Their work will be “strict, standardised, fair and civilised”, and will focus on such useful tasks as catching sellers of counterfeit or substandard seeds, pesticides and veterinary medicines, or inspecting animals and plants for disease. Its officers, all wearing the same uniforms and sporting identification numbers, will be constrained by clear legal bounds on their power, it said. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in Beijing recently spelled out advances to be expected from its Agricultural Comprehensive Administrative Law Enforcement Department. To hear the authorities tell it, such reforms should bring cheer to forlorn spots like Niezhang. These, it is promised, will sweep away a patchwork of local bodies and send well-trained, professional officers to interact with farmers, traders and other folk. New law-enforcement agencies have been created that are answerable to central-government ministries. Instead, in directives and amendments to administrative laws, officials have sought to increase support for the party by delivering strict but effective government. Mr Xi has explicitly condemned the idea of an independent judiciary as a dangerous Western notion. That does not involve allowing the rule of law to act as a check or balance on the party’s authority. Mr Xi has made “governing the country according to law” a pillar of his first decade in power. For under Mr Xi, the party and state have dramatically increased their reach into every corner of society and the economy: a process greatly accelerated by zero-covid policies, but which continues after the pandemic. Such unhappy fatalism about the limitations of legal appeals, multiplied enough times across China, should worry the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping. “If I appealed it wouldn’t amount to much.” “We farmers, we don’t know about the law.” Some neighbours sent petitions to higher authorities. Asked about asserting his legal rights, Mr Tang sounds weary.
With powerful local backers, the plant remains open. Promises to cover the creek with concrete have not been kept. A state-owned water-treatment plant, visible through stands of poplar trees, was fined in 2020 for allowing polluted waste into a local river. Both animals and people are sickened, he says. When waters rise in Niezhang, they carry pollution from a creek beside Mr Tang’s farm, which is slick and black with waste. Floods are growing more common and severe in these vast, flat plains around the Yellow River.
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