The government has no clothes
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on August 5th, 2010
The curious case of Baimiao, originally posted on China Digital Times
My dear boy, it is a contradiction in terms: You can be open or you can have government” (civil servant Bernard on the “open government” initiative, from TV series “Yes minister”)
The Township of Baimiao, in the northeast of Sichuan, rose to national fame earlier this year following a decision by its party secretary to exercise a “naked budget,” ie expose all government expenditures to the public eye. Media outlets from Beijing to Guangzhou wrote about that exercise, dubbing Baimiao “China’s first naked government”. Commentators called on other local governments to follow suit, and the official website for Baimiao was brought down after some 300,000 netizens logged in, praising, supporting or in many cases, expressing skepticism or demanding answers to many questions, all of which were patiently answered by the secretary, Zhang Yingshang.
But where exactly is Baimiao? What does life there look like? What are the challenges the naked local government face and how does it deal with them? Has the initiative changed things? Even more to the point: What do the people of Baimiao think of their own government? I was curious enough to go take a look, but have to admit here and now, I failed to resolve most of those questions, even after visiting the place.
Baimiao
At first (and second… and even third) glance, Baimiao Township seems a most unlikely place from which to launch a government reform. Up in the mountains of northeastern Sichuan, it is a tiny municipality consisting of some ten small villages, about 40 kilometers from Bazhou, the capital of Bazhong prefecture. There is only a dirt road leading to Baimiao and the ride takes almost two hours. Few outsiders ever get here, and most are involved with some small oil exploration site that operates further up the road. Oil might some day bring wealth to Baimiao but for now it brings mainly mud and dust and noise from many passing trucks. It is not perhaps so surprising that the “naked budget” that caused such a stir elsewhere has barely registered with those who were supposed to be the beneficiaries, as well as the supervisors on government spending – the 10,000 who actually live in Baimiao.
Ironically, the people of Baimiao proved to be some of the least open and hardest to communicate with I’ve met anywhere in China.. Almost all the residents of Baimiao are farmers, growing rice and rape. Some supplement that by producing rape oil in their back yards. Many don’t speak Putonghua and more were reluctant to speak to me at all.
Making rape oil at Baimiao main street
Poverty is evident and acute: Narrow dirt roads between villages, sewage flowing through the one street of Baimiao township (the seat of the local government but really just a village, though slightly bigger than the others). Electricity is provided but not all households have running water. Evident also in many people’s appearance is the total lack of work safety regulations in these parts, combined with appalling medical services and the benefits of modern medicine (plastic surgery, prosthesis) being way out of reach for most. Even a short wander through the single street reveals a remarkable variety of disabilities and defects: many limps, few missing limbs and one horribly deformed face on a burn victim. “People are very poor here,” says Ms. Yang, a farmer. “Anyone who can just leaves to find a job elsewhere. Most young people already left.” When asked if she thinks things will improve in the future she answers matter-of-factly: “I don’t see how.” There is some new construction in Baimiao, four or six stories buildings that replaced the traditional houses and, Yang says, is supposed to attract some of those who left to buy property back in the village. Some of the construction, she said, has been stalled for months. A team of road engineers was around, taking measurements. Repairs and paving of the road are supposed to start this autumn, they said.
It’s hard to elicit a response from people regarding their government’s initiative. Some haven’t even heard about it. Those who have basically find it quite hilarious that their township is now famous all over China. The budget, including officials’ salaries and benefits, welfare expenditure, and spending on cigarettes, was published on the official website. In Baimiao, however, there is no Internet bar and only a handful of people have an Internet connection. (I actually saw only one, at a small grocery shop, where the shop-keeper said a few more people had Internet connections in their homes). Even those who know about the “naked government” and might have occasional Internet access, never bothered to actually check the budget. Mr. Yu, who drives a minivan between Baimiao and Bazhou city (there is no regular bus), says he never got around to looking at the budget. He knows it caused a swirl throughout China but doesn’t know what exactly was there and doesn’t care. The mention of secretary Zhang’s name elicits only laughs but no response, supportive or otherwise (secretary Zhang himself was not in town at the time of my visit and the small government office seemed deserted). Many articles about Baimiao noted the fact that 65% of the budget was spent on food and drinks at banquettes for government officials. I suspect Baimiao’s residents already knew as much. The concept of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” is obviously quite foreign here – almost as foreign as a foreigner coming all this way to ask irksome questions. When you have exposed sewage, not to mention exposed wounds, an exposed government seems, perhaps, a bit inconsequential, and not all that useful.
Trains
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 31st, 2010
(Just read on ChinaGeeksthat Zhou Yunpeng had a piece on Han Han’s new magazine called “Green Trains”. Zhou is kind of wonderful in whatever he chooses to do and a reason enough to buy the magazine. Green train in China are the older and slower kind).
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“No tickets for the T train to Xichang. You can get a hard seat on an air-conditioned train or a hard sleeper on a slow train with no air-con. Which would it be”? (A ticket seller in Chengdu)
The answer to this, as I learned too late, should be: A flight, but I took the sleeper. Just before boarding the train I sent an item to my paper in Israel (got to finance this aimless roaming somehow…) – we did a special on mass transportation systems in different parts of the world so my part was to tell readers about the planned London-Beijing line and how awesome China is, building all those speedy choochoos.
Ha!
Green trains, marked with a K or an L before the train number, are older models. Basic facilities and design of each car are pretty much the same as the cars of the “Red trains” (faster and newer trains but not the fastest). There are hard seats or hard sleepers (but no soft sleepers). A hard sleeper car has the capacity of 60 people, with toilets and hot water tanks on both sides of the car. The difference is in speed, price of a ticket, and specially in the level of maintenance.
The green trains are pretty old and rundown, so probably require a lot of maintenance just to keep going. As for service: well, when you pay less, you definitely get less. Or nothing. Bedding look almost as old as the train itself. Toilet wont flush – which makes them usable only for the bravest of souls. Unlike on the red trains, staff don’t make much effort to keep the car clean throughout the ride. The attending staff is mostly women (because, you know, that’s what we do best: attend). They are not the neat pretty girls one can see attending the red trains but pleasant Tai Tai’s in their forties.
Probably their job evaluation conversation went something like this: “Honey, sorry to tell you that, but you are no longer sexy enough to enjoy air condition or a bed on your shift so from now on you’ll be riding the green ones with the sweaty shirtless masses. You can keep your health insurance though”. Shocking they don’t go out of their to clean unflushable toilets.
Green train
Li Dafen of Tongkou village
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 28th, 2010
Originally posted on China Digital Times
All around the countryside of Beichuan County, there are signs of massive reconstruction. People are busy: building their own houses, working as hired hands in neighbors’ half finished new homes, refurnishing or earning some extra cash in road construction. Sights on the road are telling of the magnitude of the work being done here: motorways rebuilt, dams repaired, electric grid reinstalled, schools and hospitals and government offices – usually the first to be reconstructed and the most ostentatious – and homes, everywhere, solid and spacious by rural standards.
In the little township of Chunshui (春水), a weekly market is in full swing, offering, apart from the usual selection of vegetables, geese and chickens, piles of cheap household necessities. At the edge of town temporary houses still stand, now deserted and partly covered with an overgrowth of weeds, as former residents are moving into new permanent homes. The work is not yet done: The road from Anchang (安昌) is still barely passable and at the new school electricians and craftsmen work feverishly to prepare everything in time for the start of the school year in September. The overall atmosphere is that of optimism and hopefulness for a fresh start. Onward along the road, everywhere villages are seen, all with newly constructed two story houses surrounded by corn and rice fields at the edge of forested green hills. Only here and there the road shows signs of the terrible upheaval in boulders thrown at the edge of the Jin river, or a bare mountainside where rolling earth and crushing rocks buried a whole village once, not three years ago.
Up the road on the way to the ruined city of Beichuan, now a memorial site, lies the small one street townlet of Tongkou（通口镇）, the smallest and poorest of the towns in Beichuan county – really little more than a village in the shadow of a local holy Daoist mountain. Here, too people are at work:: Some houses along the one street are already occupied while other families are still hard at work on their new homes. One of them is Li Dafen, 54, violently mixing cement for plastering on recently erected walls. She is among the last households in the village to be moving in, living in the meantime in the dark and exposed basement of her uncompleted apartment.
Born in an even smaller and very remote village in the Beichuan area, Li attended only two years of elementary school. She came to Tongkou as a young bride to live in her husband’s house more than 30 years ago and had her two children here.
Even before the quake tore down her home, Li was no stranger to calamity. Her Daughter died some eight years ago from internal bleeding early in her pregnancy. Less than two years later, her husband died suddenly of heart failure. (A new hospital was built in town with donations from Shandong province, and seems to be quite active though not as well equipped as propaganda would have us believe. It might help make tragedies like Li’s less common in the future).
She was left to support her remaining son by herself, which she did by going “Da gong” – getting odd jobs in a series of eastern cities. News of the earthquake caught her cleaning hotel rooms in Nanjing, and she rushed home only to find it gone, utterly destroyed following the quake and floods from a “quake lake”. Fortunately her son, now twenty, was in a nearby town at the time and was not hurt – He now lives with her at the basement when not looking for a job in town. Late last year, Li went east once more, to Beijing, again working to earn money for the renovation. she says she got 29,000 RMB in compensation, to which the government added the laying of foundations for all the new houses in Tongkou – now built according to a master plan and supposedly quake resistant. Walls, ceiling, roof, flooring, plumbing and installing of doors and windows are left for everyone to do according to their own design and means. Li’s means are meager, but she nevertheless has grand plans for the place:
“People are nice enough here but they don’t help each other much. They all have their own worries and cares. People suggested that I’ll leave, with my husband no longer around and my son not wanting to live in such a small place, My family in the village suggested that I’ll move in with them, or that I’ll go east for good, but I want to rebuild my home. This is all I had left after their deaths and this I want back. This is my home – If I leave I’ll never have another one”.
And so she stays. And is quite optimistic that her home will be done in two months or so. “You have to come here again next year and see the house” She says. She might not be here next year though: after building and furnishing the house, the modest compensation fund will be all but spent. She then plans to go “Da gong” again.
The roads bear signs still but it's not all tragic: The area is very beautiful and worth a visit
Master plan – survivors of Beichuan get new homes -or not
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 25th, 2010
Living in a tent when building a new house near Beichuan
(This piece was originally posted on China Digital Times)
In his village of Yuchuanshan (玉川山), Mr. Du, is leisurely sipping tea on the porch of his new home, watching his grandchildren play among fruit trees.
The scene hasn’t always been that ideal: The family of seven has only recently moved into this spacious new home after living in a tent in their own front yard for more than a year following the collapse of their old home in the 2008 earthquake. But all is well now, Du declares. The compensation he got for his lost home, about 16,000 RMB, wasn’t really enough, considering that expenses and the cost of living are going up quickly in the recovered area. Still, getting to spend the evening of his life in peace and serenity on his own land is something one like Mr. Du surely appreciates. He is full of praise for his neighbors, his sons and especially the volunteers from around China and the world who came to help Beichuan in its dire times. All is well now.
Du & granddaughter
Some 25 kilometers from there, however, all is not well. The town of Leigu (擂鼓镇), only about 8 kilometers from Beichuan city, was one of the hardest hit, the whole town virtually flattened, and survivors from the population of 18,000 people (including the population of some 30 attached villages), were all left homeless. Where the town once stood there is now a refugee camp: rows upon rows of “disaster relief houses”. The thin walled structures have served the people well, but they are meant to be temporary and two years of use are apparent. The houses are rundown but in Leigu, most are still occupied, with thousands still waiting for a more permanent solution. All around, construction of farm houses, apartment buildings and public facilities such as schools and hospitals is in motion.
Street in Leigu remporary housing site
Wei Yonghong, a farmer from near Leigu is one of those in waiting. Her 10 months old daughter, like many other children, was born in a makeshift hospital in the camp. Her older son started his schooling in a UNICEF supported school there last year. When disaster fell, Wei was out, working her fields. Her in-laws managed to get the boy out of a collapsing house, but she took almost 24 hours to find that out, all the while trying to make her way home among shattered buildings and rubble. She now prepares for what could be a third winter in the camp if she’s not relocated soon. The family still hasn’t been notified when they will get a new house. “We want to go back to the village to rebuild our house ourselves, but the government said no, there is a master-plan so we have to wait for them to approve construction. We still don’t know when that’ll be. We’ve been waiting a long time without anyone telling us anything. Will you write about it”?
With many complaints of belated compensation and of being ignored by authorities, Wei still counts herself among the lucky ones: Homeless, Jobless, facing an uncertain future and forever haunted by distressful memories, she nevertheless has her family still whole and mostly unharmed. Her neighbors from both sides, as well as her cousin, all lost children in the earthquake.
Remains of houses in Leigu
At another row of shabby temporary houses, Jiang Qinyong tells a similar story: Her village, too, is not yet approved for reconstruction (it was located at the site of the camp itself). Watching over her daughter and several other children, Jiang, whose husband was badly injured and spent months in a hospital in Chengdu, is in a good mood, like her neighbors, who all try to keep themselves busy in the routine of transitory existence. Old women busy themselves with keeping tiny plots of arable land, thus helping to feed their families. “Before, we used to grow much of our food ourselves, but now we need to buy everything in the marker, and prices are rising all the time” Jiang complains. She says the hardest aspect of camp life is personal hygiene. Showers and toilets are provided, but are crowded in the evening and uncomfortable for families with small kids.
Li Yinjin
It is hardest, maybe, for the old and the disabled, of which a smiling a amiable Li Yinjin is one. The blind woman, aged 70, was alone in her home when the earthquake hit. Feeling her way out she was then found and brought to safety by a neighbor. She too is still waiting to receive compensation and a relocation plan, living in the meantime at a 14 square meters room together with her son and two orphaned grandsons. The son’s wife died in Beichuan town, he himself coming back home from Jiangsu province, where he was working in construction. Like many of the men and some of the women, he now tries to get employed within the region: opportunities seem abundant with so much construction going on, but somehow many still complain they have a hard time to finding a steady job or sufficient income.
makeshift furniture shop in Leigu
The clearest distinction seems to be between those still waiting, Like Jiang, Wei and Li, and those like Du who already have a home, or even those with only a clear relocation schedule. The later, feeling the worst is now behind them, are in high-spirit, making many plans and frequenting the many furniture shops that have sprung up at the edge of the camp. “Come visit again this winter”, warm invitations are repeatedly being extended. “By then, we could drink tea in our new home”. By then, Wei Yonghong’s baby girl will be taking her first steps, most likely on a grassy path between trailer-houses.
Promotion
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 24th, 2010
dancer in Tongkou village
Something you wouldn’t expect to see in a poor village somewhere in Sichuan. The girl from Chengdu is showing off for a promotion event of a company that sells solar panels. Since everyone around has a new home, they hope to sell many panels and found the market big enough to come all the way over.
Bits & pieces from Beichuan
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 21st, 2010
Building a road in Beichuan
- Most striking here is how resilient people are. They have many grievances – and many scars, but their fortitude, resourcefulness and capacity of joy are impressive.
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- Many of the complaints have to do with the price of stuff. With so much construction, so many newcomers in the area and so many people forced to purchase almost everything anew at the same time, inflation here runs much higher than the national average. Compensation entitlement, naturally, was determined before this minor boom and did not take inflation into account.
- The town of Anchang was less severely affected, thus replacing Beichuan as the urban center for the region. It resulted in a strange boom: even housing prices have gone up as many of the more affluent among Beichuan’s residents rented flats in Anchang until their new homes are ready. Also, I counted some half a dozen new hotels. Bit of an absurd consider there are still camps of temporary shelters for the homeless right in the middle of town. Anchang also shows that old Chinese curse, the all surpassing need to get face: At a glnace Anchang’s main street is all newly built, and this is how officials and other visitors see it when they hurry through, getting the impression the county is well recovered. It only takes a bit more than a glance to discover that much of this new construction is merely new fronts for old buildings that survived the quake. Just to clarify: I’m not saying reconstruction in Beichuan is all fake, or that the effort made isn’t impressive, because it is, but this is curious.
New building in Anchang
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- In the little poor village of Tongkou there is a small temple for Guanyin, goddess of mercy. due to the mysterious way fault lines work the temple, along with few buildings around it, survived when nearly all other buildings in town collapsed. Thus, Guanyin was the one providing shelter to the shocked survivors in the first horrific few days until help arrived. Some old women in Tongkou consider this a miracle. Others are more sceptical.
Buddha watches over rebuilt Tongkou
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- Still in Tongkou: A city of Shandong Province donated to the building of a new hospital and the reconstruction of homes. They also left Tongkou with a new town-square. This little piece of urbanization looks somewhat out of place in a farming community, but it is flat and dry and being made useful as a surface for drying grain.
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Last from Tongkou: A farmer named Li went to Beijing last year to earn some cash for rebuilding her home. She worked at a hotel washing dishes and said she had not left to building for two months for fear of getting lost or arrested. She was paid 30 RMB a day. Her neighbor Ms Tang also went to Beijing last year but had a very different experience: She was with a tour group visiting Tiananmen, The Forbidden City and other fine sites of our fair town. Reminder to self: Even among the poor, there are haves and have-nots, sometimes living yards from each other. The difference between relative poverty and abject one is felt more sharply, perhaps, than the one between rich and poor.
City of the dead
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 17th, 2010
And now let us enter the city of death “现在，让我们走j进《死城》(From a poem by Liao Yiwu, a son of Sichuan)
“So you’ve been there today? It’s too clean now. You can’t really imagine how it was back then” (Chen, a hotel proprietor in Anchang, to where survivors from Beichuan are being relocated)
Beichuan, Sichuan. The town that is now known locally as “Lao Beichuan”, old Beichuan. To tourists it is known as “Sichuan earthquake memorial hall”. Buses go there from an improvised ticket office few kilometers away and leave when full. They get full quicly, with visitors from all over China wishing to pay their respects. Tickets are 13 Yuan.
Beichuan was right at the epicenter of the 12.05.2008 quake and was almost completely destroyed. The town will not be rebuilt in its previous location but moved some 30 Kilometers south. The site of old Beichuan is now for all intention and purposes, a tourist attraction. It seems carefully design to extract sympathy and sorrow, but not so deep as to put visitors off their plans to go on and visit the Jiuzaiguo nature reserve up north from here.
But I am being cynical. The site of Beichuan is carefully cept and very respectful. You can first see the ruined town from the road above, then the tour bus will take you down, and a young guide walks a silent group in a circular morbid path. Here is the collapsed building of the local government, the once lovely Beichuan Grand Hotel, and a vocational school that buried more than a hundred students and teachers, but whose basketball court seem barely damaged. Strange what catches your eye.
Also catching the eye are the street cleaners, dutifully doing their job in a town that no longer has streets. one of them, carefully sweeping leaves from the road, to keep everything clean for the visitors. Beichuan is an open museum now: behind the low fences are the exhibits : stone slabs, iron polls, electric cables, mattresses, kitchenware, washing machines, everything that makes a home. Everything that can tell the story of an inconceivable tragedy. Within the fences, however, facilities must be kept neat for museum goers’ sake.
I look at the street cleaner who looks back with expression that invites no enquiries.
There seems to be reproach in her eyes, but maybe it’s just because I feel reproached anyway. Like an intruder. Some of her friends tend the grass over what was the foundation to a new glitzy shopping mall – a very hopeful enterprise in this environment. Construction of the mall has just begun when nature handed its deadly blow, and the pit became a mass grave for the thousands who needed to be buried in haste. Tourists stand here in silence for a minute or two, some shed tears. Then, we all get back on the bus. On the way back to the dispatching point, some eight kilometers away, The road passes a camp of temporary houses, still inhabited more than two years later. But this is no place for tourists to visit. On what life is like there, in the next post
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Peppery spirit of Sichuan
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 15th, 2010
In Chengdu, you can find many dissidents. Many here oppose the government but it is quite different from Beijing. Sichuanese aren’t very interested in the details of politics and political institutions, they just love to be free. This is the spirit of Sichuan”. (A native explaining local culture to bendilaowai).
And probably always has been, ever since Laozi, founder of Daoism and father of all anti-establishment movements retired into the mountains of Sichuan on the back of a water buffalo sometime around the 6th century BC.
Post(card) from Chengdu
Posted by: Rachel in Economy, Stories from the Countryside on July 14th, 2010
So far, good. The Beijing-Chengdu train ride was merely 31 uneventful but fairly pleasant hours. When I first started traveling in China – it wasn’t so long ago, only in 2002, so you wouldn’t expect the changes to be that big – There were warnings in every hotel and every guidebook regarding train rides. You were supposed to take extra good care of your camera, your money, even your hiking boots as they were all legitimate prey for train-robbers. Though I’ve never lost any item on a train, nor met anyone who has, this anxious habit of keeping all of my valuables under my pillow is still with me. It’s probably a good idea still, but it made me smile slightly at my own folly when I realised that almost every single person sharing the wagonwith me had a laptop, most of them better and more expensive than my own.
I am not sure thieves specifically target foreigners anymore, Toto.
Chengdu is Humid and damp as always. with traffic that made me miss the excellent execution of law and order in Beijing. Came across a small neighbourhood market this morning called 工人村 (GongRen Cun or Worker’s village) apart from vegetables and meat and masterly made dumplings, that absolutely filthy street offers some recreational activities besides:
This massage parlour mainly serves the stall-owners and shoppers in this market. foot treatment cost 8 Yuan for 30 minutes, whole body massage costs 12 Yuan. sights, sounds and of course scents of the sorounding are all included. Now that’s a bargain…
The inevitable Ma-jiang facility is here too
And a dental clinic of sorts, right near the meat truck.
This is not some backwater small town, but a community within the first ring-road in Chengdu, capital of the South-West and home to R&D centers by companies such as Intel and Microsoft. China is developing very fast indeed.
The not so great earth
Posted by: Rachel in Stories from the Countryside on July 11th, 2010
Starting tomorrow, I will be traveling in south China for few months, from rural Sichuan down to industrial Guangdong. This trip comes mainly out of boredom, I guess, or maybe rather call it restlessness, and the feeling I am missing out on China.
I love Beijing, really. It has actually dawned on me today, as I was clearing my flat and saying my goodbyes around the Xiaoqu, that I probably love it more than you should love anyone you didn’t give birth to. Nonetheless, getting all so comfortable and acquainted with this great big city, with its great big expat community eventually only served to reinforce my prejudices and all those things I already know, or think I know, about the inexhaustible entity we usually call China. There is too much China out there, and hoping to some town for couple of days to interview some Mr Wang or other before rushing back to Beijing to make it for my deadline and for Xiao He’s next concert, is lately failing to give me the sense of being out there with it.
I hope to learn something. Long ago I was told: “You will never really understand China until you’re picking rice in the fields with some farmers”. I was young and stupid enough back then to take it literally, so picked rice (and corn, and beans) for a while. Now I know that I will never understasnd China. More important, I know I don’t want to ever stop trying.
Next post will be from Chengdu and this blog will henceforth be updated more regularly, or as often as I can get online. Many thanks for all of you who helped with this: from suggesting itineraries to storing my stuff while I’m away. Cheers
And to my beloved city: see you in November. Don’t run away.