Authors: Michael Meyer
In
1954
, after an estimated
800
,
000
landlords
Ho, Peter, p. 8. This is a government estimate. Others go as high as two million. (See Lawrence, p. 13.)
Two years later China
Chen Guidi, p. 145. Li Huaiyin put the number at 708,912, rising to 719,438 in 1982 (p. 361).
The Party called its agrarian restructuring
Li Huaiyin, p. 23.
The policy triggered the Great Famine
Dikötter, p. 333.
“We knew what it was like to starve”
Forney. Li Huaiyin notes that Xiaogang has been “mythified” to the point of some contemporary Chinese journalists questioning its story (p. 268). Also, despite promising to, the remaining men chose not to sign beside Yan’s name but beneath it, shunting most responsibility—and potential punishment—to him. Several of his descendants still held this grudge when I visited the village.
In
a series of policies issued between
1978
and
1984
Zweig, pp. 47–85. His chapter is a blow-by-blow account of the advance-retreat-retrench steps the central government took in scrapping collective farming.
The reforms continued
Ho, Peter, p 12.
China has
22
percent of the world’s population
Lohmar.
Globally, it is the largest producer
Ibid.
Only
5
percent of China’s poultry
Ibid.
In the province where
The Good Earth
was set
Herzfelder.
A
2013
government report said that
10
percent
Pang Jiaoming.
In
2007
the central government ran two experimental programs
Miller, Tom, 1. The exchange auctioned land credits to 179 buyers, including national developers and conglomerates such as PetroChina. The words
buy
and
lease
were avoided, because all land in China is owned by the state (in cities) or the collective (in the countryside). Instead, usage rights to rural land were “transferred” (
zhuanrang
) according to a contract of “compensated use” (
youchang shiyong
). The exchange permitted rural governments to swap, or “couple” (
guagou
), rural land into state-owned urban land available for development. (China divides land into four types: urban construction, rural construction, agricultural, and forest, with limits on each.)
The chasm between the two broadened after economic reforms
Hongbin Li (p. 1).
In additional note on
hukou
: In 2010, for the first time since the 1989 demonstrations centered at Tiananmen Square, Chinese newspapers defied the Party propaganda department’s diktat and published a joint editorial calling for the system to be scrapped. Eleven newspapers published the piece simultaneously, on the eve of China’s annual parliamentary meetings. “We hope,” it said, “that a bad policy we have suffered for decades will end with our generation, and allow the next generation to truly enjoy the sacred rights of freedom, democracy, and equality bestowed by the constitution.” The editorial was ordered removed from websites within hours, as was its organizer, the deputy chief editor of the
Economic Observer
. (See Canaves.)
Ironically, a trend developed wherein college graduates, facing a crowded employment market, began applying to have their classification reverted to “rural” so they could be allotted housing and land. (See Chen, Lulu, 2.)
In the second Sichuan experiment
Ibid. The homes were torn down and the land planted, resulting in a net gain of cropland. The village government then swapped this “land credit” (
dipiao
) with a developer, who could now build on a similar amount of agricultural land. The government saw it as a win-win-win: China’s “red line” of 120 million hectares of farmland remained unchanged; farmers had been “urbanized” by choice; and new construction added to national GDP.
As is often the case with state-sanctioned policy experiments, informal swaps of this sort had been happening nationwide. Landesa, the leading nongovernmental organization studying land issues in the developing world, found that 15 percent of Chinese farmers had transferred their land by 2008. In the most recent official statistics, the Ministry of Agriculture shows that land transfers tripled from 2006 to 2009, involving 12 percent of total national farmland. (See Landesa and Zhu Keliang.)
Local debt skyrocketed
Wang, Aileen, 2.
The lucrative deals, and corruption
Huang, Cary.
A comprehensive nationwide survey
Landesa. The survey found that only one-third of Chinese farmers had been issued the paperwork asserting their land rights. Furthermore, less than half of those documents contained the required information or complied with the law, e.g., because they did not list women’s names.
A rural economist at the state policy
The speaker is Wu Jinglian at the State Council’s Development and Research Centre. O’Neill.
In Sichuan province, the Chengdu city government
Miller, Tom, 1.
The only news story I found
http://www.bjgtj.gov.cn/publish/portal1/tab2951/info54411.htm. (The site has improved markedly.) The Ministry of Agriculture issues policy regulations, while the Bureau of Land and Resources is responsible for administering them. Its bureaus draw and measure boundaries and issue ownership certificates to local governments.
Poker results at: http://www.bjgtj.gov.cn/publish/portal1/tab2951/info54408.htm.
Starting in 2013, the bureau was engaged in a five-year nationwide project to map farmers’ land holdings by satellite and issue standardized documents of tenancy. The project was aimed at both preventing land grabs by local officials and providing security for farmers merging or leasing their fields that they would be compensated for every inch of earth they held. An unexpected result of the survey thus far was an increase in acreage and thus the amount of subsidy (about $150 per acre) Beijing had to pay farmers. Previously, land holdings were underreported to avoid grain taxes. (See Hornby.)
On my
kang
, as Mr. Guan
Thanks to Fanny at Fathom China for doing due diligence on Eastern Fortune Rice.
At the start of
2013
Premier Underlines Developing Modern Agriculture, Scale Farming,” Xinhua, April 1, 2013. A survey by the ministry found that 877,000 families, each holding an average of thirteen hectares, qualified as a “family farm.” It’s difficult to compare this figure to the U.S., which officially classifies many agribusinesses as family farms.
The minister of agriculture said that
Zuo 1.
Chapter 15: The Half-Bombed Bridge to Worker’s Village
The city’s name meant “Eastern Peony”
Today’s Dandong was called Andong, or Antung, during the Korean War and Manchukuo.
From his Tokyo headquarters
arolda, p. 163.
Meanwhile, MacArthur had cabled Washington
Blair, p. 396. He writes that MacArthur’s long communiqués—this one dated November 6—were not only ridiculed by the Pentagon as “posterity papers” but also gave priceless intelligence to Chinese commanders, since they showed MacArthur was ignorant of their positions and numbers.
Until November
1950
, UN forces
Futrell, p. 220.
Among their targets was a young ensign
On Patrol.
MacArthur pressed President Truman
Futrell, pp. 222–23. While there were precedents of “two to three minutes” of flying time over an international border in hot pursuit, the United States could not convince its UN-force allies to allow allow passage into Manchuria.
In his memoir, MacArthur wrote that
Ibid., p. 394.
MacArthur threatened to resign
Blair, p. 395.
Furthermore, because the United States
Ibid., p. 397. At the time, the Joint Chiefs could issue orders to commanders in the field.
At a preflight briefing
Bruning, p. 49.
“All of North Korea would be cleared”
Blair, p. 403.
From twenty-seven thousand feet, through unrelenting flak
Bruning, p. 50.
Truman was “drunker”
Blair, p. 401.
General Bradley later wrote
Ibid., p. 402. This, from one of Lyndon Johnson’s most hawkish advisers on Vietnam.
MacArthur had refused to salute Truman
Ibid., p. 402.
After six hundred sorties
Marolda, p. 309.
For MacArthur, “the wine of victory”
Blair, p. 402.
Chapter 16: Beginning of Autumn
Outside of Keats
These are lines 566–77 from “Endymion,” which begins: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Keats, p. 30.
After threshing the kernels
Sun-dried rice is yellowish and results in more broken grains than rice from a mechanical dryer. Eastern Fortune’s blower and rice husk furnace shelled the kernel’s rough, inedible shell. What remained was brown rice, whose layer of bran produced a chewy, nutty flavor. Removing the bran traditionally required milling it on a grindstone. Eastern Fortune’s Japanese-made “vertical whitener” removed the bran and polished the remaining kernel to the white grain that consumers recognize. (Technically, we eat the plant’s endosperm, the layer of starch and protein that protected its embryo.) Most rice sold in markets worldwide is polished, which reduces the grain’s level of B vitamins and iron; unlike in China, in the United States the rice must be “enriched,” replacing the nutrients. After polishing, the rice would be graded based on placing 500 grams of kernels on a plate and counting the damaged ones, then packaged, or precooked and sold as instant rice.
Chapter 17: Dalian’s Display Cases
“The marching high school students”
Kuramoto, p. 19.
The villas still showed
Ibid., p. 18.
Chapter 18: Frost’s Descent
“Prepare to weep and be grievously distressed”
Simpson (writing as Putnam Weale), p. 226.
Risk is shifted away from the farmers
As this book went to press, work began on the Jilin Food Zone, a “super farm” located forty miles west of Wasteland, near the Changchun airport. A joint project proposed by the prime ministers of China and Singapore, the 559-square-mile farm, almost the size of the city of Los Angeles, will produce organic rice, vegetables, poultry, milk, and infant milk powder using Singaporean expertise and technology. Additionally, 480 retail shops, a hotel, and exhibition center are planned.
One-quarter of China’s villages
Boehler 1. The total number declined from 368,000 to 269,000 in 2012. “China loses 80 to 100 villages to urban migration every day,” according to a study by the rural development scholar Yu Jianrong, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The nation targeted an urbanization rate
Miller 3.
Chapter 19: Major Snow
“The course of life is unpredictable”
I love that this is quote is not, in fact, Chinese at all. It’s from the rabbi and philosopher Abraham J. Heschel, whose mother and two sisters were killed by Nazis. He escaped to America in 1940.
Published Sources
(Where a formal English translation appears on the cover of a Chinese-language text, I have listed it. In other cases, the translation is my own.)
“Amur’s Siren Song, The: The Long River That Marks the Border Between Russia and China Has Proved to Be a Site of Dashed Hopes.”
Economist
, December
19
,
2009
.
Atiyah, Jeremy. “The Whole Point of Manchuria Is to Make Everything Else on Earth Seem Really Quite Nice.”
Independent
, January
16
,
2000
.
Bakich, Olga. “Emigre Identity: The Case of Harbin.”
South Atlantic Quarterly
99
, no.
1 (
Winter
2000
); Raleigh: Duke University Press, pp.
51
–
73
.
Barboza, David.
1
.
“
In China, Wholesale Urban Flight.”
New York Times
, November
25
,
2005
.
2
“
Auditor Warns of Risks from Local Debt in China.”
New York Times
, June
27
,
2011
.