Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s farmer-friendly budget, which had not made much of an impression on our dour comrades, is finding an entirely unexpected resonance in communist China. Raving about the Indian budget in a signed article published in Beijing News, Chinese scholar Zhu Sipei says it reflects the “Indian government’s determination to let farmers gain a share of the wealth created by the country’s rapid economic growth.”

That was not all. Zhu insisted that “the same is overdue for China’s peasantry, which has played the biggest role in China’s road to prosperity with its sacrifices to feed and enrich the country’s modern cities.”

The Chinese enthusiasm for India’s budget comes amidst mounting rural unrest in our northern neighbour. In recent years, China has moved to grant a measure of property rights to its citizens, especially in urban areas. The peasants do get leases on land, but can’t own it. The Communist Party is reluctant to touch the socialist dogma on ‘collective ownership of land’.

Driven to desperation, Chinese farmers are fighting back with the slogan ‘land to the tiller’ that should sound familiar to our communists. China’s rural unrest is gaining new international and domestic attention, thanks to the focus on the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing later this year.

Last month, a Chinese land rights activist, Yang Chunlin, was put on trial for subversion. Yang gathered 10,000 signatures for an open letter demanding farmers’ rights. To rally support, he posted the letter on the Internet with the title, ‘We want human rights, not the Olympics.’ For now, opposing the Olympics is the bigger, more urgent crime.

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