Chinese farmers no more

“There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.”

-  Mao Zedong, The Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, Volume 1 (1955)

YUEQI, Chongqing – Driving around the farming villages surrounding Chongqing municipality during China’s Lunar New Year holiday this weekend, we noticed plenty of evidence to support Mao’s thesis.  

The most popular was the abundance of Guangdong license plates. Guangdong province, a few hundred miles southeast of Chongqing, is considered ground zero for China’s economic reform experiment, the heartland of the nation’s export manufacturing economy.   

“These cars all belong to people who went south and made it big,” explained Li Youfu, the village elder of Yueqi. In this rural hamlet of 5,000 people, half are migrant workers, and their remittances make-up about 80 percent of the town’s income. ”They became little bosses down there and bought cars to bring back here.” 

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Hopes for a better life run high for China’s new generation of so-called peasantry.

Outside Li’s home, where he also runs a small corner shop, young men pulled up on shiny motorcycles to play mah jong for money on a nifty automated table that shuffled their tiles for them. 

“[The table] cost only 2,000 renminbi (0),” said Li Jingshan, the village elder’s 22-year-old son. That’s more than what used to be his monthly salary. The younger Li came back home early in December for the holiday – a little earlier than usual – after the Guangdong food product factory that employed him suspended its operations temporarily because of the slowdown. He’s worked in the south for four years, where he earned 1,800 renminbi a month (4), plus free meals and housing. 

But the global economic crisis has reverberated around China’s once-thriving coastal areas in the south and east. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said up to 10 million out of an estimated 150 million migrants lost their jobs last year due to the crisis. Since business has slowed at Li’s factory, it’s unclear whether he will have a job to go back to once the weeks-long New Year holiday comes to an end. 

“We were finishing work at two, three o’clock in the afternoon,” said Li when I asked him whether there had been enough orders at the factory to keep him fully employed. Then he grinned. ”More time to play!” 

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