professors taught that the Chinese Communist Party "truly represented the wishes of China's dispossessed" and one quoted Mao's saying that "A revolution is not a dinner party." Chinese reporters Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao document the plight of the peasants in their country, showing Pomfret and anyone else who dares to read their expose how corruption, excessive taxation, miscarriages of justice, too many layers of bureaucracy, and unchecked industrial pollution oppress and threaten the very existence of China's poorest.

China is no worker's paradise. The rural population is basically an unprivileged underclass -- a class of serfs -- that the government squeezes mercilessly. Despite declarations from the top Chinese Communist rulers that peasants should not be pay more than 5% of their annual income in taxes, 19% is closer to the truth. For a subsistence population, such heavy taxation (often in the form of ill-defined, sometimes illegal, fees and fines) is more than they can bear. Yet, their appeals for relief to various levels of their government generally result only in the status quo retained.

A sizable portion of the book relates journalistic investigations into specific several cases of murder of peasants by village or township officials. The petty officials became enraged to the point of doing or ordering bodily violence against peasants because the fed-up farmers were taking public steps to expose their (the officials') corruption.

Then, the authors cite some of the recent policies of the Chinese central government that have increased the sufferings of the peasants. Examples include increasing the layers of local governance, commanding villages to invest in industrial enterprises that are not sustainable and that force them into mountains of debt, and permitting giant gobs of industrial pollutants to turn black rivers peasants must use for bathing and drinking water.

"Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China's Peasants" does feature portraits of good, conscientious officials who put the welfare of their villages or regions ahead of their own advancement. But the Chinese Communist system does not ordinarily promote such people. The Party is more interested in keeping the peasants in their place, and it promotes those officials who inflate the agricultural yields and other economic "successes" of their locality and who deliver their assessed taxes in full.

This revealing look at China at the grassroots level should be read by everyone who has read glowing reports of the progressive, sweeping economic and social strides allegedly remaking the most populous nation on earth. There *is* a dinner party going on: the Chinese peasants are being feasted upon by their cadres, village heads, and Party watchdogs.

This English translation of the book now banned in China is very highly recommended.

Critical information for the serious China hand
I agree with John Pomfret, who concludes that this is one of the most important books to come out of China in a long time. I am a China specialist who regularly spends time in both urban and impoverished rural areas of China. This book provides excellent anecdotal examples of some of the sacrifices that China is making to modernize. These sacrifices are manifesting themselves in many ways: displaced workers, lost arable land and displaced farmers, corruption, increasing urban-rural income gap, etc. The book was originally published in China under the title _Zhongguo nongmin diaocha_ (An Investigation of Chinese Peasants). The book has since been banned in China. This translation will seem somewhat "foreign" to the non-Chinese speaker, but it is accurate and reflects the original language.

China's peasants are still suffering.
Forget the title, this is an interesting expose on the Chinese peasant. These 900 million people toil in the backwaters of rural China, and were instrumental in getting their country industrialized. They also helped the country sustain itself following the Great Leap Forward (or backward in reality) and the Cultural Revolution. These people spend countless hours in backbreaking labor only to have party cadres unfairly tax them beyond their means. This book by a husband and wife team examines stories about their home province and show the corruption of village and party administration. China may be a coming superpower, but it better solve these problems before the people throw the rascals out.

I found this a very informative read. It starts out slow, but this is an intensely interesting book about the unfair lives led by millions of Chinese peasants and the people that are supposed to protect them-the party and village government hacks.