Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

China has fired two agriculture ministers over the past two years, one of whom got a death sentence. This appears to be the routine discovery of bad apples in the system, but it reflects the desperation of Chinese leaders to restore confidence in the Party's leadership.  Much like a religious revival, new Agriculture Minister Zhang Zhu's first meeting with employees two days after being appointed urged communist party members to "forge their collective will and soul," translate their beliefs into collective actions, promptly correct any deviations, and address malpractices and corruption issues that directly affect the public, demonstrating "unwavering loyalty to the Party." This is the latest in a series of meetings held this year to lecture communist cadres about studying Xi Jinping thought, giving up corruption and lax work attitudes, and pursuing their jobs with sincerity. These meetings reflect the Party's worries that its hold on the countryside i...

The Chinese Communist Party relies on statistics-based rankings to demonstrate success and to promote officials, creating incentives to falsify statistics from bottom to top. The Party's head-scratching campaign to address "formalism" appears to offer no real solution and suggests the Party may be collapsing in on itself.  Last week China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs held a meetin g to prod Party officials to correct performance evaluation incentives that generate endless meetings, phony statistics, and reams of documents that distract grassroots officials from achieving practical results in agricultural and rural development work. This is part of a years-long campaign to eliminate so-called "formalism" (形式主义) that undermines the effectiveness of local Party officials and therefore diminishes the citizens' support. This year's campaign against formalism is said to be linked to the 15th five-year plan, but it may also be motivated by th...

Propaganda ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday shows Xi Jinping firmly in charge of everyone and everything. But he has pointedly refused to leave Beijing. Rural officials in the hinterland are warned to implement Xi's blueprint for overhauling the countryside, or else. Xi's "rural revitalization" in this year's 5-year plan is meant to retain the peasants' loyalty. But it could be backfire if massive spending, bank loans, carving up of rural land, and building construction breed corruption and mismanagement that undermine villagers' support for Party rule.  This week's cheerful propaganda shows Xi Jinping visiting grassroots officials in Beijing to extend Spring Festival greetings and hype high-tech AI and robots as the key to China's future. The captions of each carefully staged photo began with a list of Xi's titles--General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, Chairman of the State, Chairman of the Central Milit...

China's Grain Reserve Bureau was recognized for its "secrecy work" by the State Secrets bureau, a reminder that China's promises of "openness" and free-flow of information are still constrained by an Orwellian bureaucracy that outsiders never see. The Administration of Food and Commodity Reserves announced on its web site  that it had been designated an "advanced collective in National secrecy work," by the National Administration of State Secrets Protection . The award given in January 2019 is a recognition of the bureau's work in maintaining secrecy that is given out only once every five years. The reserves administration is responsible for overseeing the procurement, storage and distribution of government grain and cotton reserves. In a training class held in 2019, local grain reserve officials are reminded that the communist party dictates what information should be kept secret. Photo from Ningxia Autonomous Region administration of gr...

Seven years after he launched aggressive anticorruption efforts in one of his first initiatives as supreme leader, Xi Jinping promised renewed crackdowns on corrupt officials in an "important speech" on "strict party governance" this week  to the Central Discipline and Inspection Commission. The crackdown will spare no one--from low-ranking "flies" to high-ranking "tigers." Xi admonished officials to be "soberly aware of the anti-corruption fight's grave, complex, long-term and onerous nature of the anti-corruption fight." Xi advised Communist Party officials that corruption must be investigated and severely punished because it undermines the foundation of the Party's rule. Xi promised to attack corruption in financial organizations and state-owned companies, to strengthen management of state-owned assets and resources, and crack down on fraud in medical organizations and foreign investments. He warned grass roots officials a...

China's Central Document no. 1 proclaims the importance of doing a good job on rural affairs work in 2019 in view of the challenges of "downward pressure on the economy" and "profound changes in the external environment." Communist leaders insist that emphasis on rural affairs must be unwavering to maintain the "ballast stone" role of rural people, agriculture and the countryside to respond to various challenges and "win the initiative." The 2019 document announces ambitions to "decisively win the fight against poverty." It includes many ambitious reforms of rural land and governance institutions, promises to construct rural infrastructure, to make the countryside more livable, and to improve rural governance that are already underway. The document emphasizes that these initiatives are especially important this year because 2019 and 2020 are key years for achieving the "all-round relatively well-off society" and prepari...

After creating fabulous wealth for China's urban elite by seizing land from village collectives and employing a low-wage army of rural migrants, Marxist Chinese leaders are now on a crash program to let some of that wealth trickle down to the countryside. An essay in China's Farmers Daily last week assured Chinese communist party cadres that Xi Jinping's directive to improve peoples' living standards is entirely consistent with Marxism by pointing to Marx's tenet that "struggle" is all about peoples' "material interests." The essay skipped over some other glaring contradictions: a communist party founded on revolution and class struggle has adopted "order," "stability," and "harmony" as its main watchwords, and Chinese communist leaders are grafting capitalist mechanisms on to socialist institutions to forestall any possible uprising in the countryside. The Farmers Daily writer elaborated on Xi Jinping...

Illustrating the country's slide into Orwellian totalitarianism, China's communist party has been holding "democratic life meetings" that are the antithesis of democracy: attendees pledge loyalty to the undisputed leadership of Xi Jinping and repent of any ideological deviation from Xi's thoughts. A central "democratic life meeting" for the Politburo was held by Comrade Xi on December 25-26, 2017 to study "Xi Jinping's Thought for Socialism With Chinese Characteristics in a New Era." The Politburo pledged to preserve the centralized authority of Comrade Xi Jinping as core leader of the central communist party committee and to fully implement each item decided by the 19th party congress. The December meeting is a model for lower levels of the communist party. On February 2 the communist party organization of China's Ministry of Agriculture held a "democratic life meeting " chaired by the Minister of Agriculture and Party S...

Recent communist party descriptions of Xi Jinping's thoughts and discourse on rural policies assure the comrades that their "Core Leader" is a genuine Marxist committed to maintaining state control over the major factors of production--land and credit. Furthermore, he wants to build the rural economy on bureaucratic organizations created during the failed collectivization of farms 50 years ago. Xi's "innovation" is to experiment with work-arounds for a countryside handcuffed to these institutions and to pour in generous subsidies to keep it afloat. Prices are more flexible under Xi, but farm prices can't be allowed to fall enough to create unrest. Resources are reallocated through vast bureaucratic "supply side adjustment" policies to address massive imbalances between supply and demand of commodities created by inflexible prices. Bureaucrats are expected to pass along all the subsidy cash without giving in to the temptation to steal it. The bo...

China Ministry of Agriculture officials pledged their disdain for the corruption and moral turpitude of disgraced Chongqing Mayor Sun Zhengcai at a meeting reported on the Ministry's web site. The denunciations were made at a meeting for communist party leaders held on September 30 where Ministry of Agriculture officials pledged support for the central party leadership's decision to remove Sun Zhengcai from his position and expel him from the Party. Sun spent much of his career in agricultural posts, so it is important for farming officials to pledge their assent for his censure. Sun Zhengcai has rural roots in Shandong, was trained as an agriculture researcher, was leader of Shunyi county on Beijing's outskirts during the 1990s, and he served as Minister of Agriculture under Premier Wen Jiabao during 2006-09. He was placed in charge of Chongqing after the removal of Bo Xilai and was seen as a rising star in the communist party before his removal in July. ...

A meeting exhorting agricultural cadres to toe the line and "sing the main theme" last week shows that Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping is taking no chances ahead of the 19th Party Congress where he is expected to consolidate his power as China's maximum leader. A July 28 communist organization theory meeting was held by Minister of Agriculture and Party Secretary Han Changfu to "study the spirit of Xi Jinping's important speech facing the Communist Party's 19th Congress." Ministry of Agriculture party leaders were warned of the great importance of a "victorious" 19th Party Congress, and urged to implement all decisions of the central leadership with full strength, keeping the agricultural and rural situation good as the Congress approaches. Communist party cadres were ordered to highlight the "great achievements" and "historic reforms" made in agricultural development and rural income growth under the "core le...

A Chinese Communist Party discipline inspection team berated the National Bureau of Statistics for poor communist party discipline and ongoing violations of President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, a reminder of the highly politicized nature of Chinese statistics and the incentives for corruption in the statistical system. Discipline inspection team announces findings at National Bureau of Statistics. An article from the Central Commission on Discipline Inspection web site re-posted on the National Bureau of Statistics site reported on a January 31, 2016 meeting where an inspection team berated the bureau's communist party organization for weak leadership, poor party discipline, failure to fulfill responsibilities, and failure to establish party organizations at the grass roots level. The inspectors found a number of problems at the bureau, including improper employment and promotion practices, officials who used "data" for personal gain, abuse of powe...

Chinese communist party members are getting spiritual and moral guidance by studying the life of a man who was the paragon of morality and died at an early age even as he served people with no thought of his own interests. That's right, Lei Feng, a mythical soldier-hero manufactured by Mao in the early 1960s as a model for "serving the people," is back again...resurrected from the dead, as it were. The campaign comes at a time when confidence in the party is fragile, a path-breaking village election was just held in Wukan village, and the country is doing some soul-searching after the "Little Yue-yue" incident last October when a 2-year-old was run over by two vehicles and ignored by passers-by. Lei Feng is invoked as a kind of substitute deity/saint in a society run by atheists who have no moral compass. Ministry of Agriculture Lei Feng campaign (Source: Ministry of Agriculture Press Office). On March 5, the Ministry of Agriculture's Administrati...

Monopolizing local pork markets seems to be a favorite activity of Chinese gangsters. This month, a court in Guangzhou held a hearing for 18 members of a "gang of tyrants" who allegedly monopolized the pork market in the Haizhu district of that city. They allegedly conspired with 14 local suppliers of "safe pork" to sell underground pork to hotels. The gang set up a meat company with support from the head of the local commercial and industrial bureau. This venture allegedly evolved into a "triad-type" group, using force to keep other suppliers out of the market. A prominent example was the head of a meat company in Chongqing, known locally as "the butcher of Chongqing," who received a death sentence for using force to monopolize the pork market and fix the wholesale and retail prices. He won the 2005 "Outstanding Young Farmer Entrepreneur" award and was a member of his district's communist party committee. The "Butcher of Cho...