‘Rulers in China know about the power of those from the countryside,’ he said. ‘China’s history is all about how the peasantry has been burdened and oppressed, and how each time they rose up to overthrow those in power. But then those new rulers would oppress the peasant masses again, until our anger could not be contained any longer and boiled over, once more, into a revolution.’
The crowd was silent as they listened to him speak.
‘We peasants brought the Party into power. Without the power of the peasantry, China wouldn’t have defeated the imperialists and the corrupt Kuomintang.’
Now the crowd around him cheered.
‘But once they came into power, we became burdened and exploited again! Because, they said, our Motherland needs to grow fast and catch up. Industrializing China and increasing output was the only thing they wanted from us in those years,’ he said. ‘And do you know what we peasants had as our reward in the decades that followed the Revolution?’ He paused, and I waited for him to continue. The crowd was rapt.
‘Poverty! Did they ask the peasants if they wanted to be collectivized in the early 1950s? Peasants just took the orders from the top. They had no right to say no. Around 130 million peasant households at that time were turned into around 7 million mutual-help groups, and then into 700,000 agricultural cooperatives. This was for the peasants to produce on a mass scale, and then produce more! And more! All for the nation! But not for our livelihood! And then those at the top used the Hundred Flowers movement in the end, to put down half a million peasants who opposed the collectivization. 1
‘But they didn’t stop there. I’m sure you know of the Great Leap Forward in 1958? That mad policy played with peasants’ lives and turned cooperatives into over 50,000 people’s communes in a short time. They used the communes to take whatever they wanted from us! We must produce and produce, and devote whatever we had to the nation! Peasants had truly become propertyless! But what could they say? It was the state, the Motherland, that needed our input, down to the last piece of steel in our house and the last metal coin in our pocket! Millions of peasants died of starvation as a result of inflated production targets imposed by the so-called people-loving local cadres in the Great Leap Forward. And they carried on with their power games – all the way through the Cultural Revolution! And what a revolution!’
The crowd laughed, clapping and cheering, encouraging him to go on. The gateway of the City East Labour Market was becoming a soapbox, and a true orator had emerged. Xue went on, ‘My parents weren’t even allowed to grow their own bloody melons in those wild days of the Cultural Revolution. That would be a very bourgeois thing to do – to grow your own food and eat it. You had to remain propertyless, as propertyless as everyone else. We must rejoice in our equality of poverty! That’s the principle upheld by our great leaders!
‘But some were much more equal than the rest of us. Those were our local officials. They did what they pleased, imposing extra taxes on top of our existing agricultural taxes. People started to wonder: Has there really been a revolution?’
The crowd was murmuring now, and the noise grew.
‘Now we don’t have the agricultural taxes anymore, but we are still heavily burdened. We still have many charges and fees to pay. And who are we to ask them why? Also, our little plots of land can be seized by the authorities for other uses, and as cities are booming and expanding, that’s a growing trend. Will we be left waiting for some compensation for that, too? And we are now talking about not being paid compensation for the earthquake? This is just part of what local officials do.’
Yuan Gang chimed in, ‘The laws in this country aren’t for us.’
As I was scribbling furiously, trying to take down Xue’s speech, a small stone hit me on the side of my head. A man shouted at the crowd from a distance, ‘Do not talk to her! Stop talking to her! She is a spy! A spy!’ Rubbing my head in shock, I looked around.
The man was in his thirties, medium height, thin, wearing a white T-shirt. Was he a plainclothes police officer? Or simply a nationalist passer-by? I had no idea. But the crowd of workers was disturbed by his assault and his ‘warning’. They began to whisper.
The man didn’t give up. ‘Spy! Spy! Go away!’ he continued to shout.
I had to say something – all this was happening because I was there – so I defended the crowd’s right to remain. ‘This is a public space, and we are staying here to talk,’ I said.
Everyone around me clapped and cheered. It was obvious that they wanted to continue telling their stories. The stone-thrower looked embarrassed and quickly left the scene.
Later that day, I went to the North Station, a smaller labour market where rural job seekers gather. When I got there, I noticed many Yi waiting just outside. Some of them could be distinguished by their traditional colourful costumes – the women wore embroidered dresses, the necklines stitched with silver flowers. Some were sitting on their luggage, waiting for the next train home. Others were hanging around for job offers from local recruiters, although there didn’t seem to be much action. The only visible placards advertised an ‘earwax remover’ and a ‘blind masseur’ who performed their services in the alleyway next to the station.
I also noticed the presence of the police as soon as I entered the station. They seemed to be patrolling the area around it too. Their presence made the atmosphere different from other labour markets – the job seekers seemed uncomfortable and looked around constantly to observe the movement of the officers.
I wondered what had made North Station a public-security issue. It looked as insignificant as thousands of other small stations around the country. Then I saw that the officers’ eyes were fixed on the Yi workers. Ten minutes later, I saw two cops, batons in hand, chase a woman in traditional costume and her child out of a street café. The woman had apparently been having lunch with her child when the officers stormed in, shouting ‘Get out! Get out!’
The frightened woman spoke a few words in Yi language, a Tibeto-Burman variant, but did not dare resist the order. She took her child and fled the station area. The police had made no attempt to search or arrest her. It seemed they simply wanted to frighten her. I went up to the officers and asked what the chase was about. They ignored me and walked away. I was told by other onlookers that this happened all the time. But how did they justify it?
‘They say Yi have a bad reputation for dealing drugs. Every Yi person is a suspect,’ one man said.
I witnessed the same police surveillance and harassment at the South Station, also a labour market frequented by Yi residents from rural areas. When I visited, Yi job seekers had gathered to wait for the local recruiters. They looked restless and too worried to talk. A Yi woman told me, ‘The police are always around, scrutinizing our movements. They can stop and search us whenever they like, without a reason. They have no respect for us at all.’
Nationalism has always been part and parcel of ‘Chinese socialism’. Chinese socialism originated not in Marxism but in an eclectic amalgamation of intellectual trends current at the beginning of the twentieth century, including republicanism, anarchism, voluntarism, and populism. At the time, many Chinese intellectuals were being educated in Japan, where they were introduced to Western reformist and radical thinking, and the Western order came to be seen among the Chinese intelligentsia as the ideological model for nation building, which eventually gave the nationalist New Culture Movement its anti-traditionalist character. But that movement, which lasted from 1915 to 1919, was largely liberal, Social Darwinist, and youth-oriented – not Marxist – and Chinese intellectuals did not openly support the Bolsheviks.
Not until China’s betrayal by the Allies at Versailles in April 1919 would this change. China had entered the First World War on the Allied side, on the condition that all German spheres of influence in Shandong province would be returned to China following a victory, and Chinese intellectuals even began to see their participation in the war as the emergence of China as a nation-state. ‘The time had come [to establish] the Chinese nation, which with its enduring civilization encompassed the culture and history of Asia, and