荒诞者共和

While the rural problems are acknowledged by all sides, the prescribed solutions differ widely. The mainstream still counts on rapid industrialization and urbanization as the panacea. One of the most vocal advocates of this point of view is Justin Yifu Lin from the China Center for Economic Research at Beijing University, a US-educated economist who has been instrumental in many reform policies in the last 15 years. During a September 2005 conference, Lin was reported as saying , "to reduce the urban-rural gap, the most important thing is to reduce the rural population by moving large amount of labor out of the rural areas." According to his logic, with huge labor migration from agriculture to industry, these new workers would be consumers instead of producers of agricultural products; the increased demand and decreased supply would push up the income levels of remaining farmers—economy of scale and higher rate of commodification for agriculture products would help as well. The farm labor only makes up 2%, 4%, and 8% of the total labor force in US, Japan, and South Korea, respectively—he cited these numbers to justify the urbanization strategy, saying this is the way to go for China. Other neo-liberal scholars have argued further that the current communal land ownership is handicapping rural growth because it is incompatible with the market principle. They suggest that the policy should move one step further from current de facto privatization (i.e. family contract system) to total privatization where land can be traded freely. The more capable farmers could thus accumulate more land and achieve economy of scale; and the less capable farmers would sell their land and use the capital to move into other professions. This would further speed up the labor flow from rural to urban areas and facilitate rapid industrialization and urbanization.

Given the historical facts and current reality, it is highly questionable whether these schemes are working or would ever work. Private land ownership is a given fact in many developing countries including India and many South America countries, yet massive number of landless farmers and urban slums are much more common phenomena than rural prosperity. In China's own history during the last two thousand years, private land ownership has been the norm in most times and places, yet large-scale land concentration has repeatedly led to peasant revolution and bloodshed. In the last twenty years, massive labor migration from rural to urban areas has indeed happened and is still happening—there are as many as 150 million rural migrants working in the urban areas. But only few of them have become rich enough to afford urban citizenship and enjoy the convenience and comforts of urban life. The majorities are working as low-skilled labor in sweatshops or construction sites and live in urban shantytowns. As their pitiful salary is often not enough to support a family in high-cost cities, the rest of their families, especially older parents and small children, are usually left in the countryside. And they themselves will be cast back as well when they become old, sick, or injured during work, which is quite common under the harsh labor conditions. With the degenerating rural economy, remittance from these migrant workers has indeed become an important financial source for many hinterlands. Yet overall, the rural areas are big losers under the outward oriented development paradigm: the ratio between urban and rural income has risen steadily from 1.8:1 in the early 1980s to 3.23:1 nowadays . Though making huge contribution to the industrialization and urbanization process, rural laborers and even their children are trapped in servitude under the current arrangement. Even if these social problems could be solved, there is the hard constraint of the environment. The rapid industrialization and urbanization in the last twenty years has levied a heavy toll on China's already fragile environment. About 60% of the water in seven major river systems—the Yangtze, Yellow, Huai, Songhua, Hai, Liao and Pearl River—are classified as grade IV or worse (not suitable for human contact). Already, about sixty million people face water scarcity, and more than 300 million do not have access to clean drinking water . Because of this water shortage alone, the current model of industrialization and urbanization seems neither scalable nor sustainable.

The James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute

Recognizing all these problems, some rural experts have argued that the majority of China's rural population should remain rural in the foreseeable future—there is no easy escape to the cities. They reason that the solution is to revive the community spirits and empower rural people to build a people-centered and community-centered local economy. Many of these researchers have become active in concrete projects in recent years and helped to form a vibrant "new rural reconstruction movement". One of the centers of the movement is James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zhai Cheng Village at Ding Xian, which is in China's Hebei Province and about 3 hours by train from Beijing. This institute is named in honor of Y.C. James Yen (1893-1990), a Chinese educator and social activist, who had started a reconstruction movement at the same site already in the 1920s. Yen developed a fourfold "rural reconstruction" approach

Education to combat ignorance
Livelihood to fight poverty
Public health to combat disease
Self-governance to fight civic inertia

Yen's experiment in Ding Xian lasted for ten years until it was disrupted by the Japanese invasion. From 1950 until his death in 1990, Yen devoted his life to adaptation of this approach to peasant communities in developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In recent years, the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction in the Philippines, which was founded by him in 1960, has become a vibrant laboratory of sustainable agriculture and democracy training.

In his home country China, James Yen has become a source of inspiration for the new rural reconstruction movement, and 2003, the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute was founded at Ding Xian. The Institute's goal is to revive organic agriculture and permaculture based on traditional knowledge and to promote community organizing and peasant self-governance.

The daily operation of the Institute is run by 11 staff members. A few of them were from Hongkong, others were from the mainland. Some local villagers participate regularly as well. The staff members are quite young, with an average age of 26. They have 2 hectare of arable land at the institute, and so far they have planted peanuts, corn, sesame, wheat, soybeans, and various fruit trees and vegetables. As soon as one walks from the surrounding fields onto this land, one sees and hears the difference. With no chemical fertilizer or pesticides being used, the place has become an animal heaven, full of birds, lizards, and also insects—it seems like most of the wild animals of the whole village have come to this place. As soon as one walks out of this place again, the singing of birds fades rapidly.

Increasing dependence on chemical fertilizer and pesticides is a big problem for rural China. Per area, Chinese farmers already use 2.3 times more chemicals than US farmers. The village elders are well aware of the problems—the soil degrades, the quality of the food declines, birds disappear, and after a few years the pests return in larger numbers. The elders would like to revive traditional integrated agriculture, but by now they lack the necessary energy and authority. However, they provide a lot of input and support to the permaculture program at the institute. Other villagers are more skeptical. Most of the people who work the fields beyond the institute are men around 40-50 years old, or women, as many young men have left for migrant jobs in cities. Their attitudes have been shaped by the agricultural policy and educational biases after 1978, and by how convenient chemicals appear, at least at first sight. It is hard to say how much they still know about traditional farming, but they have little interest to revive it. One of the village women, to whom I talked, said that the methods by the institute were too labor intensive to be copied. This is certainly a critical point, and an outsider like me should refrain from telling farmers how to grow food. But with so many young people seeking jobs elsewhere, and with economists worrying, quite generally, about the surplus of workers in China, it seemed to me that enough labor would be available, if villagers decided to return to traditional ways of growing food.

The same woman was also afraid that without pesticides, insects would eat up a significant chunk of the harvest, but this fear was probably exaggerated. The institute had just brought in its first wheat harvest of 2005, and the output per area was similar to the output produced by the villagers, who used chemicals. In 2004, the institute harvested a bumper crop of peanuts; the output per area was the highest locally. From this and other experiences, the staff members at the institute are convinced that organic farming can produces as much or more food as conventional chemical farming. However, they see another problem: with organic farming, the size of the harvest may fluctuate more than under conventional chemical farming. With the current family contract system, this is a risk the tiny family farms are unwilling or unable to take.

The Institute offers training seminars covering topics including organic agriculture, permaculture, ecological building with local materials, community organizing, and rural cooperative building. The seminars are free for peasants—the only requirements are junior high school education and interest in rural reconstruction effort. Selected trainees are given seed money (in the form of micro-credits) to start rural cooperatives, credit unions, or other organizations back in their own villages. The institute stays in contact with these trainees and brings them back together for re-entry programs where they share experiences. So far, graduates from the Institute have founded more than thirty village cooperatives across China.

Apart from reviving traditional techniques, the institute also explores new ones. In 2004, Mr. Xie Yingjun, a Taiwan architect famed for ecological design, supervised the design and construction of an ecological toilet from locally available materials. During my visit in 2005, they were constructing a straw-bale building. Just like the revival of traditional techniques, these demonstrations of new techniques are met by the villagers with a mixture of interest and skeptics. A woman from the village had first agreed to build a straw-bale building as family dwelling, but abandoned the plan because of the opposition of her husband, who regarded straw-bale as backwards and anti-modern. In the end, developing the right techniques for growing food may be the smaller problem, as centers like the James Yen Institute look tiny compared to the research centers sponsored by companies like Monsanto. The bigger problem will be to change the mindset of all those peasants who have come to know nothing but the modern, chemical agriculture.

Perspectives of the New Rural Reconstruction Movement

Besides training organizers at the village level to carry on the ideas of popular education and rural reconstruction, the James Yen Institute also links these efforts in China with the wider rural transformation movements in Asia and Latin America. For example, it has regular exchange with KSSP (Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad--Kerala People's Science Movement) in India. Kerala is a poor rural state in Southwest India with per capita GDP around 300-400 dollars, yet many of its human development indicators (literacy rate, infant mortality rate, average life expectancy, etc.) are catching up with developed countries. KSSP has played a crucial role in this people-centered development, and in 1996 it was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for its major contribution to a model of development which, unlike the dominant contemporary process of free market globalization, is rooted in social justice and popular participation, and has made dramatic achievements in health and education." Understandably, such success has become an inspiration for many Chinese practitioners. In July 2005, a rural construction international seminar was jointly organized by the James Yen Institute and by ARENA (Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives). Many scholars and rural activists from Southeast Asia and Latin American came to share their experiences and lessons.

With all the activities described above, James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute has become one of the centers for the new rural reconstruction movement, which currently consists of a loose network of diverse experts and practitioners across China. With its member coming from within China, and not only from the urban elite but also from the rural population, this movement may really empower the local people instead of fostering aid dependency. Pat Yang, the chairperson of the Zigen Fund based in New York, once commented on the sad development she witnessed in Guizhou, a southern Chinese province with many minority groups. When Zigen first arrived in Guizhou 17 years ago, local people often told her, "we are poor but our culture is rich and unique, we can do this and that." Now much of the pride and self-esteem is gone. People often beg her, "We are so poor. We need this and that: schools, roads, buildings, medicines, etc. Can you give us some money?" While attributing most of this loss to invasion of commercial culture, Mrs. Yang cautioned that even well intentioned NGOs could do harm if they were not careful.

Even NGOs that are trying to empower the local people may fall into the trap of imposing outside ideas without heeding to local needs. Many American NGOs are funding village-level elections in China, in the hope that such efforts will foster civil society and democracy. It is well known in research circles that this topic, village elections, is the one topic for which funding can be got most easily, because US interest in it is so strong. While the goodwill and efforts from America are laudable, one should understand that democracy does not consist of elections alone. A local researcher has observed, "Most of the young and capable people leave for the cities, that one can barely find a good candidate who is willing to serve. As the village life is increasingly controlled by faraway markets or corporations, there is so little a village head can do anyway. So, many elections only expose or even exacerbate the problems, without solving them. According to my research and estimation, about 80% of the elections should be considered failures because they do not improve the village life and are often destructive instead. I am all for democracy, but I am increasingly doubtful if this is the way to achieve that." Direct election imposed from the outside is not a panacea for a fragmented community whose social capital is deteriorating rapidly and whose fate is, with or without election, determined by outside forces. Instead, rural reconstruction should be the first step: revive the community spirit; develop local institutions like cooperatives, credit unions and other social or cultural organizations; strengthen the local economy. Once people have more control of the local resources and livelihood, they will develop their own form of democratic institutions and processes.

Across its wide and varied spectrum of projects, the new rural reconstruction movement in China are address this problem. Its central theme is revival of community spirit by empowerment. It encourages communities to solve problems with their own resources, instead of becoming dependent on outside aid. In all this, it follows the old Chinese saying: "To help someone, first build up his/her will."