Modern mask hides conditions in rural
China By Lynette Ong
CHENGDU
- Traveling along the expressway from Sichuan's capital
Chengdu to Nanchong city in the northeast of the
province makes one wonder if this is really southwestern
China - one of the poorest parts of this colossal
kingdom. The highway is clean, well maintained and
clearly labeled with big signboards. It's like cruising
along a highway in an industrialized country such as
Japan.
Sichuan itself is a diverse and enormous
province that boasts a population of 111 million - half
that of the Indonesian archipelago and more than double
that of South Korea. Sichuanese are primarily Han, but
the western region is also home to minorities such as
Yi, Tibetan, Miao and Hui. Sichuan has basins in the
east, plateaus in the west, mountains in the central
south and highland swamps in the central north. The
province's economy is as assorted as its geographical
diversities. The plains in Chengdu's vicinity are major
industrial areas, playing host to a wide range of
industries such as food processing, electronics, and
medical products. Urban residents in these areas enjoy
an annual per capita income as high as 9,000 yuan
(US$1,088), while rural residents average about 3,400
yuan ($411), according to official statistics. In the
western minorities region, farmers' annual incomes only
just cross the 1,000 yuan mark.
Nanchong, four
hours by road from the provincial capital, has some
"signs" of a modern city - two huge shopping malls stand
tall in the city center, linked by a pedestrian bridge.
On one side of the mall, young consumers pack the
air-conditioned space under McDonald's golden arches on
a hot and steamy summer afternoon. Dixige (Disco
Chicken) - a local fast-food rival - occupies the other
end of the mall. Nonetheless, the facade of modernity
masks the conditions in the countryside that this
prefecture encompasses: Nanchong is a collection of nine
counties, many of which are designated poverty counties.
In Xunfeng village, four hours away from
Nanchong city, I got a glimpse of the villagers' lives
through the prism of Zhou Pinfang, a 35-year-old farmer.
Zhou is married with two school-age children and has an
elderly father. In this hilly part of the countryside,
farmers grow a combination of grains, corn and yams.
Grain production is just about sufficient for
self-consumption; there is little reserve. Corn and yams
are mostly used as feedstock for pigs and chickens. The
remoteness of this village means there is no market for
cash crops such as fruits and vegetables. Were it closer
to the county seat or a major township, where large
numbers of non-farming households reside, the villagers
could be involved in lucrative cash cropping. It is not.
Zhou has four pigs and a dozen chickens - about the
average asset level in Xunfeng, where livestock are
considered assets, investments and cash cows for the
villagers. But Zhou's assets, or those of an average
villager, aren't enough for him to make a decent living.
Zhou's wife works in a shoe factory in
Guangdong, a prosperous coastal province in southeastern
China. She has been away from home for close to two
years. She and her husband take turns at being the
breadwinner: Zhou was a construction worker in Beijing
in the years before his wife left for the factory. While
she's away, he becomes the homemaker. He farms as well
as takes care of his two children and his 55-year-old
father. His wife is among the county's 230,000 migrant
workers who work in other parts of the country, as far
as away as Beijing and Xinjiang, to support their
remaining family members in the hinterland. Migrant
workers account for half of the county's total workforce
of 470,000, and remit a total of 1 billion yuan annually
back to the villages.
The remittances make up
more than a third of the county's total income of 2.8
billion yuan, without which many residents in the
countryside could not sustain their livelihoods. The
hemorrhage of labor is certainly not unique to this
county - many poor areas in the western part of China
export labor to industrializing coastal provinces,
helping to stimulate the growth of industries and the
country's economic progress as a whole. Relaxation of
the household registration system, or hukou, that
once tied rural residents to their places of birth has
allowed people to move to where they can obtain higher
returns for their labor and, through remittances,
improve the standard of living of the remaining rural
populations. That said, rural-urban migration is still
hampered by lack of information flows about the urban
job market, as well as institutional discriminations
against rural residents in education, health care and
other social services in the cities. Rural residents, or
nongmin, are not entitled to the numerous state
subsidies on social services provided to China's
urbanities.
Back in Xunfeng village, Zhou seems
content with his life, though he and his children only
get to see their wife and mother once every few years.
"I consider myself lucky that my wife is working in
Guangdong. We miss her, but she helps to support the
family," Zhou said. His wife brings home about 4,000
yuan annually, most of which is used for the children's
education and medical costs, as well as farming and
animal husbandry expenditures - fertilizers, seeds,
piglets and chickens. In this part of the world, where
kinship and guanxi (human relationships) matter
as much as formal ties, hongbaixishi, or gifts
for auspicious occasions such as weddings and birthdays,
can also burn a big hole on one's pockets. Many even
turn to the informal credit market - borrowing from
friends, relatives and rotating credit associations - to
finance this expenditure, which they consider an
essential part of rural community life.
Education is largely on a user-pay basis in the
countryside. Zhou pays about 500 yuan a year for his
daughter, who goes to a local primary school, and 1,000
yuan for his son, who attends a secondary school. That
aside, there are other miscellaneous fees for
examinations and textbooks. Nine-year compulsory
education exists only in name. Many children in China's
rural areas have been forced to quit school simply
because their families are not able to afford tuition
fees. In the hinterland, basic education is supposed to
be funded by the local governments - township and county
- but local authorities' fiscal stress has caused them
to rationalize education expenditures. Most of them can
only afford to pay for teachers' salaries, leaving other
school expenses to be funded by the users.
Across the black-and-white screen of their
television, the material lives of the city dwellers
flash before the eyes of Zhou and his children. "I want
my children to be well educated and get jobs in the big
cities - that's the only way for us to live like they
do," Zhou said.
Lynette Ong is a
researcher in China's political economy. She can be
reached at lhlo@lycos.com.
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