Dating hjapanese+adult+movies+rushare+upload Scamming asearchi Dating Aspx r Makeup cssearch Articles osearch Dating psearchl Makeup isearchg Dating fsearchrmy+brother+is+My+slavetsearchesearchmi Makeup imu searchujapanese+adult+movies+rushare+uploadssearchssearchesearchc Aspx lo Dating asearchc Www n searchhsearch csearchu Aspx tsearchyisearche Datingmakeup is Scamming a Makeup flsearcho Dating s 2741 searchn Www p Dating l Dating ct Matters o Aspx Aspx s Makeup m Matters deb Makeup searchh Www Www e Trust d Dating o Scamming he Scamming hsearchusearche Trust o Matters d t Aspx Dating he Trust visearchlsearchge Trust ( 2741 osearchn Articles ovensearche 2741 t Makeup o Makeup Www hsearch vimy+brother+is+My+slavelsearchg Matters Dating omsearchiteemy+brother+is+My+slave searchh 2741 co Trust msearchttmy+brother+is+My+slavee Matters ten Online l Articles u Scamming c Scamming es Matters a Matters Articles nsearchessearchisearcha Www ion, searchnsearch Dating r Aspx asearchge 2741 my+brother+is+My+slaven Articles ii Www i Scamming l cnv Matters s Makeup i Datingmakeup g Dating of osearchinion. After a review by the local government, approval is given by the county Civil Affairs department. The local government and county Civil Affairs department conduct an investigation into the economic circumstances of the applicant’s household, get an idea of the family’s income, assets, labour capacity, and actual living standards. Combined with the canvassing of local opinion, opinions are forwarded on review and approval. In the process of submitting and checking the application, the applicant is required to give full information about his own and his family’s income, and actively cooperate with the investigations and reviews of the examination and approval authorities, in line with regulations. The authorities must promptly report back the results of their investigation, and clearly explain reasons when approval is not granted.

In our village, there is a four-person household, including an infant, in which everyone is getting the minimum subsistence allowance. In many cases, healthy people of working age are also receiving it, while my grandfather and grandmother, both past 80 this year, are not. Given our family circumstances, we do not have any difficulty in looking after them, but this kind of thing really makes people angry.

When my father talked about this with me, he was furious, saying “anyone who gives gifts to the Party secretary gets the allowance; anybody who has higher level connections can get it.”

All this stuff about formal application, asset investigation and fairness is a joke. The minimum subsistence allowance has become part of the brigade leader’s armory of carrots and sticks, a tool for rewarding and attracting allies.

The allowance amounts to nearly 1,000 yuan a year, and in every sense has become a kind of supplementary welfare benefit. But those who deserve it do not get it, and people who do not need it do. Members of influential households get it, the well-connected get it, the givers of gifts get it, and households that make a nuisance of themselves also get it.

My family does not get it, although my grandfather is now 85 years old and my grandmother is 80.

I hope I’m not being overly critical in all of this. I only wanted to write down what I have seen in my own village. Neither I am not trying to say that I have sloughed off the last traces of peasant thinking. Whoever I talk to, I always speak frankly. After all, I too am the salt of the earth.

What’s more, I certainly do not agree that country people should be allowed to flood the cities (though expert claims that this would create slums and ghettos is really laughable). But you cannot just stand by as country people are fed into the machine of modernization - bled white, their youth spent, and crushed into husks to be discarded.

It is my solemn conviction that nobody has the right to sacrifice the rural population on the altar of national modernization, for whatever reason, on the pretext that “they were born to be peasants.”

Political issues in the countryside

“I always keep two bullets on me, one for self-defence, and the other for joining the next Cultural Revolution.” These words were spoken by a 70-year-old man standing in our doorway on the morning of Spring Festival eve.

He has no official duties, he is not even a member of the Party, but he always enthusiastically takes part in village activities, such as checking the village committee accounts and joining petitions to county authorities.

My father said nowadays he is busying himself writing something at home. What is he writing? I asked

“No idea … he’s writing about big issues,” my father said.

I do not know whether this man has read Marx and Lenin, but he always has Marxist phrases on his lips, and seems to know what he is talking about.

“The countryside needs a second Cultural Revolution, to bring down all these dogs. In terms of Marxist materialism, the transformation of this society is already 80 percent complete.” I took out my mobile phone, and recorded these insightful words.

Taking the bus back home from the county town, I saw a big, bold red banner hanging over the road at the entrance to a village - all the more striking on a winter’s day. It said “Direct village elections are an important guarantee for building grassroots democracy in the countryside.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Democracy, direct elections, how nice it all sounds.

Back at home, I asked my father, about the elections? He told me: “Elections are no more than going to an appointed place, being told to vote for somebody, and then voting accordingly.” The Party secretary of our village, 69 years old this year, is known as “Roly-Poly” (不倒翁) [a self-righting doll – you can knock him down but he always gets back up]. He has been sitting pretty for nearly 20 years at least. Some people jokingly call him Chairman Hu. He takes everyone for a ride and has friends in high places, but never dirties his hands himself; if there is dirty work to be done, he will get somebody else to do it, behind closed doors.

Another issue is rural Party recruitment practice. Anybody who wants to join the Party has to go through him, giving gifts and reaffirming their loyalty. The Party recruitment process has degenerated into one of cultivating favourites. At the very least, an aspirant must show that they will not threaten the secretary’s position. We have a few people who like to stir things up, they have no chance of getting into the Party. Denied access to political power, all they can do is make a fuss from the sidelines. And the authorities can shut them up when they get tired of it, by cooking up some criminal charge.

There is a single guy in our village with a particularly strong sense of justice. He is always going to the county or city to petition the authorities. From a ditch by the roadside, he has carved out a pond. In the summer, many village people go to the pond to get water to mix with their pesticide. He lets them use it, but not members of the families of local officials. He has got into scraps over this. Later, he fostered a little girl abandoned by her parents. There has never been anything untoward in the idea of a bachelor adopting an abandoned girl like this. But the village authorities insisted he was violating family planning rules, and he was taken away by cops from the local town. I do not know if he was beaten there, but he was certainly a lot quieter when he came back.

“If you drink King Zhou’s water, you cannot criticize King Zhou.” That’s a saying my father drummed into me. Especially when I happened to get angry about things in his presence.

The land question

In our village everybody has approximately four mu (roughly, two-thirds of an acre) of land. Around 1995, after the first round of land redistribution, nothing changed in our area. Many people who married and had children have not yet received their due under land redistribution, while others, like me, who have transferred their household registration still retain land granted by the government. Some of this state-granted land even belongs to dead members of our family.

In 1995, when land was redistributed, they said there would be no further redistribution for 50 years.

Recently, the privatization of land has become seen as a panacea for solving the problems of the countryside. This trip back, when I discussed this with some people in the village, their immediate response was that land was being “annexed.” I mentioned that if land was privatized they could buy and sell it freely, but they said, you would soon finding people selling it off, particularly crooked elements.

“We need to get back to the time before liberation, we need to have landlords!” one said.

In fact, the nostalgic attachment all country people are supposed to have to the land is fading steadily. A lot of the wealthy people in the village have moved to the town or elsewhere in the county to buy a house. Normally, they live in the town, and only come back twice a year when there is a lot of farm work.

When I was small, our village grew a lot of cash crops such as cotton, mint and watermelon (we used to grow ten mu of cotton, nearly ten mu of mint and three to five mu of watermelons). But now, there is just a wheat season and a soybean season. Everything is completely automated, saving labour (with combine harvesters, the crop can be taken directly to the homestead; some households take the harvested crop to the market and sell it, and then go away after pocketing their money. Later, they burn the stubble and plant for the next harvest.

Although land in the country cannot be bought or sold, country people can lease out land for cultivation (at 300 yuan per mu per year). Some families do not want to farm, or are away all year, and so they lease out the lands for other people to farm.

Now I’ll turn again to last year’s land sale problem. An expressway now under construction through our village (apparently from Xuchang to Suqian) requires requisition of farmland, for two different purposes. Firstly, land is needed for the road itself, and secondly for related earth-cutting works (to underpin the road foundation).

About 18,000 yuan per mu was paid for the first type, while the second type commanded 12,500 yuan per mu (the difference in pricing supposedly arising because, in areas where earth has been cut away, resulting ponds can later be used for fish farming and other profit-making activities, though I suspect that here it may have gone illicitly into the pockets of the contractors).

The area for earth-cutting is very large, covering a good number of plots of land of 80 mu each. (Our family lost 4.5 mu). Those who can sell the land are pleased. Land is no longer scarce. People were only unhappy about selling too cheaply. They did not speak much about it.

As regards the abandonment of land, this doesn’t happen in our area. People tend not to cultivate the land themselves, but contract the work out to others. I guess that sort of makes us pioneers in land privatization.

There is another interesting thing about this issue of land sales to road builders. Some households in the village have received a share of the proceeds and some have not.

The lucky ones are very happy, but those left out are not. Some people say that the proceeds of these sales should be divvied up equally amongst villagers, and then the remaining land be reapportioned. Is this egalitarianism or a relic of collectivist thinking? Of course, nothing came of this proposal, but it was indeed a turn up for the books - something to think about, at any rate.

Rural scholars always say that the land has become a kind of shackle on country people, impeding rural modernization. Some people also say that the land is the livelihood guarantee of last resort for rural people, the ‘natural habitat’ they can fall back on when they return home. But whatever the experts say, the incontrovertible fact now is that country people no longer cleave to their patch of land.

The poet Ai Qing once said: “Why are my eyes full of tears? Because of the depth of my love for this land.” But today, the old patch has become something people venerate only out of habit.

Cultural issues

I have always believed that rural problems are not just political and economic but cultural as well. Never mind Marx’s theory of economic determinism, I believe that these cultural issues significantly impact the living conditions and lifestyles of rural villages and villagers, as well as their consumption patterns and life choices.

I have also long wondered, what exactly is culture in the rural context? Is there something we can call a rural culture? What kind of culture is specific to the countryside?

Everybody says that Chinese people are influenced by Confucianism, but in the villages, you see very little humanity or fellowship. All you see is selfishness, greed, stupidity and ignorance, the law of the jungle and infighting. What happened to the simple, pure-hearted, virtuous peasant of lore? What turned them into creatures like this?

Fights, quarrels and adultery are all are commonplace. Especially during the Spring Festival, gambling, drinking or petty grievances can lead first to quarrels, then to beatings and finally to grievous bodily harm.

After drinking, some people will wander around the village shouting abuse, insulting whoever they like, mouthing obscenities. Any family that has a lot of sons will have many willing fists, and can intimidate their neighbours.

Eighteen-year-old boys wear earrings, grow their hair long and dye it. Girls of seventeen or so adore [China Idol] Chris Lee and write on their schoolbooks statements like “I’m not mainstream.” These kids have never heard of the WTO, but they know about McDonald’s, online dating, and how to use QQ to find a girlfriend.

There are no newspapers in the village but just about every family has a television set. We’ve had cable for the last couple of years but because of the cable fees not everyone is hooked up. The county TV stations always broadcast provocative “Viagra” and breast enhancement ads. Adults and children both watch regardless.

In recent years, we have also seen the emergence of a new kind of [traditional Chinese] clarinet (唢呐 sWww Datingmakeup Dating Makeup G Dating Makeup 2741 En Articles 54 Scamming In Online Dating Or Matters Of Trust 2 Aspx Dating Makeup Returning home to life in the Chinese countryside | China Labour Bulletinp Nudity Dating Makeup Dating Makeup pWww Datingmakeup Dating Makeup G Dating Makeup 2741 En Articles 54 Scamming In Online Dating Or Matters Of Trust 2 Aspx Dating Makeup Returning home to life in the Chinese countryside | China Labour Bulletinv l Online Dating Makeup