From: xu@hydra.maths.unsw.oz.au ()
Subject: CND-Global, January 26, 1993
Organization: school of Mathematics UNSW
Distribution: aus
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 06:34:09 GMT



               * * *  C h i n a   N e w s   D i g e s t  * * *

                                (News Global)

                           Tuesday, January 26, 1993

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1. News Brief (2 Items) ................................................. 16
2. China Population Woes Grow ........................................... 26
3. Chinese Peasants Have Nothing to Crow About in Year of the Rooster ... 57
4. World's Button Capital ............................................... 76
============================================================================

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1. News Brief (2 Items) ................................................. 16
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[JAPAN ECONOMIC NEWSWIRE. 1/25/1993] BEIJING -- The value of China's gross 
agricultural output reached 865 billion yuan (150.4 billion U.S.  dollars) 
in 1992, according to preliminary figures released by the State Statistics 
Bureau. Steady growth in all five major rural sectors helped overall agri-
cultural output rise around 4% over 1991, the Xinhua News Agency reported 
Monday. China divides agriculture to include crop farming, forestry, animal
husbandry, fisheries and sideline production. (Forwarded by: Liu Jian)
                                ___ ___ ___

[SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 1/25/1993] --  China has agreed to punish firms 
that label garments with fake tags of origin in an attempt to skirt U.S. 
textile quotas. Li Dongsheng, an official with the Ministry of Foreign Eco-
nomic Relations and Trade, said the government was taking strict measures to 
punish domestic firms that falsely label textiles to show a country of ori-
gin other than China. The U.S. attorney's office in October issued a federal 
criminal indictment against a Chinese government agency, the China National 
Textiles Import and Export Corp., accusing it of evading quotas set to 
protect the U.S. textiles and clothing industries. (Forwarded by: Liu Jian)

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2. China Population Woes Grow ........................................... 26
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Forward by: Deming
Source: AP, 1/24/1993

BEIJING -- More than 64,000 government officials and employees violated 
family planning policies in China's eastern Henan province, an official 
report said Sunday.  

The Xinhua News Agency report in the People's Daily illustrated the diffi-
culty China faces in controlling its population of more than 1.1 billion. 

A 1990 census showed that more than 2 million people in Henan were not 
registered, in an apparent attempt to avoid penalties for violating family 
planning policies that generally permit only one child per couple.
  
The report said that in the autumn of 1991, the province began an investi-
gation and found more than 64,000 officials and state employees, some in the 
upper echelons, had broken family planning laws.
  
The report was meant to praise provincial investigators for helping to stem 
Henan's population growth, but it also made clear that family planning poli-
cies are widely ignored.  

Henan is China's second-most populous province, with more than 85 million 
people, and authorities there believe family planning is crucial to promote 
economic growth, the report said.  

Henan family planning rules, announced in 1990, allow urban couples to have 
a second child only under rare conditions, such as when the first child is 
deformed. Conditions are more lenient for rural couples, who can try again 
if their first child is a girl "and the family truly encounters difficul-
ties because of this," according to the regulations. 

The family planning rules prohibit early marriages and births outside of 
wedlock. Birth control measures are mandatory for fertile couples once 
their quota of children is met, and sterilization of either the husband or 
wife is mandatory if they have two or more children.  

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3. Chinese Peasants Have Nothing to Crow About in Year of the Rooster ... 57
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Forwarded by: Stephen Kam-Cheung Ng <skn1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Source: The Ottawa Citizen, 1/24/1993

China's  peasants are in turmoil because, as the Year of the Rooster dawned, 
Peking was too poor and too corrupt to pay them for last summer's harvest. 
Senior leader Deng Xiaoping fears a crisis.

It is traditional in  China  to settle all debts at the New Year, which 
began on Friday, and it is a traditional time, too, for buying better food 
and new clothes, and giving children gifts of money in red envelopes with 
gold writing.

This year, many of the country's 800 million peasants are angry because they
will not be paid. They are the linchpin of Deng's economic reforms, which 
allow them to farm on a virtually private basis while demanding from them 
the grain to feed the cities.

Chinese rulers have always feared a turbulent countryside. It was peasant
armies that swept Mao Tsetung to power. Premier Li Peng and party general-
secretary Jiang Zemin are aware that peasants would feel cheated if they
were too poor to celebrate the New Year. They commanded the State to honor 
its debts for last summer's harvest by Friday.

In Sichuan,  China's  most populous province with more than 100 million
people, the two top officials admitted the debt could not be paid on time 
and accused their subordinates of stealing the money.

What frightens leaders are the peasants' traditional forms of resistance:
non-compliance with official directives, abandoning land, secret societies 
and rural riots

   Last week, for example, the official radio in the southern province of
Guangdong, one of  China's  main grain baskets, reported that the area sown 
with grain "is the lowest since the founding of the People's Republic in 
1949." Peasants were reluctant to plant, the broadcast observed, because 
"grain prices are too low."

Since Deng's rural reforms began in 1980, peasants have been given virtual
title to their land but must provide the state with grain. What enrages them 
now is that the state does not pay for it, but instead offers IOUs, even as
inflation climbs from the present 6.2 per cent toward an anticipated eight-
ten per cent.

Premier Li acknowledged in a recent speech that the incomes of some peasants
had fallen, they could not sell their grain, and "the phenomenon of issuing 
IOUs is quite common." The situation was serious enough, he warned, for Deng 
to worry that "economic problems will occur in agricultural sectors in the 
1990s."

The reasons for the crisis are simple:  China  is bankrupt, and when money 
is available it is often siphoned off by corrupt officials. Peking official-
ly admits a total deficit of 23 billion yuan (about $ 3.6 billion). This 
does not take into account foreign and domestic debts, which bring the total 
debt, at last year's exchange rate, to more than $ 12 billion.

Peking also has to face the fact that there are too many peasants. Tradi-
tional farming is yielding to mechanisation. At least 50 million peasants
are now "floaters, rootlessly moving about, a source of crime and unplanned
births. One fifth of all rural workers now earn their livings in non-farming
occupations.

Rural turbulence is growing. The Ministry of Public Security has issued
circulars describing more than 1,800 underground groups with up to 30,000
members each which control prices and sales of land and farm products. These
secret societies, some with centuries of criminal experience, are engaged in
myriad illegal and violent activities, and are bold enough to confront the
security services and even the army in pitched battles.

The Ministry of State Security claims that in some areas party officials 
lead the secret societies. When mandarins did this in imperial times, it was 
a notorious sign to the suffering peasants that the state was losing its 
grip.

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4. World's Button Capital ............................................... 76
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Forwarded by: Charles Mok
Source: The San Jose Mercury News. January 24, 1993.
Written by: Nicholas D. Krostof, New York Times.

QIAOTOU, China -- For a glimpse into China's economic revolution, it is 
useful to stroll down the main street of this humble little town on the 
banks of a putrid river in the middle of nowhere.  

Peasants amble along the dusty pavement, carrying protesting chickens over
their shoulders, as rickshaws squeeze by street stalls pressing in on both 
sides with mounds of bric-a-brac.  Yet this remote speck in southeastern 
China has prospered itself over the last dozen years into the button capital 
of the world.

Each year, the privately run factories of Qiaotou produce about 12 million 
buttons, overwhelmingly the humdrum plastic kind found on cheap shirts and 
jackets.  This button boom, amounting to over two buttons annually per 
inhabitant on Earth, has transformed rice paddies into factory districts, 
and peasants into tycoons.

One of them is Zhan Yusheng, 27, who began making buttons in his home 10
years ago.  Today he owns a button factory with 100 employees, and last year 
he had sales of nearly $200,000.

"I'm planning to start more factories and maybe start exporting," Shan said, 
shaking his 24-karat gold bracelet, so huge that it could double as an arm 
weight for working out.  He was sitting on a leather couch in the living 
room of his new six-story home; he cannot figure out what to do with all the 
space, so the top three floors are empty.

"I may diversify into manufacturing of tennis shoes," Shan said thoughtful-
ly. "Who knows what it'll be like in 10 years?  But the bigger, the better!"

Nobody ever planned for Qiaotou (pronounced sheeyow-toe) to become a button 
capital, and the transformation seems to have happened quite by accident.  
Land is very scarce in this part of Zhejiang province, so when the Maoist 
era concluded at the end of the 1970s, the peasants were looking for side-
line businesses that they could run in their homes to earn more extra cash.

Some turned to button-making to supply the Chinese garment industry that was 
beginning to take off at the same time.  The button-makers did werll, so 
their neighbors began making buttons as well.

Soon most of the villagers were makinbg buttons, and garment factories began 
sending representatives to Qiaotou to buy buttons in bulk.  While Qiaotou, 
population 60,000, is far from any railroad and the roads are poor, it helps 
that buttons are small and can be trucked easily.

Buttons turned out to be a growth industry in the 1980s, in part because
many Chinese entered the decade with just a couple of Mao tunics to their 
name and ended it with a wardrobe full of shirts.

As a country of nearly 1.2 billion people discarded class struggle as "the 
key link," and instead substituted shopping, Aiaotou happily supplied the 
wave of demand for buttons.

"Now we need to upgrade our quality and produce more high-quality buttons," 
saiod Chen JKianlin, Qiaotou's Communist Party secretary. "Then we can 
expand on the international market."

Seven companies from Hong Kong and Taiwan have recently set up joint 
ventures in Qiaotou, competing with the 450 other button-making factories in 
town.  Some of Qiuaotou's buttons are already sent abroad, and Chen hopes to 
increase exports sharply to take advantage of higher prices on the world 
market.

Partly because Qiaotou has no state owned enterprises, Chen sees his mission 
primarily as promoting private enterprise.

"MY MOST important job is building up the economy," Chen said as he sipped 
tea at the conference table in his office. "People here say: 'If you push 
the economy along, you're a good leader.  Otherwise, you're not.'"

Independent-minded locals like Chen are becoming more common in the boom 
towns of southeastern China, and they often seem to act in ways at odds with 
the party leadership in Beijing.  Increasingly the role of local party sec-
retary is to calculate just how much fun or quasi-capitalism a town can get 
away with before incurring the wrath of higher officials.  

Under local Communist Party guideline, for example, Qiaotou has set up a
satellite dish and cable television system so residents can watch videos and 
satellite broadcasts instead of communist propaganda from Beijing.

These days, Qiaotou has a frenetic, Wild West quality to it.  The ubiquitous 
red rickshaws bespeak the town's peasants origins, but the equally ubiqui-
tous gold jewelry and leather jackets reflect the new affluence.

Faded slogans from the Cultural Revolution - "Long Live Mao Tse-tung 
Thought" - still linger on the walls and in a few homes, but the much 
greater number of abacuses testifies to the commercial nature of society.

In the home of Zheng Mengqin, a 46-year-old factory owner who sold nearly 
$500,000 worth of buttons last year, a quotation of Mao is visible on a 
mirror: "Marxism-Leninism is the base that guide our thinking."

A foreigner brashly pointed out the quotation, a relic of the Cultural
Revolution, and a long and awkward silence ensued.

"Yeah, it's the truth," Zheng, a former Red Guard, finally said weakly, and 
then he offered a modern reinterpretation of Marxism-Leninism. "It's the 
truth: You've got to struggle for what you get.  You've got to struggle!"

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