To alleviate farmers' financial burden, streamlining the government structure is more important than abandoning the agriculture tax, according to the Beijing-based magazine Outlook Weekly. An excerpt follows:

Looking to boost rural people's incomes, China plans to get rid of the agriculture tax in five years, as promised by Premier Wen Jiabao in his government work report to the second session of the 10th National People's Congress.

This is good news for rural people, who currently earn an average monthly income of about 200 yuan (US$24).

Every year, the total agriculture tax paid by rural people is about 38 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion). Although the payment per capita is not very high, grass-roots governments always collect other fees together with it. Before tax-for-fee reform, the rural people paid about 400-800 billion yuan (US$48.2-96.4 billion) annually, which posed a heavy burden on them.

Thanks to tax-for-fee reform, currently farmers' burden has been eased to a great degree. But due to collection of agriculture tax, it is unavoidable for grass-roots government to collect other fees under this excuse. In this way, rescinding agriculture tax is a drastic measure to bar arbitrary fee collection from rural people.

However, if the government structure is not streamlined, the goal of easing rural people's burden still cannot be reached.

Statistics show that in China, about 35 taxpayers support a civil servant, and the ratio can be 20-1 in some western provinces. The bloated grass-roots bureaucracy needs a swelling expenditure, which is always achieved from rural people through the administrative power. This is the fundamental reason for the long lasting difficulty of alleviating rural people's financial burden.

Lack of effective supervision leads to overlapping administrative organs. And with the cancellation of agriculture tax, grass-roots governments will face more financial pressure. Streamlining the administrative structure will become a bigger challenge and an even more urgent task.

(China Daily March 22, 2004)