Qin Hui, "Looking at China from South Africa" 6

Qin Hui, Will China’s “New Villages” Repeat the Mistakes of South Africa’s “Black Homelands?”[1]
 
Translation by David Ownby
 
China and South Africa have similar migrant labor systems, orderly urbanization policies, and dual land systems with forced enclosures and expulsions, and these similar policies have resulted in similar unhappy outcomes, in the sense that even as both countries have relied on a combination of “globalization and low human rights advantages” to achieve rapid economic growth, the crises in the villages have become increasingly dire.  In addition, in both countries, attempts by migrant labor to settle in the cities has threatened the future of “orderly urbanization.”  As a result, China, attempting to reject the so-called “Western model of urbanization,” and South Africa, refusing “disorderly urbanization,” both carried out plans to revive rural villages with the help of state investment, in the hopes that the peasants (or the blacks) would stay in the villages, or at least preserve the model which allows them to work temporarily in the cities while maintaining their homes in the country.
 
With this in mind, in 1956 South Africa launched its “Bantustan” development plan, which later became the policy of building “black homesteads,” which continued through the early 1990s.  The architect of this policy, F. R. Tomlinson, was a well-known South African agronomist, and a professor of agricultural economics at Pretoria University.  In the 1950s, the D. F. Malan government in South Africa appointed Tomlinson to organize a study group, and after some years of research, they published some 17 volumes of research materials, which served as the basis for the 1956 report on the Bantustan development plan, otherwise known as the the Tomlinson Report, which subsequently served as one of the most important theoretical bases for the apartheid system.
 
Tomlinson pointed out that the state of black villages was utterly deplorable, which meant that blacks flocked to the cities to work:  “If no measures are taken to keep blacks from pouring into the cities, before the end of this century, the black urban population will reach 15,000,000.”  This would produce an outcome like that in America, where blacks and whites live together, as well as “frightening ghettos.”  At the same time, Tomlinson argued that simple prohibition of  migration to the cities would not work, and talked a great deal about black development.  Mandela’s later verdict was that Tomlinson “advocated the independent development of blacks and whites, and hence in his report proposed the industrialization of areas where Africans lived, proclaiming that a Bantu management system that did not provide Africans with development opportunities in their place of residence was doomed to failure.”  Yet even if Mandela acknowledged that the Tomlinson Report’s ideas on developing the black economy and improving black living conditions were not without value, his overall evaluation of a plan whose goal was to prevent blacks from moving permanently to the cities was scathing.  He bitterly noted that “while more and more Africans are moving from the villages to the cities, government policy still aims to keep Africans within their ethnic tribes.”
 
Tomlinson’s basic proposal was first, to strengthen control, and second to increase investment, envisioning a series of measures that would “allow Bantustans to be independent,” and thus no longer linked to the white cities.  From an economic perspective, he first stressed that there must be a reform of the land system.  He noted that there were drawbacks to requiring blacks to implement the tribal ownership system, and the reform he proposed did not give land rights to the villagers, but instead asked that the state manage black tribal lands more tightly.  The Tomlinson Report acknowledged that the agricultural lands in the Bantu areas could only support 20% of the normal life needs of the black people, and that blacks would have to find non-agricultural solutions for the rest.  Yet to prevent the disorderly migration of blacks to the cities and the subsequent disruption of white peace and security, it would be necessary to open a path whereby the blacks could achieve “independent development.”   His proposal was, on the one hand, to encourage investment to develop non-agricultural industries in the area, allowing part of the black population to leave the fields without leaving the villages, encouraging the development of “local industries” in small townships in the Bantu areas; and on the other to guarantee, through strict management of the land system, that those blacks who remained on the land would have “economic plots” consisting of roughly eight acres.  The use of these lands would be regulated, and each farm family would have only one plot.  Movement was forbidden, meaning that the blacks were tied to the land and that there would be no “free differentiation” producing landless migrants.
 
Outside of agriculture, Tomlinson proposed a large-scale plan for “decentralized industrialization.”  Later on, in practice, this came to include two items known as “peripheral industrialization” and “focus points.”  “Peripheral industrialization” was to occur next to the black homelands, so that black workers could go back and worth every day, or at most once a week.  After the 1960s, this program developed at a speed meant to add seven to eight thousand job opportunities annually.  Beginning in the 1970s, South Africa also began to develop industrial “focus points” within black homelands, using financial resources and other advantages to encourage domestic and international entrepreneurs to invest and build factories in the black homelands, taking advantage of the black labor that would “leave the land but not the village.”  Under the slogan of “Funding Bantustan and Developing the Economy”, South Africa established the “Bantu Investment Company” and the “Kosa Development Company” solely to attract investment for black homelands. By June 1974, 116 South African companies and eleven foreign investors had set up factories in the black homelands.  These black laborers were very poorly paid (64% less that blacks working in white areas, according to one source), because regulations had been established for a legal minimum wage for blacks in white areas.  In “autonomous” black homelands, however, such regulations were ineffective.
 
At the same time, the report also recommended that the state make important investments to improve public services such as transportation, water and electricity, education and hygiene in the black homelands, in the hopes of retaining blacks.  Tomlinson noted that while these expenses were considerable, the money spent would be worth it to avoid the challenge of disorderly black urbanization to white society.
 
Politically, the South African government proclaimed that the black homelands should preserve their “excellent traditions” and maintain their rule by native chieftains rather than implementing democracy as whites had done.  With this in mind, South Africa not only preserved tribal kings in the areas originally conquered by the Boers, but also did away with the assemblies and revived tribal rule in regions like Capetown, which had originally been ruled by the British.  This “fetishization of the Bantu management system, with its emphasis on the importance and vitality of the tribal system and traditional leadership” received the support of a good number of traditional chieftains, but was firmly resisted by black democratic opposition, represented by Mandela.  Mandela pointed out:  “The people want democracy, and political leadership should be based on merit, not on birth.  The Bantu management system leads to the retreat of democracy.”
 
On the cultural front, under the banner of “respect for native language, tradition, history and the tribes that had developed with them,” South Africa practiced a policy of cultural apartheid toward the black homelands, hoping to prevent blacks from accepting ideas about human rights and democracy that whites said were part of the “propaganda of the British colonizers.”  They also vigorously fostered tribalist “traditional revivals” such as the “Xhosa people’s movement” or the “Zulu cultural revival movement” so that such organizations would become the “ruling parties” of the black homelands.  In general, these “parties” called for the maintenance of tribal particularities, and actively blocked the infusion of “white values” into the black tribes.  In addition, they cooperated with the white government, to the point that the dictatorial black townships and the “white internal democracy” shored up ethnic apartheid in a divided manner.
 
The ultimate goal of the South African authorities was to make the black homelands “independent.”  Since South Africa had nothing like China’s “village hukou,” the goal of having blacks work temporarily for whites in the cities without giving them residence rights would be best achieved by turning them into “foreign workers.”  With this in mind, South Africa not only concocted the four black homelands of Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, and Venda in the 1970s, but also demanded that blacks who came to the cities to work maintain links to their homeland, and political authorities in the homelands even set up offices in the big cities to take care of the affairs relating to black workers from their tribe.  The white state divided the blacks working in white areas, who made up more than half of the black township population, among ten black homelands, and once these homelands became “independent,” the black workers became foreign workers.  In 1970, the total population of the black homelands came to 15,030,000, of which 8,003,000 were blacks working in white areas and their family members, which constituted 53.6% of the legally defined total black homeland population.  Black labor constituted 79% of the labor employed by the “white economy.”  The black homeland system and the migrant labor system were two sides of the same coin.  The “homeland” became a source of cheap labor, as well as the final resting place for black workers who had exhausted their youth.
 
However, the Tomlinson Plan encountered all sorts of problems in implementation.  The first was black resistance.  As already noted, the “land reform” required by Tomlinson to strengthen land management was met with strong opposition, and the “redistribution” which took the form of “building new villages through land confiscation and home demolition” was seen as forced expulsion, and led to many instances of black mass struggle.  As for the industrial projects, despite the concessions which meant that entrepreneurs could pollute more easily and have access to even cheaper labor, overall, “industrial decentralization” had little effect on the plan to industrialize the black homelands.  The dictatorial chieftain system implanted by South Africa in the black homelands was corrupt and inefficient, and most of the financial support the chiefs received went to pay their own wages or to build flashy, impractical government buildings, public projects, symbolic projects or political payoffs like “roadside villages,” all of which represented a low return on investment.  In addition, black workers were uninterested in employment opportunities which which left them tied to land, working for low wages and poor treatment.   Especially in the latter period of apartheid, when the struggles of blacks in the cities began to bear fruit and they could organize unions and obtain guarantees like the minimum wage, it was clear to blacks remaining in the homelands that they did not have these even though they were ruled by their “own chieftains.”  For this reason, not only did blacks in the homelands continue to want to move to the cities, they also continued to want to take their family members with them.  They strongly opposed being relegated to any black homeland, and opposed any plan by the authorities to consign them to one.
 
The expenses incurred by South Africa to construct black homelands were huge, and increased very rapidly.  In the 1988-89 fiscal year, subsidies from the South African government to ten black homelands exceeded 6.9 billion Rand, and the following year increased to 8.51 billion rand, the equivalent at the time of 3.4 billion US dollars (or 5.9 billion US dollars in 2006).  This came to 356 US dollars for each resident of the black homelands.  By way of comparison, in 2006 China invested 339.7 billion RMB in the “three rural issues 三农问题.”[2]  Investment in the “three rural issues” exceeds that of “new village construction 新农村建设,” but if we take them together, this comes to 41.6 billion US dollars, or 46 US dollars per rural resident.  Clearly, South Africa invested much more in the black homelands than did China in its “new villages.”
 
Yet the thinking behind the construction of black homelands was:  “we prefer to provide subsidies and will never confer rights;” and “while the homelands are ‘independent,’ the blacks lose their rights.” The point was not to improve the rights and conditions of the blacks and arrive at racial equality, but rather to take advantage of the power of black “traditions” to tie blacks to their villages, and to turn black migrant workers in the cities into “foreign workers” who would lose their rights to live in the cities.  The plan forced those younger than 35 to live as bachelors in shanties and those older than 35 to return to the villages to live out their lives, or forced migrant black labor in the cities to migrate back to the countryside.  Consequently, such goals could not possibly be welcomed by the blacks.  And while the government was the “director” of the homeland policy, blacks could never be the “subjects.”  The black homeland project lasted some 30 years, and even if it built more than a few factories, as well as basic infrastructure like roads, airports, reservoirs, government offices, hospitals, schools and even universities, the economy of the black homelands never achieved independence, but instead increasingly became failed areas designed to “retain the population,” and blacks continued to pour into the cities , bringing their families with them, while the “independence” of the “black states” was all the more ignored because of international opposition.
 
These “model projects” that ate up money and produced few results came to be seen by many white taxpayers as corrupt, and eventually became one of the reasons that they changed their minds and came to support the abolition of apartheid.
 
China’s idea of “building new villages” has a long history, including a slogan from before the reform and opening period during the “learn from Dazhai 学大寨”[3] campaign, but in 2005 when the project was championed once again, there were two principle motivations.  The first grew out of what had been revealed about the crisis in village education and public health (particularly during the SARS affair), which evoked a cry from society asking that state finance take up its responsibilities and build an inclusive public service system for the peasants.  This idea of “building a new village” aimed to change the past practice of treating villages like objects of primitive accumulation, of draining the pond to kill the fish.  The new principles were to be “give much and take little,” and the idea was more to make up for the debt already incurred than to build a truly “new village.”  The idea was to provide universally recognized social guarantees and not to develop any sort of “developmental model with Chinese characteristics,” and its contents focused on education and public health as the basic objects of public service and social guarantees.  This kind of “new village construction” is truly necessary, and I have always supported it.  In recent years, certain achievements have been made on this front, and these must be acknowledged.
 
But at the same time there was also another idea, which was to see “new village construction” as part of a “Chinese path” distinct from “Western” urbanization, marketization, and privatization.  Some specialists working on the “three rural problems” went to far as to emphasize how frightening were the “ghettos” and the other problems produced by the “Western model of urbanization,” proclaiming that this was a path that we Chinese would not take, all the while wringing their hands about the problem of large numbers of migrant workers pouring into China’s cities.  Their fears were very similar to those of Tomlinson concerning black migration to the cities, fears that prompted Tomlinson to propose the creation of black homelands.  China’s specialists proposed the creation of new villages for the same reason, and both insisted that they were creating a unique developmental model.  Some even went so far as to express doubts about the rights peasants had received under the reforms to “withdraw” from collectives, and put forth slogans like “Xiaogang village should learn from Nanjie village,”[4] or “recollectivization.”  In the face of the problems resulting from the abuse of public power in the “enclose the land, seek out investors, build big cities 圈地、招商、建大城” phenomenon, they did not emphasize protecting the powerless farmers from harm, but instead, like Tomlinson, proposed to increase the power of state management even more, employing state power to “confiscate the land, destroy the houses, and build new villages 收地、拆房、盖新村.”  Again, like Tomlinson, their idea was to “provide subsidies but never confer rights,” hoping that the investment of state funds could substitute for the improvement of human rights.  As they carried out “industrial decentralization,” the peasants would be absorbed into the land,[5] change careers without entering the city, leave the land without leaving the village.  They could develop “tradition” and resist “Westernization.”  The process would stop the flow of peasants away from the villages, prohibit the privatization of land, encourage the “return to the villages to create employment 回乡创业” and the project of “migrant labor returning to the villages.”  In all of this, their thinking was much like that of Tomlinson.  Moreover, these measures are of a piece with “clean-up efforts 梳理行动” in the cities, and aim to preserve the same exclusionary system. 
 
The only important difference is that the Chinese Tomlinsons did not aim seek the “independence of the black homelands.”  Of course they could not and did not need to demand the “independence of the new villages,” because those exclusionist policies, which had been eroded in South Africa but remained effective in China, the policies that kept China’s migrant workers from receiving “citizen treatment,” meant that there was no need for a formal designation as “foreign labor.”
 
Following this line of thought, China’s “new village construction,” with the government as director but with the peasants never emerging as subject, could only become glaring examples of model projects or political payoffs.  Of course, if enough money is invested in the “model,” useful things can happen as well; this happened in the case of South Africa’s black homelands.  But as already noted, even if South Africa invested vastly more than we did on this front, the overall plan for black homelands was a resounding failure.  Should not China’s “new village construction” learn the lesson from South Africa?  Whether government spending on black homelands accorded with black needs or not, it was after all the government’s money.  But our “Potempkin villages” are decided by the state and paid for by the farmers, with a state subsidy of 10% or less.  So the officials build “models” with the farmers’ money, pretty houses which often remain empty while the peasants continue to look for work in the cities.  The result is the same as in South Africa.  Can we continue in this way?
 
Obviously, the question is not whether rural villages should be revived or whether we can surpass the “Western model of urbanization”—because what is “Western urbanization?”  Do all Western countries share a single model of “urbanization?”  And even when talking about a single country, have New York and Las Vegas “urbanized” in the same way?  The crucial point is:  who decides the fate of the peasants (or the blacks)?  If peasants choose to enter the cities and work, then they should be respected; they should not be kicked out because the “elite” doesn’t like the look of them.  And if peasants choose to remain in the villages, then their land rights should be protected; their land should not be confiscated simply because the “elite” has taken a liking to it.  No matter if the goal is to “enclose the land, find the investors and build big cities” or “confiscate the land, demolish the houses and build new villages,” it all should be done of the basis of respect for the rights of the peasants.  Surely these rights don’t exist merely in the “West?”  Nor can we conclude that everyone who seeks to decide the fate of the peasants is evil.  Mandela even acknowledged that at a certain level Tomlinson did indeed want to see “black development,” and that he understood that simply driving the blacks away wouldn’t do.  But Tomlinson still spoke with the tone of a master:  “I’ll give you a little more money and send you back to your villages to live.  Don’t come back to bother me!”  Can anyone with self-respect knuckle under like this? 
 
Notes

[1] 秦晖, 中国的“新农村”会重蹈南非“黑人家园”的覆辙吗？available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/33585.html, published on Aisixiang on May 12, 2010.

[2] Translator’s note :  the “three rural issues” are “agriculture, villages, and peasants.”

[3] Translator’s note:  A village in Shanxi province that was a model during the Cultural Revolution period.

[4] Translator’s note:  Xiaogang village in Anhui was one of the first to argue for the “family responsibility system,” while Nanjie village in Henan is often called the “last Maoist village in China” because of its resistance to decollectivization.  See https://www.kunlunce.com/ssjj/guojipinglun/2016-04-29/88598.html.

[5] Translator’s note:  就地消化, a term used to describe infiltration of Guomindang-held areas by underground CCP units during the anti-Japanese War.  See https://www.zhihu.com/question/62365111.