最近，在International Herald Tribune上看到了一篇通信，文章以一个西方记者的视点表述了对中国农村现状的看法。自然，善意的批评和怜悯一如既往地成为文章的基调，西方学者们就此似乎是毫无争议的，而长久以来的深受其熏陶的国人们也渐渐不再怨天忧人，痛快地把全身的伤疤都认作是自己的不济。坦白地讲，西方人口吻中饱含着的那种人道主义精神多少都会让我受到感动，然而，他们绝口不提————或者无意中忘却，故意地省略抑或从来就不知————的那一部分东西却更加囤积我心中的抑懑。
文章以“社会主义新农村建设”讲起，也许是出于残留的意识形态歧视，作者一开始就对该运动充满怀疑。接着文章叙及作者在河北农村一周的实地考察，这使他打消了对比中国北部农村与日本北部农村的想法，并认为所见的不幸状况甚于其所到过的任何地方。通过对比乡村破败的情景和宛如“奥兹国“的石家庄，作者点出中国发展过程中出现的问题，最后给以掺着善意批评的怜悯和同情。
显然，这是西方学者对中国目前所处困境的普遍看法，也即基督思想影响下的上帝式的怜悯。每每看到这样的文章，总是充满对西方美好社会的憧憬和对现世中国的失落，然而，回首近百年以来中国精英们及草莽们的无尽努力，无论其行为的悲壮、宏伟、残忍，滑稽甚至诡谲，竟无一成功，难免不让人疑惑不解，以至产生出另外的结论。
公元十一世纪后期，中国农业经济的发展达到其巅峰状态，国家积累了庞大的物质和财富，岁入一度超过一千八百万盎司黄金。现代化需求的巨大压力迫使中央政府进行了一次前所未有的商业化改革，执拗的王安石担当起设计和组织的重任。国家财政税收设计委员会成立并组织进行了农村信用合作及国家资本主义的若干尝试。不幸的是，试验惨烈地失败了。然而，对于中国人来说，仅仅是失去了一个提前进入他们并不是很热心的商业社会的机会，即使是经过随之而来的蛮族入侵，带给西方的依然是一个“富庶和昌明的国度”的消息。
这也使得西方世界对东方的垂涎达到了癫狂的程度，为了一个共同的目标——到东方去，帝国皇帝、西班牙王、形形色色的亲王和大公们蠢蠢欲动，整个欧洲的冒险家、骗子、海盗和囚徒们被组织起来，扬帆出海去寻找令他们抓狂的宝藏。东方没有到达，新世界却意外地被发现了，随之而来的整整四五百年中，不计其数的金银、矿产以及一切探险家们认为有价值的东西被源源不断地运往旧世界，这使小小的欧洲迅速成为了暴发户，上帝赐给西方人做梦都没有想到的比抵达东方将获取的要多得多的财富！真正与东方的接触却似乎没有那么美妙，西方对东方的贸易逆差一直持续着，从美洲掳来的大量白银又源源不断地流入中国，明朝几乎垄断着整个世界的茶叶，丝绸及瓷器市场。一直到十八世纪末，中国的经济总量依然霸占着世界第一的位置。
然而，欧洲已经启动了资本主义这台巨型机器，美洲的黄金和白银、伯明翰矿井下的童工、印第安人的枯骨以及非洲黑奴成为令它保持全速运转的无尽燃料。对中国的战争爆发了，在资本主义机器的面前，脆弱的东方不堪一击，财富终于被掳去，几千年来中国第一次陷入了贫困。掠夺一直持续到二十世纪，随即爆发的第二次中日战争更是雪上加霜，破落的中国拼举国的人力和物质惨胜日本，却已至满目疮痍的地步。来不及做任何喘息，西方两大帝国的对抗便宣告开始，作为其中的牺牲品，中国只有在经济封锁和军事恐吓的三明治中苦苦支撑。富有讽刺意味地是，两大帝国的宿敌日本却得到了前所未有的援助，逃脱了灭亡的厄运。
千年以来，东西方真正有意义的对话距今却不过三十年，中国终于得到一个休整的机会，然而其时已经是另一个世界：一部分国家专门遭受损失另一部分国家专门盈利的国际分工大行其道，成为资本机器的新燃料，财富的中心彻底转移到了西方，东方时代结束了。
千年之后，新的商业化尝试在西方的指导下再一次展开，消费主义、自由经济、全球化如同化学试剂一样被注入到试验管中，试验持续进行着，至今尚未得到最终的结果。不过需要注意的是，这一次尝试再没有了千年之前积累的巨额财富。拉丁美洲有西方世界的一切：民主政治、自由经济及现代金融体系，可是它为什么没有融入西方世界，我想那是因为没有另一个拉丁美洲。
可是无论如何，既然有了一个机会，就不能抹杀成功的希望，只是在不利的条件下，更需要广阔而纵深的视界去澄清当世的境状及历史的陈迹。对于西方，批评和怜悯自然远胜于不怀好意的欺骗和引诱，然而，带着自责和反省的积极性建议也许更能得到道德上的认同。
附：通信远文
Letter from China: A countryside jaunt to the reality of China
After years and years of runaway growth in its eastern cities, suddenly China is furiously talking up the idea of building a “new socialist countryside.” Putting money where his mouth is, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China stood before the National People’s Congress this week and pledged a 14 percent increase in spending on the rural world.
The clear aim is to boost the standard of living of farmers, whose miseries have in many ways subsidized the Chinese economic takeoff. Not incidentally, the initiative is also meant to ease a spreading wave of rural protests that could conceivably threaten stability.
Mention of any “new socialist countryside” begs the question of what became of the old socialist countryside, and any examination of this subject should provoke deep suspicions – not of Beijing’s ability to carry out sweeping national campaigns, but rather of the results that its authoritarian centralism tends to produce.
I was brought to the question of the Chinese countryside partly by the letter of a reader who objected to a recent comparison of Shanghai and Osaka that favored the booming Chinese city over a Japanese counterpart that seems stuck in the mud. The reader’s challenge was as blunt as it was pertinent: a sharp reminder of the limits of what can be explained in a 1,000-word column. “Next time, try comparing a village in northern Japan to a village in northern China,” he wrote.
As it happens, I spent much of last week driving through a stretch of northern China. I will dispense with the Japan comparisons, because the contrasts are too stark to be useful. I’m still groping for other points of reference, though, because even after visiting scores of countries, very little that I have seen elsewhere reminds me of the tragedy of the Chinese countryside.
During a jaunt of several days through Hebei Province, which borders Beijing, I never once saw the sun in the sky. What I mean by this is that the air appeared as thick as gruel, due to the heavy burden of particulates that come from coal mines, steel mills and other smokestack industries.
It is what I saw on the ground that gave me the greatest occasion to worry, though. Everyone knows about the miraculous Chinese economy. We are routinely invited to ooh and ah over the growth of its gross domestic product, its industrial prowess and the proliferation of skyscrapers in the big cities. But the predominant reality is less often seen. To a great extent, the rural world, where 60 percent of the people in China live, consists of blighted land, a development nightmare, a modern-day dust bowl for which one has trouble imagining any near-term fix.
Hebei is, in many ways, a perfect microcosm. Here one sees the scars of campaigns decided in Beijing past and present, starting with the Great Leap Forward, in which Mao Zedong decided that surpassing Britain as a steel producer was a matter of national urgency, and the countryside was cleared of trees to fuel hugely wasteful backyard furnaces that mostly produced junk.
The countryside I toured was unremittingly ugly, littered with derelict factories built in crash programs whose slogans have long been forgotten and eventually abandoned, left to rust with no effort at cleanup or land reclamation.
The rolling, mogul hills conceal a vast network of antiquated coal mines, where Chinese laborers are sent ever deeper into the earth in a quest for fuel to keep an extraordinarily wasteful economic machine humming. In mines like these, men die in numbers that would be treated as a national scandal elsewhere or, as Indian commentators have remarked, would bring down an elected government.
If you drive into those hills you may tour villages where the standard of living appears not to have changed for a generation. I sat in one typical home interviewing Liu Xianhong, a 32-year- old mother with AIDS, whose only source of warmth in the dead of winter was a small electric heater. A thick piece of cloth swung in the open doorway, the only barrier between inside and out. Liu never completed elementary school. She could not afford to.
There is another face to the problems of the Chinese countryside: the provincial capitals. I zipped from the lost world of the coal miners to Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei, on a recently built first-world expressway, and it was like entering Oz.
Hebei is among the grimmest of the eastern China provinces, but you would never guess it from the Potemkin prestige projects sprinkled about. These begin with the expressway itself, which unfurls in the mandatory cloverleaf style that planners seem to think proclaims prosperity.
Then came the monumentally broad avenue leading to downtown, with its glitzy new government buildings and a cluster of new high-rises with pretentious names.
Too often, infrastructure like this passes for development in China, and the fancier the better, from the standpoint of local officials who line their pockets in corrupt land dealings and erect buildings as monuments to their own egos.
I did not linger in Shijiazhuang. I did not see any reason to. The real China of the interior has far more to do with the life of Liu, as do the remedies to the problems of China.
Her husband was fired from the mine when it was learned that she, not he, had AIDS. Her relatives were beaten by the police for complaining about their situation. She was warned not to talk to outsiders.
“They said I should rely on the government to help solve things,” Liu said, unschooled, but ably intuiting one of the biggest problems in China. “I’ve relied on the government before, and that’s how I got into trouble.”
To his credit, Prime Minister Wen has begun to address some important issues, promising free education to peasants and abolishing stiff taxes on farmers. Unaddressed still is finding a way to give Chinese peasants a voice, to grant them a genuine say in the reinvention of their world.
Until that happens, much of China will remain a wasteland, and the economic miracle we all think we know will continue to be, in large part, a mirage.