Country Driving

by Peter Hessler

  But over time it became something different to those who arrive from the opposite direction. Huairou is situated at the northern edge of the Beijing Plain, where roads fan out into the mountains, and the city is a natural first destination for people who leave villages. Beijing is often too big and disorienting, but Huairou is manageable for a person from the countryside. In the decade after the Women’s Conference, it grew rapidly, and today the downtown population is nearly one hundred thousand. Neither city nor village, it’s actually both: a city of villagers. Few residents are more than a generation removed from farmwork, and local businesses depend heavily on people moving back and forth between the countryside.

  Like so many new towns in China, Huairou has the feel of a training ground. It’s a city of gawkers and loiterers; people often appear to be lost. They stare at seven-story buildings; they gaze into shop windows; they wander into traffic—a Huairou driver learns to be attentive. On sunny days, crowds mill around the former site of the Women’s Conference, which is now flanked by a KFC and a McDonald’s. These fast-food restaurants are always packed, and the same is true for the single department store in town, which is called Da Shijie: The Big World. The Big World is five stories tall and stocked with virtually everything a Huairou shopper could want—appliances, clothes, toys, books. Peasants go there to ride the escalators. They stand poised before the moving metal, waiting for the perfect moment to take the leap; after a successful mount they clutch the rubber railings like a gymnast gripping the parallel bars. At the end of the line they hop to safety. They have a tendency to stop dead after dismount, as if waiting for a judge’s score. Within the department store, there’s a lot of good-natured jostling: people bump each other at the end of backed-up escalators, and they plow through crowded shop aisles, and they step on the heels of folks who are rubbernecking the central atrium. The decorating scheme of the Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball. It’s hard to imagine any place more different from a quiet mountain village, and people from the countryside love the Big World—they stagger up the escalators and blink happily in the glaring lights. That’s the trick of Huairou: it’s a city of transformation, where people change as quick as a peasant with a pair of Italy loafers.

  Wei Ziqi had relatives in the city, an older brother as well as various cousins from Sancha, and they introduced him to hardware shops where he could stock up for his renovations. During the early months of 2003, he found businesspeople he could trust. These were new types of relationships—in the village, it was rare to have any sort of link that was strictly economic. Urban Chinese describe such associations as guanxi, “connections,” and a businessman learns to la guanxi. Literally the verb means “to pull, to drag, to haul,” and the description is apt: guanxi takes work. Wei Ziqi invited contacts to restaurants; he drank shots of baijiu; he handed out cigarettes. He began to smoke himself. Previously he had abstained, because he believed the habit to be unhealthy and a waste of money. But for a Chinese male doing business, sharing smokes is a crucial part of pulling guanxi, and whenever Wei Ziqi went to Huairou he carried packs of Red Plum Blossom cigarettes.

  At the end of winter, after paving his threshing platform and building a new kitchen, Wei Ziqi constructed a fishpond. The old leech pool still stood nearby, a relic of his first attempt at business, but the new pond was four times as big. He planned to stock it with rainbow trout. For advertising he found a discarded truck hood that was dented beyond recognition. He painted the metal blue, added the name of his restaurant in big red characters, and propped the sign against some rocks at the end of the Sancha road. At a printer’s shop in Huairou he had business cards made up. For his restaurant, he had considered all sorts of grand titles—Sancha Farmyard Paradise, Sweet Waterhead Farmyard Villa, Sancha Great Nature Farmyard Leisure Paradise. But in the end he settled on something simpler: “An Outpost on the Great Wall.” Even as he learned to pull guanxi city-style, he knew instinctively that his best selling point was old-fashioned rural simplicity. The business cards listed all the humble activities that a visitor could enjoy in Sancha:

  Climb Mountains, Climb the Great Wall, Admire Wildflowers, Drink Springwater,

  Eat Wood-fired Meals, Sleep on a Heated Kang, Eat from the Five Grains,

  Learn from Observation of the Simple and the Plain,

  Return to the Simple Nature of the Past

  THE COUNTRYSIDE IS ONE of the few places that make urban Chinese feel nostalgic. In cities, the rush to modernity is headlong, and most old neighborhoods and landmarks have been razed. Residents have little time to think about the past, and history usually feels either irrelevant, like the ancient dynasties and the Great Wall, or extremely painful, like the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. But there’s a distance with rural life that makes people more comfortable. They’ve left it behind—most urban Chinese have some distant family history in the countryside, but it’s not something they have to think about every day. As middle-class people become more prosperous, buying cars and having enough money for tourism, they realize how pleasant it is to go back to the countryside periodically. For a city person, it’s one aspect of the past that feels easy to control—they can drive there, spend a night, and then return to the modern world.

  But in truth there’s no other part of China that is so trapped by history, at least when it comes to policies. In Sancha, people rarely talk about the past, but their relationship to the farmland is still fundamentally troubled in ways that it has been for more than a century. Some villagers, like Wei Ziqi, still have a few scattered documents that track this history. He’s lost access to the family genealogy, but he keeps a collection of tattered land contracts that were passed down through the generations. During the Cultural Revolution, Wei Ziqi’s father hid these papers inside the ceiling of the family home. Wei Ziqi himself is less careful—he folds them up, wraps them in a dirty red cloth, and leaves them at the bottom of a drawer.

  The oldest document dates to the Qing dynasty, in the thirteenth year of the reign of the Guangxu Emperor. That was 1887, and the handwritten contract describes the leasing of a piece of land to a man named Yu Manjiang. No money changes hands—the agreed annual payment is only one dou of grain every year, a total of about two and a half gallons. Farming must have gone badly for Yu Manjiang, because the next contract shows that he pawned his land “due to lack of money.” This agreement is from 1906, and it marks the first known legal appearance of a Wei ancestor: Wei Yongliang, the great-grandfather of Wei Ziqi. He agrees to pay 150 diao for the use of the land. Four years later, he buys it outright, for a total of 356 diao.

  A diao is a string of copper coins, and the amounts documented on the Wei family contracts are tiny. Sometimes land is leased or pawned, which was common in those days. In imperial China, big landowners tended to dominate villages, and in Sancha the wealthiest family was named Yan. Poorer residents leased fields from the Yans, and even a family that was able to buy its own land often struggled to support itself. A couple of the Wei contracts describe how fields are divided between siblings; one document specifies that two sons will split the funeral costs when their father dies. In every case these agreements are written out by proxies, often poorly, and the farmers who sign them are clearly illiterate.

  The Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912, giving way to the Republic of China, but little changed in the countryside. During the war decades of the 1930s and 1940s, conditions became particularly bad in the north, and this is reflected by the Wei contracts. Of all the agreements, the worst written is from 1946, and it’s signed by Wei Mingyue, the Shitkicker’s father. Because of financial problems, he agrees to pawn a plot of land to a cousin in exchange for thirteen gallons of corn. The contract states: “Next year, when the early-spring grains arrive, pay back the price and the
land will be returned.” The cousin who takes the land is Wei Youtan, the grandfather of Wei Ziqi. In the village, tensions between neighbors often have deep roots, although many details have been lost in the haze of the unwritten past. Wei Ziqi can’t read the classical Chinese of the contracts, and he didn’t know about the pawned land until I told him. When I asked about relations with the Shitkicker, he simply remarked, “It’s complicated.” In any case, the old contracts reflect degrees of poverty. Wei Ziqi’s grandfather had enough grain to take land from the Shitkicker’s father, but it wasn’t enough to support a healthy family. Two years after that 1946 contract, the Idiot was born, the victim of a disability that was endemic in regions with poor diet.

  By then the Communists had already risen to power in northern China. They made their base in Shaanxi Province, in the rugged hills of the loess plateau, and their core support consisted of poor peasants. One of Mao Zedong’s main goals was to grant land ownership to the people who actually farmed, ending the system of landlord domination. As the Communists gained control of the country, they instituted this reform with remarkable speed. It helped that they had no scruples about violence: during the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of landlords were killed in cold blood. Fields were given to tenant farmers, and an additional fifty million families, mostly poor, suddenly received title. Most had never held any sort of legal ownership; many couldn’t even sign their names.

  In the Wei family contracts, this landmark historical change appears in a document from September of 1949, one month before the official founding of the People’s Republic. The contract is beautifully illustrated: the borders are decorated with fat red ears of corn, and the bottom features pictures of farmers planting and harvesting under a healthy sun. At the top is an unsmiling portrait of Mao Zedong. The text explains that five members of the Wei family have the right to seven plots of land. The plots are listed, and in terms of acreage they are minuscule: 0.20 acres, 0.12 acres, 0.05 acres, 0.05 acres, 0.02 acres, 0.02 acres, and 0.025 acres. In total it’s less than half an acre for an extended family, but it’s more than the Weis ever possessed in the past. One plot formerly belonged to the Shitkicker’s father—apparently he hadn’t been able to redeem the pawned land—but there’s no mention of who formerly owned the other fields. Wei Ziqi told me that they once belonged to members of the Yan family, the big local landlords, although he didn’t know what became of them. “They were struggled against,” he said, vaguely, and left it at that. His father never told him many stories about the past.

  Across rural China, this initial stage of Communist land reform had an immediate effect. The new sense of ownership made farmers more likely to work hard, and in the early 1950s the nation’s rural productivity increased, along with living standards. But these improvements turned out to be short-lived, because Mao became obsessed with deepening the revolution. During the second half of the 1950s, he commanded that rural land be reorganized once more, this time into village communes. Farmers lost their new titles, as well as their right to individual profit. Everything was to be shared in common—the fields, the labor, the harvest—and the outcome was disastrous. During the Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1961, Mao instructed farmers to contribute to industrial development; communes were expected to meet steel production quotas. They ended up melting down farm implements and cooking tools, and in many places the people stopped raising crops. A famine swept across rural China, and tens of millions starved to death.

  Wei Ziqi’s father never told any stories about this period, either. Like most people in the countryside, he refused to linger on unhappy memories, and the family collection of contracts essentially ends at the commune period. There’s nothing to mark the beginning of collectivization, and there’s no document from 1961, when the Great Leap Forward was finally abandoned. After that, the Chinese commune system remained in place, and if the Weis were given contracts, they didn’t keep them. Only one document survives: an undated labor card that most likely was used in the late 1960s. The card notes how many workdays were contributed to the commune by “the wife of Wei Mingyuan” during the month of July. The woman isn’t even named—such details are irrelevant in a male-dominated world of group labor. And the commune system never functioned well; without the possibility of personal gain, farmers lacked motivation, and rural poverty was still endemic in the 1970s. Those were the years of Wei Ziqi’s childhood, when he often ate noodles made of elm bark.

  After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, he and other reformers wanted to grant some type of landownership to individuals. But this issue was extremely sensitive: privatizing land in Communist China, especially in the countryside, would be tantamount to admitting that the revolution had failed. Instead, officials developed something called the “Household Responsibility System.” Farmers contracted land from the village commune, agreeing to pay a certain amount annually in either cash or harvest quotas, and they were allowed to keep any surplus. It was a variation on the pre-Communist tenant system, except that now the nation essentially served as the landlord.

  The policy was adopted nationwide, and it became the next best thing to private ownership. Individual motivation returned to the fields, and from 1979 to 1984, the average net income for rural people increased by 11 percent. City dwellers actually lagged during this period, at least in relative terms—the average urban income increased by only 8.7 percent. But the nation still had a dual economy—rules were different for urban and rural regions. In the mid-1980s, government policies began to favor urban development, because leaders wanted to build the export economy. They improved city infrastructure, and they built special economic zones in places like Shenzhen. Most important, in the 1990s they reformed laws about the use of urban land. In Chinese cities, all land still technically belonged to the government, but private individuals were given the right to buy and sell dwellings. They couldn’t own the land, but they could own the building or apartment atop the land; they were free to sell it, or lease it, or apply for a mortgage. This change had an immediate effect—it helped spur the growth of the new middle class. Nowadays in Chinese cities, a person’s most valuable possession is typically his apartment.

  None of these reforms apply to rural residents. In the countryside, an individual can’t buy or sell his farmland, and he can’t mortgage it. He can’t use his house as collateral on a loan. The best he can do is a long-term lease on his land, which is still owned by the village collective. And a farmer has no bargaining power if a developer comes to town—an individual can’t oppose a land sale or negotiate for a higher price. The law gives cities and townships the right to acquire any suburban land that’s in the “public interest,” a term that’s never been defined, and the result is that urban places expand at will. When cities buy farmland, they pay set rates that are kept artificially low. Such transactions are handled by the village governments, which are supposed to reimburse any farmer who loses his land, but corruption often siphons off funds. Beginning in the 1990s, as urban areas grew rapidly, such land grabs became more common—by one estimate, during the period from 1990 to 2002, sixty-six million farmers lost their land. And the rural system turned into a particularly unfair combination of the old and the new, the communist and the capitalist. Profits are individual, but risk is communal: local cadres benefit from land sales while villagers are stuck with the ramifications. A half century after the revolution, rural land reform has accomplished exactly the opposite of its original intentions.

  Over time, the government has taken some steps to improve the rural situation. They’ve sponsored road-building campaigns, and they stopped demanding harvest quotas and agricultural taxes. But the land law remains a fundamental problem, along with the sheer number of people. In 2005, according to a government survey, the agricultural population was still over eight hundred million, and the average rural household consisted of 4.55 people who tended less than an acre of land. This plot, tiny in Western eyes, is adequate to feed a Chinese family and even provide a surplus to sell. With all
the migration, land should be consolidated, but migrants have a tendency to cling to farming rights after they’ve left the village. There isn’t any alternative—after all, they can’t sell. They usually lend the plots to relatives or neighbors, who farm with less enthusiasm than if they actually owned the fields. When I moved to Sancha, my house still belonged to the young couple who were now in Huairou. They couldn’t legally sell the building; the best we could do was a long-term lease, and this agreement had no legal status. It came down to guanxi—as long as I had good relations with the Weis, I could trust the contract, but it would never hold up in court. From my perspective, it seemed unfair, but it was even worse for the village. I wasn’t inclined to improve the property, and the young couple would never get the capital from a sale.

  In a place like Sancha, real local power is held by the members of the Communist Party. When I came to the village, there were seventeen members, and these cadres made all important decisions. They settled land disputes, handled public funds, and selected the Party Secretary, the highest local official. They controlled Party membership: nobody else could join without their approval. They held meetings on all sorts of subjects—after Mimi and I first moved to Sancha, the local Party members gathered to discuss our presence. I learned about this afterward, when I was told that they were divided on the question of whether we should be allowed to stay. I knew who led the opposition: one of the Party members was the Shitkicker.