A growing literature in recent years has documented the disparity between rural and urban living standards in China, and the deteriorating situation of the country’s 900 million peasants. Li Changping’s bestselling Telling the Prime Minister the Truth, He Qinglian’s Modernization’s Pitfall and other pathbreaking works have explored the social costs of China’s headlong economic development. Intellectual journals and the popular press alike have devoted acres of space to the crisis in the countryside. Amid this ferment, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao’s Survey of Chinese Peasants stands out for its vivid narratives of peasant life and for the real voices of the toilers that speak from its pages. Not only does it name the names, one after another, of the petty local tyrants whose abuses and brutalities make these agricultural labourers’ lives a living hell. The Survey also raises the underlying political question of how this situation came about.

Chen and Wu—they are husband and wife—both come from peasant backgrounds, in Anhui and Hunan Provinces respectively, although they have made their careers as writers in the city. Wu had written warmly of her village childhood in an earlier essay, ‘Cherishing a Faraway Place’, while Chen, a novelist, had written on environmental questions. On 1 October 2000 they set out from Hefei, the provincial capital, some 500 miles south of Beijing, to explore the conditions of peasant life throughout the fifty-plus counties of Anhui, from the floodplains of the River Huai to the Yangtze Valley, travelling by bus or even on foot to reach the remotest villages. They describe the New China from below, documenting mud-hut hamlets where average annual earnings amount to 270 yuan, barely $30 a year; where the toilers depend on giving blood to make a living; where, with a carbootful of onions selling at 2 yuan, less than 25 cents, the peasants who grew them would explain that they could not afford to eat any themselves. And at the same time, the brand new, two-storey houses of the village cadres, their cars, mobile phones, their growing retinues, all needing salaries, bonuses, good meals and office space that must be paid for by taxes extracted directly from the peasantry. They show that, beneath the soaring new skyscrapers, the spreading highways, the luxurious nightclubs and Karaoke bars and the thundering Formula 1 racing track, there lies a foundation of flesh and blood. The ‘silver coins’ whose jingling lights up the brightly coloured coastal cities are forged from the sweat and toil of hundreds of millions of peasants. This is the dark side of the legendary Chinese Moon.

The Survey details innumerable cases of abuse: if the peasants have no money to hand, the village Party Secretary’s ‘tax collection team’ will confiscate their pigs, furniture, grain and machinery. If they meet with resistance they may call in the security forces and have the peasants beaten up, arrested or imprisoned. Thuggish behaviour and outright intimidation are commonplace: the son of a village Party Chairman in Jiwangchang District would drive up with an escort of the People’s Militia and, if the peasants tried to hide indoors and not hand over the money he was demanding,

would have the door knocked down, get the peasant to pay up and also to reimburse him for the costs incurred in breaking down the door. After he had collected all the money, he would take his gang off to a restaurant for an enormous meal, which he would later demand be paid for by village funds.

The Party Secretary in Linquan County sent a 300-strong team to ‘investigate’ the family-planning situation in one village:

Many of these officials were poorly educated and behaved very badly. They targeted innocent people and demanded they pay fines. If the people refused to pay, the officials would confiscate their pigs, sheep or furniture. The ‘investigators’ then split the money they had raised from the fines between themselves, and demanded that the villagers pay for all their living and travelling expenses during the trip.

During the course of a single year, three government cadres from Sunmiao village, Lin Ming, Ai Zhidong and Li Peng, arrested over 200 villagers from the surrounding area for ‘violation of the family-planning regulations’ and kept them locked in a windowless detention centre until their families had come up with a hefty fine.