By Anne F. Thurston Warmly welcome the Fulbright delegation’s visit to Sanchuan,” read one of the banners as we stepped from the bus to the sound of beating drums and popping firecrackers. “The people of Sanchuan offer their heartfelt thanks to our American friends for their support,” read another. Most of Guanting’s townsfolk had turned out to greet us. Our welcome had begun on a bridge several miles outside of town. Zhu Yongzhong, the 36-year-old president of the Sanchuan Development Association, was waiting for us there, flanked by an entourage of local elders in black fedoras and long white gowns. They greeted each of us with the white silk khata scarf traditionally bestowed by Tibetan Buddhists on honored guests. Now a small troupe of masked dancers whirled and jumped and beat their drums, clearing the way as we walked the length of the town, our path lined by smiling and curious residents. The 16 members of our Fulbright group were teachers from a cross-section of American high schools and colleges, and the visit was part of an official exchange between the Chinese Ministry of Education and the U.S. Department of Education. The Fulbrighters would be teaching about China when they returned home. I wanted them to see something of what I call, in deference to Michael Harrington, “the other China.” Harrington’s 1963 book, The Other America, called attention to the persistence of poverty in the midst of affluence in the United States and is credited with having sparked the “War on Poverty.” As “rising China” is being touted for its economic achievements and heralded as the next great superpower, I wanted the Fulbrighters to know that the majority of China’s 1.3 billion people are still poor, beset with the same problems that trouble the poor everywhere—substandard education, minimal access to health care, limited opportunities for work and a government that too often seems not to care. And I wanted to introduce them to some of the people who are trying to bring about change. The town of Guanting in Minhe county, Qinghai Province, seemed a good place to begin.
New Leadership Model
Minhe is one of China’s poorest counties. Located along the Yellow River, the area is mountainous and overwhelmingly rural. Its roads are bad, often dangerously so. The land cannot support its large population. Of its 387,000 people, most are ethnic minorities—either Hui, who are Muslim, or Monguor (Tu, in Chinese), whose religion is a mixture of Tibetan Buddhism, animism and the cult of their local god, Erlang.
Although China’s national minorities make up only 8 percent of its population, they constitute some 40 percent of the nation’s officially recognized poor. The average per capita income of Minhe in 2005, according to official figures, was about 1,700 renminbi, or a little more than US $200 a year. But local people say that figure is too high—the result of annual contracts local officials must sign with higher levels of government, promising to increase per capita income by a certain percentage each year. Promotions are based on exaggerated claims of having reached or surpassed the targets. Locals say the real per capita income is around US $110 a year. Some villages have incomes that are substantially less.
This is why Zhu Yongzhong and the Sanchuan Development Association are so important there. Zhu Yongzhong is one of China’s new social entrepreneurs, working to bring about change at China’s grass roots. His work began in 1996, when Zhu and his American teacher of English, Kevin Stuart, collaborated on a project to build a water delivery system for Zhu’s home village and seven surrounding communities. Eventually, the villagers were able to construct a gravity-based piping system that put a cold-water spigot in every family’s courtyard. Later, Zhu Yongzhong decided to refurbish the village’s dilapidated primary school. The Canada Fund donated money for repairs. Then people from other villages began asking Zhu Yongzhong to help them, too. Zhu began raising money to build village schools. He found funds for more water delivery systems, for greenhouses and for devices that allow farmers to cook and boil water using solar energy, thereby freeing villagers from the labor of collecting firewood or paying the high cost of coal.
As one success followed another, Zhu Yongzhong became known and respected throughout the county. He was offering a new model of leadership, an example of what can happen when leaders address the needs of local people. As news of Zhu Yongzhong’s accomplishments spread, so did the demand for his help. In 2002, Zhu Yongzhong set up Minhe’s first NGO, the Sanchuan Development Association. Since then, the organization has raised close to US $1 million and implemented some 121 small-scale development projects.
Zhu Yongzhong is no longer unique in this part of China. Much of the credit goes to Stuart, who has lived in Qinghai since 1987 and directs an English language training program that recruits young students from Tibetan China—Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan and the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Few teachers anywhere have inspired more students to greater effect. Not only do Stuart’s students become remarkably fluent in English, but many also become activists in their home communities. The stories those students tell are similar—remote home villages, dangerous mountain roads, grinding poverty and a dream that someday things might change.
Powerful Small-Scale Development
Zhu Yongzhong’s dream was inspired by his mother, who used to spend backbreaking hours each day fetching water from distant wells. Lerjiater’s dream began when he was 12 years old. His village school had only two grades. To continue his studies, he had to walk a mountain road, two hours each way, to the township school. In winter, the path was made treacherous by ice and snow. In spring and summer, his father had to help him ford the stream, swollen from melting snows. Sometime during those difficult walks, Lerjiater decided that if he ever became a “capable person,” he would build a village school. That school began its first classes in summer 2003.
When I first met Sonam Wonjal more than three years ago, the pain of his mother’s long and agonizing death was still fresh. He told me about the llamas the family had visited, the mountains the family had circumambulated praying for a cure, the unsuccessful surgery, the doubts about the Chinese doctor—and then carrying his mother’s corpse to the sky burial. Sonam Wonjal’s first project was the construction of a clinic of traditional Tibetan medicine in his family’s village. The stories of how people’s lives are affected by these small-scale development projects are also remarkably similar—more children attending school, saved hours when water is delivered from a spigot, increased crop yield from a simple irrigation system and freed days when fuel no longer has to be gathered from the mountainside. Some villagers explain how water delivery systems have freed young adults to work on construction sites in county towns and the provincial capital of Xining. Household incomes increase considerably with the opportunity to dagong, as construction work is called. But dagong can keep villagers away from home for several months each year, and the children and elderly are left behind. Without a good water system, dagong is impossible: The young and the elderly are not strong enough to carry water from distant wells. Stuart is the force, both inspirational and practical, that helps make those projects real. It is okay to dream, I once heard him say to a class; the question is how to make those dreams come true. By now some 70 of Stuart’s students have launched more than 200 successful small-scale development projects costing well over US $1 million. But for all the success of these efforts, most of these villages remain tragically poor. Indeed, Guanting seems prosperous compared to some of the villages I have visited in other, less accessible, parts of Qinghai. In recent years, the province has become part of a new policy called “develop the West,” bringing the promise of economic development to some of the poorest parts of China—which would lift millions out of poverty. Important changes have been introduced: Agricultural taxes have been eliminated, primary school education is now free and bosses who trick migrant workers out of their dagong wages have been punished. But “development” in Qinghai still seems focused primarily on gigantic infrastructure projects. The newly opened high-tech railroad running across the 14,000-foot-high Tibetan plateau from Golmud, Qinghai, to Lhasa, Tibet, is the most highly publicized result of the Western development policy. Closer to Minhe, a new superhighway now links Qinghai’s provincial capital of Xining to the capital of Lanzhou in neighboring Gansu. And just at the edge of Guanting town is a huge new 750KV power transformer station, the second largest in Asia. But local residents scarcely benefit from its presence: The electricity is sent first to Lanzhou and then on to Shanghai and Shenzhen, bypassing Guanting altogether. Poverty Amid Affluence
For all the promise of China’s Western development policy, the gap between rich and poor seems only to widen. Poverty persists in the midst of growing affluence. Our Fulbright group left Guanting and flew directly to Shanghai, China’s richest and most modern city. Shanghai’s average per capita yearly income is well over US $3,750 a year, more than 30 times the average in Minhe. We took a nighttime cruise along the Huangpu River, where Shanghai’s futuristic skyline, with its delight of architectural fantasies, shone bright in neon lights. Guanting’s electric power transformer was hard at work. The electricity expended during our hour-long cruise could have lit Guanting for years. In Guanting, we had visited the Sanchuan Development Association’s newest education project, a primary school built with funding from Hong Kong’s Save the Children. We visited one of Shanghai’s latest educational endeavors, to an 18-story Children’s Palace constructed, according to my notes, at a cost of US $250 million. Here, children of privilege receive after-school lessons in ballet, music, computer skills, calligraphy, painting and swimming. We were greeted with a military salute by well-scripted students in sky-blue shorts and immaculately clean white shirts. The red scarves around their necks identified them as Young Pioneers, the Communist Party’s equivalent of our Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. One of the Fulbrighters passed me a note during our briefing: “My heart is breaking, and I think I am going to cry,” it read. “I keep thinking of the children in Guanting.” I, too, was thinking of the children of Guanting. Minhe county could have constructed more than 7,000 new schools with the money it took to build the Shanghai Children’s Palace.
But I was also thinking of the so-called Western development policy. Perhaps the name is a misnomer. “We know the policy is mostly extracting from the poorest and giving to the richest,” friends told me when I questioned its implementation. “We are used to that. … Unfortunately, the poorest are also powerless.” Then, as I was preparing this piece, the Chinese government announced the removal of Chen Liangyu, the first party secretary of Shanghai. Chen and his family are said to have profited from a massive corruption scheme involving diversion of some portion of the city’s US $1.2 billion pension fund to illegal development projects and personal profit. It is the highest-level party purge in more than a decade and has been subject to a variety of interpretations. The mainstream view assumes both that corruption at the highest levels of the Communist Party is fairly widespread and that officials remain exempt from punishment unless politics intervenes. The politics in this case is seen as a move by Hu Jintao, president of the country and chief of China’s Communist Party, to solidify his power against the so-called Shanghai Gang, led by former President Jiang Zemin. Other analysts attribute the downfall to the fact that Shanghai’s development efforts have been out of step with those currently being pushed in Beijing and see Chen’s removal as a warning to other local officials to begin toeing the government line.
“A cancerous growth eating into the heart of the Communist Party” is how one official report described the growing corruption in China. The Beijing government’s line is to fight corruption wherever it occurs. The government sees grave danger, too, in the growing gap between rich and poor and has pledged to work toward a more equitable society. It is difficult to see how these policies might work. This piece originally related a story of official corruption at local levels in Qinghai. But I was warned against publishing the account because innocents might suffer. But if stories of corruption cannot be told because innocents will suffer, how can the cancer be cured? In the meantime, the lights of Shanghai shine as brightly as ever, and the poor remain powerless, their voices still unheard. Anne F. Thurston, a former SAIS associate professor of China Studies, is working with grassroots NGOs in China and completing a book, The Other China. |
