Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China.

• Author: Esarey, Ashley
• Position: Book Review

By Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiabo Lu

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 282 pages

In the last 20 years, the Chinese Communist Party's leadership has allowed China to reach levels of economic growth unparalleled in modern times, improving the quality of living for the vast majority of citizens in urban areas. But development did not come without a price, and much of it was borne by peasants who struggled against an increasingly predatory local state. Central government policies dictating the universal provision of public goods drove the local governments in poor areas to egregious informal forms of taxing peasants to meet performance quotas. In addition to officially sanctioned forms of taxation, county; township, and village governments in rural China imposed fees to extract more revenue. The rates of informal taxation, known as "peasant burdens," grew so severe as to prompt mass demonstrations, riots, even suicides by peasants who were forced to pay taxes and fees related to weddings, funerals, livestock, crops and scores of other miscellany. Peasant burdens remain today: When peasants fail to pay the taxes, roving bands of local government officials confiscate household possessions of monetary value, and harass and beat farmers. The peasants' perception of the local state as wealthy and corrupt further heightens tension, created by the unfortunate combination of budgetary pressures from above and lawlessness in local government.

In Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China, Bernstein and Lu discuss various forms of resistance to excessive burdens that merit a new appreciation of rural rather than urban China as the heartland of political activism. In the political science literature on transitions to democratic rule, urban intellectuals and bourgeoisie are typically seen as the firebrands of activism and the principal actors in pro-democracy movements. Local government in China, however, may illustrate an alternate trend. The calculations of peasants, as revealed by individual narratives and case studies, demonstrate political rationality, and reveal savvy not usually attributed to poorly educated people in impoverished areas. Chinese policy-making elites, who generally view rural areas as incapable of handling the challenges of democratic government, have for their part failed to recognize the importance of local political action. Thus, Bernstein and Lu shed light on political forces in China seldom or poorly...