Land from the Tiller

The Push for Rural Land Privatization in China

LUKE ERICKSON

Source: China Left Review, issue no. 1.
http://chinaleftreview.org/index.php?id=58

The Debate

Recent peasant protests over land in rural China have received wide-spread coverage in the international press. Protests, such as those in rural Heilongjiang, are referred to in mainstream newspapers as a sign of the Chinese state’s “Losing the Countryside”,1 of a “Farmers protest against a key Mao tenet”,2 and as a “Challenge to Chinese Land Policy”.3 These articles have drawn upon the policy analyses of the U.S.-based Rural Development Institute and Cato Institute, which have long supported land privatization in China and elsewhere, touting it as the solution to poverty and social unrest.4

But what lies beneath this fuss over land privatization? What does it represent? Why does this issue engender such passionate debate? Why do such diverse actors—the Financial Times, the Cato Institute and Rural Development Institute, state policymakers, intellectuals, and peasants themselves —care so much? The answers lie beyond the issue of land privatization per se in a historically bloody struggle over the best approach to development, challenging the facile equation of development-as-economic growth. Who that development is for, who does the developing, how is it done, and towards what goals, are all key questions rarely asked.

The recent ‘land rebellions’ in Heilongjiang point to the volatility of this issue, as peasant demands to retake control of collective land to prevent local officials from selling it off to private large-scale agribusiness interests sparked apparently similar movements across the country.5 Misinterpreted in the international press as mainly a call by peasants for ‘privatization’, they are in fact largely driven by an opposite desire—to prevent large-scale privatization of collective lands and the last of the commons by a small elite, an issue being played out across China today. As peasants see their collective farmland, forests, and grassland commons sold to private investors, companies, and those connected to local leaders, they are fighting back in a variety of ways including demanding that the land be instead equally divided among households. This is not driven ideologically by the idea that private is better than collective, but rather by the idea that taking the collective out of the hands of corrupt officials in cahoots with private interests must be achieved by any means necessary.

The utopian scenarios put forward by the Financial Times and others, drawing on The Cato Institute and Rural Development Institute’s positions, imply instead that land privatization, subsequent concentration of holdings into large plots for the best farmers, and the transfer of hundreds of millions of peasants to urban areas, will ultimately lead to greater efficiency and productivity in rural areas, stimulate overall growth in China, and result in national prosperity. This argument is based on a linear and limited historical model of U.S. development, and shows little understanding of China’s significantly different history and reality. It also is revealing of the assumptions and political project of those who promote it.

Contrary to neoliberal propaganda, land dispossession following privatization is not the result of ‘poor individual choices’, ‘backwards individual practices’, ‘limited human capital’ or other common tropes. The competitive dynamics of capitalism when applied to farm communities around the world (heightened by an impoverished context of state disinvestment in social welfare under neoliberalism) ensures rapid sale of poor farmers’ lands and concentration into a few hands, dispossessing the majority of their primary claim on subsistence. Rather than the promise of ‘land to the tiller’,6 land privatization around the world, and certainly as being discussed in China, leads to just the opposite—land from the tiller. This is the paradox of the neoliberal so-called ‘land reform’, which in its current manifestation, is in direct conflict with the needs of the world’s poor majorities.

Equating development with economic growth is a well-worn neoliberal assertion that privileges unevenly distributed overproduction and over-consumption with parallel concentrated wealth accumulation in the hands of a few. It undervalues broader social understandings of well-being. If development is redefined beyond simplistic economic growth indicators to include guaranteed access to livelihood and the material necessities of housing, food, healthcare, education and social welfare, a much different assessment emerges of land privatization. The poverty of the development-as-economic-growth paradigm is even clearer if we add to this redefinition the sustainable use of resources, and the right to a clean environment, participation in social caring, individual and community opportunity for fulfillment and growth, as well as self-determination.

Land privatization in China would most likely bring an opposite development outcome, i.e. that China’s majority will face increasing poverty in both urban and rural areas, and be further subjugated to the needs of a wealthy and powerful elite, the primary beneficiaries of land privatization. Forceful imposition of an ill-conceived free-market utopia through land privatization immiserates the most vulnerable and marginal peoples and environments not only in China, but also around the globe — a reality despite vocal insistence to the contrary.

Why? Though land privatization is touted as the solution to rural poverty, there is extensive evidence that land privatization through neoliberal reforms leads to widespread landlessness, land concentration and increased social stratification, greater rural to urban migration, increased urban poverty, and a decline in urban wages.7 In China this process simultaneously drives down occupational and environmental standards worldwide as hundreds of millions of peasant-workers are more completely integrated into the global economy. Poor landless peasants lose the basic security provided by subsistence plots that buffer them from vulnerability to predations by elite interests both in China and globally. While this increases China’s attraction as industrial platform for global capital, it does little to improve the long-term interests of peasants or workers.

Let us be clear on the ideological roots of those arguing for privatization. Although land privatization clearly undermines the basic livelihood security of the majority of China’s peasants, it is also clear that a small rural and urban minority benefits enormously from privatizing rural China’s lands. The pressure to privatize comes not from the peasant majority, but from emergent political and economic elites with much to gain. These players actively misconstrue the desperate attempts of poor peasants to maintain basic livelihood security through access to land. In effect they are translating their promotion of a new enclosure movement, and appropriation of remaining commons to promote global capital accumulation, into a so-called ‘peasant movement’ from below.

But this is not a collective to private property movement. The issue is one of control over access. The land in many areas is already de facto privately controlled by the local leadership and used to private ends when profitable and possible, and in so doing denying the last vestiges of collective benefit. Peasants use the language of privatization as a defense. If community participation and decision making over land allocation were reestablished within a carefully regulated framework, it would make clear that privatization is not the key issue, but rather the illegal appropriation of collective assets, and parallel denial of access to collective resources. It is the absence of democratic collective processes that allows dispossession and primitive accumulation to occur on such a widespread basis.

The dazzling creation of industrial and real estate billionaires and the flood of foreign direct investment into China in the 1990s did not result from a broad-based popular call for China’s current development path. On the contrary, those who were able to consolidate their power through primitive accumulation via dispossession shaped and influenced the direction of capital and wealth flows, as well as resultant poverty and vulnerability. The private seizure of privileged access to industrial assets as well as scarce land-use rights resulted in a historic shift in national wealth. China went from being one of the most egalitarian to one of the most unequal societies in less than twenty years. A spike in rural to urban migration, expansion of urban shantytowns and rural desolation in the hinterlands for the left behind populations, led to increasing unrest that plagued the 1990s and 2000s. Are we to expect differently from expanded privatization this time around?

Why codify into law these illegal appropriations as the right path? Why not instead pursue criminals within the rural and urban elite who abuse their positions by stealing land and other assets, building fortunes through their transfer of political power to economic wealth?8 This will re-strengthen legitimate peasant institutions and ultimately do much more to reverse the decline in peasant livelihoods than allowing them the one-time sale, often under duress and at fire sale prices, of their limited material assets, whether individual or collective held.

In the relatively small number of cases where communities can guarantee the equal distribution of substantial financial resources that can fully replace the life-long subsistence guarantee of access to land, then land sale and conversion can and should be contemplated under strict regulatory controls to prevent abuse and dispossession. But this has rarely happened in China, and when it has (often in suburban areas where such scenarios are more likely), the benefits have been obtained by a few actors while the majority have seen their livelihoods destroyed—hence rising unrest over illegal land seizures throughout China over the past decades.9 The answer to such criminality is not wholesale privatization but actual prosecution of those abusing their position and undermining broad long-term social interests for their own individual material gain.

Case Study: The Rural Development Institute and Roy Prosterman

It is useful at this juncture to closely examine one of the key proponents of land privatization in China, the Rural Development Institute (RDI), and in particular its founder, Roy Prosterman.10

RDI’s promotion of land privatization in China has an intended—if unstated—goal: to protect elite interests in China and internationally. This is both the reason that RDI appeals to a new class of neoliberal policymakers in China, and why it garners support from international media (like the Financial Times). RDI’s pandering to the ‘needs of the peasants’ should not divert attention from the explicit programs of ‘village pacification’, through terror and right-wing death squads, upon which RDI built its reputation over the past 40 years. The immense suffering these programs imposed upon poor peasants worldwide, and RDI’s cynical presentation of revisionist historical accounts, clearly demonstrate both RDI and founder Roy Prosterman’s ideological position and ultimate goals.

Roy Prosterman, a Professor of Law at the University of Washington, built RDI by designing and implementing the ‘land reform’ programs of the U.S. Government in Vietnam, the Philippines, and El Salvador. In each place the program was accompanied by what is widely regarded as a rural terror—anyone opposed to the programs was assumed to be a leftist sympathizer thus legitimating their elimination through murder, described as ‘neutralization’.11 As such, these ‘land reform’ programs were a central component of overall efforts to pacify rural areas in war zones as part of much larger geopolitical struggles.

Who benefits from ‘village pacification’ and ‘land reform’ à la RDI? Here the Chinese state should really take note. In its most notorious programs in Vietnam, The Philippines, and El Salvador, the failure of Prosterman/RDI’s schemes to achieve even the rhetorical claims is clear. In Vietnam, at the height of the US-Vietnam War (1968-73), Prosterman and RDI participated in a purported land reform so hated that peasants in the areas of ‘Operation Phoenix’ were kept behind barbed wire in ‘pacified villages’ for their own ‘protection’, in territory ‘cleaned’ by the ‘scorched earth’ tactics of the US military.12 The colossal failure of this approach was unequivocal in the ultimate overthrow of the US-backed puppet regime it was designed to support. In The Philippines Prosterman/RDI worked under the US-backed Marcos dictatorship (1970-80) helping, through their ‘land reform’ programs, to counter any attempts to overthrow the small handful of families that continue to this day to control the vast majority of land in the country. The Marcos regime’s U.S.-trained and armed military and paramilitary forces were instrumental in guaranteeing the ‘success’ of these programs through extra-judicial killings, torture, and terrorizing of any opposition. In El Salvador (1980-84), during the Reagan administration’s criminal support of the US-backed military dictatorship,13 Prosterman/RDI instituted its ‘land reform’ campaign as the military and right-wing paramilitary death squads killed any peasant organizers who dared think more structurally or supported the struggles for peasant self determination raging through Central America at the time.

But none of this stops Prosterman/RDI from today claiming legitimacy based on their ‘success’ in all three countries.14 RDI hypocritically turns its actual historical role on its head, presenting itself as an organization struggling for basic social and economic justice instead of owning up to its historical record as an organization with intimate ties to the CIA and the most regressive US foreign policy campaigns and military interventions, a front line organization opposing—frequently through helping legitimate violence and terror, both direct and strctural—grassroots peasant movements around the world.

It would be one thing if RDI distanced itself from its past. But on the contrary RDI points to these programs to legitimate its current position as part of a revisionist history. That revisionism extends to China, where RDI claims to be the driving force behind the government’s 30-year land lease policies and subsequent land rights laws, and therefore takes credit for gaining land rights for more than ‘400 million peasants’ in China since 1996.15 In fact, RDI claims now to be the “principal foreign advisor to China’s central policy-makers in the current reform process.”16 In a further distortion, RDI claims responsibility for peasant progress in the past 40 years through its promotion of land privatization stating that “nearly one out of every sixteen people on the planet has been helped by RDI”.17 Discussing this in terms of the excellent “returns on investment”, RDI claims to have produced new land rights for six families for every dollar invested in its programs.18 With a staff of just 23 people, RDI represents itself as the most important force on the planet for obtaining peasant land rights through its top-down privatization promotion. Strangely missing in these discussions is the role peasant themselves have played in struggling for secure livelihoods through a variety of creative means.

Let’s be clear. RDI’s ‘land reform’ has from its inception been about countering the larger political and economic aspirations of poor peasant movements globally by ‘any means necessary’. Prosterman has historically justified support for some of the most corrupt, violent, authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes precisely because they represented not peasant, but elite national interests, and US geopolitical Cold War interests.

The fervency of Prosterman’s anti-socialist activity is particularly revealing, as is his willingness to be funded by any charlatan as he pursues his goals.19 But it was the rural ‘land reforms’ in Vietnam, The Philippines, and El Salvador that most clearly reveal the ideological heart and motivation of Prosterman and his organization, RDI. For Prosterman land reform is about appeasing a peasantry in the face of the evils of socialism.

Similar to his boss in Vietnam, William Colby (at the time Saigon CIA head and later CIA chief), Prosterman views the U.S. loss in Vietnam as “too little too late” of the kind of rural pacification that Colby directed and Prosterman and other civilian advisors implemented through USAID’s CORDS (Civil Operations and Rural Development Support Program) as part of Operation Phoenix.20 But Prosterman was not just a well-meaning surrogate of Colby. He was an active participant and ideologue in promoting Operation Phoenix and its “massive program of torture and assassination”,21 which he later replicated in The Philippines and El Salvador. In drawing up the document that asserted the legal basis for Operation Phoenix in Vietnam,22 Prosterman proposed using the carrot of a ‘so-called land reform program’, coopting Lenin’s slogan ‘Land to the Tiller’ for his own opposite purposes.23

Five years after the ignominious US defeat in Vietnam, Prosterman was put in charge of the CIA’s ‘Land to the Tiller’ operation in El Salvador.24 In El Salvador, Prosterman’s work for the CIA was equally notorious. In the guise of promoting land reform the CIA established the “Salvadorean Communal Union” in 1968, which infiltrated genuine peasant organizations and trade unions to ‘stifle social unrest’.25 Prosterman continued this work relying on the most regressive and violent social forces in El Salvador to implement his rural pacification project.

In their current proposals for Indonesia and India, RDI programs consist of ‘buying off’ peasants with ‘micro-plots’. Interestingly, in India, RDI states that to provide such garden plots to all of India’s rural poor would “require the re-allocation of less than 1% of India’s cultivated land.” The needed land, they assert, “could in part be granted from public lands, with the remainder acquired on the market.”26 The goal is to defuse the political desires of peasant communities for a voice in their self-determination, while being sure not to threaten or put any burden upon the powerful landed gentry that control the vast majority of land in India, and in particular the best agricultural lands where most peasants work in virtual serfdom. The wide-spread peasant land reform movements in many areas of India, a direct threat to state power, are the principal target of Prosterman/RDI’s rural pacification scheme through micro-plots.27 A similar proposal for Indonesia finds support amongst the landed elite as well, given its publicly-funded expenditure to provide a very small portion of overall land to the peasant majority while protecting the rights of the country’s wealthiest families to continue running their feudal estates.28

Prosterman’s arguments, now presented in a more politically shrewd manner as if coming from the demands of peasants themselves, are still founded on protecting elite interests through ‘village pacification’. As RDI and its Chinese agents publish reports calling for the privatization of land in rural China, we now learn that ten intellectuals – some based in Beijing, others overseas – have spent two years covertly searching rural China for peasant voices to act as the sacrificial figureheads in a “movement” to privatize land that the intellectuals hope will “threaten” the Chinese government “with a real grassroots rebellion […] just as the world’s attention is focused on the Beijing Olympics.”29 This covert activity fits neatly with Prosterman/RDI’s close ties from its founding to the CIA.30

Today Prosterman/RDI promote their refined elite-oriented pacification schemes through well-placed policy experts in China, predicting a wave of freedom and productivity from land privatization, and characterizing collective land control as the last vestiges of a failed system that is all that is left between current difficulties and a market nirvana.31 As true believers, Prosterman and his cohort’s fanaticism should also not come as a surprise. They believe the world is as they want to see it. This is not ‘truth from facts’ but ‘truth’ irrespective of facts. Prosterman/RDI follow a long line of zealots who, when facts don’t fit theory, say it is the facts that are wrong and not their theory. From their historical role in Vietnam, The Philippines, and El Salvador, to China, India, and Indonesia today, they distort the record, hide the facts, and persistently push a single-minded agenda.

Individual success and failure, as opposed to class success and failure to achieve adequate livelihoods, is central to Prosterman/RDI’s position. In standard neoliberal dogma, individual success is used to demonize larger class and broad social interests for structural transformation. This reveals Prosterman/RDI’s explicit attempts to defuse the clear class interests of rural China’s majority. Rather than attend to the structural causes of rural poverty, they focus on supporting institutions and approaches that reproduce inequality over time, undermining solidarity by pitting peasants against each other through competitive land markets under a situation of rural crisis. As a policy of atomization as opposed to empowerment, appeasement as opposed to liberation, Prosterman/RDI avoid mention of structural transformation, choosing instead to view poor peasants as fundamentally conservative and self-serving, with little interest in increasing their collective power.

Prosterman/RDI provide an impoverished ahistorical analysis of the land question. This non-structural analysis avoids pinpointing the prime actors, institutions, and historical determinants of peasant impoverishment. Framed as a problem of private property rights, peasant liberation becomes a question of creating institutions and legal structures supportive of land markets rather than attending to the source and ongoing determinants of socioeconomic inequality, with or without privatized land holdings.32

Importance of the Debate

How important in China’s domestic debate is this international discourse of RDI, the Financial Times, the Cato Institute, and other neoliberal standard bearers? Despite repeated evidence of the disastrous effects of their ‘land reform’ programs for those they claim to help, the power of this discourse resonates through those trained in its traditions and those who have benefited from the creation of massive inequality. Despite clear state interests in maintaining stability and legitimacy in rural China by avoiding this course of action, current policy discourse increasingly brings up privatization as a prime avenue for exploration in attending to the san nong wenti. Although privatization is attractive to the elite minority as a means to further amass wealth and capital, and can even be popularly sold in the rhetorical guise of empowering peasants by giving them “land rights” a la Prosterman/RDI, historical experiences in China and the rest of the world point to its utter failure to do anything but concentrate land and wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.

The recent appointment of Justin Yifu Lin as chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank points to the power and influence of the neoliberal wing of Chinese intellectual and policy actors. In a public symposium in Shanghai in 1993, Lin argued that the suffering of hundreds of millions of rural migrants was simply part of the sacrifice required for development, and that they would all eventually benefit through ‘trickle-down.’ In the intervening years, the number of migrants and landless peasants has increased to now over 200 million, and the contradictions of the transition and its trickle-up reality, has done little to modify Lin’s overall neoliberal approach.33 For many of China’s policy elite, land privatization is the ultimate goal for China’s future path.

If their goals for land privatization are realized it will exacerbate landlessness for the rural majority as they are forced to sell their limited subsistence plots to pay for needed services such as health, education, and basic needs, as well as to repay village loan sharks—often village heads. Land privatization will amplify further the primitive accumulation through dispossession on the part of the existing rural elite (village cadres, their friends and families), and their rise as the new landlord class in rural China, mirroring the same process that has occurred in the rise of urban China. Combined with land grabs for development, infrastructure, and to provide for agribusiness interests, scarce land resources are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. The resulting landlessness amplifies the vulnerability of the rural majority.34 As peasant vulnerability continues to increase via land concentration and growing landlessness with declining social welfare, desperation forces out-migration to urban shantytowns, with no rural subsistence plot to return to in slow labor times.

This deprivation of livelihood options forces peasant laborers to accept jobs in the most dangerous occupations with few rights or recourse. It also forces intensification of resource use on remaining lands, increasing environmental degradation through soil mining, forest cutting, grassland destruction, and so forth. As poor peasants move to marginal lands they become criminalized for destructive practices, legitimating further state intervention in the name of environmental protection to deny them access to land altogether. This simultaneously legitimates the ‘scientific management practices’ of the large landholders as model actors in the privatizing land economy. In a strange paradox the victims are criminalized, disenfranchised, and further marginalized. As people with only their labor to sell, migratory landless peasants lose what little subsistence entitlements they now possess along with their few remaining rights as they are increasingly blamed for their poverty and their desperation.35

Conclusion

China’s rural crisis will continue to challenge state legitimacy and therefore potentially the current party and government’s hold on state power. Further land privatization will force the state to increase authoritarian control in rural areas to overcome the growing unrest and protect entrenched elite interests. This dark vision emerges despite the movement by the state since 2003 towards neopopulist answers and the introduction of the New Socialist Countryside. The limitations of this approach are apparent in the limited quantity of resources allocated and the minimal redistribution of urban wealth to rural regions that have accompanied it, as well as its top-down, non-participatory, infrastructure orientation.

Neopopulist programs have so far done little to address the structural imbalances to stem increasing social inequality, focusing instead on visible infrastructure in model villages primarily through cementing the landscape. Rural tax relief is accompanied by a decline in social welfare through the creation of unfunded mandates. Despite the elimination of all rural taxes in a move to “decrease the peasants’ burden,” local governments are required to provide access to education, health care, and other services. This often forces local cadres to extreme measures to find funds for these services, at times in the form of enclosing and selling off remaining collective land resources. Although lucrative, these one time deals cannot replace the long-term investment needed to insure the provision of basic rural infrastructure and social entitlements.

The Chinese state risks creating another revolution if it follows the path of land privatization, despite its neopopulist responses to rural concerns. The poor majority who are the last to benefit, if at all, are living the ‘collateral damage’ and the ‘growing pains’ that Justin Lin and other neoliberal economists dismiss as a ‘transitional phenomenon’. Given the widespread suffering that neoliberal policies have imposed on peoples around the world, there is no way to argue that this path will lead to a win-win for all involved. It is a fact that hundreds of millions of the poorest and most vulnerable lose in this global transformation, and China is no exception.

Uncovering the elite-oriented ‘Land to the Tiller’ hoax for the ‘Land from the Tiller’ reality it represents is the first step in re-envisioning an alternative future for rural China. Rather than relying on the failed neoliberal prescriptions of privatization and markets based on individual action to overcome China’s rural crisis, rural China’s protesting peasants are drawing on their rich and complex history of collective action to pursue a different future. It is up to others in society—from the party, state, intellectuals, students, and workers—to find ways to support this movement for social justice. The answers to the questions of development for whom, by whom, how and towards what goals, will be grounded on a definition of development, redefined through daily practice, that is as rich and complex and exciting as the communities from which it emerges.

Notes

1 “Losing the Countryside”, by Jamil Anderlini, 19 February 2008, Financial Times.

2 “China’s farmers protest a key Mao tenet,” by Peter Ford, 22 January 2008, Christian Science Monitor.

3 “Farmers rise in challenge to Chinese land policy,” by Edward Cody, 14 January 2008, Washington Post.

4 “Securing Land Rights for Chinese Farmers: A Leap Forward for Stability and Growth,” by Zhu Keliang and Roy Prosterman, 15 October 2007, The Cato Institute, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity [http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8745]. The co-authors of the Cato Institute Policy Analysis are the Beijing program manager (Zhu) and the founder (Prosterman) of the Rural Development Institute.

5 Ibid “Farmers Rise In Challenge To Chinese Land Policy”, Edward Cody, The Washington Post, Monday, January 14, 2008; A01.

6 Since Lenin’s first use of ‘Land to the Tiller’ in his treatise on “The Agrarian Question in Russia Towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century,” it has become one of the most-widely used revolutionary phrases of the past 100 years. For Lenin, the debate on the Agrarian Question was a key part of the overall discussion of the ‘transition debate,’ centered on identifying the most important pre-conditions for the transition from Feudalism to Socialism, and whether Capitalism was a necessary historical phase. Land ownership in rural areas was always contentious, and Lenin’s view of the peasantry, as opposed to the industrial working class, warned of their potential to remain a relatively conservative force in revolutionary terms. The Lenin-Chayanov debate on the role of peasants, and Kautsky’s discussion of the Agrarian Question, further fleshed out the issues of rural transformation and peasant revolutionary potential. Mao fully reclaimed the poor peasant classes as a revolutionary force, and in so doing transformed many of the social movements of the 20th Century. “Land to the Tiller” was used in almost every major rural-based social movement, from Sun Yat-sen’s Manifesto, to Indian revolutionaries, to African, Latin American and Asian post-colonial struggles. Its adoption (and cooptation) by US-based agrarian land reform institutions corresponded with Cold War efforts to counter socialist alternatives in the post-WW2 development era. Land privatization is therefore part of a long historical debate over the role of agrarian transformation in development.

7 See “The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis and Poverty: A Multi-Country Participatory Assessment of Structural Adjustment,” SAPRIN, 2002, http://www.saprin.org/SAPRIN_Exec_Summ_Eng.pdf.

8 For an early comparison of primitive accumulation strategies in post-socialist contexts see Privatizing the Land: Rural Political Economy in Post-Communist Societies, Ivan Szelenyi, editor, Routledge, 1998.

9 The uprising against land seizure for a power plant in Dongzhou, Guangdong Province, is a case in point. Peasants blocked access to the power plant in December 2005 only after years of petitions and peaceful protests had failed to get them promised compensation for their lost lands.

10 The Cato Institute, among many, would also be a good case study. But for this essay, we will focus on just one organization. For RDI’s close ties to The Cato Institute and its promotion of extreme libertarian free-market policies see: http://www.cato.org/.

11 In Vietnam Prosterman’s ‘land reform’ work was a major component of Operation Phoenix which killed 40,000 civilians between August 1968 and mid-1971; in the Philippines, RDI’s program was implemented under martial law and wide-spread extra-judicial killings of anyone opposed to the government, particularly in rural areas; in El Salvador, Prosterman implemented the program under a state of siege by the U.S.-backed military dictatorship. Covert Action Information Bulletin (now Covert Action Quarterly) Winter 1990: 69. For a detailed account of the ties of the Phoenix Program to the debate over U.S. war crimes see: http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine.html.

12 There were debates about the effectiveness of these ‘pacification’ schemes even in the midst of their implementation. Heated debates in the US Congress ensued over the “rural development and other types of inter-related activities” involved in the so-called “pacification” programs. See “U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam, HEARINGS BEFORE A SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, NINETY-SECOND CONGRESS, FIRST SESSION,” July 15 {a.m., p.m.}, 16, 19, 21; and August 2 1971.

13 See details of the U.S government’s criminal activities in Central America (and elsewhere) supporting human rights abuses, death squads, torture and other atrocities in the now publicly-released National Security Archives at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/elsalvador2/.

14 Details at RDI: http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork.html.

15 http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_Accomplishments.html

16 http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_China.html

17 http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_Accomplishments.html

18 http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_Accomplishments.html

19 Prosterman was the legitimating voice of the Hunger Project, Werner Erhard’s cult-like organization that Prosterman was an active mouthpiece for, traveling with Earhard and appearing on stages around the world to proselytize, legitimating their useless programs to supposedly alleviate hunger while primarily relieving middle-class guilt of white Americans by taking a large ‘contribution’ for that privilege. In so doing they built their own personal fortunes and hid them through tax shelters and corporate shell games. Erhard’s EST was repeatedly sued by the IRS for this. Details can be found in Mother Jones’ investigative report: “Let them eat est”, by Suzanne Gordon, Mother Jones, December 2, 1978, http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org/articles/letthemeatest.

20 “The Heart and Mind of USAID’s Vietnam Mission”, http://www.afsa.org/fsj/apr00/leepson.cfm.

21 The Fantastic Other: An Interface of Perspectives, by B. Cooke, et al, 1998, p. 174.

22 Wheaton 1983: 260, cited in Cooke et al, 1998.

23 See the Time Magazine article that discusses the South Vietnamese attempts to co-opt this phrase as well during this period in “Land for South Viet Nam’s Peasants,” Friday, Jul. 11, 1969, http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,900983,00.html

24 Interestingly, Prosterman wrote a science fiction novel, Peace Probe, in 1973 that betrayed his belief in ‘any means necessary’, as he justifies genocidal practices of a US-backed global fantasy of Operation Phoenix based on good intentions. This is another window to explain the contradiction behind the benign appearance of ‘winning hearts and minds’ and the terror and slaughter it often represented in implementation (see H. B. Franklin’s “The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy” in Cooke et all 1998: 175). The continuation of these programs today in the US’s failing initiatives of the same name in Iraq is also not coincidental, nor their justification based on ‘terrorism’. See “From the Ashes of the Phoenix: Lessons for Contemporary Counterinsurgency Operations,” by Lieutenant Colonel Ken Tovo, United States Army, 2005, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army-usawc/ksil241.pdf

25 See Heroes, by John Pilger, South End Press, 2001, and The Americas—Vietnam Again, 1983, p. 484. For further details of Prosterman’s ‘Land to the Tiller’ rural pacification schemes see J. Pearce, Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean, South End Press, 1983. In it Pearce describes the US goal from Prosterman’s ‘Land to the Tiller’ program: “There is no one more conservative than a small farmer. We’re going to breed capitalists like rabbits.” For more on Prosterman’s role in El Salvador’s rural terror via ‘land reform’ see “El Salvador”, by J. Beverley, Social Text, No. 5, 1982, pp. 55-72; and “La Tierra es Nuestra! The Campesino Struggle in El Salvador and a Vision of Community-Based Lawyering,” by R. F. Klawiter, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 42, No. 6 (Jul., 1990), pp. 1625-1689.

26 http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_FAQ.html

27 http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_India.html

28 http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_Indonesia.html

29 “Losing the Countryside”, by Jamil Anderlini, 19 February 2008, Financial Times.

30 Prosterman continues to draw on the sophisticated neoliberal position of Samuel Popkin’s US Army-funded research on Vietnam published in 1976 (The Rational Peasant). This was an effort to support the logic of US intervention and ‘land reform’ even after its complete failure, based on Rostowian assumptions of peasants as homo economicus, and asserting the beneficial role of individual behavior strategies in a progressive market economy. Popkin’s book was published as opposition to James Scott’s 1976 assessment of the same Vietnam in Moral Economy of the Peasant. Today’s debate on peasants and land privatization in China could be usefully informed by a re-framing in light of Scott and Popkin’s views, and subsequent critical assessments of both studies. See O. Salemink, in A Moral Critique of Development, P. Quaries van Ufford and A M. Giri, eds., Routledge, 2003.

31 See interview with Li Ping, the head of the RDI’s Beijing office, titled “Land Privatization is the Ultimate Solution” (???????????????), a frightening use of the term given the structural violence that will likely result and the apparent ignorance of its close historical association with ‘the Final Solution’, http://www.phoenixtv.com.cn/home/phoenixweekly/143/36page.html, and also http://www.rdiland.org/OURWORK/OurWork_FAQ.html.

32 The success of the neoliberal agenda is confirmed in many areas of rural China today. In recent interviews with local leaders in charge of collective forest privatization, as well as development of markets for land-use rights transfers, neoliberal assumptions are clearly articulated. According to these leaders, the only problem in the current decollectivization process of remaining forest lands is making sure the initial distribution is fair, as peasants’ differentials in individual capacity will rightly lead to land concentration in the hands of the most capable, forcing the less capable to become laborers or find other means of livelihood. This ahistorical ideological justification for maintaining and expanding the growing rural inequality, also provides ready ammunition for use by local officials against those who may argue that decollectivization leads to rising social vulnerability and suffering. In the neoliberal position, such suffering is only the result of poor individual choices or capacity, and therefore is no longer the responsibility of the state, but rather is firmly the responsibility of those who are suffering. The victims are blamed for their own situation and this serves to undermine collective action [Erickson, Fieldnotes, 2008].

33 “Development Strategies for Inclusive Growth in Developing Asia,” Justin Lin, HKUST Paper No. E2004007, October 2004.

34 Interestingly, the end of rural taxation and levies has made rural social welfare even more costly at the local level, decreased the desire to reallocate scarce land to those who need it (as there is less liability to holding on to it), and decreased numbers of women on village committees to represent their already undermined interests in the growing inequities that have resulted from the 30-year land use right provisioning. See Ellen Judd, “Women’s Land Rights in Rural China,” Development And Change, 38(4): 689-710, 2007, for a detailed account of this unintended process. The end of this taxation has had other unintended negative results for long-term sustainability, such as the rapid “opening up” of marginal lands, though this is beyond the scope of this essay (Erickson Fieldnotes 2008).

35 While in the short-term, land privatization and subsequent landlessness increases the pool of urban workers thus allowing footloose capital to achieve super-profits, missing from the debate is that small rural land holdings provide a cheap means of labor reproduction for urban and industrial centers—de Janvry’s functional dualism—hence their persistence and key role in China’s ongoing growth dynamics (A. de Janvry, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1981.). As the rural majority loses its subsistence plots, the full cost of reproduction of the newly landless peasantry is placed on companies, urban institutions and the state. This has multiple impacts in the form of increased taxation in urban areas on corporations and individuals as well as increased pressure on workers to fight for a living wage in urban areas. This results in a crisis between profit-driven companies and the increasing demands of a worker population deprived of its rural subsistence base. Recent headlines pointing out the shortage of peasants willing to work at low ‘internationally competitive’ wage rates driving factories in Guangdong and other places into bankruptcy is a case in point.