Taxation without Representation in Rural China (review)

In their fine study of taxation in rural China under reform, Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü come to the sobering conclusion that "developmental and predatory behaviors [are] interrelated" (p. 9). In the "agricultural China" of the central heartland (contrasted against the "industrializing rural China" of the east coast and the "subsistence China" of the west), rural cadres squeeze the peasantry because they have to. Where cadres in industrializing rural China can turn to Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) for the revenues needed for development, cadres in agricultural China have no such luck. They are, therefore, "compelled" (p. 245) to choose between the "contradictory" (p. 245) imperatives of rapid development and easing demands on the peasantry. As "rational actors" (p. 244 ), they have chosen the former. The result: increasing cadre exploitation—and peasant resistance.

Bernstein and Lü's explanation is thus largely structural: the "institutional sources of informal tax burdens," as they title chapter 4. They focus on five structural variables. (1) The "deconcentration of state power," undertaken to stimulate development, has given local government considerable autonomy from a central government that is impotent to rein in local cadre abuses and thus reduce peasant grievances. (2) "Unfunded mandates" from a developmental Center do not heed the financial constraints faced by rural cadres in agricultural China. (3) With China's transition from plan to market, the government should have shrunk; instead it has expanded parasitically, creating a tremendous burden on China's peasants. (4) The lack of a clear rural tax system creates the "muddled finances" that allow rural cadres to impose endless fees and levies. (5) The system, in the end, creates "opportunities" to engage in corruption: "even honest officials . . . [feel] compelled to impose oppressive taxes and fees" (p. 115 ).

To what extent do such "opportunities" justify or even explain corrupt behavior? Bernstein and Lü's largely structural explanation ends up letting corrupt rural cadres off the hook a bit too easily. Many of the shocking examples of cadre corruption that they discuss, such as the Ningxia cadres who appointed their own primary-school-aged children to government posts (p. 113), cannot be blamed on the developmental imperative; they are better attributed to individual arrogance and greed. Indeed, Bernstein and Lü implicitly recognize the limits of their structural approach when they discuss human agency. In chapter 2, on the historical background, for example, they note that the collapse of Confucian ethics was a major reason for peasant exploitation at the end of the Qing dynasty (p. 25 ).

Bernstein and Lü also emphasize agency at the Center: just as the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s was the product in part of Mao Zedong's conscious decision to industrialize based on extraction from the countryside, today's problems in agricultural and subsistence China are the product of Deng Xiaoping's deliberate decision in the early 1980s to let the coastal provinces get rich first. In the end, Taxation without Representation in Rural China is an indictment of Deng's decision to develop the coast at the expense of the hinterland.

Although Bernstein and Lü eschew an in-depth case-study approach in favor of a broad survey of rural China, the strength of Taxation without Representation is the rich empirical material they cull from a reading of hundreds if not thousands of Chinese press reports. The reader will learn, for example, that relations between rural cadres and peasants have deteriorated from "fish-in-water" during the revolutionary period to "oil-in-water" today (p. 81). Indeed, when cadres are seen approaching, peasants will shout "The devils have entered the village!" (Guizi jin cun le!) (pp. 79, 154). Unmodified, "devils" is generally understood to refer to the hated Japanese invaders of the first half of the twentieth century. That the local Party is now compared to the Japanese is indicative of the extent of cadre-peasant animosity in China today.

Taxation without Representation is illustrated...