Rural society in China

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Rural society in the People's Republic of China encompasses less than half of

are a problem in these areas.

History

Founding of the People's Republic

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One of the major avowed objectives of the

. China in the early post-1949 period saw increases in mechanization of agriculture, the spread of electricity, running water, and modern technology to rural areas. However, by the late 1950s, much remained to be done.

Mao noted that most benefits were accruing not to the rural areas, where the vast majority of Chinese still lived, and who were the ostensible focus of the revolution, but to urban centers. Identity card systems channeled unequal degrees of resources, including food rations, to urbanites and rural dwellers.

Great Leap Forward

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During the Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958 to 1961, China's leaders attempted to accelerate collectivization and dramatically increase the pace of industrial production throughout the country, particularly in rural areas. This mostly involved small-scale production, such as the smelting of "backyard" steel. It was thought that through collectivization and mass labour, China's steel production would surpass that of the United Kingdom within only 15 years from the start of the "leap."

An experimental commune was established in

. Small backyard steel furnaces were built in every commune where peasants produced small nuggets of cast iron made from scrap metal. Simultaneously, peasant communities were collectivised.

The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen, both within and outside China, as a major economic disaster. Peasants often abandoned farming to produce steel or work in other industrial production. The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years," the

(although this name is now rarely used in China), and the Great Leap Famine, as the Chinese people suffered from extreme shortages of food. The period had a profound impact on the history of rural life in China.

Post-Mao Zedong era

Under Deng Xiaoping, urbanization in China has expanded at an unprecedented speed since the declaration of "Reform and Open Policy".^[1] new policies in China's economy shifted the approach from collective farming to household-based production quotas, in many ways reversing decades of collectivization efforts. In many areas of China, especially southern and coastal China, the standard of living improved dramatically after Deng's reforms. Township and Village Enterprises brought industrial production to rural areas—predominantly along the southern coasts, helping open these rural communities to greater economic prosperity. (The idea of industrial production in rural areas had been attempted under Mao but with much more limited success; for instance, industrial plants in highly remote areas found their ultimate production efforts hampered.) Soon, however, an imbalance appeared where northern, interior, and western China remained at a far lower degree of economic development, a situation which persists to the 21st century. However, there are multiple, complex factors contributing to this state of affairs. For instance, distances are much farther, and geography often more challenging, in western and interior regions. Population is more spread out; social structures may also play a role, in that the demographics and social structures of these regions often differ significantly from those of coastal China.

Deng Xiaoping's reforms included the introduction of planned, centralized management of the macro-economy by technically proficient bureaucrats, abandoning Mao's mass campaign style of economic construction. Deng sustained Mao's legacy to the extent that he stressed the primacy of agricultural output and encouraged a significant decentralization of decision making in the rural economy teams and individual peasant households. At the local level, material incentives, rather than political appeals, were to be used to motivate the labor force, including allowing peasants to earn extra income by selling the produce of their private plots at free market.

Rural markets selling peasants' homegrown products and the surplus products of communes were revived under the more free-market economic approach of Deng. Not only did rural markets increase agricultural output, they stimulated industrial development as well. With peasants able to sell surplus agricultural yields on the open market, domestic consumption stimulated industrialization as well and also created political support for more difficult economic reforms.

Development remains uneven, with many highly prosperous areas far outpacing deeply impoverished regions where parents have great difficulty attaining enough income to ensure their children can be sent to school, despite the already-low education fees. Indeed, educational and social imbalances are a salient feature of this uneven development.

One emerging trend since at least the 1990s is the "floating population" or "black (e.g. black market) people", rural migrants (民工 min gong) entering urban areas in search of work. Until recent developments, rural residents lacked the legal permission to resettle in urban areas without approval, yet between tens and hundred of millions did resettle in search of jobs. Many have found work, in the form of construction and other sectors with relatively low wages and benefits, and high workplace hazards. Numerous social issues have developed as a result, namely discrimination of ruralites in cities, psychological isolation of rural migrants, some of which has led to crime. In this sense, then, rural life has "entered" the cities.

Lack of employment opportunities has increasingly made life in many rural regions difficult, hence the apparent enticement to resettle in urban areas. Of course, jobs are still limited, so many do relocate in cities only to find prospects much more meager than they had expected. Statistics suggest a very high proportion of residents of rural areas are unemployed or underemployed.

The development of

also spurred rural growth in some parts of China.

An important policy document of the Xi Jinping era, 2013's Decision on Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening Reforms, described the urban-rural divide as a main obstacle to China's continued modernization and stated that efforts should be made to further integrate development.^[2]: 32 A series of projects designed to decrease the urban-rural divide followed.^[2]: 32

In 2013, China announced a new plan to reduce poverty and develop impoverished rural regions by raising rural farmers' income growth and reducing obstacles in agricultural development. The plan includes the promotion of new types of agricultural businesses, such as family farms and organized cooperatives, and encouraging industrial and commercial enterprises to invest in agriculture.^[3]

Collectivization and class status

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The first major action to alter village society was the land reform of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which the party sent work teams to every village to carry out its land reform policy. This in itself was an unprecedented display of administrative and political power. The land reform had several related goals. The work teams were to redistribute some (though not all) land from the wealthier families or land-owning trusts to the poorest segments of the population and so to effect a more equitable distribution of the basic means of production; to overthrow the village elites, who might be expected to oppose the party and its programs; to recruit new village leaders from among those who demonstrated the most commitment to the party's goals; and to teach everyone to think in terms of class status rather than kinship group or patron-client ties.

In pursuit of the last goal, the party work teams convened extensive series of meetings, and they classified all the village families either as landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, or poor peasants. These labels, based on family landholdings and overall economic position roughly between 1945 and 1950, became a permanent and hereditary part of every family's identity and, as late as 1980, still affected, for example, such things as chances for admission to the armed forces, colleges, universities, and local administrative posts and even marriage prospects.

The

remained, although they were not as marked as they had been before land reform. Under such a system, however, upward mobility required becoming a team or commune cadre or obtaining a scarce technical position such as a being a truck driver.

Decollectivization

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Collectivization and other political processes led to widespread famine and tens of millions of deaths. In the late 1970s, administrators in provincial-level units with extensive regions of low yields and consequent low standards of living began experimenting with new forms of

were abolished; they were replaced by administrative townships and a number of specialized teams or businesses that often leased such collective assets as tractors and provided services for money.

The agricultural reforms of the early 1980s led to a confusingly large number of new production arrangements and contracts. Underlying the variability of administrative and contractual forms were several basic principles and trends. In the first place, land, the fundamental means of production, remained collective property. It was leased, allocated, or contracted to individual households, but the households did not own the land and could not transfer it to other households. The household became, in most cases, the basic economic unit and was responsible for its own production and losses. Most economic activity was arranged through contracts, which typically secured promises to provide a certain amount of a commodity or sum of money to the township government in return for the use of land, or workshops, or tractors.

The goal of the

and in society in general. Rural incomes increased rapidly, in part because the state substantially increased the prices it paid for staple crops and in part because of economic growth stimulated by the expansion of markets and the rediscovery of comparative advantage.

Role of the household

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Decollectivization increased the options available to individual households and made household heads increasingly responsible for the economic success of their households. In 1987, for example, it was legally possible to leave the village and move into a nearby town to work in a small factory, open a noodle stand, or set up a machine repair business. Farmers, however, still could not legally move into medium-sized or large cities. The

increased, along with increasingly visible differences in income and living standards, it became more difficult to encompass most of the rural population in a few large categories. During the early 1980s, the pace of economic and social change in rural China was rapid, and the people caught up in the change had difficulty making sense of the process.

Consequences of rural reform

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The state retained both its powers and its role in the rural economy in the 1980s. Decollectivization, like the collectivization of the 1950s, was directed from the top down. Sometimes, apparently, it was imposed on communities that had been content with their collective methods. But in permitting households and communities greater leeway to decide what to produce and in allowing the growth of rural markets and small-scale industries, the state stepped back from the close supervision and mandatory quotas of the 1960s and 1970s.

Decollectivization obviated the

.

By 1987 rural society was more open and diverse than in the 1960s and 1970s, and the rigid collective units of that period, which had reflected the state's overwhelming concern for

division of labor

were trends not likely to be reversed. In the rural areas the significance of the work unit appeared to have diminished, although people still lived in villages, and the actions of low-level administrative cadres still affected ordinary farmers or petty traders in immediate ways.

The state and its officials still dominated the economy, controlled supplies of essential goods, taxed and regulated businesses and markets, and awarded contracts. The stratification system of the

. The norms of the new system were not clear, and the economic and social system continued to change in response to the rapid growth of rural commerce and industry and to national economic policies and reforms.

Regulations and favors

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Increased commercial activity produced a high degree of normative ambiguity, especially in areas like central

and to foster respect for it can be interpreted as responses to the problem. On the local level, where cadres and entrepreneurs were engaged in constant negotiation on the rules of their game, the problem was presumably being addressed in a more straightforward fashion.

Family and household

In past Chinese society, the family provided every individual's support, livelihood, and long-term security. Today the state guarantees such security to those with no families to provide for them, and families and work units share long-term responsibility for the individual. The role of families has changed, but they remain important, especially in the countryside. Family members are bound, in law and custom, to support their

depends on the number of household wage earners and the number of dependents. In both cities and villages, the highest incomes usually are earned by households with several wage earners, such as unmarried adult sons or daughters.

In late traditional society, family size and structural complexity varied directly with class. Rural landlords and government officials had the largest families, poor peasants the smallest. The poorest segment of the population, landless laborers, could not afford to marry and start families. The need to provide for old age and the general association between the numbers of sons surviving to adulthood and long-term family success motivated individuals to create various non-standard family forms. Couples who produced no sons, or no children at all, adopted or purchased infants outright. Families with daughters but no sons tried to find men willing to marry their daughters and move into their families, abandoning their original families and sometimes even their original

prostitutes

. The variation in family size and complexity was the result of variation in class position and of the dual role of the household as both family and economic enterprise.

From the 1950s onwards, China sought to pursue gender equality by including women in the formal labor force.^[4]: 132 In urban areas, this process was facilitated by the development of a network of public nurseries, daycare centers, and kindergartens.^[4]: 132 In rural areas, working mothers obtained support from mothers-in-law and other extended family members, usually on the father's side.^{[4]: 132–133} By the mid-1970s, the extended family on the father's side was the most important safety net for rural child care.^[4]: 133 The work of childcare was primarily associated with women, particularly mothers-in-law who exercised significant authority.^[4]: 133

In contemporary society, rural families no longer own land or pass it down to the next generation. They may, however, own and transmit houses. Rural families pay medical expenses and school fees for their children. Under the people's commune system in force from 1958 to 1982, the income of a peasant family depended directly on the number of laborers it contributed to the collective fields. This, combined with concern over the level of support for the aged or disabled provided by the collective unit, encouraged peasants to have many sons. Under the agricultural reforms that began in the late 1970s, households took on an increased and more responsible economic role. The labor of family members is still the primary determinant of income. But rural economic growth and commercialization increasingly have rewarded managerial and technical skills and have made unskilled farm labor less desirable. As long as this economic trend continues in the countryside in the late 1980s, peasant families are likely to opt for fewer but better educated children.

The consequence of the general changes in China's economy and the greater separation of families and economic enterprises has been a greater

, although possible, was rare, and families were stable, on-going units.

A number of traditional attitudes toward the family have survived without being questioned. It is taken for granted that everyone should marry, and marriage remains part of the definition of normal adult status. Marriage is expected to be permanent. That marriage requires a woman to move into her husband's family and to become a daughter-in-law as well as a wife is still largely accepted. The norm of patrilineal descent and the assumption that it is sons who bear the primary responsibility for their aged parents remain. The party and government have devoted great effort to controlling the number of births and have attempted to limit the number of children per couple. But the authorities have not attempted to control population growth by suggesting that some people should not marry at all.

In the past,

Marriage

Chinese marriage The Marriage Law of 1950 guaranteed everyone the freedom to choose their marriage partner. Nevertheless, especially in the countryside, there were few opportunities to meet potential mates. Rural China offered little privacy for courtship, and in villages there was little public tolerance for flirting or even extended conversation between unmarried men and women. Introductions and go-betweens continued to play a major role in the arrangement of marriages. In most cases each of the young people, and their parents, had an effective veto over any proposed match. In the past, marriage was seen as the concern of families as well as of the two parties to the match. Families united by marriage were expected to be of equivalent status, or the earning power and future prosperity . The most desirable husbands have been administrative cadres, party members, and employees of large state enterprises. Conversely, men from poor villages have had difficulty finding wives. From the early 1950s to the late 1970s, when hereditary class labels were very significant, anyone with a "counter-revolutionary" background, that is, anyone previously identified with the landlord or even rich peasant class, was a bad prospect for marriage. Such pariahs often had no choice but to marry the offspring of other families with "bad" class backgrounds. At the other end of the social scale, there appeared to be a high level of intermarriage among the children of high-level cadres. Community structure This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) Most rural Chinese has lived in one of some 900,000 villages, which have an average population of from 1,000 to 2,000 people. Villages have never been self-contained, self-sufficient units, and the social world of Chinese peasants has extended beyond their home villages. Almost all new wives come into a village from other settlements, and daughters marry out. All villagers have close kinship ties with families in other villages, and marriage go-betweens shuttle from village to village. Before 1950 clusters of villages centered on small market towns that linked them to the wider economy and society. Most peasants were only a few hours' walk or less from a social unit that, although less immediately visible than the villages, was equally significant. From the early 1950s on, China's revolutionary government made great efforts to put the state and its brokers who had traditionally interpreted central policies and national values for villagers. The state and the party were generally successful, establishing unprecedented degrees of political and ideological integration of villages into the state and of village-level awareness of state policies and political goals. The people's communes meant that villages became collective landholding units and had clear boundaries between their lands and those of adjacent villages. Central direction of labor on collective fields made the former practices of swapping labor between villages impossible. The household registration and rationing systems confined villagers to their home settlements and made it impossible for them to seek their fortune elsewhere. Cooperation with fellow villagers and good relations with village leaders became even more important than they had been in the past. The suppression of rural markets, which accompanied the drive for self-sufficiency in grain production and other economic activities, had severe social as well as economic consequences. Most peasants had neither reason nor opportunity for regular trips to town, and their opportunities for exchange and cooperation with residents of other villages were diminished. Villages became work units , with all that that implied. Decollectivization in the early 1980s resulted in the revival of rural marketing, and a limited relaxation of controls on out-migration opened villages and diminished the social boundaries around them. The social world of peasants expanded, and the larger marketing community took on more significance as that of the village proper was diminished. Village membership, once the single most important determinant of an individual's circumstances, became only one of a number of significant factors, which also included occupation, personal connections, and managerial talent. Healthcare After 1949, the Chinese healthcare system, in rural areas the first tier was made up of "barefoot doctors" working out of village medical centers. They provided preventive and primary-care services, with an average of two doctors per 1,000 people. The barefoot doctors emerged in 1968 when China lacked qualified health workers in rural areas and in 1985, China stopped using the term of barefoot doctor. Most of them were transferred to village doctors as private practitioners, making a living out of drug sales based on user fees.[6] At the next level were the township health centers, which functioned primarily as out-patient clinics for about 10,000 to 30,000 people each. These centers had about ten to thirty beds each, and the most qualified members of the staff were assistant doctors. The two lower-level tiers made up the "rural collective health system" that provided most of the country's medical care. Only the most seriously ill patients were referred to the third and final tier, the county hospitals, which served 200,000 to 600,000 people each and were staffed by senior doctors who held degrees from 5-year medical schools. In the late 20th and early 21st century, the availability and quality of health care varied widely from city to countryside. According to 1982 census data, in rural areas the crude death rate was 1.6 per 1,000 higher than in urban areas, and life expectancy was about 4 years lower. The number of senior physicians per 1,000 population was about 10 times greater in urban areas than in rural ones; state expenditure on medical care was more than -Y26 per capita in urban areas and less than -Y3 per capita in rural areas. There were also about twice as many hospital beds in urban areas as in rural areas. These are aggregate figures, however, and certain rural areas had much better medical care and nutritional levels than others. Village life and expressive culture See also: Xiaonong Yishi Traditional Chinese village life focused on agricultural, ritual, and festival activities based closely on seasonal and environmental requirements. Early Western studies of Chinese village life dealt with villages in Hong Kong or Taiwan as mainland China was not accessible to Western scholars at that time. For a useful compendium of studies on the Hong Kong New Territories see James L. Watson and Rubie S. Watson (2004), which comprises studies based on fieldwork carried out from 1969 to 1997.[7] For studies of village life in Taiwan see Seaman (1978),[8] and Ahern and Gates (1981).[9] In the 1980s and 1990s it became possible to undertake fieldwork in mainland China. Anthropologists working in the mainland noticed the revival of pre-1949 religious and festival practices throughout rural China in the post-Mao era. Thomas David DuBois investigated village life in Cang County, Hebei, from 1997 to 2002. According to DuBois: "What has remained constant is that religion continues to permeate all aspects of life in rural North China," (DuBois 2005, p. 2).[10] Funerals in rural villages can last for days and include thousands of people and complex funeral rituals.[4]: xxii  Thousands of temples were rebuilt at village and county level in the reform era (post 1978). Temples provide entertainment and festival occasions as well as religious activity. According to Adam Yuet Chau, who studied the Dragon King Temple in rural Shaanbei in north China, the temple was the focus of entertainments such as folk operas, dance troupes, storytellers, and musicians (Chao, 2006, p. 242).[11] He argues further that "Temple associations…have played an important role in expanding folk cultural space and the agrarian public sphere in contemporary China" (Chau, 2006, 242) Temple activities promote good community relations and offer assurance of mutual help in time of need (Chau, Miraculous Response, 144). For studies of the role of temples in the revival of Taoist sacrifices in Fujian see Dean (1993).[12] He notes the importance of temples in the economic, political, and social life of the village (Dean,1993, 17). David Johnson has studied the close relationship between village temple opera and territorial units known as shȇ (Johnson 2009).[13] He claims that village-level communal rituals were "the highest expression of the values and beliefs of ordinary people" (Johnson 2009, 10). In the contemporary era (post 1978), village administrators, including communist party officials, can be very involved in the running of village temple activities (Tsai 2007, 140).[14] However, other aspects of village culture, such as the performances of itinerant folk musicians, are subject to minimal regulation by the state (Jones 2009, xxi).[15] Folk musicians carry out ritual roles as well as provide entertainment. Jones distinguishes between the "institutional" role of temple Buddhist and Daoist monks and the more "diffused" activities of lay Buddhist and Daoist ritual practitioners, many of whom are "ordinary peasants performing for life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies" (Jones, 2009, xxi). Very talented rural singers may be able to adapt their repertoire to attract both elite and popular audiences (Gibbs 2018).[16] In border areas, informal and often hidden song traditions help bolster ethnic identities. For a study of the revival of the song and storytelling traditions of the Tai Lüe people of Sipsongpanna, Yunnan, see Davis (2005).[17] Village ritual, expressive culture, and festival activities reflect the villagers' struggle with their local environment. In southern rice-growing regions, which require intensive irrigation, both drought and floods can be a problem. The famous Chinese anthropologist, Fei Xiaotong, investigated village life in the Lower Yangzi Delta region in the 1920s. He observed that the villagers enacted religious ceremonies and rituals at times of drought, floods, and locusts (Fei, 2010, 134).[18] For a comprehensive study of the ritual and expressive culture associated with rice growing in the Lower Yangzi Delta region see Jiang Bin (1996).[19] Rice cultivators along the shores of Lake Tai in Jiangsu province believed that "the rice-seedling transformed from a young girl, to a pregnant wife, and finally to a Rice Mother bearing child-grains," (McLaren, 2022, xviii).[20] Lake Tai songs and stories include tales of a local hero who brought back the art of rice growing from a paradisial land to his home village (McLaren, 2022, 77–110). The songs of the Kam people of Guizhou reflect local "environmental management and agricultural practices" in this rice-cultivation zone (Ingram 2011, 445).[21] Ingram observes that these instructional songs "complement and assist in retaining longstanding farming techniques" (Ingram 2011, 446). Drought is a serious problem for villagers living in the region of the Yellow River. The Dragon King is venerated because he can dispense rain and save the community from drought (Chau, 2006, 79). The ritual operas of Aoshi in Shanxi were performed "to bring rain during droughts, to drive away disease, and to prevent fires, as well as to celebrate the New Year" (Johnson 2009, 71–72). The resurgence of popular folk practices and beliefs after 1980 was largely due to the lack of economic advances in most of rural China during the period of high socialism. As Stephen Jones points out, "In Shaanbei, as elsewhere in China, one may partly relate the persistence of pre-Communist belief systems (like worship of the gods and ceremonial practices) throughout these periods to the inability of modern governments to transform the environment. The largely agrarian society has remained poor and partially dependent on divine blessing, even since the 1980s when some parts of the area made clear economic progress." (Jones, 2009, xix-xx). Film At the PRC's founding in 1949, there were less than 600 movie theatres in the country.[22]: 102  Projectionists traveled through rural China showing films, a process modeled on the Soviet Union's use of mobile film teams to spread revolutionary culture.[23]: 45  Rural mobile projectionist teams and urban movie theaters were generally managed through the PRC's cultural bureaucracy.[23]: 47  Until the 1990s, the vast majority of people in China lived in rural areas, and therefore did not encounter film until mobile projectionists brought them in the 1950s and 1960s.[23]: 148  Telecommunications and internet In 2004, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began the Connecting Every Village Project to promote universal access to telecommunication and internet services in rural China.[2]: 24–25  The MIIT required that six state-owned companies, including the main telecommunications and internet providers China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, build the communications infrastructure and assist in financing the project.[2]: 25  As of December 2019, 135 million rural households had used broadband internet.[2]: 25  The program successfully extended internet infrastructure throughout rural China and promoted development of the internet.[2]: 25  The expansion of e-commerce in China has resulted in the development of Taobao villages, clusters of e-commerce businesses operating in rural areas.[24]: 112  Because Taobao villages have increased the incomes of rural people and entrepreneurship in rural China, Taobao villages have become a component of rural revitalization strategies.[25]: 278  See also Hukou - system of household registration used in mainland China Ten-star household Urban society in the People's Republic of China Women's healthcare in the People's Republic of China Wokai - Organization that connects contributors worldwide with micro-entrepreneurs in rural China to help them start small businesses References S2CID 133182671 . ^ ISBN 9781978834736 . ^ "China eyes more rural development in 2013 - Xinhua | English.news.cn". Archived from the original on 2013-05-10. Retrieved 2013-05-27. ^ ISBN 978-0-295-74738-5 . ^ "China - Family and Household". Countrystudies.us. Retrieved 15 August 2018. S2CID 153321167 . ^ "Village Life in Hong Kong". The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. Retrieved 2022-11-01. ^ Seaman, Gary (1978). Temple Organization in a Chinese Village. Chinese Association for Folklore. ISBN 978-0-8047-1043-5 . ISBN 978-0-8248-2837-0 . ISBN 978-0-8047-6100-0 . ^ Dean, Kenneth (1993). Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeastern China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780674033047. Retrieved 2022-11-01. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help ) ISBN 978-0-521-87197-6 . ^ "Ritual and Music of North China: Volume 2: Shaanbei". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2022-11-01. ^ "Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China". UH Press. 2020-06-24. Retrieved 2022-11-01. OCLC 298412652 . ISBN 978-7-5135-0268-9 . ISBN 978-7-5321-1383-5 . ^ "Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture By Anne E. McLaren". www.cambriapress.com. Retrieved 2022-11-01. S2CID 145471425 . ISBN 978-0-295-75085-9 . ^ ISBN 9780231206273 . ISBN 978-0-231-21101-7 . ISBN 978-94-6239-316-5 . Bibliography Yang, Dali. Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. ISBN 9780804734707 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rural_society_in_China&oldid=1221061959"