经济学人 中国城镇化,你在哪里？

Urbanisation

城镇化

Where do you live?

你生活在哪里？

Town- and country-dwellers have radically different prospects

城镇居民和农村居民的前途是截然不同

Rus in urbe

IN DAYI COUNTY, a couple of hours’ drive down a motorway from the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, Chinese tourists stroll through the meandering courtyards of a rural mansion. In the 1950s, soon after Mao seized power, the mansion was turned into a museum, intended as a showcase of evil. It once belonged to Liu Wencai, a landowner supposedly notorious for

ill-treating his tenant farmers. Liu embodied a class despised by Mao, who came to power on the back of a promise to give land back to the peasants.

在大邑县，距离四川省府成都市数小时车程的一个县城里，中国游客漫步于一家乡间宅所那曲折的庭院里。在1950年代，在毛泽东掌权后不久，这栋宅所被辟为了一家博物馆，以作为罪恶的展品。它曾一度归属为刘文彩（Liu Wencai），作为地主，刘文彩因被断定虐待他自己的长工而臭名昭著。刘文彩代表了为毛泽东所鄙视的那样一个阶级。而毛泽东在掌权后，推动了将土地交还给农民的这样一个承诺的兑现。

In its Maoist heyday the museum was a place of pilgrimage. Red Guards swarmed there for ritual denunciations of Liu and his ilk. A high point of their visit was a trip to the “water dungeon”, a room with several inches of water covering the floor where Liu had allegedly kept disobedient farmers. Another was a series of life-size sculptures of peasants and their vicious oppressors. A politically disfavoured curator from Beijing’s Forbidden City who happened to look like Liu was forced to stand next to the sculptures as a “living Liu Wencai” so that visitors could shout and (though not strictly permitted) spit at him, according to Geremie Barmé of Australian National University.

在毛泽东思想的全盛期，这个博物馆就是个圣地。红卫兵扫荡了这里，为的就是仪式性的宣示刘文彩和他的同类。他们的串联的一个高潮是参观“水龙”，即刘文彩非法拘禁不守规矩的

长工的地方：一间数尺深的水漫过地面的房间。而另外一个高潮是，一套由长工和他们恶毒的压迫者组成的真人大小的雕塑。据澳洲大学的Geremie Barmé讲，一位来自北京紫禁城的，在政治上的失宠的馆长，因碰巧长得像刘文彩而被作为“活刘文彩”强迫站在这些个雕塑边上，以让参观者能够对着他大声喊叫，大吐口水（尽管严格的说，并没有得到这样的允许）。

The sculptures are still there, but in recent years a wave of revisionism has been sweeping across Dayi. Local officials were already having second thoughts by the early 1980s. But it was a book reassessing Liu’s life published by an outspoken journalist in 1999 that finally convinced many that the man was really not that bad. His water dungeon was a government fabrication, the museum now points out. He spent a lot of money on local schools and paid for a road to be built from Chengdu to Dayi. Last year a grandson organised a

get-together in Dayi for the extended Liu clan, whose members would once have been terrified of revealing their ties. More than 1,000 turned up.

那些雕塑还在，但是近年来的一波回头客在大邑县境内来了次旧地重游。当地官员在1980年代就已经有了另外一种想法。在1999年，一本由一位率性直言（大嘴巴）的记者出版的一本重估刘文彩的人生的书最终证实了刘文彩这个人也并没有（上面写的）那么坏得透顶。现在的博物馆方面指出到，他的“水龙”是政府捏造的。刘文彩为当地学校花费了大量钱财，出资相互修建从成都到大邑县的公路。去年，刘文彩的一位重孙为了延续刘氏的香火，在大邑县组织了一次大团聚。这些人员曾一度对于自己身份的泄露而倍感恐惧，而那次团聚的出场人数超过1000人。

The slaughter of many thousands of landlords (not including Liu, who died of natural causes) by officials and vengeful peasants shortly after the communist takeover resulted in profound changes in the system of rural land ownership. Peasants got the land Mao promised them, but only briefly. In the late 1950s the party took it back again and forced farmers into collectively owned “people’s communes”. The legacy of that disastrous decision, which contributed to a famine that left tens of millions dead, still weighs heavily on rural China. So too does a decision to confer hereditary status on peasants, who would be all but barred from cities to stop them rushing in to find work.

在共产党取得政权之后的极短时间里，政府官员和仇恨的农民就屠杀了数以千万计的地主（不包括刘文彩，他死于自然原因），这导致了农村土地所有权体制的深刻变化。农民正如毛主席保证的那样夺取了土地，但仅仅是短暂的取得。在1950年代晚期，党又把土地收了回来，并强制农民加入集体所有的“人民公社”。这一灾难性的决策遗留下的祸害之处就是，招来了一场对中国农村仍然造孽深重的数以千万人死亡的饥荒。一个对只会被城市所阻止的，为了寻找工作而涌入城市的农民的世代相传的权利状态进行转变的决策，只会带来同样（的结果）。