The information in this file was recently published in FREEDOM - the fortnightly anarchist journal published by FREEDOM PRESS: FREEDOM PRESS (IN ANGEL ALLEY) 84B WHITECHAPEL HIGH STREET, LONDON E1 7QX GREAT BRITAIN Do write for a sample copy or for a copy of our booklist of publications. We will be putting more of this information out so watch this spot... As your ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange and ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures. - EMPEROR CH'IEN LUNG (1793) A couple of hundred years ago Ch'ien Lung's allusions to the self-reliance of the Chinese people were more bravado in the face of European traders than revelatory of his true thoughts on the matter. However, they are still of interest because of on the one hand their underlying truth and, paradoxically, on the other their underlying falsity. If it takes a bit of imagination to get your mind around the size of China territorially and in population terms, another stagerring statistic is that in China 25% of the world's population is sustained by less than 7% of the planet's arable land. If that sends you to thoughts of Fields, Factories and Workshops and Kropotkin's insistance on self-reliant societies based on intensive labour you wouldn't be the only one. Colin Ward in his edited version of the classic calls the Chinese communes - of the Maoist dynasty which ended nearly 20 years ago - 'the nearest thing to Kropotkin's industrial villages'. This critical support needs some qualification - some of the communes would have been pretty big villages - the production teams which were also more free of political control might come closer - but his prophetic aside that the problem with China was, '...the knowledge that some great shift in policy might put into reverse the trends which, at a distance, we admire.' ..is more pertinent even if the shift came from directions less foreseeable at the time - as we saw in part one of this FOCUS... Ch'ien Lung's rejection of things foreign has come a little unstuck in the 1990s. These recent developments however are not typical of Chinese history. We asked, at the end of part one, what anarchists could find of interest here. The answer is considerable. Indeed as Peter Marshall has pointed out recently in Demanding The Impossible Chinese history (we will come more up-to-date shortly) has been one of self-governing communities where even the Confucians with their centralist - and incidentally anti- commercialist - tendencies failed to make the state a reality in the daily lives of the vast population. Marshall sees links between anarchism and Chinese Taoism and he writes of the traditional concepts of Ta-t'ung - an Eden of social equality - and Ching-t'ien - a system of communal land tenure and a more real concept, probably practiced sporadically during the first millenium. Indeed it is to the traditions of Chinese society that we must look for its strength in the modern era. Although this might be said to have begun in the authoritarian Maoist era one should emphasise two factors at play here. Firstly, the extent to which this progress was based on the foundations of traditional society and secondly the degree to which it was independent of government. Frank Leeming who has produced one of the most recent, comprehensive studies of the China away from the urban centres which now command the West's attention says: Chinese agriculture after 1949, and up to the present, has had much to learn from Western agricultural science about tactics, but in terms of basic strategy, in the maintenance of very dense populations, traditional farming in China had little or nothing to learn from the West... Farm expansion in China under the People's Government has depended above all on intensification, and present signs are that it will continue to do so. Intensification in this sense is increase in production per unit area. It has been achieved by the people directly, rather than by the government.' Rural China (Longman 1985 emphasis added) This may already seem somewhat dated but in rural China little has changed. Information about contemporary agricultural techniques in China is like reading a Lawrence Hills book on organic gardening: the pig returns all household waste to the land, the Chinese were the first to develop biological pest control, green manuring is still around after 3000 years, intercropping is still a widely used technique, according to official statistics 500,000 biogas (methane gas for cooking) were constructed each year throughout the 1980s... the list could go on. With growing industrialisation and burgeoning populations on the seabord (see part one) the rural Chinese are being forced to turn to artificial fertiliser and chemical pesticides in what can be seen as a desperate attempt to come to terms with the ever increasing strains on their traditional way of life. The World Bank in a secret report has said that some 30 million have been evicted from their homes in the past four decades to make room for road, railway and reservoir projects and there's more to come. We have in this FOCUS... painted a picture of two Chinas - a picture which is repeated in so many countries throughout the world. If you're now expecting us to trumpet the eventual triumph of the forces of liberation then... tough. Instead we'll leave you with these thoughts from Paul Theroux: When countries modernise these days they become Americanised, and often lose their cultural identity. China is exceptional. The more China develops, the more it seems to be turning back into the old China, just as regional and unequal and busily self- sufficient and hard to read as ancient Chung Guo... The Guardian 18/3/94 The Observer 10/10/93