Mon, Jan 12, 2004 page16

• Populism in China brings smiles, not change

  Top leaders have shown themselves tobe more concerned with the country's poor, but their individual acts of intervention are more symbolic than substantive

  • By Joseph Kahn
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  Xiong Deming was returning from a day tending her cabbage patch, her hands caked with soil and manure, when a well-dressed man stopped her and asked if she wanted to meet the prime minister of China.

  She was escorted to a neighbor's courtyard, where she had a chance to tell Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) that the authorities had repeatedly failed to pay peasant workers, including her husband, for work on prominent government-financed construction projects.

  

  Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, in his current post since March 2003, and Hu Jintao, China's new president and Communist Party chief, have been unusually attentive to everyday concerns of workers and farmers. Xiong Deming received personal help from China's prime minister earlier this month when she was handed US$300 back pay. But other workers in Xiong's group remain unpaid and few believe that Wen's gestures will change bureaucratic inertia and systemic corruption in China.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  That night, after Wen left to continue his inspection tour, Xiong recalled, a local official handed her US$300 in cash, the amount the county government owed her husband, Li Jianmin.

  For Xiong it was manna. But hundreds of other people who worked on the same projects never were paid. For them, Wen's personal touch was no substitute for good government.

  Despite efforts by China's new leaders to cast themselves as populists, issues like income distribution, labor rights, taxation and land policy tend to divide the Communist Party against itself, central versus local, urban versus rural, creating pockets of opposition that top leaders often seem unable or unwilling to overcome.

  Political analysts say Wen and President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) fear that the party can collapse unless it does more to share China's increasing prosperity with more of its 1.3 billion people. Yet that requires that local officials, government-backed companies and well-connected businessmen give up power and profits. The bureaucracy often prevails through inertia.

  Wen, in his current post since last March, and Hu, who became president then and has been Communist Party chief since late 2002, have been unusually attentive to everyday concerns of workers and farmers.

  They have pioneered a form of populist politics that sometimes seems closer to Western-style campaigning than the cloistered decision making that remains the norm for China's leadership.

  The two men frequently mention the gap between those who have benefited from China's capitalist-style urban economy and those left behind in the countryside. They have descended coal shafts, toured AIDS and SARS wards and abolished some conspicuous perks of high office.

  During trips outside Beijing, Wen sometimes surprises local officials by halting his motorcade at random villages and inviting peasants to share their grievances, giving him a reputation for earnestness and sensitivity.

  But despite a few new programs intended to reduce some rural taxes, Wen and Hu are finding that the Communist Party and government apparatus sometimes pay only lip service to their demands.

  That seems to be the case in Yunyang, the poverty-stricken village where hundreds of colleagues of Li, the peasant who was paid, are still fighting city hall for their wages.

  "We have gone to the government offices time and time again, and they pay no attention," said He Diren, a local construction crew chief whose workers have received less than half of their promised wages last year. "If they don't listen to the prime minister, are they going to listen to us?"

  Taming the bureaucracy is a tougher challenge for Hu and Wen than it was for their predecessors, because they are of it rather than above it. Mao Zedong (毛澤東), Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and even Jiang Zemin (江澤民), the three previous top leaders, all joined the Communist Party before it came to power in 1949. They were said to have revolutionary credentials.

  Hu and Wen are insiders who were almost completely unknown to the public before they assumed China's top titles. They have tried to build popular reputations by reaching over the heads, or behind the backs, of the bureaucrats who anointed them.

  This form of populism is reminiscent of latter-day leaders of the Soviet Union, including Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who tried to overcome widespread corruption and inefficiency by personally resolving minute but symbolic complaints of workers and farmers. His interventions helped make him popular for a time but ultimately failed to arrest the collapse of the apparatus he governed.

  "I think we've seen a clear change in leadership style, and I think it's a long-term trend," said Kang Xiaoguang (康曉光), a political analyst at Qinghua University in Beijing. "But although the public has high hopes, power is still in the hands of bureaucrats who resist fundamental change."

  No issue presents the quandary as clearly for China's leaders as wages for migrant laborers. Between 100 million and 200 million peasants work in cities to supplement their meager farm income. But many are paid only a fraction of their promised wages, with little or no recourse.

  Feng Lanrui, a labor expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, estimates that migrant workers, who supply about 40 percent of total rural income, are owed US$12 billion in unpaid back wages. The construction industry is notorious for hiring peasants whose wages disappear in an impenetrable web of unpaid debts.

  Their woes are a major source of rural instability. The official news media regularly carry reports of construction workers who beat their bosses, or threaten to kill themselves by jumping off towers they have built, to draw attention to wage arrears.

  Villagers seek jobs around Yunyang because of big government-financed resettlement projects connected with the massive Three Gorges Dam, about 300km down the Yangtze. But government backing has done little to ensure that they are paid.

  Li was one of several hundred people recruited to build grand stone stairways, known as the 10,000 steps, connecting Yunyang's relocated city center to the banks of the dam-swollen Yangtze. But while most sections were completed in the last year, workers say they were paid only 30 percent to 50 percent of their promised wages.

  After Wen's visit with Xiong, he ordered local officials to resolve the issue, according to reports in the local news media. Wen personally intervened not only in Yunyang, but also in other individual disputes around the country. Newspapers and TV have reported on the matter regularly, a sure sign of high-level emphasis.

  But though Xiong got her money, the limits of Wen's suasion are clear. At a new Yunyang construction site, not far from the 10,000 steps, workers swathed in layers of sweaters against the wet winter chill complained bitterly that the government had not acted on the prime minister's orders.

  He, the crew chief, who was formerly one of the Li's colleagues on the stairway project, now commands a group of workers building a local park. He said his 27-man crew was owed US$7,250 in outstanding wages, though their work was finished last spring. Guo Siyin, another crew chief on the stair project, said he and 30 of his men were owed US$8,500.

  In the two months since Wen's visit, the workers said they had repeatedly visited the Yunyang County government offices, but achieved little.

  "I was there yesterday, and the official told me that we might have some money soon," He said. "If we protest any more, he said, we will not get a penny."

  Yuan Shaodu, a deputy director of the county construction committee, said that his agency had distributed 83 percent of the funds for the stairway project, and that bosses should have paid their employees already. He acknowledged that some had not, and said the matter was "under intensive discussion."

  Wang Ping, a manager of the Lishen Construction Co., a government-backed contractor on the stairway, initially said all of his workers had been paid. But when told details of his workers' complaints, he said it was the government's fault because it had paid him only half of what it owed him. Even if he had the money, he said, he probably could not find his workers now.

  "They come from all corners of the land," Wang said. "I don't know their phone numbers. If they do not come to collect their salaries, how am I going to pay them?"

  Such stalemates over back pay have prompted some experts to question Wen's interventions, arguing that only sweeping political and legal reforms can make things better.

  Feng, the labor expert, recently wrote a commentary in The China Economic Times arguing that the problem of unpaid wages would never be solved by "personal rule" and "certain clean officials."

  "The wage issue cannot be solved even if all the top leaders made it their special task to collect the wages," she wrote. "We have to rely on rule of law."
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