Uncle Fu looked away from the televised snooker to add, “Now the song would be about petroleum, corn, and rice.”
“It was really hard to open the paddies, though,” Auntie Yi said, picking up her previous thread. “We all helped out. We used a horse and sled to turn over the soil, then wore wooden shoes to flatten it, all of us walking back and forth, back and forth. Once the land started to be improved, more and more people were moved here. Our agriculture progressed from a ‘beginning collective’ to a ‘mutual help collective’ in 1955. It was for people classified as poor, lower, or middle peasants—not the rich peasants who had hired laborers or owned a bit of their own land. They were excluded, and reeducated.”
That last word always sent a chill down my spine, but Auntie Yi was a true believer, and said it with pride. I asked what mutual help meant.
“If you have a horse, but I have more laborers in my family, we would exchange: your horse would turn over the soil with a plow, and my family would help you plant and harvest. That changed into the big commune, when we all ate together in a canteen, and when everyone had to bring their hoes and other tools to keep in the yard for anyone to use. We gave our wardrobe to make a table for the canteen. Wasteland became a village then.”
“Nineteen fifty-six,” I said reflexively, quoting the village stone. By 1958, all of China’s co-ops had become “people’s communes.” The policy triggered the Great Famine, killing at least 20 million people; some estimates go as high as 45 million. Officially, the deaths were blamed on natural disasters, and the period was labeled the Three Years of Bitterness.
“All our personal food was confiscated during the collective times,” Auntie Yi said. “We used to grind soybeans mixed with barley in secret at home. Everything was supposed to be for the commune. We didn’t even have money. We were paid in work points. At the end of each workday, you had your score assessed and entered into a little handbook for each family. It was casually decided, actually. It wasn’t a true commune: whoever had the power to decide the score earned the most points, or rewarded his family and friends. You knew the standard. If you did hard labor, people would murmur, ‘Give him six points.’ If it was really hard work, you could earn up to ten, even twelve. But the ‘rich peasants’ could only earn up to eight, and every night they would be reminded it was because they had exploited people in the past. That was our family, you know: my grandfather hired people after he migrated here on foot, starting out hauling grain on his back. And my father ran a granary out here. So I was marked. But really, I was lucky. The people who collaborated with the Japanese in Manchukuo got it the worst. Then you had to sit and eat together after all the points talk! You could have points deducted, too, if you didn’t work or made mistakes. There’s a saying that proves it: dao zhao ba fen’r—you work a whole year and end up owing eight points.”
I said that I would not have lasted long.
“You would have talked too much and said the wrong things,” she said, swatting my arm in a mock scolding. Then she became a cadre again: “Mostly I hated the points from an administrative standpoint. The system wasn’t fair. By the time we got to ‘advanced-level collectives’ in the 1960s on our road to achieve socialism, we had a good village secretary. But of course he got transferred elsewhere, and we had to start over with new leaders.”
That system remained. To advance in the Communist Party was not to stay in one post, like an American mayor working toward reelection, but to do well in one place, then get shuffled up a rung on the portfolio ladder: village to county, county to city, city to province, and so on.
“Whenever we had too much pork,” Auntie Yi said, “they transferred that out, too.”
It wasn’t a saying. Memories often looped back to food. Uncle Fu stood up and, as he made for the kitchen, said I was staying for dinner. He made flash-fried garlic stems and pork over rice. “Eat,” he urged me, even after my third bowl. “You haven’t eaten enough. You’re not full. Eat. Eat. Eat.”
When Chairman Mao died in 1976, so did his dream of collective agriculture. By decade’s end, farmers were allowed a small, personal plot to supplement crops raised by the village team. The work points system was abolished. “But at every turn, people were unhappy!” Auntie Yi said. “It’s in people’s nature to complain. But very few people complained when da baogan was introduced.”
The term meant “the complete allocation of responsibilities,” and the policy meant that individuals, like the hungry Pilgrims, no longer had to farm as a team. The change was born not in a ministerial meeting but in a farmer’s home in the central China province of Anhui, where The Good Earth had been set. A corn-growing village named Xiaogang was starving, suffering under the nation’s quota demands. Its residents dug up roots, boiled poplar leaves with salt, and ground roasted tree bark into flour. Entire families left their thatched-roof, mud-walled homes and took to the road to beg.
A farmer named Yan Hongchang, whose studies had ended at middle school, was the deputy leader of the village work team, overseeing production. But there was no production that autumn of 1978. During the Great Famine, a quarter of the county’s residents had died. “We knew what it was like to starve, and we would rather die any other way,” Mr. Yan later recalled.
On the night of November 24, Mr. Yan summoned the heads of the village’s twenty families to a secret meeting. The village accountant was deputized as a secretary, and on paper torn from a child’s school exercise book transcribed a seventy-nine-word pledge to divide the commune’s land into family plots, submit the required quota of corn to the state, and keep the rest for themselves. “In the case of failure,” the document concluded, “we are prepared for death or prison, and other commune members vow to raise our children until they are eighteen years old.” The farmers signed the document and affixed their fingerprints.
Thus began China’s rural reform.
Today a large stone monument to the pact greets tourists to the village. But in the spring of 1979, a local official who learned of the clandestine agreement fumed that the group had “dug up the cornerstone of socialism” and threatened severe punishment. Thinking he was bound for a labor camp, Mr. Yan rose before dawn, reminded his wife that their fellow villagers had promised to help raise their children, and walked to the office of the county’s party secretary. But the man privately admitted to Mr. Yan that he knew, since the pact had been signed, the village’s winter harvest had increased sixfold. The official told Mr. Yan he would protect Xiaogang village and the rebellious farmers so long as their experiment didn’t spread.
Villagers gossip; farmers talk about their fields. Soon neighboring hamlets copied Xiaogang’s model. News reached the provincial authorities, who were unwilling to punish farms that were, at last, producing food. Thus, they did not brand the abandonment of collective farming as counterrevolutionary but instead endorsed it as “an irresistible wave spontaneously topping the limits once enforced by the state.”
In Beijing, three years after Chairman Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping was opening China to foreign trade and liberalizing the economy. Yet originally he ruled against allowing “household farms,” afraid that critics would again label him a “capitalist roader,” for which he had been purged during the Cultural Revolution. However, the grassroots movement that began in Xiaogang made the decision for him. In a series of policies issued between 1978 and 1984, China formalized the Household Contract Responsibility System (colloquially called chengbao). It allowed families to farm their own allocation of land in exchange for turning a portion of their crops over to the state. What remained was theirs to eat, and to sell at unregulated prices. China’s communes, brigades, and production teams were renamed as townships, villages, and hamlets, respectively.
Xiaogang was made into a living patriotic education base where a small museum displays a replica of the farmers’ pact, since the original was lost. Exhibits praise the bold wisdom of its ringleader, Yan Hongchang, his cosignatories, and the Party. But not everyone bought the high r
hetoric. “My father signed that paper because we were starving,” Mr. Yan’s son told me. “There was nothing heroic about it. He had no other choice. It was human instinct, trying not to die. It’s strange the leaders want to celebrate survival.”
The reforms continued: in 1984, fifteen-year leases were introduced for family farm plots—then extended to thirty years in 1993. The state stopped requiring grain procurement in 2001 and abolished all agricultural taxes in 2006.
Auntie Yi supported these changes. “But now people are unhappy here again. Why? Because it’s not about farmland. It’s our individual houses. I don’t want to be a tenant of Eastern Fortune Rice.”
“You’ll own the apartment.”
“But they’re making me move. It’s just a new landlord.”
We stood in the July sun on the side of Red Flag Road, watching workers slather golden yellow paint on her house. “There’s an inspection coming, now we can be certain,” Auntie Yi said. “Whenever the garbage is collected from the side of the road and it’s swept, that’s when you know someone big is coming. This time they built a new road. How interesting.” Three hundred yards ahead, a temporary fence went up at the dirt-road turnoff to San Jiu’s house. A call to Frances taught me a new Chinese word: po’te jin cun. Potemkin village.
“The land distribution and how we farm it has changed over the years here,” Auntie Yi said. “But our houses never did. We lived in one place. The homes themselves improved from mud to cement, but that’s all. Your mom”—my mother-in-law—“and wife grew up where San Jiu lives.”
She repeated her complaints. If you gave up your home and accepted an apartment, it became part of the collective, which would demolish it and lease the plot to Eastern Fortune for planting. The company would contract to pay an annual rent for the land you previously farmed. “But farmers don’t just sell the rice. We eat it, and burn the stalks to heat the kang. In an apartment, we’ll have to pay for heat. Now, the company said they won’t charge for heat the first three years. That’s deceptive. Do you expect to be alive three years from now? Yes? You’ll have to pay for heat then. We’ll lose our vegetable gardens, our chickens—we’ll become dependent on the company. Our house will be razed; there will be no going back.”
Using rollers, the painters buttered her home.
“It looks nice.”
“I have an idea,” she said, ignoring my comment. “If we really want to know what Eastern Fortune’s plans are, you should walk in there and tell the boss that you want to buy the company. See if the price includes the office buildings, the greenhouses, the hot spring, and so on. Ask about the land: how much is under contract now, and how much the company expects to control.”
I gestured at my mud-covered legs, frayed shorts, musty hoodie, and thick beard.
“But you’re a foreigner,” Auntie Yi said dismissively. “Also, ask if they’re going to change the village name. Could that really happen?”
Twenty minutes before, her house was unpainted. Now one wall—facing Red Flag Road—shone freshly yellow.
There is no such thing as a typical Chinese farm. The sizes, geographical locations, and types of farms—dairy, livestock, produce, cotton, grain—are as diverse as the number is large. China has 22 percent of the world’s population, on 8 percent of its arable land. Globally, it is the largest producer of rice, wheat, pork, eggs, cotton, fruit, and vegetables.
But its new agricultural model is easier to summarize: the nation is turning away from family plots to agribusiness, away from villages to company towns.
Urbanization brought the challenge of reducing the number of farmers while simultaneously producing the same amount of food. As in the developed world, the solution was to scale up. Only 5 percent of China’s poultry now comes from “backyard” operations producing fewer than two thousand birds a year. Instead, three-quarters of chicken meat is produced by commercial farms processing over one hundred thousand birds annually. In the province where The Good Earth was set, and where Xiaogang village’s family-farming rebellion began, the American agribusiness giant Cargill—which, along with Archer Daniels Midland, controls 80 percent of the world’s grain trade—was building a poultry operation it calls Site 82, which will breed, slaughter, and process 65 million chickens a year. The output would be “peanuts on the scale of China,” the manager said. But the government sees it as a model for similar conglomerations of small farms, and a progression toward “high-tech, efficient and safe farming.”
It is harder to monitor safety when a single shipment of food is produced by hundreds of farmers using different levels and quality of feed, antibiotics, and fertilizer. A 2013 government report said that 10 percent of China’s rice could be contaminated with cadmium, a heavy metal that causes cancer and kidney failure. It enters the water supply from factory waste, but also from overfertilizing crops: cadmium is an ingredient in the popular fertilizer that San Jiu used on his field.
Farms were more than a workplace, however. In an era of soaring real estate prices, a rural house doubled as a social security policy. Young generations may have migrated to work in factories, but they could always return to their village. Or they could send their children away from a polluted city to be raised on the farm, as Frances had been, here in Wasteland.
Persuading older farmers—and their entire families—to leave that security behind was an obstacle in China’s drive toward urbanization. The Party often first tested reforms before implementing them nationwide, as in the creation of capitalistic “special economic zones” such as Shenzhen city, whose model has since transformed other metropolises. In 2007 the central government ran two experimental programs in southwest Sichuan province that could prove as transformative for China’s countryside.
The first program set up a “rural property exchange,” where interested farmers could transfer use of their land to an agribusiness for an annual rent. This was formalizing what Eastern Fortune Rice was doing—with the central government’s imprimatur—on a village scale in Wasteland. Individual households’ land would be consolidated, mechanized, and managed by a company, instead of a village government loosely overseeing hundreds of family plots.
The second program allowed rural residents “free migration” into the city, giving them previously forbidden access to schools, employment, health care, and other social services. Since 1958 the household registration system (hukou) had divided Chinese into two strata: rural and urban. The chasm between the two broadened after economic reforms: urbanites earned over three times as much, and city kids were three times as likely to attend high school, and a whopping eleven times more likely to attend university. While China’s urbanization rate reached 54 percent in 2013, migrants still officially classified as rural totalled a third of that figure. An estimated 250 million Chinese lived as second-class citizens in the nation’s cities.
In the second Sichuan experiment, farmers would retain the right to their plots but could exchange their single-story houses for new apartments in the city, with access to its schools and hospitals. Their former homes would be razed, and the land planted. Consolidating a horizontal village into a vertical apartment block in an already-developed town would result in a net gain of cropland as well as urbanites. It was also similar to what Eastern Fortune offered in Wasteland, although its apartments were located in the village, not downtown.
The central government said the experiments were to test ways of equitably moving people off their farms. But it was also looking for measures to quell dissent against the current system.
China forbids local governments from borrowing to raise funds, so villages cannot sell bonds. Instead, they commonly set up development companies, which use village land as collateral for bank loans. Local debt skyrocketed to $3 trillion in 2013, equivalent to 58 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
The lucrative deals, and corruption, that resulted from these land transfers caused protests—averaging more than five hundred a day—and headlines such as FARM SEIZURES SOW SEED
S OF SOCIAL UNREST. In 2011, in the southern fishing village of Wukan, three thousand residents attacked the government office after its secret land transfers were revealed. Village officials, in power for forty-one years, had pocketed the proceeds.
A comprehensive nationwide survey released in 2012 found that 70 percent of farmers were unhappy with their socioeconomic situation, with illegal land grabs their top complaint. A rural economist at the state policy advisory body likened tensions over the nation’s income gap to that of Spain’s on the eve of its civil war. It was an artful dodge: he also could have likened it to China’s during its own civil war.
In Sichuan province, the Chengdu city government hailed its experimental program as “the first in the country to break down the long-term barrier hindering the free movement of residents; the first to let farmers enter the city without losing their land; and the first to eliminate inequality in education and health care between urban and rural residents.”
Two weeks later the experiment was over. The rural property exchange market was shuttered, without explanation. The only news story I found on a government land bureau website reported that at its recent office party, cadres recited programs, sang snippets of regional opera, and performed a “nunchakus hip-hop skit entitled ‘Joking about Land Use Planning.’” At night’s end, “the song and dance ‘Emancipated Serfs Singing by the Land Reserve Center’ brought about a climax.”
Another item was headlined: “Poker Playing Competition Closed Successfully.” “After six rounds of fierce competition in 20 days, Gao Yang and Zou Mujin from offices of the bureau won the championship with seven victories in seven contests.”
In Manchuria Page 26