如何让中国更富有--月落垟

如何让中国更富有

China
How to make China even richer
Mar 23rd 2006
From The Economist print edition
Let the peasants own their land
中国专题
如何让中国更富有
2006年3月23日
让农民拥有自己的土地
IN 1940, nine years before his Communist Party seized power, Mao Zedong set out his plans for a “new China”. The republic would, he said, “take certain necessary steps” to confiscate land from rural landlords. Under the principle of “land to the tiller”, it would then “turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants.” If only things had turned out this way.
1940年，远在中国共产党夺取政权的九年之前，毛泽东就宣布了建设“新中国”的计划。他说新的共和国将要“采取必要的步骤”没收地主手中的田地。在“耕者有其田”的原则下，如果一切执行顺利，农民将会拥有他们自己的私有土地。
The “necessary steps” involved widespread slaughter. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of landowning rural residents and their families were executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers. The peasants got their small parcels of land, but not for long. By the late 1950s, private land ownership had been eliminated and peasants had become property-less members of “People‘s Communes”. It was an upheaval that, along with bad weather and a
frenzied attempt to catch up with American levels of industrial production, contributed to millions more deaths in a nationwide famine.
“必要步骤”包括大范围的滥杀无辜。成百上千，甚至可能是数百万地主及他们的家人惨遭屠戮或是被同村人活活打死。农民们终于得到他们日夜渴求的小块土地，可惜同样为时不久。二十世纪五十年代晚期，私有土地政策被废止，农民们成为“人民公社”的无产阶级一员。之后天灾加上超英赶美的狂热造成一场全国范围的饥荒，数百万人悲惨地沦为饿莩
As our survey describes, China has yet to undo the damage. A few years after Mao‘s death in 1976, the People‘s Communes were dismantled. Under Deng Xiaoping, agricultural production soared as for the first time in 30 years peasants were allocated (but not given full ownership of) plots of land to farm independently. This marked the start of the economic transformation that today holds the world spellbound. But it is the prosperity of urban China that mesmerises foreign businesses. Since its boom in the early 1980s, the countryside has lagged ever further behind.
调查显示中国至今仍对那场灾难心有余悸。1976年毛死后不久人民公社即行解散。在邓小平领导下，农民终于在解放三十年后第一次获得可以为自己耕种的土地（虽然还是没有土地所有权），农业生产力由此快速增长。这标志着如今令全世界吃惊的中国经济改革迈出第一步。但是仅仅是城市的繁华吸引外国投资者。农村地区从八十年代早期蓬勃发展之后就每况愈下。
This time, a genuine great leap forward
现在，一场真正的大跃进
Deng kept in place two pillars of the Maoist rural order: collective land ownership and an apartheid system that barred rural residents from moving to the cities. The latter has begun to erode, due to the need for cheap labour to
sustain a manufacturing boom. But the former remains firmly in place.
邓保留了毛泽东两大农村政策：集体土地所有制和限制农村人口流向城市的户籍制。由于国内制造业的繁荣需要大量廉价劳动力，后者已经日渐驰废。但前者在农村仍然根深蒂固。
Now is the time to revive Mao‘s vision of a new landowning order. This would ease rural strife, fuel growth and help develop the genuine market economy the leadership claims to want. Giving peasants marketable ownership rights, and developing a legal system to protect them, would bring huge economic benefits. If peasants could mortgage their land, they could raise money to boost its productivity. Ownership would give them an incentive to do so. And
if peasants could sell their land, they could acquire sufficient capital to start life anew in urban areas. This would boost urban consumption and encourage the migration of unproductive rural labour into the cities. For China to sustain its impressive growth rate and reduce inequalities, getting the many tens of millions of underemployed peasants off the land and into wealth-creating jobs is essential. The exodus would help those left behind to expand their land holdings and use them more efficiently.
现在到了重新考虑毛关于新土地秩序远见的时候了。这将有益于缓减农村矛盾冲突和燃油增长，并帮助发展真正的市场经济－这是中国领导人宣布想要的。给予农民市场化的土地所有权并发展相应的法律程序保护他们将会带来极大的经济效益。假如农民可以将土地抵押贷款，他们就可以得到更多的钱去提高土地的生产力。私有制会激励他们这样去做。假如农民可以出售土地，他们也可以得到足够的钱在城市开始新的生活。这将促进城市消费并鼓励地力贫瘠地区农村劳力迁入城市。为使中国能够继续保持这样令人讶异的增长速度和减少不平等，令数百万的失业农村劳动力从土地束缚中解脱出来并获得能够创造财富的工作是必要的。人口的流动也有助于留在农村的人拓展大片土地提高效率。
No government, least of all the control freaks who run China, would embark on such a momentous exercise lightly. Communist Party ideologues are all too aware that a failure to handle rural issues properly can be destabilising. They worry that allowing peasants to sell their land could restore a rural landowning class, and that peasants would sell up in huge numbers and descend upon ill-prepared cities, throwing up shanty towns and pushing up crime.
Some officials also see collective ownership of rural land as one of the few remaining adges of China‘s professed “socialism”, and fear the explosion of divisive political debate if this bit of constitutional dogma is changed. In China‘s case, however, it is the absence of reform that is proving destabilising, as peasants protest violently against land seizures by local governments keen to exploit the land themselves. Though materially better off than
they were in 1949, many peasants say that local bureaucrats have in effect become the landlords, sometimes using mafia-type gangs to push them off their fields.
政府，尤其是党内那些保守势力，都不愿轻启这个话端。共产党的信徒们都很清楚农村政策处置不当将导至颠覆性后果。他们担心允许土地交易会产生新的地主阶级，而农民们变卖土地蜂涌到尚未准备接纳他们的城市，最终出现大量的窝棚建筑和高居不下的犯罪率。部分官员同时也视土地集体所有制为中国特色的“社会主义”所剩不多的标志之一。假如这一宪条容许改变，则会爆发政体分裂大讨论。但是中国现状表明土地改革的缺席正在制造不稳定现象。农民以暴力抗拒热衷于剥削土地价值的地方政府的巧取豪夺。虽然从物质上讲农民的日子比解放前要好过一些，但很多农民都说地方政府事实上成了土地所有者，并常常以黑社会式的暴力将他们驱离自己的土地。
A few opponents of land reform in the countryside say they are acting in the rural population‘s own interests. They point to the lack of social-security provisions for peasants. Though peasants have limited control over the land they farm, in most cases it can at least help to feed them.
一些农村土地改革反对者说他们眼下所为符合农村人的利益。他们指的是农民社保体系的缺乏。虽然农民对耕地控制有限，但大多数时候留在农村足够温饱。
The weakness of this argument is that forced appropriations by local governments have already deprived as many as 40m peasants of some or all of their land since the early 1990s, with little or no compensation. Besides, the best way to secure the welfare of the peasants is not to keep them trapped on underworked land but to spend more directly on services for the poor. With strong revenue growth, a low budget deficit and a booming economy, China can afford this. Compensating peasants for appropriated land on the basis of market values, not just minimal agricultural ones, would help too. And introducing a value-based property tax would persuade local governments to worry less about losing the one-off revenues they now enjoy from the sale of land rights.
但是这个观点的问题在于，自九十年代以来，地方政府强征土地的行为已经夺走了大约四千万农民的部分或所有土地，却仅仅给予很少或没有补偿。此外解决农民福利的最好方法并非把他们限制在低产出的土地上而是投入更多的钱直接为穷人服务。随着国家税收的增加，财政低赤字加上经济继续繁荣，中国政府有能力支付这笔钱。同理，以土地市价补偿失地农民而非以最小的农业价值糊弄他们也是另一种方法。只要引入财产税就能说服地方政府不必担心失去他们如今从出卖土地所有权中所得的收入
It would be disingenuous to deny that land reform will loosen party control in the long run. A decade ago almost all urban housing was owned by the state. In one of the most dramatically successful economic reforms of the past quarter century in China, most is now privately owned. This has fostered the growth of a middle class that wants guarantees that its new assets are safe from the party‘s whims. Property owners are electing their own landlord committees—independent of the party—to protect their rights. A new breed of lawyers, not party stooges as most once were, is emerging to defend those whose properties are threatened by the state. Property owners want a clean environment around their homes. Green activism, which hardly existed in China a decade ago, is spurring the development of a civil society.
不能否认土地改革从长远来说会削弱共产党的控制。十年以前几乎所有的城市房子都由政府控制。经过四分之一世纪极为成功的经济改革之后，大部分住房已括入私人囊中。改革促生了一批中产阶级，他们希望自己的不动产能在政党反复无常的政策变动中保持安全。所以业主们选举产生了独立于政党的“业主委员会”来保护他们的权利。一批新生代的律师－不象他们曾经只是附庸的前辈－也挺身而出帮助那些财产受到政府侵害的人。业主们需要家居环境清洁。所以绿色环保主义，十年前在中国难以立足的东西，正在促进公民社会的发展。
Even so, China‘s Communist Party has shown that it will take big risks if economic development demands them. Hence the widespread closure and privatisation of state-owned enterprises in the past decade, with the loss of millions of jobs. The leadership knows that China‘s history has been one of recurring bloody upheavals by landless peasants; it is caught between wanting to retain control and wanting to avoid another upheaval. This is the
moment to complete the unfinished business of rural reform.
即便如此，中国共产党仍显示出只要经济发展形势需要就敢冒险的信念。所以过去十年出现影响范围广泛的国有企业破产与私有化过程，数百万人失业下岗。领导阶层深知中国历史就是由失地农民血腥反抗引发的更迭。这种平衡维持于继续维持统治和避免另一次剧变之间。现在已经到了完成农村改革未竞事业的时候了。