
Once a Symbol of Power, Farming Now an Economic Drag in China - adventured
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/world/asia/once-a-symbol-of-power-farming-now-an-economic-drag-in-china.html
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Htsthbjig
I have lived in China.

The New York Times sees the solution as privatization. Very American. But if
privatization happens in China it will be like in Russia: A few will be given
the property of all(as the property is in theory collective of all). Russians
are so angry about privatization there.

I am not such a fan of the American system, USA is very rich but also terribly
poor. Living in the USA you see poorer people than anywhere else in a western
society. And poverty is rising enormously.

Ironically, the original American system was giving property in small chunks
to anyone who took it from the Indians.

This differentiated it from systems like Latin America, in which property was
given to a very few people. This has been a total disaster for them.

Also, US of A territory is as big as China for 5 times less people.

There are ways in between. You can make cooperatives that aggregate
rights(which is what Chinese have, not property) of small farmers into big
territories.

I was born in Spain and some cooperatives work very well there because they
are well organized by the same workers. It is very common to share tractors or
distribution channels between a group of farmers.

~~~
chrisBob
>I have lived in China.

> USA is very rich but also terribly poor. Living in the USA you see poorer
> people than anywhere else in a western society. And poverty is rising
> enormously.

This is a very interesting perspective; did you ever travel to rural parts of
China? I have never been to china, but my Chinese lab mate says that the best
translation for Chinese outside of the cities is "peasant" not farmer. One
good example of the way these people are treated is the lack of public
education for people in these areas. In the US some schools are _much_ better
than others, but every child is guaranteed a public education, and has the
opportunity to train for a reasonable job.

Similarly I have friends from Iraq and Nepal who are happy here. Pretty much
everyone in the US has heat, running water, a modern dwelling... I know very
little about Europe and other western societies though, so perhaps it is much
worse here than in some places.

~~~
rsynnott
> This is a very interesting perspective; did you ever travel to rural parts
> of China?

China isn't what would normally be considered a western society; I assume they
were talking about the developed world.

Much of the developed world does have substantially better social safety nets
that the US, and lower rates of income inequality, though probably not due to
the distribution of ownership of farmland.

~~~
zo1
" _Much of the developed world does have substantially better social safety
nets that the US, and lower rates of income inequality_ "

Can you point me to your sources on this, I'm quite curious?

~~~
dragontamer
The better social safety nets are damn obvious. Much of Europe (including UK)
has free education up to College-level, truly universal healthcare (State-
Sponsored for all citizens).

As for income inequality, the statistics are pretty telling.

[http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/08/news/economy/global_income_i...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/08/news/economy/global_income_inequality/)

But it is the goal of liberalism to have strong social safety nets and
equalize pay to all. The US has a different culture with different values...
tending towards the "conservative" and with great trust in market forces.

"Obamacare" is seen as Socialism and half the population seems to hate it. But
Obamacare only establishes rules for the free market to operate under...
standardizing health care plans across insurance companies. There is no state-
sponsored health care from the law, and yet people are still worried about
socialism.

Obamacare is closer to Credit Card reform, in that it forced all credit card
companies in the US to standardize upon the "Annual Percentage Rate" / APR so
that everyone can comparison shop across credit cards. With Obamacare, all
insurance companies have to offer similar plans (bronze, silver, gold,
platinum), and they must cover certain provisions (contraceptives make the
controversy here). So now when you see a "Bronze" plan from say... Aetna
Health Insurance, you know it is similar to "Bronze" plans from Kaiser
Permanente.

As far as the "Socialism" goes... US has had Medicare / Medicaid for nearly 80
years now. The "socialist" part of our health care system has existed for a
very long time, but no Republican seems to want to attack it.

But inside the US, _any_ new laws upon the market is seen as a "Market
Distortion" and is criticized as "Socialism". Because most American's don't
even know the meaning of that word. The absurdity in the "Net Neutrality"
argument is more proof of the free market sheeple ignoring important issues
and placing their trust in the free market instead.

~~~
gretful
Obamacare is closer to car-insurance, with the caveat that even if you don't
want a car you still have to buy the insurance. THAT is what has most of the
nay-sayers agitated.

Medicare/Medicaid are, like the student loan programs with college tuition, at
least partially responsible for driving up the costs of healthcare in the US.

We've backed ourselves into a very difficult corner, and getting out of it
isn't going to be easy, and it won't be popular.

~~~
cpwright
Car insurance doesn't protect you, it protects the other drivers on the road.
You can decide to risk it, and if your brand new car is totaled, its on you
[assuming you paid cash, if you finance it any lender will also make you get
collision and comprehensive]. What you can't decide to do is forgo liability
insurance so that if you hit someone else's car they have to extract the
payment from you rather than from a well-capitalized insurance company.

Of course this is all state regulated (and this is US-centric, but so is
Obamacare), so it can work differently in different places.

Health insurance nominally protects you, though some make the argument that it
protects society as a whole from any individual burdening the system.

~~~
gretful
Put Drs/Hospitals/HealthCare in place of the other car, and your body in place
of your car. The analogy works very well. ACA is acting as the bank in the car
insurance analogy, demanding that you HAVE to have bumper-to-bumper collision
insurance.

In the car insurance case you can forgo the car and thereby forgo purchasing
car insurance, but with the ACA you can't forgo health insurance.

------
tokenadult
The great thing about China as a country to study for examples of national
policy is that China was divided into two parts. After 1949, when the Chinese
Nationalist Party (中國國民黨) regime had effective control only of the island of
Taiwan and a few offshore islands that are technically parts of other
provinces of China, its policy direction could be distinguished from the
policy direction of the Communist Party of China (中国共产党) regime ruling the
mainland regions of China. Land reform, all over the world, is a crucial
problem in national economic development. Taiwan's program of land reform was
notably successful[1] and acclaimed in books from a rather leftist
perspective[2] by the 1970s. By the 1980s, I was living in Taiwan and
occasionally visiting Hong Kong and China during a three-year stay overseas,
and I had been continually reading the Chinese press (first in English, and
then in the original Chinese) since beginning my study of Chinese language and
history in 1975 (while the Cultural Revolution in China was winding down).

I've seen a lot of policy claims about China go back and forth over the
decades. Plainly, China's Communist government has never been as careful about
individual rights or civil liberties as Taiwan's government was even while it
was still a one-party dictatorship. (I lived in Taiwan both before and after
the mostly peaceful transition to multiparty democratic government with full
protection of individual rights and civil liberties there, and China is
nowhere near as far along that path as Taiwan already was in the 1970s.) Rural
people in China need economically productive employment to continue to advance
in prosperity. The country still needs food production, even if it ends up
with many fewer farmers, as all other countries do along the path to economic
development. Private land rights with actual legally protected sales of those
rights can eventually rationalize how land is used for farming, and who lives
where. (Many of my uncles and quite a few of my cousins in the United States
in 2014 are STILL farmers, generations after when most Americans have stopped
being farmers.) The key issue is whether the Communist Party's overwhelming
appetite for corruption will allow the needed economic transformation to
happen or not.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Miracle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Miracle)

[2] [http://www.tni.org/tnibook/how-other-half-
dies-0](http://www.tni.org/tnibook/how-other-half-dies-0)

------
Noughmad
The article states that China's problem is too many little farms, and that
farmers can't consolidate because the land is owned by the government. It even
goes as far as suggesting that private ownership of the land would help get
bigger, more efficient farms instead of a larger number of smaller ones. I
understand this is a US site so they're not allowed to say that, but aren't
they basically making the case for collective farming (as in communism)?

~~~
vidarh
No, they are making the case for having a large proportion of Chinese farmers
leave their plots to allow them to be aggregated into larger farms operated by
fewer people.

There are two basic problems there: Too many people, and that it is hard for
farmers to provide sufficient security to get loans to finance
industrialisation because they don't own any land. With the latter, you could
get collectives arranging to aggregate their land and e.g. share machinery.

Basically, they've socialised the land ownership, but not socialised the
farming operation, and as a result they have a mismatch where they've made
their farmers a high financing risk. Either socialising parts of the farming
operation, or privatising the property would both likely be better than their
current alternative for profitability of farms.

But the issue of too many people exacerbates the problem: More efficient farms
have the potential to be more profitable because you can farm a larger area
with fewer people. If the number of people remain constant, you don't have the
same incentive, since you are paying for the labor anyway, and probably won't
be able to afford it either. So ultimately whatever they do, they will want to
encourage a reduction in the number of farmers.

The problem is that the government would not like to have to deal with a
growing unemployment problem in the cities by driving people to leave their
plots, and they also would not enjoy the social unrest it could potentially
cause to force the issue. Hence their slow reforms.

(It's also very indicative about the ideology of the Chinese government that
it has _not_ made any moves towards socialising the farming; e.g. they could
have increased the land rent but provided farmers access to collectively owned
farm machinery as part of it, or even explicitly required farmers to arrange
cooperatives and only rent out bigger parcels of land - instead they are
opting for means of making farming rights a commodity subject to market
forces)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
This is spot on.

To note, China did delve into farm operation collectivization under Mao, but
this was almost completely undone by Deng.

