by Chen Weijun

Research by a Chinese historian sheds light on the situation in China's rural areas, still under heavy-handed Communist rule. The Great Leap Forward might be past history, but peasants still live with its legacy at the bottom of the social heap. Data confirm that rural populations have lower wages and lack adequate health care or education as their land is seized and given over to capitalists.

Beijing (AsiaNews) - Whilst the coastal cities of China and its people have benefited from the economic reforms of the past three decades, in many parts of rural inland China, peasants continue to live in dire poverty, legacy of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), Mao Zedong's dream to turn China into a communist utopia, but also the consequence of widespread corruption among the country's current leadership.

Zhou Xun, research assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong, came to this conclusion after travelling across the Chinese countryside. His released his findings in an article published by the South China Morning Post.

In 1958, the rural population in China was forced to sacrifice homes and possessions in order to build socialist collectives and finance the country's industrialisation. The net result was mass starvation that took the lives of 35 to 50 million people.

Today, many of those who survived the famine are still left without homes, health care and, sometimes, food. It may be hard to believe that in today's China that there are still a fair number of people suffering from chronic malnutrition.

Luliang County (Hunan) has a special place in the history of the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward. In August 1958, the authorities subjected local farmers to gruelling shifts to collect the harvest to feed the cities. Some 169,000 cases of oedema were reported in the area and nearby counties. Nearly 24,000 people died. Many families fled the famine. Across the country, millions more died as a result of this plan.

Today, most of Luliang's rural population is poor, even though it is seen as one of Yunnan's most prosperous granaries. Locals, however, beg to differ.

 "We don't see any of the prosperity, it's all lies," some villagers said. Officials "all the glory and put all the cash and rewards into their own pockets, but we get nothing. Things have not changed much." Most of China's 800 million rural dwellers are in the same situation.

The wage gap between cities and rural areas is one to ten, according to FAO figures. Peasants earn even less since they are not allowed to sell their own output in a free market, but have to accept government prices, which are deliberately kept below their market value.

Land ownership remains an unresolved problem. Even if Deng Xiaoping opened the country to a capitalist economy, the Communist regime has never given peasants title to the land they till. Instead, land is rented out to farmers who can buy it only after ten years. Chinese government data show that because of problems associated with land distribution, more than 70 million farmers have to hire themselves out to their neighbours to make a living.

In addition, local Communist officials often sell land to private or public companies without due compensation paid to peasants. In fact, many rural residents are literally thrown off their land by force, losing their homes that are demolished to give way to another kind of development.

The lack of adequate environmental laws means that plants can spew their sometime toxic waste without controls. Water and land that are still used for food production are thus contaminated.

Lastly, the remoter rural hamlets are often deprived of education and health care. Rather than build schools and hospitals in farming regions, the government has preferred focusing on cities, which are more often than not too distant for farmers.

Last year, the number of clashes between ordinary Chinese citizens and the authorities totalled 87,000, 55,000 in rural area according to the World Refugee Service.

• china
• rural
• areas
• poverty
• great
• leap
• forward