ABSTRACT
Though the introduction of elections may, we hope, have an impact on how the rural officialdom operates, this is only part of a much larger picture. As seen in these pages, two decades after China decollectivized agriculture and its farmers returned to household farming, the countryside is still struggling with a very wide range of problems, some of them old and some new. Much has been achieved these past two decades in higher agricultural productivity and rural industrialization. But rural living standards in a great many agricultural households away from the coast have stagnated since the mid-1980s, income disparities within the countryside have grown to an alarming extent and continue to widen, taxation under both Anhui's new single-tax regime and its predecessors has been regressive, rural education is underfunded in large parts of the countryside, much of the rural medical-care system is overpriced and beyond the means of farmers, large pockets of severe poverty persist, and as observed in the previous chapter, corruption today is rife in much of rural China.
