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. Up until a few years ago It was 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. Sugar, cigarettes and liquors have traditionally been regarded as the luxuries of village life. Cigarettes are a often 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. Tania Branigan wrote in The Guardian, "To understand just how poor rural Guizhou is, you can look at the statistics. Or you can look at the children in Qixin village. Zhao Ai is nine, but is so short he appears three years younger. He eats nothing between leaving home at 6.30am---for a two-hour trek down the mountain to
Ruiyuan primary school---and returning at 5pm. [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, October 2, 2011]
In 2010, Shanghai took the top spot in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)'s international rankings for reading, maths and science in state schools. Meanwhile, at Zhao's primary, the big educational challenge is "no food", says headteacher Xu Zuhua. Malnutrition stunts her pupils' growth and hampers their concentration. "Even though we are developing, it feels like urban areas are running while we are strolling," says Zhou Liude, who oversees Ruiyuan and nearby schools.
The government has sought to invest in rural areas, and the benefits of growth are spreading. In the towns around Qixin you see stores with gleaming yellow motorbikes and adverts for 3G and coffee. But these remain unimaginable luxuries for families like Zhao's, who survive on basic farming and wages sent home by relatives working in cities. Their poverty is disguised by development: the further away from the road people live, the poorer they are---and the worse their children's grades---says Ruiyuan's headteacher.
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.
In a major speech marking the opening of National People's Congress in March 2010, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao promised to expand old-age pension coverage and other social benefits for rural residents.
Yongning Green Migration Scheme
Sebastien Blanc of AFP wrote: On a dry plain in China's remote northern Ningxia region, thousands of neatly aligned, identical brick houses have sprung up from the dusty soil. This is the Yongning Green Migration Scheme, where 3,000 two-room houses are being built to accommodate 17,800 villagers from the poorer, mountainous south of the region. [Source: Sebastien Blanc, October 13, 2011]
Bu Xing'ai, director of external affairs for Ningxia, said authorities planned to move 350,000 people within the autonomous region over the next five years as he showed off the project to journalists on a recent visit. China's breakneck economic growth has been accompanied by huge population movements, as exemplified by Ningxia, where new towns have been quickly built, sometimes at the heart of semi-arid zones.
For the government, planned migration is a way of channelling the inevitable rural exodus and redistributing the labour supply to suit the country's needs. Authorities in Ningxia say those who move under the scheme will have a better quality of life than they do at present.A cement factory with the capacity to produce 4,500 tonnes of cement a day is being built to provide employment for the migrants. "Once they are here they will find roads, electricity, water, they will be able to find work at the factory and their children will be able to go to school," said Wu Guangning, deputy director for development and reform in Ningxia's Yongning county.
Many of the intended residents are Hui, a Muslim minority that has lived in the autonomous region of Ningxia for centuries. The local climate is dry, but the authorities have planned an irrigation scheme that would allow residents to grow grapes, mushrooms and goji berries -- a highly nutritious fruit that is popular in the area.
It is not entirely clear why the scheme has been labelled "green". The roofs of the houses are to be fitted with solar panels, but they are not yet visible. Each house will cost 40,000 yuan ($6,275), but of that, the local government provided 30,000 yuan, said Wu.
Asked about the practicalities of getting mountain people to move to the desert, Wu said they were being encouraged to come and see the new settlement and decide whether they are "satisfied" with it. "They are currently living in very difficult conditions," he added.
With no one yet living in the new houses, and their proposed occupants living many hours' drive away, it was not clear how their satisfaction with the new housing might be gauged.So, the organisers of the trip took the journalists by bus to see a migrant who had agreed to be interviewed in his tiny home, where baskets of fruit had been laid out.Ma Guowen was dressed in a Muslim skull-cap and wearing his best jacket for the occasion. But the farm worker's comments on the benefits of the government rehousing scheme seem a little too pat to be convincing.
Guizhou to Relocate 1.5 Million Poor
In February 2012, China Daily reported: "The government of Southwest China's Guizhou province is planning to spend 18 billion yuan ($2.85 billion) to relocate 1.5 million people living in mountainous regions in a bid to end chronic poverty there. Ethnic minorities account for about 39 percent of the province's population, and the province is eight years behind the national average development level, according to official statistics. Per capita GDP of the landlocked and ecologically fragile province was 13,000 yuan in 2010, equivalent to 40 percent of the national average or just 17 percent of that of economically prosperous Shanghai, according to official figures.[Source: China Daily, February 14, 2012]
Zhao Kezhi, governor of Guizhou, on Monday said in a news conference in Beijing that the local government has initiated a pilot relocation project for the first batch of 100,000 people this year. "In Guizhou, 1.5 million people live in mountains that barely provide the conditions for sustaining life," said Zhao. Explaining the necessity of the plan, Zhao said "even if we build roads to reach them, provide drinking water to them and work to alleviate poverty there for another 50 years, the problem still might not be addressed, in my opinion".
He said the relocation plan will take nine years to complete. In order to address complications that will arise when moving farmers from mountains into townships, the project will require massive funding as well as supportive policies that boost jobs.
More than 30,000 square kilometers of Guizhou's 170,000 square kilometers of territory can be classified as rocky desert terrain, according to official statistics. Yang Hongmin, a farmer from Jiangman village of Qinglong county, said rainwater has washed away the topsoil of his land, and Yang and other fellow villagers "had no choice but to sell blood to sustain themselves" 10 years ago. The situation at that time was so dire that rice was now only served during celebrations of marriage or new births, Yang said.
"Poverty and underdevelopment are two major problems Guizhou should address to realize common national prosperity," said Du Ying, deputy minister of the National Development and Reform Commission. China's top economic planner, at the conference. Though Guizhou's relocation plan is pending approval by the State Council, Zhao added that the Guizhou government has initiated a pilot plan because it is urgent to get the process under way. "When faced with difficulties that have emerged during Guizhou's development, our attitude is we can't wait any longer. We have to begin doing it while reporting to the senior leaders," Zhao said.
A total of 1.2 billion yuan from the provincial, city and county budget has already been allocated to facilitate the relocation of the first batch of 100,000 people from villages to townships or development zones, Zhao said. He added that senior citizens could get an allowance from social security funds and medical insurance. Jobs will be created for people in their 40s and 50s to help them adjust to the move.
Zhao said the government will buy 80,000 job posts in the service industry and the public welfare sector at the cost of 12,000 yuan to 15,000 yuan each. These jobs will be provided to the middle-aged. Vocational education and training will also be given to the youth during the relocation. "I talked with many villagers in the remote mountains, and they said they would like to move for their children," Zhao said. "Moving out is also done for the sake of improving their own lives," he said.
Chinese Village Drained by Migrant Labor
Describing a village in Shandong Province, a 12-hour bus ride from Beijing, Megan Stack and Barbara Demick wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Nobody remembers just how Liloucun village came to be. There is a vague story, something about how a group of Li men moved here 300 years ago in search of wider tracts of fertile land for farming. The name translates as "Li house village," and the men who live here today all bear the surname Li. The exact relations are lost to time, but the villagers assume their blood is shared, and intermarriage is forbidden. Men remain in the village, choosing wives from elsewhere, and the village daughters marry out. [Source: Megan K. Stack and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2011]
"Today, Liloucun is home to 160 people, three computers and a single car...There are two main roads; at their intersection are two general stores, a fertilizer shop and a small restaurant. There is no running water, and the town got electricity only a decade back. Most of the money comes from migrant workers. About 40 percent of the villagers leave home to join China's urban workforce." [Ibid]
"The migrants' salaries have bought bricks and lumber to replace the grass and mud once used to build homes. People proudly show off their televisions, washing machines and refrigerators; everybody knows who has what, and how much it cost. The price is paid in absence. Most of the year, these hamlets are ghostly, drained of the young and fit." [Ibid]
For two week Chinese New Year holiday "the village looks like its old self. Couples get married, taking advantage of the luck of a new year and the presence of migrating relatives. Roving holiday markets spill from one village to the next, peddling live fish, dried lotus, pigs' heads, hand-pounded sesame oil, mountains of fireworks." [Ibid]
Village Family Fractured Absent Migrant Father
Li Guangqiang works on the construction of the new Microsoft site in Beijing. His children in his home village in Shandong Province have grown up without him. Megan Stack and Barbara Demick wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "He seems uneasy around them, scoffs that their mother gave them names that are embarrassingly rural. His son, Shengshun, has been acting out. He skips school, runs off with his friends. To the fury of his teacher, who threatened to ban him from school, he dyed his hair bright red. His grades are terrible; in a few years, he'll probably follow his father's example and migrate to a big city. [Source: Megan K. Stack and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2011]
"Now he trails after his father, hurls himself at the older man, who brushes the boy away. He manages to lure his father into a wrestling match, but it doesn't last long. As for 15-year-old Yingying, she is tall and dreamy. She earns better grades than her brother, and helps her mother in the kitchen. She pines for adventure, of becoming a factory girl someplace bustling and distant." "I always think outside is better than my village," she says. [Ibid]
'sun Fengzhi is mincing goat fat for the stew, banging it over and over with a shining cleaver. She married Li more than 13 years ago, when she was 26. She has hardly seen him since. It's cold in the kitchen; her breath hangs in front of her mouth, and the fat is freezing. Her thick, strong fingers ache from the work. With her husband out of earshot in the yard, Sun describes a melancholy family life." "He went away and I had to take care of everything," she says quietly. "It was really difficult for me. I had to take care of the kids myself. I used to hold them so long my arms were in pain. I had to be their father and their mother." [Ibid]
'since coming home, her husband has shared his son's bed, not his wife's. He has spent a lot of time visiting his friends, driving around in his cousin's van. He wears his nice city clothes, and although his family speaks to him in local dialect, he stubbornly replies in the Mandarin of Beijing....While Sun is telling her storey one of the neighbor women slips out to warn Li: Your wife is criticizing you to outsiders!...Li bursts into the room. "Stop complaining so much!" he yells at his wife, who cringes and shrinks from him. Their son joins in, echoing his father's orders: "Stop complaining!" Sun drops her reddened eyes and turns her attention to the goat stew." [Ibid]
"On the wardrobe, in pride of place, hangs a picture of Sun and three other women. They stand in factory smocks, smiling shyly at the camera. She looks younger and prettier, but the photo is only 2 years old. That year, Sun tried her hand as a migrant worker. She left her children with her parents and found a job at a DVD component factory in Qingdao. Those days were happy. But her son grew unruly; nobody could control him. After six months, Sun returned to the village. [Ibid]
Li is sullen. His efforts to portray a family life unscathed by his gaping absence have fallen apart. "I guess you can tell, since my wife just says whatever comes into her head, that we don't have a very good relationship," he says grimly. Still they try to put on a happy face. A few days later, the whole family travels two miles down the road to visit Sun's village. "I don't go to her village very often," Li says. "It's something I have to do." [Ibid]
Children in Chinese Villages Emptied by Migrant Labor
Migration rates exploded over the last two decades as residents left their fading villages in droves to seek jobs in the cities. The left-behind children are the fallout of a rapid dissolution of traditional Chinese values in the rush for economic opportunity and growth, and a vivid reminder of how routine migration has become in the country's lifestyle.
Describing a remote village in Anhui Province,Megan Stack and Barbara Demick wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "This is a village of empty rooms, children left behind and frail grandparents who struggle to hold it all together. Most of the able-bodied adults have left the hamlet of rutted, muddy roads and drought-withered fields of corn. House after house, the same family tale is repeated: The parents have migrated to the big cities for work; their young children stay with grandparents, great-grandparents or any other relatives who can shelter and feed them. At the age of 10 or so, when the youngsters are considered old enough, many move into packed boardinghouses attached to their public schools. [Source: Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2010]
"A generation of left-behind children is growing up in China. Researchers estimate that at least 58 million---nearly a quarter of the nation's children and almost a third of its rural children---are growing up without one or both of their parents, who have migrated in search of work. More than half of those were left by both parents. The youngsters face psychological and emotional challenges; many struggle to keep up with their lessons and end up abandoning school in their teens to join their parents on the road, researchers say." [Ibid]
"Their education is always lagging behind," Nie Mao, author of "Hurt Village," a book on the fate of the separated children, told the Los Angeles Times. "Their safety is always compromised because they are far from their parents. Their future is not clear. "This is a social problem in China and, as a society, we have to find a solution," Nie said. Bringing their children along means paying city school costs, sheltering them despite their own dubious living arrangements, and keeping them supervised during long work shifts. Chinese children are entitled to nine years of free public education but must pay steep fines to enroll in schools outside the town or village where their residence is registered."
"People choose to be separate from their children because they don't have any other choice," Shi Zhengxin, secretary general of the China Social Assistance Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times . Despite the hardships, Shi urges parents to try to keep their children with them. Most of them will eventually end up migrating anyway, he says, so they might as well get used to urban life. "If they get left behind, they grow up into the second generation of migrant workers," he said. "They'll still have to come to the city to work, and it will take them much longer to adjust and learn how to live here." [Ibid]
"There is general unease, among government officials and the intelligentsia, about the plight of the left-behind children and the fraying of the Chinese family, which traditionally prized togethernesss and intensive parenting," Stack and Demick wrote . "The government has created migrant schools, and this year launched a program that gave children the chance to travel to the city to spend summer holidays with their parents. But the migrant schools are notoriously inferior to the mainstream public schools, and so far just one trainload of children has gone to Beijing for a reunion with their parents. [Ibid]
Grandparents Raising Children in Chinese Village Drained by Migrant Labor
"At 77, Cai Zhongying is the matriarch of a nearly empty homestead," Megan Stack and Barbara Demick wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "From a mud road where scraggy dogs roam, the cluster of family homes looks almost splendid: a string of buildings adorned with turquoise trim and statues of birds perched on curled rooftops, still being built piece by piece with wages from Cai's faraway children. Inside, the rooms are mostly bare. Her children and the grandchildren who left have spent much of their money, scraped together during shifts in far-flung urban factories, to build the rooms. The cash to furnish them will have to come later. They come home once a year, if they can earn the fare and get the time off." [Source: Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2010]
"For years, people here tried to stay ahead of hunger as subsistence farmers. There is a coal mine nearby, but only a few villagers have been lucky enough to land jobs there. For the rest, there's the road. Villagers go south and east, to the massive coastal cities of skyscrapers and suburban factories, or to bigger coal mines in more prosperous towns. To Shanghai, Pinghu or Xuzhou."
"It's the job of Cai, along with her 78-year-old husband, to keep an eye on the houses and raise the younger children until they are old enough to work. The couple had six children, with hopes of being cared for in their old age. Instead they are locked into perpetual parenthood, raising waves of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. These days, they are tending to two youngsters, ages 4 and 6, plus fields of vegetables and a pomegranate orchard in the mountains." [Ibid]
"My husband just cries sometimes because the little boy is always clinging to his neck and climbing all over him," Cai told the Los Angeles Times. "And my husband is exhausted." Still, it is an improvement from recent years, when the couple had as many as six small children under their roof. Back then, they struggled to find enough food for everyone. Bitter arguments would erupt at mealtimes. "The whole scene was a mess," Cai said. "Some of them really needed to be taken away to be with their parents. Thinking about it now, I want to cry." [Ibid]
As noon rolled around, Cai's husband, Li Jiachen, arranged their 6-year-old great-granddaughter on the rear rack of his bicycle and pedaled her home from school for a lunch break. Li's is a farmer's face, weathered with deep ruts; his pants were smeared with mud. He sat, lighted a cigarette and began to cry as he described the choices his family has faced. "When I was raising my grandchildren, I could only provide them with food, nothing more," he said sorrowfully. "And then when they were 15, they all left to go work." At other moments, Li and Cai are more sanguine. The children have never known their parents well enough to miss them, they say, shrugging. And anyway, there is nothing unusual in their circumstances. Most of their neighbors are also grandparents raising the younger generation. [Ibid]
"The family has faced worse," Stack and Demick wrote. "Years past, when the harvest was particularly thin, Cai was reduced to begging in order to feed her children. That seems like a long time ago now. And like the other villagers, the family regards the en masse exit from the village as a double-edged sword. For all the emotional turmoil of shattered families, there is a new gleam of prosperity on the landscape.The dirt roads are littered with construction materials: Bricks, roofing tile and cement. Old-style houses, built from rocks bound together with a paste made from ashes, are regarded as evidence that the household's migrants haven't done their part. [Ibid]
Inside their home, Cai's great-granddaughter hides from visitors in the double bed she shares with her great-grandparents. There is another bed nearby, the mattress still sheathed in plastic from the factory. On the label, a Western-looking woman reclines dreamily under a nonsensical English slogan: "Salubrious endless imagination you life." Nobody sleeps there."It's my son's," explains Li. Then the family turns to examine in silence the newly bought bed. [Ibid]
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.
© 2008 Jeffrey Hays
Last updated April 2012
RURAL POOR IN CHINA AND PROBLEMS IN CHINESE VILLAGES | Facts and Details
