by Xiaowei Wang
The past confronted my grandmother constantly in the way she was unable to tell her personal stories without talking about political events. These political events physically shaped her—she lived most of her life on crutches, one leg having been amputated during the Cultural Revolution after faulty medical advice from a young student while the country’s doctors and intellectuals were being “reeducated” in the countryside. Growing up, I would hear my grandmother sleep-talking in her bedroom next to mine. Some nights, she would reenact the past in her dreams. In the darkness, ghosts would emerge and I’d wake to her wails—“Leave me alone, you foreign devil!” In the morning I would ask her about her dreams, and she would reply, with a blank look, that she could not remember them at all.
3.
The third day of my visit involves watching several hours of TV with my great-uncle. There’s a dramatic, true-story special about a young village kid who was raised by his grandmother. After heading to the big city with his older brother, he was kidnapped and doomed to a life of hard labor. Twenty years later, he’s on live TV being reunited with his grandmother. I turn my head and see my great-uncle sniffling and crying at the show.
Other programs are aimed at the elderly daytime audience. A talk show on health and medicine features an old man showing off his technique for battling constipation: dressing up in a raincoat and blow-drying his stomach until he sweats. Two doctors, one a Western medicine specialist and the other a Chinese medicine practitioner, sit in front of a painted landscape debating the effectiveness of the tactic. An ad comes on that reminds viewers of our “Core Socialist Values.” Hours later, I watch the evening news report, a deflated affair filled with some world events and party propaganda. In one segment, the TV anchor heads to a bus station, interviewing migrant workers about buying bus tickets to go home. One worker is not optimistic about his chances of getting a bus ticket during the upcoming Spring Festival, or Chun Yun (春运), one of the world’s busiest travel seasons.
During the Chinese Spring Festival, a multiweek affair, a travel frenzy descends across the country. In 2018, nearly three billion trips were made over the monthlong period, many by people headed to their ancestral homes (laojai, 老家) in the countryside, or by rural migrants returning home. Returning to your ancestral home is not just a return to the earth, to soil, but a time to visit elders and extended family. Your ancestral home is often where your hukou, or household registration, is, part of a government system that incentivizes people to stay in certain geographical areas.
If you were lucky enough to be born in Beijing, you’d receive a Beijing hukou and numerous benefits, including access to almost fully reimbursed health care in Beijing, home to some of the best hospitals in the country. You’d also receive education for your children at top schools, and they’d be given a lower bar for standardized test scores to get into the country’s top universities, Tsinghua and Beida (Peking University). On the other hand, if you have a hukou in a rural area, you are given a title to a piece of land you can farm, which technically you are stewarding for the government. If you do decide to migrate to the city, your children’s access to Beijing’s wonderful schools is limited. The amount you get reimbursed for a hospital visit in Beijing is next to nothing, and if you did have dreams of upward mobility by attending Tsinghua or Beida, you’d have to outrank native Beijingers on standardized tests, all the while harboring little hope that you’d be one of the lucky few to bypass the hukou-based admissions quotas at these schools. Despite all these disincentives to leave, more than three hundred million people have left their rural homes in search of work in nearby cities, creating China’s economic miracle over the past thirty years. Such rural migrants take jobs that urbanites refuse—from making iPhones in a Foxconn factory to building the awe-inspiring Olympic architecture of Beijing. In modern China, the peasant turned migrant worker is always haunting the landscape, in skyscrapers and cell phones, in the welded tracks of bullet trains. Without the rural population, contemporary China would not be what it is today.
The hukou system reveals the unabashed directness of socialist central planning. There is no dark magic like the American Dream, a sugarcoating that lets you believe in an imagined freedom, when really, the way we have structured our capitalist economy in the United States also relies on distinct labor and class differences. In central planning, rural laborers and peasants must efficiently produce food to feed the nation, to sustain a knowledge-based workforce in cities.
The rural peasant has always been a foundational, central figure in China’s nation building. After World War II, during China’s civil war, Mao Zedong’s winning strategy against the Kuomintang was to catalyze China’s peasantry. Peasants would lead his revolution, “encircling cities from the countryside” (农村包围城市).
During the Great Leap Forward, Mao attempted to collectivize farming, with disastrous results. The country embarked on an attempt at industrialization—through almost laughable means, including village steel furnaces where farmers smelted agricultural tools into useless pig iron. Mao and others in power had an anti-elite, anti-intellectual attitude, insisting that technology was a tool for peasants and the people, unveiling programs with names like Mass Scientific Research in Agricultural Villages. For the early nation, technology was an ideology for achieving an imagined future, a future that already existed in the West.
Mao’s economic plans were aimed at matching Western industrial and agricultural production in sheer volume, from steelmaking to grain farming. The early project of building a socialist nation demanded a mass fervor for fighting Western imperialism and, most important, the rewriting of a national story to weave a new consciousness. Yet the West would still haunt China, serving as an image on which to project all the early nation’s ambitions and rivalries.
The attempts at catching up were troubled. The famine of the Great Leap Forward was devastating, with millions of deaths in the countryside. After the Great Leap Forward, a food coupon system was used throughout the country, controlling how much food each family could purchase—rice, grains, eggs, and meat. The system was a mechanism by the government to control urban consumption, agricultural prices, and yields. The food coupons would be used all the way into the 1990s.
Beginning in the 1980s, technology shifted from a means of survival to a way of imagining a uniquely Chinese future. The country’s policies changed drastically, as Deng Xiaoping presided over the combination of free market strategies and socialism: socialism with Chinese characteristics. China’s economy boomed, laying the foundation for companies like Huawei and Alibaba.
The countryside became an economic incubator in this ambitious experiment. Both Jean C. Oi, a Stanford political scientist, and the MIT economist Yasheng Huang emphasize the importance of Town and Village Enterprises (TVEs) in the 1980s. It was these enterprises that marked the “rural roots of Chinese capitalism,” writes Huang.2 According to Huang, rural residents from some of the poorest provinces were undertaking bold entrepreneurship that was impossible in cities. These entrepreneurial models, TVEs, were radically different from the government-controlled State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Instead, TVEs were a decisively indigenous innovation, centered around local, village-level decision-making—an agile environment of sorts. By 1995, “TVEs accounted for approximately a quarter of China’s GDP, two-thirds of the total rural output … and more than one-third of China’s export earnings.”3 And with this economic boom, free market socialism allowed for another kind of national consciousness to emerge. Rather than being at the whim of other countries’ political events, global stirrings, and European treaties, perhaps China might gain the freedom to define a future on its own terms—the kind of power that had long been afforded to Western countries.
The desire for this kind of national autonomy not only fuels Chinese nationalism but also makes it crucial for China to demonstrate technological prowess and economic might. Nationalism has led to a small group of leaders wielding tight control over the country, claiming that
strong leadership is necessary to China’s freedom on a global stage. Yet the irony is, freedom will always slip away when grasped too firmly.
4.
The People’s Republic of China was founded October 1, 1949, and is twenty years younger than my great-uncle. The nation’s comparatively young age is a reminder to those in power of the ways upheaval is a constant possibility, and that any perception of fragility must be wiped away.
This same fragility breeds nationalist strategies of technological self-reliance, like the Made in China 2025 strategic plan to cultivate China’s knowledge industries, alongside a firm focus on the countryside as a place of technological growth. While the countryside and agriculture may seem antithetical to the project of industrialization and high-tech work, the balancing act that China is currently undertaking emphasizes how intertwined the rural and urban are, with technological change threaded throughout. What China faces now is a potential “agrarian transition,” a term used by economists and agricultural policy makers. Agrarian transition is the process in which farmers are pushed out of the countryside and small-scale farming is replaced by industrialized agriculture, which requires less manual labor. As a result, there is a surplus of labor as farmers attempt to re-skill or find new jobs.
The same thing occurred during the Industrial Revolution in the West. As the agronomist Eric Holt-Giménez describes, technologies such as the steam engine, mills, and the telegraph were only partially responsible for industrialization and capitalism. Labor, especially factory labor, played an equally important role, and the Industrial Revolution “could have never happened without the agrarian transition. The Industrial Revolution displaced people from the countryside and created a large reserve army of labor.”4 While the transition might sound easy or logical, the social, environmental, and political ramifications of an agrarian transition are enormous. And after such transitions, when development in urban areas reaches new kinds of peaks, labor finds ways to expand and transform under a free market.
Despite threats of China’s economic development overshadowing the economy of the United States, the future of China remains as precarious as ever, balancing rural-urban dynamics and the ever-increasing materialism of urban life. During one conversation I had, a Chinese government policy adviser said to me, “I definitely wouldn’t want to be in power right now. There’s so many cascading problems, it’s not a fun position to be in. And the people in power are very aware of these problems.”
There is an urgency to build the new socialist countryside in response to these problems. While the term “the new socialist countryside” has existed since 2006 (coined by President Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping’s predecessor), Xi Jinping’s recent policies of Rural Revitalization have taken a much bolder stance in addressing hollowed-out villages and rural decline. These policies affect nearly 40 percent of the national population (8 percent of the world’s total population), who live in the countryside.
The new socialist countryside will be filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes. Rural Revitalization envisions the use of blockchain and mobile payment to catalyze new businesses, and will leverage big data for poverty relief and distribution of welfare benefits.
Numerous government policies, including poverty alleviation efforts, have laid the groundwork for Rural Revitalization. Rural Revitalization prioritizes China’s food security by sustaining at least 124 million hectares of arable land—what the government calls maintaining the “red line.” The Made in China 2025 plan comprises industrial policies that include homegrown farm-machinery manufacturing and the stabilization of food production. Closely associated with the goal of poverty alleviation is the desire to create new consumers (and internet users) through a rural “consumption upgrade,” where the hope is that rural internet users will become full-fledged online shoppers. China Mobile and China Unicom have rolled out feats of infrastructural magic, including 4G and 5G cell service to remote regions. Small rural entrepreneurs are being cultivated by tech monopolies like the e-commerce platforms Alibaba and JD.com.
As I talked to policy advisers and looked at Rural Revitalization documents, I couldn’t help but compare them to American rural policies. Back home, driving down the California I-5, which cuts through the agricultural Central Valley, always reveals San Francisco as being a kind of urban delusion. Along the I-5 is a procession of Amazon fulfillment warehouses, resource extraction sites, industrial agriculture, communities ravaged by the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, and prisons—one of the biggest industries in the rural United States, and growing ever larger. A 2001 article from The New York Times about economic revitalization in rural America said that building prisons was more effective than building Walmarts or meatpacking plants in stimulating economic growth. As the abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes in her book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, prisons were purposefully constructed in rural California throughout the 1990s with an economic agenda. The rural prison industry was fueled by policy makers trying to alleviate the economic crisis, because even as crime rates declined across America, prison populations grew. Building rural prisons would capitalize on the surplus foreclosed land that came from the Farm Crisis, and transfer vulnerable urban communities of color into rural prisons just as the social services of education, health care, and public assistance were being eroded. A 2017 study by the Vera Institute of Justice highlighted how the rural incarceration trend continues to grow. According to the study, financial incentives encourage the building of more rural prisons, and thousands of rural prisons are expanding their capacity—despite drastically declining crime rates and growing evidence that rural prison industries fuel national sociopolitical upheaval.
The sociopolitical upheaval in China after the Great Leap Forward and the wild uncertainty of the current U.S. political climate both stand as lessons to China’s current lawmakers: agrarian transition is enormously tricky and the consequences are huge, especially in an era of global agricultural trade. Although China harbors dreams of becoming an AI superpower, the question of the countryside will have to be resolved in order for China to garner enough knowledge workers.
China has one of the largest rates of income inequality in the world, due to the rural-urban income gap. Rural migrants work for little pay in cities but are unable to actually stay in urban areas. Yet hukou system reform is beginning, although there are new signs that rural hukou holders are less enthusiastic about switching to urban hukous.5 China’s land reform has continued by allowing farmers to lease out their land or transfer land rights to another, enabling an extra source of income. And as China is a country built on experiments, Rural Revitalization just might succeed in creating sustainable growth in the countryside. The constitutionally sanctioned Organic Law of Villages allows villagers to democratically elect their governing committees, which in some places has resulted in villagers holding those in power more accountable for social and economic well-being. The agricultural tax on peasants was abolished in 2006, allowing more investment opportunity, and the slow trickle of migrants back to the countryside has brought an influx of knowledge and technology.6
The cultural differences between the city and the countryside can still be felt. This might be best encapsulated in the frequent stories of rural citizens stealing from the Chinese state government: bemused journalists describe the theft of state electricity wires, concrete, and other building materials that are then resold on illicit markets. In Shandong Province, I asked one thief why they decided to steal from the government. As if I were missing the obvious, they responded, “Well, clearly I would never steal from other villagers and none of the villagers would steal from me. We all know each other. Once in a while, we’ll take vegetables from each other’s gardens. But anything of value, I’d steal from someone I don’t know!”
5.
One night, I decide to cook a simple shrimp
dish for my great-uncle. Fifty years ago, shrimp would have been difficult to come by, but these days it’s as easy as going to the supermarket and paying via mobile phone. As we eat, my great-uncle reminisces about the early days of the revolution, how at the time, leaders of the Communist Party dressed and ate the same as regular civilians. About how slow work was, how time moved differently then—a filmy haze seemed to cover every moment, suspending life in the present.
In his 1947 book, From the Soil, the sociologist Fei Xiaotong underscores the agricultural roots of Han Chinese culture and shows how distinct values emerged in rural areas. In Fei’s eyes, rural culture is marked by a different sense of time, a different cosmology. At the core of rural culture, he says, is a belief that the universe is already perfect as it is, and that our duty as humans is to maintain that harmony. This was a sentiment I heard often from farmers as I traveled throughout the countryside. One farmer told me that the future is a created concept, and that in the fields, in the long dark of winters, there is no future, because every day depends on tending to the present moment. An act of care. In contrast, urban culture is centered on the belief that the universe must be constantly corrected on its course, and that life is defined by the pleasure of overcoming future challenges.