On the situation of the Chinese farmers

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On the situation of Chinese farmers ( Chinese  中国 农民 调查 , Pinyin Zhōngguó Nóngmín Diàochá ) is a study by Chen Guidi ( 陈桂棣 , Chén Guìdì ; * 1963 in the province of Anhui ) and his wife Wu Chuntao ( 吴 春桃 , Wú Chūntáo ) about the Situation of farmers in the People's Republic of China .

Authors

Chen Guidi, son of a peasant family, and his wife Wu are both members of the Writers' Union of Hefei , where they live in Anhui. Chen Guidi is also a member of the Chinese Writers' Association and has received the Lu Xun Literature Achievement Award , one of the most prestigious literary awards in China, for his report on the environmental conditions on the Huai He River .

Emergence

The two had been discussing the idea of ​​a report on the situation of the Chinese rural population for over ten years. The decisive factor for the start was the birth of her son; at that time they witnessed the deaths of a mother and her child who died because the mother had no money for medical treatment.

Starting in 2001, the author couple researched for over three years and conducted interviews with farmers in 50 cities in rural Anhui Province. They identified the exploitation of the rural population through a large number of taxes, levies and excessive prices as a state system, exacerbated by the enrichment and excessive levy of local cadres, from whom there is neither legal nor social protection. In the report you paint a gloomy picture of the situation of the approximately one billion people in the rural Chinese population.

In the foreword the authors write: "We observed unimaginable poverty and unthinkable evil, we saw unimaginable need and unthinkable helplessness, unimaginable resistance in incomparable silence, and we were confronted with unbelievable tragedies beyond our imagination ...".

The statistics of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China alone show 93 taxes, funds and reserves from 24 authorities that deal with peasant burdens. In the regions, however, there are up to 293 loads - this does not yet include excessive prices for deliveries.

There is also massive amounts of theft, embezzlement, embezzlement and levy overdraft by corrupt and criminal officials. These functionaries maintain their exploitative regime with iron force. One of the many examples in the book is a process in which a corrupt vice village chief had the skulls of four peasants chosen by their village to complain about him split open in front of everyone. Witnesses and prosecutors are sometimes beaten to death, often with the help of the police.

Impact history

A preprint of the text appeared in the literary magazine Dangdai (Modernes Magazin) at the end of 2003. It was sold over 100,000 times in ten editions in a short time. Excerpts in German were published in 2004 in the German magazine Lettre International .

The book, which appeared in China in January 2004, sold 300,000 copies in a very short time. After the two authors were interviewed over a hundred times in fifty days, the book was banned in March 2004. Since then, however, over 8 million copies have appeared as pirated prints.

In 2004, the author pair received the prize worth 50,000 euros for the book Lettre Ulysses world price for literary reportage ( Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage ).

In March 2005, they were sentenced to a large fine for allegedly slandering senior party official Zhang Xide in their book. The verdict was fought in Fuyang Court, where the officer's son is a judge. Zhang Xide commented on this in an interview.

In March 2006, German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a reception for the couple on her first visit to China.

Voices on the book

“The reporters Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao stayed in the villages of the Chinese farmers for months, reconstructing them minute by minute, document by document, explaining with radical righteousness what corruption, mafia-like entanglements and murder had done in the great empire, for its liberation of arbitrariness in the great revolution, millions died. "

- Susanne Mayer : Go there. Write it down. In: The time

swell

literature

  • Chen Guidi, Wu Chuntao: On the situation of the Chinese farmers. Zweiausendeins Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-86150-765-X .
  • Chen Guidi, Wu Chuntao: Will the Boat Sink the Water ?: The Life of China's Peasants. PublicAffairs, 2006, ISBN 1-58648-358-7 .
  • 陳桂棣 、 春桃: 中國 農民 調查, 大地 , 2004, ISBN 986-7480-19-8 . (Chinese edition from Taiwan)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Interview with Zhang Xide ( English ) EastSouthWestNorth. Retrieved April 2, 2019.
  2. ↑ Susanne Mayer: Go there. Write it down . In: The time . No. 45/2004 ( Zeit Online ).