It Takes a Family…To Live in a Chinese Village

Over the past year, Western imaginations have been spinning over the implications of China’s new leaders’ foremost policy objective. The stated goal of closing the income and wealth gaps between the populations of big Eastern cities and those of rural China is, indeed, potentially momentous: only one third of China’s population reportedly lives in cities, with two thirds living in farming villages. Furthermore, the standard of living of the farming population is notoriously lower and is said to have progressed more slowly than that in the cities. Boosting rural incomes and unleashing the spending power that would result could create a boom to dwarf the one of recent years.

The eruption of news coverage on the subject and the proliferation of instant experts, as always, incited me to investigate. My first question, admittedly a somewhat naï one for one who has been traveling to China regularly for the past seven or eight years, was: Where is rural China? As you drive around, you do see farms everywhere, but no huge expanses of farming land as, for example, in the United States. So, I e-mailed my local friends and their answer wasn’t too surprising: Rural China is between the cities -- just as, in the cities, you find remnants of the old life in the tiny passages between the brand-new skyscrapers.

To conciliate my desire for some diversity with logistical and time constraints (after all, I am still a working man), I settled for a sampling tour that would have me drive South and West of Beijing through Hebei and Shanxi provinces, then fly to Xian (Shaanxi province) and Nanjing (Jiangsu province) and drive around the villages surrounding these cities. Of course, to accentuate the contrast, I would finish in Shanghai which, today, is arguably more modern than New York.

Settings

The villages I visited usually were situated within one to two hours from the closest town. (County towns, from a few hundred thousand to about a million people, don’t seem to qualify as cities but, after all, we are in China, a country of 1.2 billion people). Some villages are closer to town, though road conditions often make it feel otherwise. The sizes of visited villages ranged from 140 heads to about 2,000. There were many differences, but I shall try to focus on the common characteristics. After all, Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the all-time champion of generalization – even in France – and we owe our name to my admiration for him.

Typically, there are 4-6 heads per family living in the village: one or two grandparents (often in their seventies), one or two children (in their forties) and some grandchildren. The families really are larger since much of the working-age generation was born before the one-child-per-family rule was introduced. But some members usually work in nearby factories and cities, coming back to visit only two or three times a year, during the one-week public holidays.

Each family is allocated a plot or a house on village grounds, with the size depending on population and village land available. On that lot, small cubic housing units, usually of brick and most often only one story high, are built around a courtyard. Typically, they have one-to-three small rooms and each “house” shelters one generation. Grandparents take care of the grand children all day while the middle generation tends to their farming and other chores. Most villages (except the smallest ones) have at least an elementary school. After that, some traveling by foot, bicycle or bus is necessary – to a bigger village or the nearest small town.

In addition, each family is allocated a small plot of farm land (away but not far from the village) and also, occasionally, a rudimentary green house nearby, where fruits and vegetables are grown. One or two fruit trees also stand in the middle of the small courtyard.

At intervals running from fifteen to fifty years, the housing lots, farm acreage and green houses are re-allocated on instructions from the regional government and according to village size and demographics.

Beyond Voyeurism and Clichéo:p>

It is easy, on such visits, to fall into a sort of voyeurism, because the families visited seem so destitute by our standards. However, we were surprised by the openness and natural hospitability of the people we met. There was no sense of embarrassment about their conditions, even perhaps some pride. In addition, whereas a French farmer, for example, would rather die under torture than to tell you how well he is doing, Chinese farmers were totally sanguine about how much they were making, the value of what they owned and how much they paid for various things.

Also, one cannot compare our standards of comfort with those of the Chinese without reconstructing some of the logic and priorities that drive the lives of China’s farmers.

For a long time, the Chinese have paid less attention to home comforts and sanitary conditions than to other attributes of money – even after they had well emerged from poverty. I remember, a few years ago, being shocked at hearing that my interpreter’s grandmother still lived in a “cave”. Whether natural or built from earth, caves are the equivalent, in some regions, of the houses I visited on this trip. Some are connected to the power grid and even to telephone lines, although they more often have wells than running water. A friend from Shenzhen, who consults with successful entrepreneurs, commented: “One of my best customers lived in a cave until last year”. His customer probably already owned a car, expensive hi-fi system and was routinely having dinner in some of the city’s best restaurants: it’s all a question of priorities. As the Chinese have become better off, home comforts just could not compete with the attraction of other attributes of new wealth combined with the cheapness of free lodging.

The farming families we visited ran from fairly poor to very poor, not only by our standards, but also by those of Chinese cities’ white collars. In addition, like farmers everywhere and the Chinese in general, they were not shy about telling us how hard life is. Yet (here comes the cliché, everywhere I was impressed about the obvious joy and peace – almost contentment – of family life. In spite of a poor crop last year, our hosts unanimously agreed that they were better off today than three or four years ago. Now, they all can afford to eat well and to clothe themselves, which has not always been the case.

The paradoxes that must be surmounted in assessing life in rural China may be best illustrated in Premier Wen’s statement: “I wish for farmers that they receive good meals every day and can take a bath every week…” and in the following anecdote:

A young lady who manages the industrial properties of a foreign joint-venture in Eastern China employs a retired government worker as a gardener. With a state pension and money earned as a gardener, the man is not rich, but he is not badly off. Yet, he lives in something that apparently looks like something between a shack and a rough village housing unit, with no electricity. The government wants to use the village land for some industrial development and is offering him a fair cash bonus and an apartment in a housing complex not too far away. Eventually, the man will have no choice but to accept the offer, but he is miserable. He likes his home.

Finally, at dinner in Shanghai, a Chinese lady entrepreneur who travels extensively through China mentioned two new suburbs of this megalopolis – Ming Hang and Xing Zhuang. These are new housing developments, with basic comforts, probably better ones than in the inhabitants’ prior abodes, but soulless. They basically serve as dormitory towns for lower-echelon white collars working in Shanghai. On week-ends and at night, one can see groups of disenfranchised youths wandering around with nothing much to do – as in the troubled “cité/span>” on Paris’ periphery. Crime is not particularly high, but the whole thing is a bit frightening. Although these suburb residents arguably are much better off financially than the farmers I visited, they are confronted daily, in central Shanghai where they work, with all kinds of luxuries that they cannot afford. And family life, when it still exists, is much less cohesive than in the villages.

So, the farmers, while often disadvantaged by our material standards, do not seem particularly unhappy or disenfranchised in today’s China, compared to families of urban poor living in or around the big, prosperous cities or to the millions of workers laid off by heavy-industry, state-owned enterprises in Northeast China. The big question is: Are those farmers the source of the next enrichment and consumption wave on which many analysts are counting to sustain the economic boom of recent years?

François Sicart
in Shanghai

June 2, 2004
^© Tocqueville Asset Management L.P.

The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable and to the best of our knowledge is complete. The validity and completeness however cannot be guaranteed by Tocqueville Asset Management. Nothing herein constitutes investment or any other advice and should not be relied upon as such. This document has been prepared solely for information purposes and does not constitute an offer or an invitation to buy or sell securities. Any reference to past performance is not necessarily a guide to the future. Tocqueville Asset Management L.P., their affiliates and their officers, directors, employees, advisors or members of their families as well as the clients for whom they manage portfolios; 1) May have positions in securities or options of issuers mentioned herein and may make purchases or sales of the securities or options while this publication is in circulation; 2) May hold directorships in corporations discussed in this publication. The opinions expressed in this document are those of Tocqueville Asset Management as of the date of the writing and are subject to change.