Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
service examination system, were also often bribed by unscrupulous
businessmen and shady underworld figures involved in prostitution
and gambling. Party members in the People's Republic of China today,
who play and fill many of the roles and functions that the gentry did
in late imperial times, also have more or less the same opportunities
for accruing ill-gotten gain. And they, like Qing gentry, need to know
how to keep things from boiling over and coming to Beijing's attention.
B. Turmoil in the Countryside
The benefits of China's breakneck economic growth are by no means
shared by everyone in China. Eastern and southern coastal areas reap
a highly disproportionate share of China's newfound wealth, while
many hinterland provinces lag behind. Standards of living in China's
major cities are far ahead of almost all rural areas in the country. The
CIA estimates that there is a fluid and mobile population of about
200 million rural laborers and their dependents wandering around
China seeking employment and opportunity in large cities. In spite of
the contributions these laborers make to China's economy, they are
widely exploited and mistreated. During the Olympics, Beijing shooed
them out of the central parts of the city in order to present a more
pleasant urban face to the outside world and its cameras. Peasants in
the countryside and rural laborers in the cities are increasingly angry,
and they are speaking up and protesting.
A lengthy report on the lives of peasants in Anhui province entitled
“Investigations into the Chinese Peasantry” (Zhongguo nongmin diao-
cha) was published in a magazine in China in 2003, and the issue
quickly sold out. The report spread like wildfire and made its way
onto websites throughout China before it was finally published in
topic form in December of that year by the prestigious People's Litera-
ture Publishing House. The first printing of 100,000 copies sold out
within a month, and the topic proved so infuriating to so many people
in China that Beijing simply banned it as of March 2004, yanking the
topic from the shelves of bookstores.
This topic, which has been translated into English as Will the Boat
Sink the Water?, paints a bleak picture of the lives of peasants in Anhui
and how they suffer at the hands of cruel, vindictive local officials and
cadres who care nothing for their well-being and exploit them. The
topic's first chapter, entitled “The Martyr,” is about how one peasant,
Ding Zuoming, was murdered for daring to expose corruption and
oppression in his village. After he complained about the corruption
