If they ever found out how little I actually earn, they would say, there’s no point in going to study, so-and-so did not even complete middle school, but now earns several thousand yuan a month as a migrant worker. What would I say to them then?

I think we have one of the lowest college entrance exam pass rates of any county in Anhui. The population of our county is more than 800,000, but in 2008, little more than 7,000 students took the university entrance examination (and this figure includes many students doing retakes). Barely 1,500 passed and the majority of those were doing retakes, some for the third or fourth time.

A poor elementary school education leads to a poor middle and high school education. It leaves pupils unable to compete in the provincial college entrance examinations. Those few that do get admitted to universities are basically all children from the county towns.

After the New Year, I went for drink with a high-school classmate of mine, who now works as a teacher at a county high school. He told me that his school’s basic target for getting arts students into college was just one out of 70. Getting three into college would be exceeding targets. I asked him to estimate how many had a realistic chance of getting to college, and he said, at most, five or six. The others he told me would simply have to retake the exams or become migrant workers, and then later come back, marry and have children.

My former classmate asked me to say a few words to his final year students, to give them some encouragement prior to taking the exam. Standing on the rostrum, facing these students, all I could do was tell them that their fate was in their own hands, and how pleasant university life was, and encourage them to go out into the world and gain experience. I warned them that the outside world is very competitive now and that they would have to study even harder in order to realise their ambitions.

In our county, a number of vocational and technical training colleges have just opened, not only in the main town but also in the smaller towns. Training courses include lowly stuff like sewing and electrical welding. Afterwards, the students will go to factories in the coastal areas to work. For more and more children and their parents, this is the only realistic road in life. Even if you study at high school and spend a lot of money on education, there is no guarantee you will get into university. And if you do, it doesn’t mean it will be any use.

I certainly don’t see university as the only option in life for them either. But I do think university can at least give you self-awareness, some understanding of society, and for ever free you of the ignorant aimlessness of country life.

Here, of course, is the paradox for the man of education: who is better off in the end, the enlightened or the benighted? Is it more painful to know, or not to know? Should people be allowed to remain in blissful ignorance until one day they awaken naturally, or should they be awoken? And what happens when they awaken?

That day in the classroom, I drew on the blackboard a pyramid. I told these 17 and 18-year-olds that they should not expect to reach the top, but hoped they did not end up at the bottom of it, either. I only hoped that they could find a place for themselves in the middle. That, I said, would be enough.

Sometimes my parents say, half in jest and half in anger, it would have been better to have kept me out of university, “for if we had done that, we now would have had a grandson to hug.” Nearly all people of my age in the village have produced a grandson for their parents.

This was hard to swallow. It was not what my parents really thought. They were simply voicing a widespread prejudice among country people.

The minimum subsistence allowance

In the countryside, some things happen that just boggle the mind. An example is the minimum subsistence allowance. On this subject, I just read the following on Baidu, here paraphrased:

The minimum subsistence allowance is designed to be an open, fair and just livelihood guarantee. You become eligible through a process of individual application, case review, audit, report approval and supervisory checks. Responsibility for approvals lies with the county Civil Affairs department, with specific cases handled by local authorities and village (Party-affiliated) committees.

The basic process for applying for the minimum subsistence allowance in the countryside is as follows: An application is made by the head of the household to the village (town) government or the village committee. The committee then launches an investigation, and arranges an initial canvassing of opinion. 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).

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