Authors: Michael Meyer
What I viewed as bucolic, he saw as industrial. I searched for the Chinese vocabulary to explain how, in the West, people started using the word
grower
instead of
farmer
, as it indicated a smaller-scale operation. But in Chinese, a farmer was
nongmin
(“agricultural person”) and
nongmin
only. It was often translated in English as “peasant,” which to my ear sounded like person tilling mud in a feudal, preindustrial world. In Chinese,
nongmin
did not sound as archaic. Regardless, the terms didn’t matter to San Jiu. “We’re
nongmin
. But we’re really manufacturers. We produce grain.”
We walked a mile south of his house, to the intersection with the road that led to Jilin city. At the single-story cement building that was Wasteland’s “rice station,” a chalkboard announced a Perpetual Harvest brand thresher for sale and also a slice of land for rent for
10
,
000
yuan ($
1
,
631
) per year.
“I should rent that,” I said.
“You can’t,” San Jiu replied. “No one outside this village can rent it. Even Auntie Yi and Uncle Fu, they’re classified as urbanites, so they can’t rent it, either. Farmers only.”
“You could rent it for me.”
“Uh,” he said. It meant
No way.
The last time he leased someone else’s land, San Jiu found himself in Beijing, petitioning the central government to resolve a dispute.
China’s constitution stipulates that land in cities is owned by the state, although urban residents can buy and sell homes, which usually come with a renewable seventy-year leasehold. In contrast, rural land—including housesites—is owned by “collectives,” or local governments. Leaseholds on farming plots are renewable and run for thirty years. Until recently, farmers could not transfer the rights to use their assigned field, which averaged one to two acres per family.
The area fluctuated with a household’s size. The local government assigned additional acreage when a child was born or a person got married, or subtracted it after a person died or got divorced. San Jiu’s family paddies totaled
1
.
5
acres, a bit larger than an American football field.
New rules allowed leaseholders to rent their assigned plots of farmland so long as the land did not sit fallow or was converted to industrial use. In Wasteland some families leased their entire plots to sharecroppers, leaving them free to open a restaurant or commute to jobs in Jilin city. Other families leased strips of their allotment.
San Jiu had leased a strip of paddy from a fellow villager in need of cash. The local government approved the deal, but after the land produced more rice than expected, it tried to reassign the plot before the next planting. “I had a signed contract between me and the collective,” San Jiu said. “They just didn’t expect the land to be that good. They thought it should go back into the pool of village land, to be redistributed. To a government official’s relative, I suspected.”
In
2010
,
65
percent of China’s “mass incidents,” as protests were called, concerned rural land. Often the conflicts were between farmers and developers or the local government in league with them. San Jiu consulted his law books and sought advice from a legal expert on a call-in radio show. The expert, a professor, suggested he view his dispute as contractual, not personal. This, San Jiu said with a self-aware laugh, only angered him more.
“Of course it was personal,” he told me, clenching his fists. “Everything in a village is personal.”
Still, he had filed a complaint in a Jilin city court, asking that the village government be made to honor the terms of their contract. When the court dismissed it without ruling, San Jiu boarded a train to Beijing.
Petitioning the central government was rarely successful; some supplicants spent years clutching ever-growing sheaves of photocopied documents, waiting to be heard, while others were hauled back by police who followed them from home. San Jiu, however, got lucky.
“I was there only a couple days,” he said. “I followed the law handbooks I had collected. The important clause, which I memorized, was: ‘Collectively owned land must be registered at the county government, which will issue a land-use contract and land-rights certificate.’ I had those. An official read them and wrote a letter for me to bring back here.”
The document, called a
gonghan
, told a lower court that the petitioner’s grievance had been heard in Beijing and suggested the matter be handled “courteously and according to law.” It was, in effect, an upbraiding for wasting the central government’s time.
“The Jilin city court heard my appeal right away. The contract was upheld. I can still farm that land.”
“So you won.”
He shrugged, looking wary of the harvest to come.
San Jiu had refused to contract his crop to Eastern Fortune Rice, and so far it had been a smart bet. His last harvest sold for the equivalent of forty cents a pound, double the previous year’s price. Even after expenses, he still earned
50
percent more than what a contract with Eastern Fortune would have paid.
Like Auntie Yi, he also refused to move to the new apartments. The company representative hadn’t threatened him or even called him stubborn. The man understood that San Jiu wanted to stay in his home. But when San Jiu cooked dinner every night, the view from his kitchen window showed the cranes and sprouting high-rises silhouetted in the setting sun. “The taller those buildings get,” he said, “the closer they seem.”
The rice station was a state-owned shop that sold pesticides and seeds. There are more than
140
,
000
varieties of rice; the station sold two dozen of them, selected for their suitability for these paddies. San Jiu, like all farmers here, hedged his bets and selected five varieties, whose names ranged from boastful (Super Production Number
1
) to technical (Agricultural Institute Number
7
) to inventive (Jilin Japonica Number
66
) and poetic (a Japanese variety that translated as “Small Part of an Autumn Field”).
The rice station showed packets of each, hanging from walls adorned with dried rice husks, banner advertisements for herbicides—
OUTSTANDING PADDY: SPRAYING ONCE IS ENOUGH
!
—and posters for seeds named Harvest Leader Number
8
(and
9
, and
13
, and
14
), which promised higher yields. Pictures showed ripe rice hanging heavy off the stalk.
The seed varieties all looked the same to me, but San Jiu described the properties of each like a car salesman touting a new model’s features. “This kind takes
145
days to ripen, and this one takes a few less, but the real difference is that this one averages
90
grains of rice per panicle, but some of these other ones can have a third more than that, so you’re getting more rice, obviously, but that’s if they all ripen and don’t get sick. You’ll spend all summer worrying about fungus,” he said, shaking his head.
The rice station smelled like musty fertilizer, and the walls were painted the same colors as my classroom. But it looked lively after the brutal winter; its opening signaled planting season. A posted chart explained how to prepare a rice paddy according to the solar cycle. Now, during the period named Grain Rain, was the time to plant beds of seedlings.
“I didn’t know you transported seedlings to the paddies,” I said. “I thought you just walked through the field broadcasting dry rice like this . . .” I demonstrated the Johnny Appleseed toss, flicking my hand left and right.
San Jiu laughed loudly, as did the clerk standing behind the counter.
“You can’t plant like that! You’ll starve!”
Actually, rice seeds can be sown this less efficient way. But I learned this later. At that moment I heard the many Chinese synonyms for
moron
. San Jiu called me a dolt, a fool, a hollow head, and more. It was the happiest I had seen him in weeks.
I interrupted to add: “It must be exhausting transplanting the seedlings, bending over all day.”
He snorted. “We use a machine! A mechanized rice transplanter! You load trays of seed beds onto it and it plants them in the paddy.” San Jiu’s tone made it sound like robots had long followed his every command. But when I asked him when the machine first came to the village, he said, “Last year.”
Now it was my turn to teach. In California, this type of short-grain rice was planted by a low-flying propeller plane pelting the paddies with dry seed that bounced like hail off the mud. Standing on the ground meant being stung by a post-wedding seed shower: rice in your hair, rice under your collar, rice in your shoes.
The clerk said, “I wonder who isn’t working anymore, that they need to use planes.”
“Even though the machine plants our field,” San Jiu stressed, “we still prepare the seedlings, and weed the paddies. We still labor.”
“Young people don’t want to work the fields, though,” the clerk said.
It was true. On our walk back to his house along Red Flag Road, everyone pacing the muddy fields, or tending seedbeds in their front yards, looked San Jiu’s age. He was about to turn sixty-seven.
Unusual for a Chinese company, Eastern Fortune Rice kept its office building’s electric accordion gate open, and its front door, too. I walked in and asked to see the boss. He wasn’t there, but the company’s chief agronomist offered to take me on a tour. Dr. Liu was in her fifties and wore a white lab coat over slacks and a hand-knit sweater. Behind her oversized glasses, her eyes had shown no surprise at seeing me.
“You’re the teacher,” she said. “I often see you running. How do you know where to go?”
“I just head for the river, and the hills.”
“Do you get lost?”
“I try.”
“You should make a map. You could sell it at the hot spring. Tourists like to drive around and take pictures.”
“I still haven’t reached the foothills. That’s my goal: ten miles each way.”
“That’s far! That’s like running all the way downtown.”
Dr. Liu lived there, in Jilin city, where she taught at the agricultural institute. She told her origin story chronologically and quickly, sounding practiced. In the late
1990
s, Wasteland’s then village chief hired a man named Liu Yandong—no relation to Dr. Liu—as his driver. When officials visited, the leader would send Mr. Liu to purchase the freshest rice. Mr. Liu always drove to a neighboring township that had its own mill and polishing plant, and better-looking and -tasting rice.
“His brain opened up,” Dr. Liu said. “He thought, ‘If I have money, I can open my own mill in Wasteland.’”
But he didn’t have money. His family was among Wasteland’s poorest. And even if he did open the mill, he would have to buy rice to polish. Not just any rice, but high-quality rice.
“He came to the agricultural institute looking for the director, but he was out, and by chance Mr. Liu talked to me. I was doing research on organic rice, which was an initiative that started with the provincial party secretary, who was looking to make a name for himself by doing something experimental. So here comes Mr. Liu and his partner, the other driver. They drove a simple Hyundai. Yes, it was black.”
She smiled at my question. Officials, from the president of China down to the chief of a village named Wasteland, rode in black cars.
“I told them what varieties of seeds would be best to try. They left. Then they came back asking if I would teach them how to plant. I came out here and stayed with his family for a few days to see what kind of people they were. They wanted to start something that would be good for the village, something that wasn’t being done elsewhere. I told them, ‘Look, if you want to make money, that’s fine, don’t hide it. But I don’t care about your money. I care about my research.’”
Dr. Liu smiled at the memory of her conviction.
She told them that the State Council had earmarked funds to develop businesses producing “green food.” Dr. Liu suggested they be among the first to raise organic rice.
“Mr. Liu said, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ That was April
8
,
2000
. He called the business Eastern Fortune because it combined the last character of his and his partner’s names. Then he drove around in his Hyundai seeking approval to start what we called the Eastern Fortune Technological Experimental Site.” The adjectives were chosen because they would look pleasing to the agencies that issued business licenses.
“It cost
700
yuan
[$
115
] back then to complete the process, but I followed the clerk around the agricultural committee office to make sure she wouldn’t pocket the money. I argued that the price was too high, that we were just a small company, and experimental, after all. In the end, she charged me only half the license fee.”