industrial working class. They are not organized as a workforce and experience institutional discrimination and social exclusion. They remain the most marginalized and impoverished group of workers in China.
Sixty years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rose to power on the strength of the peasantry. The misery of rural life under the corrupt Kuomintang – the Chinese Nationalist Party – and the KMT’s unwillingness to oppose the imperialist powers ensured the revolution’s success. The new Chinese state could begin to carry out its work: to develop and industrialize China with the aim of achieving full socialism.
In that process, the peasantry has been considered an unchangeable social class, one of Mao Zedong’s ‘four blocs of society’ along with workers, the national bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia. This theory of ‘four blocs’, known as New Democracy, bypasses the bourgeois-democratic revolution that classical Marxism holds to be necessary for establishing a working-class majority – the universal class through which a socialist revolution must be achieved. Instead, socialism is instituted directly through a coalition between the four blocs, led by the Party. Once the old ruling powers had been overthrown, the CCP claimed that this coalition had been forged. The bourgeoisie were not abolished, only expected to realign themselves in the interests of the country.
Thus, in revolutionary China, a citizen’s class position was fixed and permanent, no matter what his occupation or relationship to the means of production. Those born as peasants were nongmin on their ID, a status they carried for life, determining their rights and entitlements in society. (For example, peasants are not entitled to pensions.) Movement into the cities was strictly controlled and in effect prohibited via the system of hukou (household registration) set up in 1958. It was impossible for peasants to move their hukou to the cities.
As in Stalinist Russia, national investment during China’s industrialization was focused on building heavy industry and increasing industrial output. The rural population served as a massive backyard production team for the urban one, feeding the cities that were modernizing the ‘Chinese nation’ but agriculture as an industry in itself was neglected. There were no initiatives to develop rural infrastructure or improve life in the countryside, both widely studied and documented by Marxist academics. In the Great Leap Forward of 1958, the collective power of the peasantry was institutionalized as simply a vast resource to help develop industrial China. About 53,000 communes were set up to direct the 700-million-strong rural labour force for national use (remaining in place until 1985, when they were replaced by townships), and local cadres inflated figures to meet unachievable grain production targets set by the state;1 the tragic result was the death of tens of millions of peasants.
After the four years of fierce political power struggles that followed Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping emerged as leader and embarked on gaige kaifang, a process of economic reforms and ‘opening up’ that established ‘special economic zones’ for international investment without state restraints; that is, he opened China up to the forces of global capitalism. Yet the farm remained the backyard of production. Reforms directed at the countryside were still geared toward developing the cities and the country as a whole, under the banner of the ‘four modernizations’, in agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology, which were to transform China into a global economic powerhouse. Increased agricultural production required measures to ‘release the productive forces’, which amounted to decollectivization and commercialization of the rural economy, along with decentralization of national industries. Many communes were disbanded after the Household Responsibility System was established in 1981. Peasants were given limited rights to the use of land through fifteen-year contracts (later, thirty-year contracts), and with the increase in grain prices, production increased.
However, because of poor administration, the amount of land distributed to each household was very limited and fragmented. According to a survey conducted by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture among 7,983 sample villages in 29 provinces in 1986, the arable land allocated per household was only seven mu,2 or little more than an acre, hardly sufficient to feed the average household of more than four people.3 Half of China’s 400 million rural working people became unable to sustain themselves and therefore ‘superfluous’, the government term for off-work, ‘extra’ labour.
The growth in agricultural production lasted only a few years. Long-term state investment in agriculture was lacking; there was no political will to develop the countryside. After 1985, as growth stagnated, rural income began to decline. Class divisions intensified, and inequalities deepened within the villages as peasants suffered from heavy taxation and the corruption of local party bureaucrats, who profited hugely from the increasingly commercialized rural economy. Under these conditions, the 200 million ‘superfluous’ peasants could no longer depend on the land for a living.4 About 100 million of them became workers in newly developing village enterprises, including nonagricultural enterprises. Another 100 million were without work and had to find other ways to survive. They began to move cityward and opened up the restricted rural-to-urban movement, and the authorities allowed this as cheap labour was much sought after now the economic reforms were gathering pace. These people became the new mobile proletariat, going from one city to the next searching for work – from service industries and food to electronics manufacturing to construction. Meanwhile, the per capita income gap between the cities and countryside continued steadily to widen, from a ratio of 2.49 in 1980 to 3.3 in 2009. Rural unemployment also continued to rise.
The millions of unemployed rural migrants were referred to as ‘blind flow’ (mangliu). This derogatory term was coined in the early 1950s, when state media (especially the People’s Daily) began to describe rural to urban migration as ‘blindly leaving the countryside’ and ‘blind penetration’. Mangliu came into wider use in the 1980s and 1990s as migration grew, and has helped to shape urban prejudice against the rural population. But the term also reflects the desperation and directionless movement of the migrants in search of a livelihood. The government tried to control this growing rural migration by directing it abroad. Unemployed former peasants were sent out of the country in a variety of work and construction schemes through national government corporations (with foreign building contracts), local government corporations, and trading companies. Throughout the 1990s, up to 200,000 workers from China’s countryside were recruited and sent abroad in this way, mostly to Asian countries, where they received payment below the local rates and were isolated in their own enclaves. According to the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, the remittances from Chinese migrant workers abroad generated $8 billion for China in 1994.5 But despite the contributions of this diaspora, most of the superfluous rural workers were left in China, travelling internally in search of jobs. Some, from China’s border regions, crossed over with short-term visas that did not permit them to work, in search of better opportunities, but the majority eventually returned to their families back home.
My train was packed with homebound Chinese migrants. Their suitcases and food parcels lined the floor. The mass exodus was largely due to the closure of Moscow’s Cherkizovsky Market, a 400-acre outdoor space where about 100,000 migrants (half of them from China, the rest from Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam and North Korea) sold counterfeit goods – purses, jeans and shoes – out of wooden shacks. My cabin mates, Ah Sheng and his wife, Xiao Ning, both in their late twenties, had run a handbag stall, and now they sat at the foot of another passenger’s bunk, anxious to relate their story.
They’d been in Moscow less than a year, said Ah Sheng. Xiao Ning missed her seven-month-old daughter, who was being looked after by her parents back home. She often asked Ah Sheng when they might be able to return. ‘Soon enough,’ he always said. They had once worked on the land in Changchun, Jilin Province, but Ah Sheng had quit farming and gone to work in a joint-venture car assembly factory in Changchun, earning 1,000 yuan (£91, $145) a month, better than his farming wages but not enough to support his and Xiao Ning’s parents, all retired farmers, who as peasants did not qualify for state pensions and were dependent on their children’s income. Xiao Ning’s relatives in Moscow had told the couple that despite the difficulty of living in a foreign country without speaking the language, money was fairly
