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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