11 L. Is Rural Poverty in China a Mirror into World Deprivation? 1st excerpt.
Poverty rarely happens isolated from the greater society. I know that China’s urban dwellers had much higher salaries and services paid-for by the government, when the rural segment did not.
(4,600 words)
Is inequality one of the causes of rural poverty? Also, the urban/rural cost of living was the same, because of fixed food prices, which favored the urban. Western poverty also occurs amongst the highest levels of inequality. There must be some relationship between the coexistence of the two, rich and poor.
In the last post we asked, are “needs being met” as a measure of poverty. For the first 40 years of Communist China the rural people ATE, something; (and there were some years of famine). But another measure of poverty would be a lack of any upward mobility. The rural area that we are studying is in the province of Jiangxi. I have seen other rural studies in the province of Jiangsu. These rural areas could be similar, but we are not trying to say all of rural China was the same. And we are saying almost nothing about urban living.
Jiangxi has a village system, established 100’s of years ago, and relatively fixed since then. We are studying the very small area of Gao Village. Its population grew from 161 to 300 in about 40 years, much because of the reduction in child mortality. Gao village is in a commune production brigade with the close Xu village and the Cao village. All the villages in this area are Clan Villages, in that they are relatively closed to people outside the clan. Yes, women can marry into the clan, and daughters can marry outside the village. But then they belong to the other village. Everyone in the clan has the same sir name, Gao in Gao village, Cao in Cao village and Xu in the Xu village. Our author is Gao Changfan, Mobo Gao as his name is westernized.
Historically, these clans have always been self-sufficient, and they don’t mix. They produce most everything they need, and basically there were no markets in any one of these villages. They would only buy matches, salt, soap, kerosene for lamps, joss sticks to burn in front of the Buddha, some red paper for writing couplets (lucky sayings), for the Spring Festival, and rationed sugar if they could afford it. So, the clans don’t interact. (Accept in the communist communes they did, but still kept their separate identities and their separate loyalties.) Then in the 1980’s when the communes were abolished, they went back to the isolated clan system, kind of back to 1949 politically.
So, I would ask: where could upward mobility come from, if resources and land were fixed for 100’s of years, and the clan structure, the power hierarchy, and the belief systems were also fixed? There is no movement outside of sustainable agriculture, not even a horse drawn wagon. You only walked on foot paths, no roads, or you could push a wheelbarrow (even great distances), or carry things in two baskets with a shoulder pole. Free range chickens were prohibited because they would eat the growing grain. No horses, cows, no dairy, no goats or sheep. Only pigs and fish, and buffaloes pulled the ploughs. (Of course, China knew horses, with 1,000’s of years of war with the Steppe nomads. But horses were not in this province.)
[NOTE: We can already notice differences with western poverty. Western farmers grew products to sell, not to only consume. Middle men could manipulate prices during harvest so they were at or below the cost of production. Farmers were thus driven off of the land. In rural China, land and resources were fixed at the village border with the next village. The opposite in America, with plenty of space, industry moved out. People were left with the “rust belt”, derelict and obsolete factories. Even mid-sized cities had boarded-up central districts.]
LIVING STANDARDS
Living standards are difficult to quantify, especially when there is a lack of hard statistics at the village level. Even the most comprehensive record, Dadui Taizhang 1949-1978 (The Basic Brigade Statistics Record 1949-1978)[1] is incomplete. In it, more than half the items are left blank. For the item “Income of the Commune”, there are only statistics from 1969 to 1978 while from 1949 to 1968 the pages are all blank. As for health and education, the book only has records from 1972 to 1978. Another difficulty is that these statistics are total figures for the brigade and no breakdown figures are provided for each production team.
A production team is about ten to twenty households. The whole of Qinglin brigade, with 593 households had a population of 3,610.
The production team’s own records are even less complete because for many crucial items, and for many years, records simply no longer exist. The production team accountant was supposed to keep these records. However, over four decades, the position had been occupied by several accountants, and there was no requirement for one to hand over the records to the next accountant. Paper is scarce in rural China and most of the record papers were used for other purposes, or simply as toilet paper by the accountant’s family.
The other complication is that over a period of forty years, production team organization changed five times. When agrarian policies were radical, the government wanted the peasants to form larger production teams. When the policies were less radical, the peasants were ordered to form smaller teams. The rationale was that the larger a production unit was, the higher the degree of public ownership became, and public ownership was automatically assumed to be more socialist. Thus, during the Great Leap Forward the two production teams in Gao Village were disbanded to form one team. In 1960, the team was again divided into two teams. They were thus alternately combined and divided in 1969, 1972, 1974 and 1977. Every time there was a change, land and agricultural tools would have to be re-divided and new account books would have to be established.
Note 1: Dadui Taizhang is classified as “state secret”. It includes the class backgrounds of all the households, memberships of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League, statistics of the local militia, the amount of state government taxes and levies each year, annual production output, local government financial income and expenditures, peasants’ income, crop distribution and unit yield, development of mechanization and development of production team and brigade enterprises.
Despite a lack of satisfactory official records, other sources of information on the living standards of Gao Village are available. In this chapter, ✓housing, ✓consumption of staple foods, the ✓value of one day’s work by a villager in terms of cash at that time, ✓composition of diets, ✓unit yields in the village, ✓state taxes and local levies, ✓consumer goods and so on are discussed.
I will publish some of these fascinating outlooks in the coming weeks. (Note: Many of these issues have been overcome in the 21st century.)
Housing
Before 1949, there were twelve houses: eight large brick houses, two small brick houses and two mud houses. One of the small brick houses belonged to the landlord Gao Tiangiang and the other belonged to the rich peasant Gao Jingxiang. Each of the large brick houses belonged to a lineage group (a clan), of families who were either middle peasants or poor peasants. In 1951 the land reform team confiscated the landlord’s brick house and the landlord was moved to a mud house. Apart from that, housing ownership remained unchanged.
[NOTE: we are now told of the difficulty in building a new house, both with bricks and a wooden floor, and even with unfired clay bricks and a mud floor. These 10 pre-1949 brick houses were built 200 years ago.] (No new houses were built in Gao Village for decades, only 3 by the late 1970’s, and only 10 by the 1990’s.)
The seven large brick houses were all of the same pattern, with very thick brick walls: cool in summer and warm in winter. The builders managed to achieve this effect by means of an ingenious technology. Each brick is of rectangular shape, 25 centimeters long and 15 centimeters wide. Unlike bricks-made nowadays, these bricks are very thin, only 1.5 centimeters wide. They are all of a dark grey color. The bricks are not laid one on top of another, but are put together in fives to form a box, one at the bottom and one on each of the four sides. Then the box is filled with dry soil before the next box is formed on top of it. So, the walls are formed by thousands of small boxes. Each box is glued to the next with white lime. Those little boxes form a very effective insulation system. They are also inexpensive since the filling is soil and dust from the building site. The white lime is not only cheap because it is local, but it is also good for decoration, with its long-lasting white color.
[NOTE: It is hard to visualize this box construction. Is it a square box, 25 cm on a side and 15 cm high? But then what makes the bottom, since the 5th brick is only 15 cm wide? Or the dirt filling just rests on the dirt in the box below. If two bricks were used for the bottom, then 2.5 cm would protrude on either side, (which could be OK too).]
The houses all face south to avoid the bitter northerly wind in winter and take in the cool-breeze in summer. There are two spacious rooms on both the east and west sides and a rectangular room at the back. The four main rooms all have a wooden floor made of oak. In the middle of each house there is a big hall, so big in fact that it is divided into two parts by a huge skylight in the middle of the roof, through which rain falls into a pool inside the house. Each of the four main rooms has two wooden windows, on which human figures and flowers are carved by the finest craftsman in the area. The pool is built with elegant large-scale stones under which water is channeled away. Attached to each of these houses is a small cottage used as a kitchen, usually by two or three families of the same lineage group. (Four families, the sons, can live in one room each, the parents moved to the back room.)
Unfired clay bricks
The walls of the mud houses are made of clay that is not baked in a brick kiln. Because soil on the river bank is very sticky, villagers can use it to make solid clay bricks 20 centimeters long and 10 centimeters wide and thick. The soil is first pressed hard on the ground and then made smooth with water. When the clay is half dry, the villagers cut it into pieces. When the pieces are completely dry, they become hard bricks. Finally, these bricks are then laid one on top of the other to form a wall. These are cheaper than baked bricks because the villagers can make them themselves. They do not last as long because after some years they tend to erode under the rain. Usually, to prevent erosion, villagers string rice stalks together into pieces to cover the clay walls.
What I disliked about the smaller houses which did not have a skylight in the middle of the hall was that the rooms were very dark. There are no windows except two little holes on the front wall of the house. In some houses there were one or two glass tiles, each the size of a brick, that provide some light for the rooms. However, ever since I could remember, I had never seen that kind of glass tile on sale in the area, and nobody in the village had ever bought one. Out of desperation, I once dug a hole in the middle of a brick wall in my house and made a window with two pieces of wooden board, so that I could read in my room. The villagers were horrified, and rightly so though I did not realize it at the time, at my destruction of a wall that had lasted for more than two hundred years.
There are good reasons for the villagers not to have windows to let in light. To start with, for hundreds of years, the pattern of village life has been to get up at dawn and not to return home until after dark. Daylight is hardly ever needed in the house. Secondly, windows need glass and other kinds of technology that Gao villagers cannot afford. Without this technology, windows let in rain and wind in winter and mosquitoes in summer. I can still remember the bitterly cold winter days when the wind and rain were howling and beating against the “modern” windows that I made by damaging a wall of “historical” value. Finally, houses with windows are a higher security risk. In the days before 1949, like other parts of China, there were bandits visiting the area. Even in Mao’s China, there were thieves from other villages. In post-Mao China, security is certainly not any better.
To all intents and purposes, the traditional houses were good enough for Gao villagers for more than a couple of hundred years. However, with the increase of population since the 1960s, the existing houses have become inadequate. More housing was needed to accommodate newly-weds and new families. Yet, since 1949 most of the families could not afford to build new houses. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a moderate house with a wooden frame structure and mud clay walls would cost somewhere around 3,000 yuan to build. On average, a full day’s work would earn an adult male in Gao Village less than 1 yuan. Suppose the best adult male villager worked 300 days a year at 1 yuan a day, it would take him ten years to earn 3,000 yuan. In fact, for the entire period of Mao’s rule no one in Gao Village could have earned enough work points in a year to the value of 300 yuan. To expect Gao Villagers to build new houses on their earnings from farming was unrealistic.
There was no government support in this respect. What happened as a solution to the housing problem was that the villagers dismantled those ingeniously built large houses and used the materials to construct smaller houses for more families. By the 1990s, five of the six large brick houses had been dismantled to build smaller houses to accommodate more people.
The rationale for the destruction of those large brick houses was not just economic. It also has something to do with the tradition of inheritance. In a family of many sons, all the members could live together when only the oldest son is married with children. However, when the other sons grow up and get married, more space is needed, and relationships inside the family can also become too complicated for living together under one roof. The process of fen jia (“separation of the family”) has to take place. When fen jia takes place, everything is equally divided among the male children. How else are they going to divide the house if it is not dismantled?
If a family has four or less male children, it can still manage to live under the same roof, because each male child ran occupy one room. The parents are usually pushed to live in the rectangular room at the back of the house. Gao villagers managed in this way until the 1970s. However, when any one of the four sons’ children start to have a family, problems arise. The son in question needs a house with more rooms, and yet he cannot afford to build a new one. He needs the materials, his share of the large house, to help with the building of a smaller house with more rooms. Thus, the dismantling of the large house has to take place.
By the early 1990s, more than half of the households in Gao Village had built “new houses”, albeit small and primitive ones. The houses are lower, and it is usually one family to a house. There are no more skylights in the middle of the house. Nor can they afford the luxury of a wooden floor. They have a mud floor instead, and the internal walls are made of mud clay instead of wood as they used to be. Some internal walls are made of newspaper and other waste paper glued together. In order to save costs, some families only have the front wall and back wall of the house made of baked bricks, the former for appearance and the latter for weather conditions. The two side walls are built with unbaked clay bricks.
The bricks and wood taken from dismantling’ the old brick houses, once shared out among its former residents, were not enough for each family to build a new house. Thus, each family had to save for years for the additional cost. They would have to plan many years ahead by buying one piece of wood this year, another tree trunk next year, and some tiles the year after until finally they had saved enough resources to launch the biggest project in their lives: building a house for the family. Loans from banks or the government for housing construction were never available, so most of them had to borrow from relatives and friends, sometimes only ten or twenty yuan from each source.
There were other ways in which the villagers helped each other to lessen the cost burden. One was for friends and relatives to come and work at the building site. Apart from a master builder and a bricklayer—local professionals who in the 1960s and 1970s were paid roughly one to two yuan a day plus three meals —most of the other work was carried out by the family and relatives or friends without payment. Of course, help is mutual; but reciprocal favors may not be offered for many years, since the building of a house is a once in a lifetime project.
Another important way of helping is through the loan of tools. It is essential for villagers to borrow from each other as a way of pooling resources for a single project. Tools are lent without charge. Villagers even tend, albeit reluctantly, to lend their tools to families they do not like. This is because everyone is more or less related, and therefore has a sense of obligation to everyone else. Moreover, the custom of helping each other has been practiced for so long that not to lend what you have is considered morally unacceptable. Of course, there is also the practical consideration: you may in future have to borrow something from the very family to which you fail to render your generosity.
Still another important way of helping is again derived from a long-standing tradition. When a family builds a house, there is usually a celebration. During the celebration each family of the whole village is invited to send one member to join a banquet. The banquet is held on the day when the roof beam right under the roof ridge is set in place. This roof beam is the highest and most central in position and is considered to be the most crucial and oracular part of the house. Therefore, a banquet is held, red paper couplets written with lucky and good wish characters are pinned up, and firecrackers are set off. Friends, relatives, respected village elders and all those who have helped, attend the banquet. Clan powerholders and village officials whose presence is meant to give “face” to the family are also invited. Apart from the village officials and clan powerholders, villagers who attend the banquet have to give the family some cash as a gift, usually wrapped in red paper. This gift can be just two, three or five yuan. In the 1960s and 1970s 10-20 yuan was considered generous.
The amount of money given on such an occasion rest on many considerations. One concerns the amount received from the family in question in the past, as if to repay a historical debt that can date as far back as a couple of generations. Another important consideration is the current prestige, power and prospects of the family in question. It obviously pays to invest more in a powerful or potentially “wealthy” family. Sometimes, a family has to borrow money to fulfil the obligation of giving a gift. At the time when they have to give, villagers find this practice of gift giving extremely stressful and burdensome, and so they call it renging zhai (“human relationship debts”). However, when they receive the favor, it is a great help. It could amount to as much as several hundred yuan for some families, which was a considerable income in the 1960s and 1970s. Economically, the practice is a sort of investment, or reverse mortgage: the villagers pay an installment on the mortgage before the loan is made. For some villagers, their payment may not yield anything until many years later or indeed their investment may never be realized.
Despite all the factors discussed above such as building materials inherited from the large old brick houses, long term investment in the form of gifts, many years of saving, and help from the villagers at no cost, other sources of funding are required for Gao villagers to build a house. Until the later 1970s only three families managed to build their own small houses. One was built by Gao Couyin, who worked as an accountant for a commune rice mill enterprise, and the second by Gao Shihua, who was the village’s “barefoot doctor”. The third was built by Gao Yunfei, the landlord Gao Tianqiang’s son by his former wife, who was a primary school teacher. All three had regular cash income from sources other than farming.
During the 1960s and ’70s there was little money around and for those who worked in agriculture there was no cash for many years in succession. When I was small, the only cash I had ever seen was at each New Year’s Eve when I was given some bank notes as a gift. It was always something like 0.1, or 0.2, or 0.5 yuan, at most 1 yuan, and it was given to me by my mother’s lover. My father would never have been able to give it to me. I could only keep the money for a few days before I had to give it to my mother for urgent family use. As peasants, we were supposed to be content as long as we had enough to eat. We never did have enough.
From 1980 to 1995, however, nine more houses were built in Gao Village. How did this happen? Where did the villagers get the cash from? Two important developments since the late 1970s in China have had a great impact on Gao Village, and the most visible aspect of the impact was the villager’s ability to build those houses. One occurred in the early 1980s, not long after the end of the Mao era. From the early 1950s to the late 1970s, the Chinese government, as part of the push for industrialization, imposed a differential pricing system by which Chinese industrial products had always been priced higher than similar products on the world market, while agricultural produce had been “consistently priced at a third of the US price and a fifth of Japanese and European prices”.* Furthermore the peasants were not allowed to sell their produce at local markets. They had to sell to the state at a designated price. Since 1979, however, the Chinese government changed its policy in this respect. The price of agricultural produce was raised by 25 to 40 per cent and compulsory purchase of grain by the state was also reduced.* These reform policies from 1979 to 1984 brought a substantial increase in income to Gao villagers who were then able to save some cash for house construction.
Since 1985, however, the situation fixed prices began to deteriorate and Gao villagers would have descended further into poverty had not another new development occurred. The industrial expansion in the Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen and other coastal areas in southern China led many young people to leave Gao village as migrant workers. The cash income (remittances), from these migrant workers not only helped sustain life in Gao Village, but also provided funding for housing construction. More attention will be paid to these two developments shortly.
These new houses are built in a traditional style. There are two small rooms on either side of a hall which is also the main entrance. At the back of the house is a rectangular room, a part of which is used for storage and another as a kitchen. There is usually a small pigsty hut connected with the kitchen.
Note 2: Zheng Yi, ‘The Perils faced by Chinese Peasants”, China Focus, vol. 1, no. 3 April 1993. past.
Note 3: Zhu Ling, Rural Reform and Peasant Income in China: The Impact of China’s Post Mao Reforms in Selected Regions, London, 1991.
The framework of the house is made of timber and the whole structure consists of twenty tree trunk poles in four columns, connected by beams. The structure can stand alone without walls and the four walls can be constructed of anything: bricks, timber, fence-like bamboo screens, or just a partition made of rice straw for those who cannot afford anything else. No iron or steel of any kind is used in these traditional houses.
By examining the remaining eight households that have built new houses since 1980 we will see how changes in agricultural income had little impact on Gao villagers even in the post-Mao reform period. Of the eight households, one house was built by the village doctor Gao Shihua who had already had one house built during Mao’s time. Another two houses were built by Gao Chaojin and Gao Guoneng, who are carpenters. These two made some money by using their carpentry skills and by working as migrant workers far away from the Gao Village area. Another household was that of Gao Renzhu, one of the sons of the former rich peasant in Gao Village. This is the only household that was able to build a house with savings from agricultural income, as a result of the early 1980s price rise in agricultural produce. The remaining four households were able to build their own houses principally because they had inherited and used the building materials from two large brick houses which were dismantled.
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