Farmers In China

Why are China’s 656 million farmers, slightly less than half of the population, so often referred to as “peasants” in English when this seems like a pejorative term? In fact, it has to do with the feudal economic system. Peasants differ from farmers in that they do not own the land upon which they are born and which they till, and yet they are bound to their land. China’s farmers in this sense are most often economically truly “peasants.” They have the right to grow crops on their land but they do not own their land. Private landownership was banned shortly after the Communist Party took
over the country in 1949, and today most peasants are too poor to buy their land under the new reformed economy. Commercial enterprises in the new market-based economy may purchase the land upon which the skyscrapers, factories, shopping centers, and so on are built or they negotiate a long-term lease from the Chinese government.


     China’s farmers up until 2006 could not technically legally leave the land upon which they were born and upon which their residence permits (called hukou in Chinese) were based. As such they truly were peasants in the medieval economic sense of  the word. Today the hukou system has been modified because the government officially recognized a trend that had been occurring for decades: that is, millions of farmers were leaving their land and moving to the cities to find work. Without this
labor force, China’s cities could not have developed as rapidly as they have; there would be a vast shortage of construction workers and factory workers; and the cost of labor would skyrocket.

     Still, Chinese farmers in the city (dubbed “the floating population”) face endless legal discrimination. Because of the hukou system, they are like so-called illegal immigrants in their own country.


     They cannot legally send their children to public school nor can they use the hospitals or medical facilities in the city without paying extra money up front. They also do not have access to welfare benefits. This saves the city governments tremendous money from having to provide these services (which are not funded by the central government); however, it places tremendous burdens on the farmers. They are faced with a difficult choice: either stay in their villages and earn very little
money, or move temporarily to the cities to work while leaving their children behind, often to be raised by grandparents. Young men who move to the city often find they cannot save enough money to attract a spouse, and young women face numerous kinds of discrimination and gender-based harassment. For example, if a young woman from the countryside should become pregnant
by a man in the city, her child is not guaranteed a city registration that would allow the child to attend a city school. Instead the baby is assigned the mother’s hukou.


     So why do farmers want to leave their villages in the first place? Perhaps the most important reason is that it has become almost impossible for them to make a living simply by farming. A farmer can make the equivalent of $180 per year raising crops or animals. That’s not enough to pay for medical expenses or schooling for their children. So when young people (and sometimes even children) are able, they leave their parents’ farms to work in city factories or construction work or other hardlabor jobs that many city people do not want, all in the hopes of making more money and sending it home to help their parents or saving it up to start their own businesses so that they can afford a family of their own.


     The second reason farmers leave is that their farmland is increasingly being confiscated by developers. One way cities have found to raise revenue to pay for all the services for their official residents is to expand their boundaries. That means confiscating farmland on the outskirts of the city and allowing developers to bid on it. In order to make a profit, city officials give the farmers much less in compensation than they receive from the developers. As a result, farmers are left with no way to make a living.


   This outrageous dilemma has led to myriad protests—some estimate more than two hundred dailyacross China as desperate farmers fight off the developers and officials who have colluded to take their land. These fights can involve tens of thousands of farmers who band together from different villages and try to protect their land or demand more compensation.

       Local police are called in and in recent years many of these protests have ended in violence, with both police and farmers seriously injured. While the police have guns, the farmers have their farm implements and greater numbers. Still, it is the farmers who can be carted off to prison.


      Whether protests and pledges from the central government’s highest leadership, namely
President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, to improve living conditions for China’s
farmers will actually greatly benefit this generation of farmers remains to be seen. Much
prejudice remains against China’s peasants among urban dwellers who see them as a
reminder of China’s rural and in their eyes backward past. As a result, one of the worst
insults a city person can use is to call someone else “a peasant.”