COLLECTIVE INCENTIVES 57 13 The real purpose behind the Cleaning of Class Ranks Campaign apparently was to wrench China out of the anarchic conditions of the Cultural Revolution factions that had lost out. The bad-class targets were to serve as examples, what in China is called "killing the chicken to scare the monkeys." 14 These remarks are drawn from, and this nationwide campaign is further discussed in, Jonathan Unger, "The Politics of Wages in the Socialist States'*, IDS Discussion Paper no 88, 1975. pp 56-60. 15 Much of this production gets consumed or bartered privately and so probably never even gets included in the official agricultural figures from China. The official statistic we do have is that nearly a fourth of all the agricultural products purchased by China's commercial departments (which probably excludes quota'ed grain et al) derives from the private sector. (Radio Peking, 20 December 1976; in FBIS, 30 December 1976. p E9 ) 16 At the very beginning of the 1970s Ghen village's richest team could provide its best workers a daily pay of about Y1.10, while the poorest team could offer only Y0.60—0.80. The disparities in public income are greater between equivalent workers in these different teams than between higher and lower-paid members of the same team. 17 1975 was a year of catastrophic weather: the third wettest in the entire 130-year history of Hong Kong; and the winter of 1975-6 was the coldest on record (which will adversely influence, too, the incomes for 1976). Hong Kong's farmers suffered as severely in the latter half of 1975 as did Chen village's. lp China's official news media has reported that in this Line Education Campaign 1.6 million cadres were dispatched into the countryside in such a leadership capacity; in Chen village a cadre work team entered and assumed temporary command of village affairs in the first months of 1976. 1) To be sure, not all basic-level cadres are like this, either in Clien village or elsewhere. Chen village in fact seems to possess an uncommon number of such dedicated cadres. In most of the other villages we know about, cadres more regularly seem to take modest advantage of their positions to gain special privileges for relatives and themselves, Chen village is an especially 'red5 village, in this and other respects. w The displacement (or non-use in many villages) of the talents of such immigrant urban youngsters has become a very serious problem for China. Fourteen million have been dispatched to settle in the countryside since the Cultural Revolution alone, and (as comes through even in China's official media) these more recent rural settlers seem for the most part to have become an alienated, frustrated rural social class. Their plight, their organizational abilites, their Red Guard experience, and their sheer numbers may provide China with serious political problems in the years to come. To stanch this, the government may have to reverse its rustication-of-urban-youth policies. Already Kwangtung province, in 1975, suddenly declared that all of the province's rusticated youths were to return immediately to urban jobs, and recent secondary school graduates in Kwangtung are being told they will only have to go to the countryside for a few years, not for life.