Facts and Details

RURAL LIFE IN CHINA

Rural population: 56 percent, compared to over 95 percent in the 1920s. There are 800 million rural peasants--roughlly 600 million farmers and 200 million to 300 million excess unskilled rural laborers.

The are around 1 million villages in China, about one third of the world's total. Each village has an average of 916 people.

The rural population has declined from 82 percent in 1970 to 74 percent in 1990 to 64 percent in 2001 to 56 percent in 2007 and is expected to drop below 50 percent by 2015.

There is a wide gap between the wealth of the impoverished countryside and the booming cities, with the income of rural residents less than a third of that of urban residents. The annual per capita disposable income of or rural residents was 2,762 yuan (around $300) in 2006 compared to 8,799 yuan for urban dwellers. For every 100 household in the countryside there are 89 color televisions, 22 refrigerators and 62 cell phones. By contrast, for 100 every household in the cities there are 137 color televisions, 92 refrigerators and 153 cell phones.

A typical village farmer grow rice, corn, chilies and vegetables on a half acre of land, and maybe keeps some chickens and pigs. Farmers produce enough to eat but not much to sell. There are inadequate basic public services such as education, health and applications of new technologies.

Typical rural families live in simple wooden houses, use outhouses and cook in shacks over open hearths. Many villagers now have televisions and even washing machines, refrigerators and DVD players, but manyvillages only have electricity during the night as rural industries need the power during the day. Land-line phones are still rare. Cell phones are becoming more common. In villages outside Shanghai you can find people with stylish haircuts and expensive suits that live in houses with coal grills and plastic tables.

Land essentially belongs to local government, a holdover from the commune era.

See Farmers, Agriculture, Economics

See Chinese Villages, Separate Article

Will the Boat Sink the Water: The Life of China’s Peasants by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao (Public Affairs, 2006).

Views on Rural Life in China

In his book The Villagers, Richard Critchfield wrote: "I found that once you stepped inside a [Chinese] peasant family's household walls, property, marriage and the family mattered just as much as in any village. There were the same proudly displayed photographs, the same complaints about the expenses of weddings, the same deference shown to old people, even the same mind-numbing homemade country liquor that is, alas, the gesture of having broken the social ice from Africa to India." [Source: "The Villagers" by Richard Critchfield, Anchor Books]

A peasant farmer told the New York Times, "There's a huge difference between life now and the way it was. Our life today is better than a landlord's life in the past. But tell this to a young people and they don't want to hear. They say, Go away! They don't know about the old life...Last year [my son] wanted to buy a stereo cassette recorder for [$80]. I said, 'No that's too much. We should buy a mule.' A mule can work. It's useful. A stereo isn't. And a mule is so big, while a stereo is so small." [Source: Sheryl Wudunn, New York Times magazine, September 4, 1994]

One villager in Henan Province told the Los Angeles Times, “Farmers are realistic. If their kids are not high achievers at school, the parents just want them to finish school as soon as possible, get a job, build a house, and get married,”

Mao publically idealized peasants, he sent dwellers to the countryside to learn from them. Many think his actions were motivated purely by politics. The best education, health care and other benefits generally went to urban people, perpetuating inequality that exists today.

Hard Times in the Old Days

One of Hessler’s students wrote, “My parents were born in a poor farmer’s family. They told us they had eaten barks, grass, etc. At that time grandpa and grandma had no open mind and didn’t allow my mother to go to school because she is a girl.”

In the old days strangers sometimes showed up and stole things, kidnapped women and children and killed people . Often villagers could do little but stuff their baskets with rice and run and hid in the mountains.

In the old days the easiest way for a man to escape village life was to join the army. These days it is by working hard in school and attending university.

Rural Daily Life in China

In rural areas, time as measured by a clock has little relevance. People wake up at dawn and go about their chores until they are finished or its gets dark. In hot climates, people wake up early, often between 4:00 and 5:00am, and do their most arduous tasks before it gets too hot. During the hottest hours people rest and nap and resume their activities in the relatively cooler hours before sunset. As a rule people usually go to bed pretty early.

One villager in Gansu told the Washington Post that on a typical day she rises at 6:00am. cleans the floor and furniture and cooks breakfast. Afterwards she weeds the wheat field and them returns to cook lunch and feed the chickens. After more fieldwork she returns to cook dinner. After dinner she and her children sit on hard bed and she tells them stories or they watch television.

Villages are often empty on the morning because everyone is out working in the fields or doing other chores. Before breakfast, a rural family usually feed their animals, and collects eggs and milk. Water is tossed outside during the dry season to help keep down the dust. Treks often have to be made a kilometer or so outside the village to fetch firewood for cooking or to make charcoal and sometimes to collect water for bathing and drinking. During the rainy season water is collected off the roof of the house.

Rural Chores in China

Life in the countryside in much of China has changed little in the last thousand years. Rice is still planted in paddies by hand and tilled by hoes or wooden plows pulled by oxen or water buffalo. Pigs and herds of ducks wander around the farms.

The roads are filled with slow moving tractors, peasants carrying belongings on shoulder poles, peasants carrying heavily-loaded baskets yokes and farmers moving everything from produce to cement in hand carts, bicycles or carts attached to their bicycles.

Newly harvested grain is threshed in the central square; water is collected from a hand pump; Dried red peppers , onions and garlic are hung from houses.. Hours are spent washing clothes in the afternoon in streams that feed fish ponds and rice fields. While the clothes are being washed, small gates into the pond and irrigation ditches are closed so the fish and crops are not contaminated by soapy water. Chores such as washing clothes are performed communally in some villages—a hold over from the collective farming days.

Villagers are very resourceful. Soccer balls are made from tin cans and large insects are tied to strings and kept as pets. Nothing is wasted in China. Human waste is collected from family outhouses and used as fertilizer called night soil. Outhouses are often placed near pig sties so waste can be collected from both sources and used for fertilizer. The morning distribution of night soil is common sight throughout China.

See Agriculture, Economics

Rural Income and Markets in China

A typical family of seven described by Business Week in 2000 lived in a four room house, used 0.64 of an acre for growing rice, used 0.59 an acre for growing other crops and owned four pigs, one horse and 20 ducks. Their expenditures were $546: $217 for food, $96 for transportation, $72 for fertilizer and pesticides, $48 for medicine, medical services, $36 for local taxes; $7 for road building and improvement; $4 for power station maintenance; $6 for education and culture and $60 for cloth and clothes.

The family's income was $674: $12 from the sale of 100 kilograms of rice; $54 from the sale of 100 kilograms of chilies; $25 from the sale of 150 kilograms of rapeseed; $163 from selling pigs; $34 from the sale of 20 ducks; $145 from the father’s construction work; and $241 in remittances from a daughter working in southern China in a factory.

Many villagers have become dependent on the money family members earn as migrant workers and factory employees. There is often prestige attahked to how many children a family have that are working outside the village that and how much money they send home.

Markets are often the center of economic and social life. Peasants hawk melons and potatoes and other food crops from blankets spread on the ground the back of ox carts. There are also snake oil salesmen, opera troupes, fortunetellers, watermelon sellers, billiard table operators, noodle stalls, and gambling tables. Choosy Chinese shoppers prefers honest, straightforward sellers.

"Market day is magic for millions of Chinese peasants who see civilization only three or four times a month when they pack their bundles and their hopes and head for town," wrote Patrick Tyler in the New York Times. "They stream out of the mountains on bike or on foot or in a packed horse carts, cheerfully suffering the burdens of their rice bags, pork shanks or spinach heaps. They travel for hours along bumpy roads, some just hoping to make a successful purchase of a needed farm tool, a well-woven basket or a hand-fitted wooden water pail to balance on a shoulder pole."

Rural Poor in China

Poor people living in rural areas depend on agriculture to make a living and feed their families. Most of the crops are raised for food. Meager surpluses or rice or potatoes or animals are sold for money. The head of the household and other family members often have no other job. It is not uncommon for a family to earn less than six dollars a month and be required to pay taxes of $10 a month.

Many people live in huts with a thatch or tin roof held on with rocks. They subsist off daily rations of flour and sugar, supplemented with tomatoes and yoghurt. They cook their meals over wood dung fires and gather their water down stream from village privies. Wood is in short supply. The wells from which water is fetched are often dry. Cigarettes are a luxury they can't afford.

Health care and education for the poor is generally of poor quality. According to World Bank economists, the mortality rate in the Chinese countryside is "as bad as you'll find in the developing world," and four out of five peasants can't afford to see a doctor. More than 180 million rural Chinese are illiterate.

A Communist party cadre in Hubei wrote: "I often meet old people, grabbing my hands, saying they are wishing for an early death and young people running up to him recounting the tragedy of not being able to afford elementary school."

In remote Duyun prefecture of Guizhou province half of the 3.8 million people live below the poverty line of $1 a week. Many of these people are worse of than they were during the Mao era, when at least they were guaranteed grain rations and given subsidized medical care and free schooling.

Daily Life of Rural Poor in China

In the poorest areas, people have no running water or electricity. They use digging sticks to plow their fields and irrigate they land with water carried in buckets fastened to either end of yoke-like shoulder poles and have to walk more than 20 miles on dirt paths to reach the nearest dirt road. Their dream is replacing their rickety stone and log shacks for small brick homes.

Many poor peasants in China subsist off bread and shrimp paste or boiled turnips and eat meat only once a month, and that often is dog or cat. Children go barefoot and use discarded syringes for water guns. Many people are so poor that they decorate their houses with empty Coca-Cola cans, have never heard of electricity, let alone have it, and sell the blood of their children to buy fertilizer.

Some people have nothing. The New York Times did an interview with a peasant in a poor village north of the Yellow River in Shandong province. The peasant was asked how often he had meat or eggs? "Never," she said. Is her 14-year-old daughter in school? "No." Does her 8-year-old some have any toys "None."

Despite being for poor, rural families until recently were required to turn over about half their harvest to the government as tax, leaving just enough grain to feed their families and enough to barter for shrimp paste to flavor their food.

Some rural poor earn money by doing things like laboring on highway crews or carrying bricks in a brick klin. For many the easiest way to make money is selling blood for around $12. But because people have contacted AIDS, hepatitis and other disease from tainted blood, selling blood is no longer widely practiced, denying the rural poor of a way to make money.

Rural Problems in China

Excessive taxation, local corruption and declining services are problems faced by many people in the countryside. In their book Will the Boat Sink the Water: The Life of China’s Peasants Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao describe a village chief who murdered a man who tried to audit villages books; a township leader that forced peasants to grow mulberry trees so he could get rich from selling the seeds; and a Communist Party boss who called in armed troops to put down a tax revolt.

Many villagers have hacking coughs and respiratory ailments as result of being exposed to indoor cooking fires. They avoid going to the doctor because they can't afford the $5 visits.

Some receive very little government support. One woman who lived in a mud hut in Ningxia province and tried to raise seven children with her husband on an income of $120 a year told Newsweek, "We get no government services, no medical care. If I want birth control I have leave here and buy it myself."

Riots by angry farmers have occurred in many different places. The government now fears that a major revolt is more likely to come from the countryside than in the cities. See Taxes, Local Government, Government; See Land Seizures, Agriculture, Economics

Money Problems for Rural People in China

Rural people enjoyed benefits in the early stage of the Deng reforms when peasant were released from the communes but suffered in the 1990s and 2000s as the emphasis of the economic reforms switched to the cities

The annual income of people living in Shanghai is around 18,000 yuan while those living in agricultural areas around the city is 7,000 yuan. Six percent of elderly people in rural areas receive a pension compared to 60 percent in the big cities. Teachers and health workers in rural areas go unpaid for months and are forced to seek bribes to survive.

The incomes of farmers rose dramatically during the early years of the Deng reforms, but recently their incomes have leveled off or dropped. In many cases the poverty situation is getting worse for villagers and the income gap between them and urban people is widening. Ability to make money often depends on access to non farm jobs.

While incomes have stagnated costs for basic things like health care and education have risen out of reach. The cost of treating the most basic health problem is often more than people earn in a year.The annual cost of $250 to send a child to high school is either beyond a family’s reach or enough to drive them deep into debt. Unlike urban Chinese, peasants are not entitled to government benefits such as health care and unemployment payments. What is more the cost of food, fertilizer and seeds has risen so that farmers are earning even less than they did. In some places earning are declining by around 5 percent a year.

Help for Rural Poor in China

In recent years the government has promised to more to help to rural people. Government assistance for the poor includes rural anti-poverty projects, new drinking water systems and incentives for investments in poor provinces. Nobel-Prize winner Muhammad Yunis was invited to China for a trial of his “micro credit” system. See Farmers.

In an attempt to reduce the number of people migrating from the countryside to the cities, governments have put more funds into rural development for things like village schools, clinics, and sewers. In some places craft and weaving schools have been set up for young men and women to give them a basic education and teach them skills they can use in their villages. Even so, there are so many village and rural communities out there that these programs affect a relatively small number of people.

Perhaps the biggest help to villagers is the $45 billion sent back to relatives from migrant workers who left the villages. Without this money many villages would die.

See Taxes, Government; Improvements for Farmers, Agriculture, Economics; Electricity, Energy, Public Services

The Chinese economist Hu Angang has called for large amounts of money to be spent in the countryside in what some Western analysts call "a Chinese New Deal." In regard to talk about investments in the poorer provinces, local people often say, "the thunder is huge, but the raindrops are tiny."

Undermining the ability of rural poor to help themselves are government policies that require them to grow grain when they could make more money growing fruits and vegetables and policies that restrict the migration to the cities. Some of programs end up cheating villagers. Some farmers surrendered their land for reforestation programs that promised $65 a year for the rest of their life but ended up receiving nothing,.

Hu Jintao Government and Help for Rural Poor

In a New Year speech in 2007, Hu said he was committed to spreading the wealth in China so the have-nots could get their share. In his speech a before the 17th Congress in October 2007 Hu said, “There are still a considerable number of impoverished and low-income people in both urban and rural areas and it has become difficult to accommodate the interests of all sides.”

Over a two year period starting in 2003 the Chinese government paved more rural roads than it did in the previous half century.

By 2007 there was a shift in focus on policy with the government saying that it was just as responsible for improving the quality of life as it was for delivering economic growth. The shift is at least partly a reaction to increasing discontent over income disparities, land seizures and other problems.

In a speech in March 2006, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao promised massive social spending in the poor countryside. Wen said “building a new socialist countryside” is a major historic task and said the government would spend $5.2 billion on rural schools, hospitals, crop subsidies and other programs, raising spending in these areas by 15 percent.

China spent $70 billion on rural development in 2008, a quarter more than in 2007, on roads, health care, education, agricultural subsidies and things like patching up crumbling dams. Beijing hopes the measures will do something to shrink the gap between the rich coastal cities and the rural interior and reduce the number of migrant workers to the cities by giving them more opportunities at home.

Image Sources: 1) Pole man, Bucklin archives http://www.bucklinchinaarchive.com/ ; 2) Chores, Agroecology ; 3) Sewing ladies, Nolls China website http://www.paulnoll.com/China/index.html ; 4) Others Beifan.com http://www.beifan.com/

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

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© 2008 Jeffrey Hays