Authors: Michael Meyer
“But you’re a foreigner,” Auntie Yi said dismissively. “Also, ask if they’re going to change the village name. Could that really happen?”
Twenty minutes before, her house was unpainted. Now one wall—facing Red Flag Road—shone freshly yellow.
There is no such thing as a typical Chinese farm. The sizes, geographical locations, and types of farms—dairy, livestock, produce, cotton, grain—are as diverse as the number is large. China has
22
percent of the world’s population, on
8
percent of its arable land. Globally, it is the largest producer of rice, wheat, pork, eggs, cotton, fruit, and vegetables.
But its new agricultural model is easier to summarize: the nation is turning away from family plots to agribusiness, away from villages to company towns.
Urbanization brought the challenge of reducing the number of farmers while simultaneously producing the same amount of food. As in the developed world, the solution was to scale up. Only
5
percent of China’s poultry now comes from “backyard” operations producing fewer than two thousand birds a year. Instead, three-quarters of chicken meat is produced by commercial farms processing over one hundred thousand birds annually. In the province where
The Good Earth
was set, and where Xiaogang village’s family-farming rebellion began, the American agribusiness giant Cargill—which, along with Archer Daniels Midland, controls
80
percent of the world’s grain trade—was building a poultry operation it calls Site
82
, which will breed, slaughter, and process
65
million chickens a year. The output would be “peanuts on the scale of China,” the manager said. But the government sees it as a model for similar conglomerations of small farms, and a progression toward “high-tech, efficient and safe farming.”
It is harder to monitor safety when a single shipment of food is produced by hundreds of farmers using different levels and quality of feed, antibiotics, and fertilizer. A
2013
government report said that
10
percent of China’s rice could be contaminated with cadmium, a heavy metal that causes cancer and kidney failure. It enters the water supply from factory waste, but also from overfertilizing crops: cadmium is an ingredient in the popular fertilizer that San Jiu used on his field.
Farms were more than a workplace, however. In an era of soaring real estate prices, a rural house doubled as a social security policy. Young generations may have migrated to work in factories, but they could always return to their village. Or they could send their children away from a polluted city to be raised on the farm, as Frances had been, here in Wasteland.
Persuading older farmers—and their entire families—to leave that security behind was an obstacle in China’s drive toward urbanization. The Party often first tested reforms before implementing them nationwide, as in the creation of capitalistic “special economic zones” such as Shenzhen city, whose model has since transformed other metropolises. In
2007
the central government ran two experimental programs in southwest Sichuan province that could prove as transformative for China’s countryside.
The first program set up a “rural property exchange,” where interested farmers could transfer use of their land to an agribusiness for an annual rent. This was formalizing what Eastern Fortune Rice was doing—with the central government’s imprimatur—on a village scale in Wasteland. Individual households’ land would be consolidated, mechanized, and managed by a company, instead of a village government loosely overseeing hundreds of family plots.
The second program allowed rural residents “free migration” into the city, giving them previously forbidden access to schools, employment, health care, and other social services. Since
1958
the household registration system (
hukou
) had divided Chinese into two strata: rural and urban. The chasm between the two broadened after economic reforms: urbanites earned over three times as much, and city kids were three times as likely to attend high school, and a whopping eleven times more likely to attend university. While China’s urbanization rate reached
54
percent in
2013
, migrants still officially classified as rural totalled a third of that figure. An estimated
250
million Chinese lived as second-class citizens in the nation’s cities.
In the second Sichuan experiment, farmers would retain the right to their plots but could exchange their single-story houses for new apartments in the city, with access to its schools and hospitals. Their former homes would be razed, and the land planted. Consolidating a horizontal village into a vertical apartment block in an already-developed town would result in a net gain of cropland as well as urbanites. It was also similar to what Eastern Fortune offered in Wasteland, although its apartments were located in the village, not downtown.
The central government said the experiments were to test ways of equitably moving people off their farms. But it was also looking for measures to quell dissent against the current system.
China forbids local governments from borrowing to raise funds, so villages cannot sell bonds. Instead, they commonly set up development companies, which use village land as collateral for bank loans. Local debt skyrocketed to $
3
trillion in
2013
, equivalent to
58
percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
The lucrative deals, and corruption, that resulted from these land transfers caused protests—averaging more than five hundred a day—and headlines such as
FARM SEIZURES SOW SEEDS OF SOCIAL UNREST
. In
2011
, in the southern fishing village of Wukan, three thousand residents attacked the government office after its secret land transfers were revealed. Village officials, in power for forty-one years, had pocketed the proceeds.
A comprehensive nationwide survey released in
2012
found that
70
percent of farmers were unhappy with their socioeconomic situation, with illegal land grabs their top complaint. A rural economist at the state policy advisory body likened tensions over the nation’s income gap to that of Spain’s on the eve of its civil war. It was an artful dodge: he also could have likened it to China’s during its own civil war.
In Sichuan province, the Chengdu city government hailed its experimental program as “the first in the country to break down the long-term barrier hindering the free movement of residents; the first to let farmers enter the city without losing their land; and the first to eliminate inequality in education and health care between urban and rural residents.”
Two weeks later the experiment was over. The rural property exchange market was shuttered, without explanation. The only news story I found on a government land bureau website reported that at its recent office party, cadres recited programs, sang snippets of regional opera, and performed a “nunchakus hip-hop skit entitled ‘Joking about Land Use Planning.’” At night’s end, “the song and dance ‘Emancipated Serfs Singing by the Land Reserve Center’ brought about a climax.”
Another item was headlined: “Poker Playing Competition Closed Successfully.” “After six rounds of fierce competition in
20
days, Gao Yang and Zou Mujin from offices of the bureau won the championship with seven victories in seven contests.”
But unlike government ministries, private companies had to show their hand. Legal filings and license registrations were accessible to the public. On my
kang
, as Mr. Guan snored loudly in the neighboring room, I read Eastern Fortune’s credit report, part of a due diligence dossier on the company.
The destruction of Auntie Yi’s poppies aside, the company’s hands looked clean: no pending lawsuits, no environmental fines, no muckraking reports of malfeasance. The details matched what the agronomist Dr. Liu had told me in her company office: Eastern Fortune was cofounded in
2000
by Wasteland’s current party secretary, a man named Liu Yandong. It started as a small rice-processing workshop with limited facilities. The company’s moniker was a blend of characters from the founders’ names. Mr. Liu had bought out his partner. There were no shareholders, and his younger brother was the company’s general manager. The only news items, from city, provincial and national newspapers, were positive. Mr. Liu was often quoted as saying, “Technically, we are a rice processor, not a rice grower. We provide seed free of charge to farmers, who plant the fields. Those who choose not to farm will have their land tended by laborers and receive an annual payment of
15
,
500
yuan
[$
2
,
530
]. Our motto is: ‘A stable company, plus farmers, plus technology equals green rice.’”
In
2003
, some
2
,
000
farmers in Wasteland and surrounding villages had contracted their crop to Eastern Fortune. Eight years later the number reached
5
,
120
.
“In the past, farmland here was divided into numerous pieces and contracted to individual households,” Mr. Liu told a Jilin city newspaper. “At the beginning of
2011
, the village representatives decided to consolidate the farms while preserving farmers’ rights to it.”
Mr. Liu did not mention that he—and his brother—were among the village representatives, only that “the decision was based on voluntary and legal principals and farmers will get compensated.”
Auntie Yi disagreed. “Will anyone replace my poppies?” she asked, watching the road-widening work. “Do you expect me to trust a promise to pay me fairly for my house, let alone to better manage my village? I’m a retired cadre. I know all the policies, all the announcements. But I don’t know if we have to move into those high-rise apartments. I told you to go to the office and say you want to buy the company. Did you do it yet? Walk in and get a meeting with the boss. He probably sits in the hot spring all day. Go look for him there.”
The sun rose at
4
:
15
on a Sunday morning, and I was wide-awake to see it. All through the night, cement trucks shook my windows. The electricity had been shut off again. Workers raked wet cement onto the widened road, illuminated by spotlights powered by gasoline generators.
At six, a vendor’s pedicab puttered past, calling out types of noodles and also “Seaweed strips for sale!” By seven a crew of men wielding brooms made of willow branches tied to a stalk of dried bamboo swept our driveway. Mr. Guan was still fishing, and I reflexively ducked away from the windows, feeling suddenly foreign amidst the strangers.
I went on a long run, reaching the Songhua River but not finding Mr. Guan. When I looped back through a hamlet named Zhang’s Family Outpost, the man who sold me a bottle of water said that his Internet had stopped working and his cell phone reception was spotty. “We’re expecting official guests,” he said with a smile.
Muggy with a chance of motorcade.
I turned at the northernmost end of Red Flag Road and ran toward home. Cars never slowed for me on this stretch; they swerved and sped away. But now a Land Cruiser, painted in green camouflage, slammed its brakes and reversed back in my direction. My stomach sank. I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Frances. The diversion, I thought, would somehow render me invisible, or at least look too busy to chat.
Before Frances answered, the driver’s tinted window lowered in a whir. A bull of a man—crew cut, aviator sunglasses, thick gold chain around a meaty neck—yelled in Chinese, “Stop filming!”
“I’m talking to my wife,” I replied.
His mouth twitched slightly.
“Does that phone have a camera?”
“Nope. I’m cheap. Look.” I showed him the old, basic model.
He sneered, the window whirred up, and the Land Cruiser sped away.
At Wasteland’s intersection, uniformed policemen halted traffic, preventing anyone from crossing the road. I couldn’t go home. Instead I sat in the sundries shop with the rest of the village. “Once the motorcade passes, we can leave.”
“Who’s visiting?”
“Wen Jiabao.” China’s premier.
“Incorrect!” a man playing mah-jongg said. “It’s a general.”
“Someone said it was the minister of agriculture.”
“Hu Jintao came in
2006
.”
“It was
2007
,” I corrected, and added a brag: once I attended an official lunch for President Hu at the U.S. State Department. The villagers were not impressed.
“He came
here
.”
“He ate
our
rice.”
The names of other titles, of other officials, rang in the air. In the end no one could agree who was in the backseat of the black Audi that toured Wasteland. The car turned left, edging the concrete drying on the new half of Red Flag Road, and sped away.