Then and Now

(Lindsay)

Today we visited Pangliu village and its school, about 45 minutes from Xi’an. Richard is from Pangliu, and on our way there, he told us a bit about China during the time of his growing up. Back in the 1960’s, Richard had passed all of his exams and begun university, but all of his plans were interrupted with the Cultural Revolution, when he was sent back to the village to work in the fields as a peasant along with everyone else. Fortunately, the village needed teachers, and he was singled out. (All of the families in the village were large. Richard himself was one of six boys.) He was given a monthly allowance of 4 yuan (about 65 cents) for teaching, which was in addition to the work subsidy given to all villagers. The men in Richard’s village earned 43 cents a day, and the women earned about 30 cents. Back then villages sold their produce to the government with each harvest, twice a year, for whatever the government was willing to pay. Then payment was allotted according to the work points an individual had earned.

Ever since 1954, under government regulation, if you are registered as a rural person you are not permitted to work in a city. It used to be that the government gave you land to work with other villagers, and as rural families grew, rural populations grew to 70% of the entire Chinese population. Production was very low under communal physical labor, because many lacked the incentive to work very hard. Since the government invested more in the cities, everyone desired the urban life, but there were only two ways to escape rural life: you could work hard at school and go to university, after which the government would give you a job; or you could join the army and perform well enough to become an officer and/or develop a special skill desired by the government. This governmental division remained rigid until the early 90’s, but when cities began to need cheap labor to build roads, airports and other facilities in a modern infrastructure, the ban on movement from villages to cities was lifted. The urban population of China is now a little more than half of the overall population.

It used to be that if you qualified to move to the city, the village took your land, because land was allotted by the number in the family. Now, if you move to the city, you can retain your land and contract with a villager to have it farmed. You can even sell it if an interest wishes to buy it for development. Such was the case with the nearby Tang Dynasty theme park, which was farm land just ten years ago. If you do well enough in the city, you can even purchase your urban apartment. Rural/urban registration has not gone away entirely, but, according to Richard, it is on its way out. While the system of registration still exists, a permanent income in the city enables you to be registered as an urban person, and if you are registered as an urban person, your children can go to school in the city.

Before the 1990’s, instead of greeting each other with “good morning,” villagers would ask, “Have you eaten?” People were always hungry, and food was the first concern of the day. Those days are gone, and everyone today is well fed. Houses that used to be mud brick are now made of the much more durable, commercially-produced brick. The government seems to recognize, Richard says, that if they want a rich country, the peasants must be rich as well. Even so, Pangliu is a ghost of its former self. Many of the adults have left for the city, leaving their children behind with grandparents, and leaving manual field labor to large machines like those used in American agribusiness.

When we arrived at the school, Ms. Wei, the principal, met us at the gate and ushered us into a conference room. The school, which used to have over 300 students, she told us, now has only 106 students and eleven teachers. It is like other village schools in the district, but better in that it has a library, which was funded and built through a program developed by Richard and Massachusetts’ own Primary Source. (Richard also found a way to build a clinic for his village.) Public education is free through nine years, and the government is currently discussing providing up to twelve years. While what is taught in public schools is controlled by the central government, regions, particularly minority areas, have some say in the curriculum.

While the adult discussion in the conference room was very interesting, what is indelible from our trip to the school is the time we spent teaching a class of third-graders the first few lessons of their English primers. They were divided into four groups, each with five or six of the cutest little kids you could ever hope to see. The lesson was rote—we wouldn’t win any teaching awards for engaging multiple intelligences—but getting a group of them giggling with some exaggerated pantomiming is one of the golden memories that will stay with me from this wonderful trip. It was just priceless. We taught for about a half an hour and then the bell rang and our fun was over.

Before leaving Pangliu, we were treated to lunch at the home of one of Richard’s acquaintances. It was more like a banquet, with enough food for twenty. Dishes included mushrooms, chicken and peppers, cauliflower and pork, peanuts, lotus root, glass noodles, buckwheat noodle soup with doufu, quail eggs and fermented eggs and more. Throughout lunch we were treated to our hostess’s little boy daring his friends to come inside to see the “foreigners.” He dragged one little girl in, and once she felt brave, the two of them dragged in another little boy. I thought he was going to start charging admission, but after a while their fascination faded, and they went outside to play.

On our way back to the city, Richard made an interesting point. “We are plagued by corruption, but the current government is cracking down. When people say we should be a democracy,” he said, “look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Nothing but fighting and chaos. Why would we want that?”