china article

[montoya 0]

Does not paint a pretty picture of China's countryside:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/international/01CHIN.html?hp

 

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Amid China's Boom, No Helping Hand for Young Qingming

By JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY

 

Published: August 1, 2004

 

 

PUJIA, China — His dying debt was $80. Had he been among China's urban elite, Zheng Qingming would have spent more on a trendy cellphone. But he was one of the hundreds of millions of peasants far removed from the country's new wealth. His public high school tuition alone consumed most of his family's income for a year.

 

Advertisement

 

 

He wanted to attend college. But to do so meant taking the annual college entrance examination. On the humid morning of June 4, three days before the exam, Qingming's teacher repeated a common refrain: he had to pay his last $80 in fees or he would not be allowed to take the test. Qingming stood before his classmates, his shame overtaken by anger.

 

"I do not have the money," he said slowly, according to several teachers who described the events that morning. But his teacher — and the system — would not budge.

 

A few hours later, Qingming, 18 years old, stepped in front of an approaching locomotive. The train, like China's roaring economy, was an express.

 

If his gruesome death was shocking, the life of this peasant boy in the rolling hills of northern Sichuan Province is repeated a millionfold across the Chinese countryside. Peasants like Qingming were once the core constituency of the Communist Party. Now, they are being left behind in the money-centered, cutthroat society that has replaced socialist China.

 

China has the world's fastest-growing economy but is one of its most unequal societies. The benefits of growth have been bestowed mainly on urban residents and government and party officials. In the past five years, the income divide between the urban rich and the rural poor has widened so sharply that some studies now compare China's social cleavage unfavorably with Africa's poorest nations.

 

For the Communist leaders whose main claim to legitimacy is creating prosperity, the skewed distribution of wealth has already begun to alienate the country's 750 million peasants, historically a bellwether of stability.

 

The countryside simmers with unrest. Farmers flock to the cities to find work. The poor demand social, economic and political benefits that the Communist Party has been reluctant to deliver.

 

To its credit, the Chinese government invigorated the economy and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty over the past quarter century. Few would argue that Chinese lived better when officials still adhered to a rigid idea of socialist equality.

 

But in recent years, officials have devoted the nation's wealth to building urban manufacturing and financial centers, often ignoring peasants. Farmers cannot own the land they work and are often left with nothing when the government seizes their fields for factories or malls. Many cannot afford basic services, like high school.

 

This year, the number of destitute poor, which China classifies as those earning less than $75 a year, increased for the first time in 25 years. The government estimates that the number of people in this lowest stratum grew by 800,000, to 85 million people, even as the economy grew by a robust 9 percent.

 

No modern country has become prosperous without allowing some people to get rich first. The problem for China is not just that the urban elite now drive BMW's, while many farmers are lucky to eat meat once a week. The problem is that the gap has widened partly because the government enforces a two-class system, denying peasants the medical, pension and welfare benefits that many urban residents have, while often even denying them the right to become urban residents.

 

Even in a country that ruthlessly punishes dissent, some three million people took part in protests last year, police data show. Most were farmers, laid-off workers and victims of official corruption, who blocked roads, swarmed government offices, even immolated themselves in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand social justice.

 

India, the world's other developing giant, has a less pronounced gap between urban and rural living standards, and an open political system. In May, India's governing party lost an election largely because the strong economic growth did not trickle down fast enough to the rural masses.

 

"This government has recognized the problem of lopsided development," Chen Xiwen, the top rural policy coordinator for China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a recent interview. "Yet India does show that if this problem cannot be managed rationally, it could become a danger" for the Communist Party, he said.

 

Mr. Wen and Hu Jintao, the president and Communist Party chief, have promoted a new "scientific development" plan, emphasizing social fairness in addition to fast economic growth. Mr. Wen also ordered officials to reduce taxes on farmers.

 

But for now the party's strongest reaction to reports of rural discontent is to suppress them. A muckraking exposé on illegal taxation and police abuses in the countryside was banned this spring, just after it became a best seller.

 

A seven-page official report on the death of Zheng Qingming, prompted by questions submitted to the Sichuan authorities by The New York Times, concluded that the school did everything possible to help his poverty-stricken family. It denied that the school had insisted he pay his tuition. It said insanity led to his death.

 

"The investigation team thinks that the school's handling of Zheng's death was objective, just, voluntary and humanitarian," the report concluded.

 

Yet relatives, classmates and several teachers gave a starkly different account. They said the school hounded Qingming to pay his debt. Several friends said he behaved erratically in his final weeks, but they said financial worries and family pressure weighed most heavily.

 

For in an era when peasants have long since lost their "iron rice bowl," the state's guarantee of a livelihood, Qingming wanted to attend college not only as a matter of pride, but also because he needed to provide for his relatives.

 

"Qingming had the talent to go to college, but he did not have the money," said Deng Jun, a classmate and close friend. "He could not bear being left behind."

 

A Village Defines Poverty

 

Sichuan's hill country, north of the metropolis of Chongqing, is as picturesque as it is poor. The landscape is lush and green from spring rains, but summer brings a stifling heat that shrouds the region, "China's oven," in a halo of steamy mist.

 

The Zheng family village, Sanceng, is nestled into a mountainside, accessible by a dirt trail that climbs through terraced rice paddies. The rumble of a waterfall drowns the occasional roar of trucks passing below. Making a phone call requires a sweaty 20-minute hike to a dusty roadside store.

 

The house the Zhengs share with several other families has electricity but little else. It is a sprawling barnlike structure built of adobe and wood more than a century ago. Food is cooked on open wood fires. At lunch smoke chokes the interior and leaves doors and windows stained with black ash.

 

Zheng Qingming grew up here by chance. He was born a second child to parents who could not afford the fine they faced under the one-child policy if they wanted to rear him. Just after birth he was secreted into the care of his mother's brother and sister-in-law, who are both mentally retarded.

 

His foster parents were often mute and disoriented, and the burden of raising him fell on his maternal grandparents. He was given the family name of his grandfather, Zheng Zili, who raised the boy to be the healthy son he never had.

 

"I carried him on my back every day in the fields," Mr. Zheng recalled in his thick hill-country accent. "That child grew so fast. I started with one box of milk powder a week, but soon that didn't last three days."

 

The family grows corn and rice, and raises a dozen chickens and ducks on a half-acre of land. They produce enough food to eat but little extra to sell, a problem when Qingming reached school age and needed to pay tuition.

 

The elder Mr. Zheng had few ways of making money. He had little schooling and could not read. But even at 74, his strapping forearms and muscular hands look as if they belong on a weightlifter, or a convict doing hard labor. He found work chopping stones into pebbles to make roads.

 

"Every cent that came in went right out to pay his school fees," Mr. Zheng said. "As you can see," he added, waving his hand around his earthen home, "there wasn't enough for anything else."

 

Qingming proved a worthy investment. His high-school admission test score qualified him to attend the area's top school, in Dazhou.

 

But his grandfather worried that money and class put that out of reach. He had once seen schoolchildren in Dazhou wearing sporty windbreakers and sneakers, not the padded blue Mao jackets and sandals many peasants wear. He said he feared city youngsters would look down on his grandson. Moreover, the basic tuition at the local high school, in Pujia, was half as much.

 

If Qingming resented missing the chance to attend an elite school, he did not tell his closest friends. "He knew the reality of his family's situation," said Deng Jun.

 

In school in Pujia, Qingming excelled in biology, and dreamed of becoming a doctor. He also loved literature. He filled his scrapbook with clipped essays and wrote his own ditties. One he repeated so often that his grandfather recites it from memory:

 

Do not toady to those above.

 

Do not flatter the rich.

 

Do not cheat the poor.

 

Make way for a new generation.

 

As he entered his senior year, with marks that put him in the top tier of his class, he and his grandfather imagined that Qingming might go to college.

 

The Rutted Road Out

 

For most rural Chinese teenagers, college is a distant hope. Compulsory education ends after ninth grade, and most youths then hop a train or bus to the swelling cities to eke out a living at a low-wage factory or construction site.

 

More than 100 million people leave the farm each year, and they send back $45 billion to their relatives. Without this money, many villages would wither and die.

 

Even so, migrants are an underclass. They do not have residency rights in cities. They cannot easily send their children to school there. They are often abused by employers.

 

College offers a brighter path to legal residency, a white-collar job that pays a steady salary and provides a safety net for the whole family.

 

The challenge for a rural youth like Qingming is getting there. Only 15 percent of college-age youth get any tertiary education, and most are urban.

 

Top colleges cater to the elite and favor children in their home cities, often requiring rural students to outperform urban counterparts on national tests.

 

Even in the days of Mao Zedong's radical egalitarian ideology, workers in cities lived better, enjoying cradle-to-grave benefits provided by factory or government work units. Farmers had a semblance of collective welfare when they lived in communes, though standards were lower.

 

Today, the gap has grown. Nearly all urban residents get health insurance through their companies or the government. Cities have bigger budgets and better schools with lower tuition. The government mandates this because it worries that urban residents could more easily organize and rebel if they lost their economic security.

 

The countryside is another story. Deng Xiaoping dismantled inefficient communes a quarter century ago in favor of land contracts, raising rural output. But the government gutted services as well. Rural governments get almost no support from wealthier areas. They tax local farmers and impose endless fees to finance schools, hospitals, road building, even the police.

 

A new study by Li Shi, a leading Chinese sociologist, concludes that China's urban-rural gap grows to extreme levels — higher than any other nation's — when urban housing, education, welfare and health care benefits are considered along with income.

 

Qingming and his family would have had a hard enough time overcoming these obstacles. But this year the pressure became greater for a simple reason: money.

 

No Money? No School

 

Pujia Senior Middle School, the formal name of Qingming's high school, is a grimy building where students pay enormous fees to get a government education.

 

By Western standards, the long list of fees — tuition, dormitory rooms, textbooks, computer access — may seem a pittance, about $290 a year. But that is more than the $253 average per-capita income for farmers in Sichuan in 2002. A comparable ratio in the United States would have public schools charging each student about $43,000 a year.

 

Even so, Zheng Zili had kept his grandson up-to-date on school payments until winter of his senior year, when he was hit by what might seem like a perfect storm of financial problems, except that they were perfectly ordinary.

 

His boss at a government road project stopped paying him. Mr. Zheng was given I.O.U.'s, totaling $200. He made trips to the county construction bureau to demand payment. Officials alternately blamed middlemen and superiors. Nobody got paid.

 

Then Mr. Zheng's wife, who is 78, took ill with lung disease. Like most peasants, they have no medical insurance. The hospital demanded $250 for treatment and drugs. The family savings were exhausted.

 

As Qingming entered the final half of his senior year, his family was behind on school payments, and the strain began to show. Qingming's teacher, Zhang Xudu, often scolded him in front of the class for not having paid his tuition, classmates said. The teacher said, "Anyone who hasn't paid his fees must do so immediately." Everyone knew he meant Qingming.

 

Qingming returned home several times to request money, and the family raised what it could. His grandfather wrote to a distant relative on the coast who mailed 500 yuan, or $60. Qingming still owed $80 to the school.

 

The teacher, Mr. Zhang, did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment. But the official investigation of Qingming's case said the teacher had not pressed the young student to pay his debts.

 

Qingming, friends said, had always been frugal. But his economizing in his senior year set him apart. He spent 40 cents each meal for vegetables and rice at the school cafeteria. Many others spent double that and ate pork, chicken, soybean curd or eggs.

 

"Qingming ate meat just once a week," one classmate recalled. "He went home and his grandmother killed a chicken."

 

His academic promise was confirmed when he tested into the most elite class at the school. But with the college entrance exam looming and his tuition payment still unresolved, Qingming's friends and classmates say, the pressure got to him.

 

A student who shared his dorm room said Qingming had nightmares, moaning about school fees and his teacher. He began having disciplinary problems. He picked fights with classmates. He once inexplicably stormed out of class during a lecture.

 

On May 6, Mr. Zhang told Qingming to join him on a trip. They went by motorcycle to Sanceng to meet Mr. Zheng, the grandfather. As Mr. Zheng recounted, the teacher told him his grandson had been misbehaving so badly he suspected the boy might have "mental problems."

 

Qingming, who was standing by his grandfather's side as the teacher spoke, shot back, "You're the one who has mental problems," Mr. Zheng said. Qingming then dashed out of the house and returned to school on his own.

 

A few days later, Mr. Zheng tried to smooth things over. He collected 50 eggs from his chickens and hitched a ride to Pujia. He sold the eggs, earning $6. Then he invited the teacher to dinner. The $6 bought several meat dishes and two bottles of beer. "Officials expect favors," Mr. Zheng said.

 

He said he urged Mr. Zhang that day to agree to waive the school fees, pleading poverty. The grandfather said the teacher "gave me the impression" that the request would be considered, but he never received a formal reply.

 

The End of a Promising Life

 

The matter came to a climax on June 4, three days before the college entrance exam, teachers and classmates said.

 

Mr. Zhang called Qingming to his desk. As classmates listened, Mr. Zhang insisted, again, that Qingming must pay his $80 debt. Otherwise, the school would withhold his license to take the exam, effectively ending his hopes of attending college.

 

Qingming said flatly that he had no money. One classmate stood up and volunteered to sell blood to help Qingming.

 

"I don't care if you sell a life," Mr. Zhang responded, according to teachers who looked into the incident later. "He pays the fees or he doesn't take the test."

 

Qingming exploded. He kicked an umbrella across the room, then picked it up and threw it out the window, the teachers said. He then fled the building.

 

Later that day, Qingming was spotted at a railroad depot. He was wandering on the tracks, barefoot. According to a police report, a railway officer asked him what he was doing. Qingming said he worked for Interpol, then scurried away.

 

Just after 9:30 that night, he came back and stood his ground. The train that crushed him was No. 1006, the Chongqing-to-Beijing express. His jacket, containing one arm and his identification card, was found 30 yards from his body.

 

The Bureaucrats Close the Books

 

Qingming's death sent shock waves through the school. Teachers said school officials were obsessed with fending off outside inquiries.

 

When the police first notified the school, officials initially denied Qingming was a student there, said one teacher involved in the discussions. The reason cited was that Qingming had failed to pay his tuition, and so was not a registered student in the school's care.

 

A few days after the incident, school officials traveled to Sanceng to visit the family. Zheng Zili was not there that day. But the officials found Qingming's uncle, his mentally handicapped foster father. They offered him 18,000 yuan, or $2,150, to sign a document that absolved the school of culpability. The uncle signed the paper and took the money.

 

Officials have issued two reports on the death: one an internal document the school sent to higher authorities in June, the other prompted by questions from The Times in July. They both maintain that the school never pressed Qingming to pay his dues. They also say the school reduced his tuition because of his family's poverty. But they differ significantly on the details of when and how much the school reduced his fees.

 

Officials also said they found no evidence that Qingming and Mr. Zhang had had a confrontation on June 4, the day of his death. But in an account of Qingming's death in a state-owned newspaper, the West China City Daily, Mr. Zhang was quoted as saying he had last spoken to Qingming on June 4 and had told him that he must pay his fees.

 

Teachers said that even if Mr. Zhang had wanted to help, he might have had few options. They said the school's headmaster, Yang Fangfu, held teachers responsible for their students' tuition and used the college exam as leverage to collect debts. The year before, they said, Mr. Yang deducted $75 from the salary of one teacher after two of his students, citing poverty, did not pay their tuition.

 

The official investigation confirmed that Mr. Yang made teachers accountable for tuition and that he docked the pay of a teacher for this reason. But it said Mr. Yang did not link school fees to the college exam.

 

Ultimately, the authorities insist, Qingming died accidentally because he "lost his mind"; he did not intend to commit suicide. Several students said their teacher had arranged individual meetings with them after Qingming's death to remind them of his erratic behavior and to impress upon them that they should emphasize this if outsiders asked about the case.

 

Mr. Zheng, the grandfather, dismissed the official explanations of what happened. He said the school never reduced his grandson's tuition. He said Qingming was upset, not insane. He is suing the school for having caused Qingming's death.

 

All he has left now to remember the grandson he once carried on his back is a stack of workbooks — trigonometry, politics, history. Mr. Zheng does not recognize enough Chinese characters to read them. But he keeps the books as memorials.

 

One is Qingming's scrapbook. Near the end, Qingming pasted in a magazine article about a retarded farm girl. She was raped, then abandoned by her relatives for the shame she inflicted on them. In the margins of the text, Qingming scribbled his thoughts: "We must extend our helping hand to any innocent underdog. Only by so doing can that person find a footing in society."

 

 

Joseph Kahn reported from Pujia for this article, and Jim Yardley from other parts of rural China.

[r45 4]

Nice article, shame about the subject...