In his preamble, the blogger, Xiao Sanlang (萧三郎) describes his feelings on returning to his roots after living, studying and working in the vibrant modern city of Shanghai as: “a depressing experience. It was a leap from post- to pre-modernism, from the 21^st Century back into the mediaeval world, and it left me with a mixture of feelings - anger, sadness, bitterness, impotence and much else.”

The blog looks in detail at the rites of passage in a rural village, social welfare and education, land ownership and village politics, as well as the nature of “rural culture.” It records a society in transition, a rural community coming to terms with economic development and modernity.

CLB has translated the main body of Xiao Sanlang’s extensive and discursive blog, divided into 11 sections, below.

Early marriage

Early and late child-bearing

Death

Education

The minimum subsistence allowance

Political issues in the countryside

The land question

Cultural issues

More comments on education

Life in the countryside

Conclusion 

Early marriage

I must begin this article with some thoughts on early marriage. This is the thing that shocks and upsets me the most. You may blame the ignorance of country people, or the backwardness of village life. Whatever the justification, the fact is, it happens.

According to the Marriage Law, the statutory minimum age for marriage is 22 years for men and 20 years for women. This is what actually happens in our village. When I came home, a 17-year-old boy was preparing to get married to a local girl that he had met online. I don’t know the girl’s age, and when I saw her during this trip, wrapped up with a scarf against the cold, I couldn’t guess. But I don’t think she could have been that old, because where we live, it's very rare for women to be older than their husbands. When I heard this news, I was shocked, and still more so to learn that she had had an abortion during the winter (such is the level of awareness of contraception among young country people).

I asked around a bit and was told people generally get married before they are 20, unless they move away from the area to go to college. If you do not marry by the age of 20, your options become increasingly limited.

One day, I met this young man, who was just a boy when I was a student, and to me still is. I asked him, has your marriage been registered yet? He said it hadn't. I said, you’re marrying without registering? He said it was not a problem. I asked, so what will you do when the first child comes? He replied, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Cross that bridge when we come to it ... That would mean arranging for a bribe to be sent to some official to falsify the ages and post-register the marriage certificate. If they didn’t do this, how could the couple register the birth?

Another day, when I was drinking with our village brigade leader, I asked him about the early marriage issue. His answer was typical: it has always been like this, not only in our village and county, but even in neighbouring counties. There was nothing he could do about it.

“I'd like to act, but I cannot. After tying the knot, these young people leave the village to work in the cities year in year out. If they are single, you just cannot keep tabs on them,” he said.

In our area, early marriage has become a kind of fad, a model that others copy, as villagers always keep an eye on what neighbours are up to. If A gets married at 20, then B will wed at 19, and C will get married at 18. Basically nobody bothers with the marriage certificate. As far as the parents are concerned, if the nuptials are completed early, that means their responsibilities also end early, and it also stops the young ones from going astray when they leave to work in the cities.

Here’s another case. A girl in our village, about 19, came back to the village at the end of the year to get married. But she already had a child several months old. She met the father while away, working as a migrant. Unable to certify the marriage, they could only “marry” by organising a banquet for the village, thereby earning informal community recognition for the union. It was enough.

This issue has affected me personally. After I came back, my parents pressured me every day to get married. They felt that because I was already in my twenties but still single, other villagers would look down on me, I would not be able to hold my head up, I would be laughed at.

Let me say something about the background to all this. Our village - a very typical village in a county of northeastern Anhui, is no different from countless other places in the area. Over 1,000 people locally have the same surname, and four families predominate. Villagers usually have around four mu (two-thirds of an acre) of land. We are not really poverty-stricken. Apart from income from farming, people in their twenties and thirties can work in the cities year after year. In our village, a number of two-storey buildings have been erected in recent years (typically at a cost of around 150,000 yuan) and some people have been able to buy small Daihatsu cars (60,000 yuan). Of course, a lot do remain poor.

Early and late child-bearing

The reasons for early childbearing are easy to understand, given the above remarks on early marriage. In rural areas, a child will generally be born within the first year of marriage, and if this does not happen, the couple can suffer mockery and discrimination. One couple in our village did not have a child for more than four years, so the husband began to beat his wife, even though people said medical checks at the hospital showed the problem was nothing to do with her. However, the husband adamantly refused to get himself checked.

To be a woman in the countryside means forgoing one’s youth. After marriage and childbirth, she ages very quickly. A girl in her early twenties looks the same as a worn-out woman of 40. I heard that a girl in the village, just turned 20, got married in the spring of 2008. That winter she gave birth to a child. In rural areas, the tendency is always to want children very soon after marriage. Waiting is considered strange.

Under China’s birth-control laws, if the firstborn is a boy, the parents are not allowed to have a second child. In the tightening of birth-control regulations in the 1990s, rural women in China had to undergo compulsory tubal ligation. I always found this an act of profound inhumanity. But, on close reflection, perhaps there is no other way. How else can the birth rate be controlled? It is hard to persuade country people to use condoms, count the days or take contraceptives.

In recent years, however, many women approaching 40, who have undergone forced tubal ligation, have had surgery to reopen their fallopian tubes and have a second child. A woman in a neighbouring village, 40 this year and with a son born in 1994, now in his third year of elementary school, had another boy last year. I saw the infant during this stay. My father blames social pressures, saying “everyone is having children nowadays.”

Early one morning, a woman came hobbling along the road to the west of our village, her stomach thrust out. I didn’t know her, and asked my mother who she was. “Just somebody,” she replied. Originally, it transpired, this woman had had two children, a girl and a boy, but the daughter had died three years earlier (when I was back home this time, I went past the grave; she had been only 15 or 16 years old). Only the son was left, and so she had another operation and was now pregnant again.

I didn't ask, but I would guess she was over 45 years old.

This is what happens in the country, the real country. Women aged 45 and 18 go through the travails of pregnancy and birth. The arrival of the internet in the countryside has made it even easier to get pregnant. A boy and girl hook up through an internet dating site, a child will be born out of wedlock, and an elderly midwife will be called in - it’s much the same in the country now as it is in the cities.

On a wall of a house at the entrance of the village, you can see a large-character AIDS-prevention poster; I cannot remember exactly what it said.

Whenever I go back to my village for the New Year, I always ask my father who died over the past 12 months. All of the people in the village are getting on, and of the ones I know well and have fond memories of, any could die some day without my knowing. Of course, my time will come too. I have already chosen my parents’ and my own grave plot. All of us will be buried in a field that is now green with young wheat.

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