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Will rural China survive the Covid wave? The countryside doesn't fit into Xi's national story

Farm labourers in Szechuan province (Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)

Farm labourers in Szechuan province (Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)


January 9, 2023   5 mins

As Chinese New Year approaches, there is apprehension in a part of China often overlooked by overseas news reports: the countryside. China’s now-abandoned Zero-Covid policy was always more focused on urban areas; locking down apartment blocks in Shanghai or smartphone factories in Beijing was always more practical than doing the same in China’s extensive rural hinterland. But now that China’s biggest annual holiday is just weeks away, with tens of millions of people set to travel across the country, the latest Covid wave is sure to follow in every high-speed train or crowded bus.

A preview of the tension this will inevitably arouse was revealed towards the end of last year, when a film about rural China became a surprise box office hit in the country — before being pulled. Return to Dust, directed by Li Ruijun, portrays a rural couple (played by renowned actress Hai Qin and farmer-turned-amateur-actor Wu Renlin) who are pushed into an arranged marriage. Over time, they develop a quiet, understated love while dealing with countryside poverty. The luminous and deeply moving story ends in a muted tragedy.

The film received international accolades, but in September, it was abruptly removed from Chinese streaming services and discussion of it was censored on social media. No official reason was given, though there was speculation that the film’s bleak and unglamorous view of rural society was unwelcome just before the 20th Party Congress, when Xi Jinping would seek (and gain) an unprecedented third term in power.

Before it was banned outright, there was a brief moment when the distributors tacked a more upbeat ending onto the end of the film. There is a long tradition of this tactic. Back in 1950, one of the first films made under the new Maoist government was This Life of Mine, directed by the brilliant Shi Hui, and based on a story by the novelist Lao She. The story is bleak: across the first decades of the 20th century, a policeman falls lower and lower in social status as his economic situation worsens. Eventually he falls down dead. Although the film was an indictment of the old society that had been ended by the 1949 revolution, the censors clearly thought that such a downbeat ending was too depressing for audiences in a glorious new China. So they added some gratuitous but rousing footage at the end of People’s Liberation Army soldiers storming towards victory.

Yet the desire to change narratives in films about contemporary issues is a thread that runs through the Chinese Communist Party’s political tactics. Gao Xiang, the historian who has just become president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), recently reiterated the importance of treating history as a “Marxist” subject; in other words, one that has a definite grand narrative, based on “objective” factors. The rise to power of the CCP is the grandest possible such narrative, and the transformation of Chinese society the inevitable consequence of its rise.

That certainty sits in stark contrast with the story that the CCP tells about the pre-1949 world. This Life of Mine made the cut in the Fifties because it was primarily about a supposedly feudal society that had now been eliminated, one where individuals had little control over their own fates. There are scenes in Return to Dust that could easily fit into the 1950 film — for instance, a moment when the protagonist is pushed into donating blood to save the life of a local landlord, in the hope that he’ll be given some leeway on his rent (he isn’t).

As metaphors go, this one isn’t subtle. Yet this isn’t the bad “old society” but the 2020s, a decade after the initiation of Xi’s “new era”. In this context, the implication that ordinary Chinese citizens, particularly the peasant farmers who were at the heart of the revolution, have turned into passive victims of fate, is an indictment of the CCP. After all, in the Forties, the revolution was made in the countryside, with “land reform” used euphemistically to describe the violent seizure of land, and public humiliation and lynching of thousands of landlords by poorer peasants, all organised by the Party in campaigns to “speak bitterness”. Today, that same party does not welcome hints that seven decades of reform have not eliminated that bitterness.

Here, the countryside is a particularly sensitive subject. China’s rural areas did suffer during Covid, but less from the effects of the disease than from its knock-on effects. Online teaching, relatively easy to arrange in well-connected cities, proved much harder to arrange outside of urban areas. The capacity crisis was further exacerbated by longer-standing problems that have dogged China’s attempts to improve rural education in the past few decades. China offers free primary education, up to grade 9 (aged 14-15), but textbooks and tuition fees then fall on family shoulders during high school. Many parents move to the city to earn enough money to pay for their families. However, the internal passport (hukou) system means that if their children come with them, they can’t register at local schools (although there are charities that do provide some schooling for migrant labourers’ children in some cities). And if their children stay at home, they do so in the care of grandparents or state boarding schools, which are a long way from the elite high schools in Shanghai that nurture youthful genius in maths and music.

Local governments are expected to foot the bills, but they are almost all strapped for cash and loaded with debt. (One of reasons for the Zero-Covid protests was that the central government created the legislation but local governments were expected to pay for its implementation, including expensive PCR tests). Then, even if you have funding, it is very hard to get good teachers. Few urban graduates want to spend years in what they consider backward parts of the country on miserable salaries.

Back in 1987, Chen Kaige directed King of the Children, which dealt with the dilemmas faced by an idealistic teacher going to an impoverished area of southwest China. Today, however, there are too few real-life equivalents to his fictional hero, meaning that some 60% of rural children drop out of high school. This doesn’t bode well for a country whose shrinking population means that it will have to develop a highly educated workforce serving a high value economy. There are more signs of this change in southern China, where the financial power of Hong Kong and the emergence of the Shenzhen tech hub have created a much stronger set of economic drivers. But in the impoverished north-west, the need for levelling-up makes Britain’s gap seem tiny.

In one scene in Return to Dust, we are shown a “solution” to the rural dilemma which is becoming all too common. The couple’s land is purchased at a low price, under pressure from local elites, and they are scheduled to move into one of the new, underpopulated tower blocks that mark so many of the instant cities thrown up during China’s property boom (now in danger of becoming a property crash). “Where will my donkey go?” asks the protagonist plaintively. It’s not just donkeys who are cut out of the picture in the new cities, but also the rural way of life as a whole. Simply creating instant urbanites, without lives and structures to replace what they have lost, is a huge challenge. No wonder that nearly 100 million Chinese suffer from mental health or anxiety disorders.

Some might suggest that Return to Dust, though beautifully shot and movingly performed, is slow and doesn’t have a definitive conclusion. But that, in a sense, is the point. There are plenty of narratives created by China, and by others about it, that have conclusions either transformative or apocalyptic: from the power of its economy to its threats over Taiwan. Yet for many Chinese, it is the slow but very real crises in the countryside that are likely to create dilemmas on a day-to-day basis. These can be the specifics of poor education or rising Covid rates. But they might also be the anomie that comes from a growing realisation that China is a fast-modernising society which has yet to develop a convincing story about how its peasant farmers, for thousands of years the backbone of society, are going to fit into its national story.

***

Return to Dust is available to stream online (outside China).


Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020).


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J Bryant
J Bryant
1 year ago

A very interesting essay about an aspect of China I knew nothing about. There’s a certain similarity between the fate of the Chinese rural population and the folks in the heartland here in the US.

Simon S
Simon S
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Exactly what I was thinking. Urban “multifamily” housing is said to be quite the investment at the moment.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Agreed – and a school day for me too with ‘anomie’.
For the benefit of others as uninformed as myself: “in societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values. Such a society produces mental states characterized by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, and emotional emptiness and despair. Striving is considered useless, because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable.”

Sounds like the current situation in the U.K. and the West in general to me.

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Stewart
Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Not sure I agree. In the US, people who live in the heartland do so largely because they want to be there. Nobody is really stopping them from moving wherever. In China’s system, moving requires government approval and labor, skilled and otherwise, is managed like every other economic commodity, with little regard for the people themselves. Completely different situation. I suspect that the poverty there, as here in America, is probably overstated because while the rural population is poorer in absolute terms, their lifestyles are probably better than the urban poor simply because stuff, particularly housing, food, fuel, water, and electricity are significantly less costly outside the major metros, but I have little knowledge of day to day life in China so I could be wrong.

Simon S
Simon S
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Exactly what I was thinking. Urban “multifamily” housing is said to be quite the investment at the moment.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Agreed – and a school day for me too with ‘anomie’.
For the benefit of others as uninformed as myself: “in societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values. Such a society produces mental states characterized by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, and emotional emptiness and despair. Striving is considered useless, because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable.”

Sounds like the current situation in the U.K. and the West in general to me.

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Stewart
Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Not sure I agree. In the US, people who live in the heartland do so largely because they want to be there. Nobody is really stopping them from moving wherever. In China’s system, moving requires government approval and labor, skilled and otherwise, is managed like every other economic commodity, with little regard for the people themselves. Completely different situation. I suspect that the poverty there, as here in America, is probably overstated because while the rural population is poorer in absolute terms, their lifestyles are probably better than the urban poor simply because stuff, particularly housing, food, fuel, water, and electricity are significantly less costly outside the major metros, but I have little knowledge of day to day life in China so I could be wrong.

J Bryant
J Bryant
1 year ago

A very interesting essay about an aspect of China I knew nothing about. There’s a certain similarity between the fate of the Chinese rural population and the folks in the heartland here in the US.

Sophy T
Sophy T
1 year ago

China isn’t the only Asian city to regard tower blocks as the answer. In Seoul acres of beautiful traditional housing was torn down and replaced with high rise buildings. I feel really sorry for rural families being forced away from the countryside into a tower block – I couldn’t imagine anything worse
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that old buildings can be adapted to modern needs – as has happened all over Europe for hundreds of years.
Re. the banning of Return to Dust, presumably Chinese people have got access to VPNs.

Sophy T
Sophy T
1 year ago

China isn’t the only Asian city to regard tower blocks as the answer. In Seoul acres of beautiful traditional housing was torn down and replaced with high rise buildings. I feel really sorry for rural families being forced away from the countryside into a tower block – I couldn’t imagine anything worse
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that old buildings can be adapted to modern needs – as has happened all over Europe for hundreds of years.
Re. the banning of Return to Dust, presumably Chinese people have got access to VPNs.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 year ago

There are a lot of articles in the media, especially those that cater to more intellectual tastes, whose headline consists of some formulation of ‘woe betide the poor uneducated folk in the hinterlands with their donkeys, their guns, and their superstitious backwards ways.’ They then go on to discuss achievement gaps or teen pregnancy or dropout rates or w/e other perceived negative measure of social value that inflates the egos of educated urbanites vis a vis their perceived social inferiors. Then they move on to some macroeconomic assessment of how the rural folks are dragging all of society down, ruining our otherwise enlightened civilization with their benighted views and destructive habits, perhaps proposing some piece of top-down paternalistic social engineering to ‘address the problem’. The attitudes inherent in these types of articles would likely be considered racist and would never be printed were they about a a racial group or nationality, but alas, unwashed hill folk who won’t get with the program and go live in a sardine can with the rest of the good little sardines remain acceptable targets of both ridicule or pity as needed for urbanites to indulge their vanity and sense of self-righteousness. Whatever lets you sleep at night, I suppose.

Andrew Boughton
Andrew Boughton
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

I like the cut of your jibe.

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

Tellingly, those unwashed hill folk manage to do the one thing necessary for civilisation to sustain itself and which the metropolitan on-programme types increasingly can’t or won’t build lives to do: have children.

Once the whole globe, including the children of the hill folk, is in sardine cans and the birth rate has plummeted everywhere, the cities will fail. The hill folk, those that are left, will still be where they were.

Andrew Boughton
Andrew Boughton
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

I like the cut of your jibe.

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

Tellingly, those unwashed hill folk manage to do the one thing necessary for civilisation to sustain itself and which the metropolitan on-programme types increasingly can’t or won’t build lives to do: have children.

Once the whole globe, including the children of the hill folk, is in sardine cans and the birth rate has plummeted everywhere, the cities will fail. The hill folk, those that are left, will still be where they were.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 year ago

There are a lot of articles in the media, especially those that cater to more intellectual tastes, whose headline consists of some formulation of ‘woe betide the poor uneducated folk in the hinterlands with their donkeys, their guns, and their superstitious backwards ways.’ They then go on to discuss achievement gaps or teen pregnancy or dropout rates or w/e other perceived negative measure of social value that inflates the egos of educated urbanites vis a vis their perceived social inferiors. Then they move on to some macroeconomic assessment of how the rural folks are dragging all of society down, ruining our otherwise enlightened civilization with their benighted views and destructive habits, perhaps proposing some piece of top-down paternalistic social engineering to ‘address the problem’. The attitudes inherent in these types of articles would likely be considered racist and would never be printed were they about a a racial group or nationality, but alas, unwashed hill folk who won’t get with the program and go live in a sardine can with the rest of the good little sardines remain acceptable targets of both ridicule or pity as needed for urbanites to indulge their vanity and sense of self-righteousness. Whatever lets you sleep at night, I suppose.

Phillip Arundel
Phillip Arundel
1 year ago

Have you ever fallowed Peter Zeihan? He is everywhere on the internet – everything he says sounds so plausible, and his shtick is China will be done as a nation within a decade. For a living he talks to Corporate Headquarters, Business Clubs, Military, Security Services,,, and loads of youtube

His main thing is Demographics, and he is a very compelling talker. Watch a long one and he will convince you a billion people will soon starve, China and Russia will be destroyed, and most of the world a disaster. Energy is the key to everything he says – and it all is so convincing – he studied Chinese and lived there a bit, and it is his specialty… This is his home page on youtube – check out any on China – you will learn a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/@ZeihanonGeopolitics/videos

I do not believe what he says, only he is really good at his talk of global (except some parts) Armageddon coming at us very fast. His insights on Xi are what is really interesting – and if he is right it puts China in a whole new light – a lot of things make sense there that just seemed crazy…

My problem is he is 100% pro vax – so I know he has some huge biases – also his Ukraine (something he talks of a great deal) stuff I do not believe – but one never knows. I rather suspect he is ‘Controlled Opposition’ and really a sort of tame conspiracy person who is actually part of the whole Agenda thing. But then that is how deep a conspiracy loon I am – that I think other conspiracy loons must be really working for the other side….haha, a sort of agenda Ray Epps, haha..

But if you wish to hear a lot of good China stories check him out – the Urbanizing of the Chinese is a big part of his story, so on topic here – although Xi is the main story, that and energy and aging of the Chinese…..

Rob C
Rob C
1 year ago

Peter predicted the Chinese economy would have crashed by now. He makes such extreme predictions I can’t accept any of them as likely.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Rob C

The Chinese economy would appear to be a slow moving car crash though. A population that is becoming incredibly old (even more so than the west), many countries trying to move production away from China as well as a massively unsustainable property bubble points to serious problems in the not too distant future, even before the problems caused by the Covid lockdowns

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Rob C

The Chinese economy would appear to be a slow moving car crash though. A population that is becoming incredibly old (even more so than the west), many countries trying to move production away from China as well as a massively unsustainable property bubble points to serious problems in the not too distant future, even before the problems caused by the Covid lockdowns

B Emery
B Emery
1 year ago

Hello Mr Moze Arundel. Its the haha that gave it away.
‘But then that is how deep a conspiracy loon I am – that I think other conspiracy loons must be really working for the other side’ – that’s pretty standard fringe stuff, there was a set that thought alex Jones was just part of the new media. That he deliberately tried to cause trouble at demonstrations and discredited causes merely by association. Old piers corbyn association with David ike during covid anti vax business got caught taking money from people pretending to be Astra Zeneca. To say their vax was safe over others. The proper ‘conspiracy loons’ like Mark Lombardi, don’t normally make it public for long.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/metro.co.uk/2021/08/01/piers-corbyn-tricked-into-taking-monopoly-money-astra-zeneca-bribe-15019838/amp/

Last edited 1 year ago by B Emery
Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago

Well thanks for the degree of objectivity you managed to helpfully apply to your interpretation of Mr Zeihan’s musings – sounds like it’s a real challenge for you to keep the dogs of your own conspiratorial prejudices at bay!

Rob C
Rob C
1 year ago

Peter predicted the Chinese economy would have crashed by now. He makes such extreme predictions I can’t accept any of them as likely.

B Emery
B Emery
1 year ago

Hello Mr Moze Arundel. Its the haha that gave it away.
‘But then that is how deep a conspiracy loon I am – that I think other conspiracy loons must be really working for the other side’ – that’s pretty standard fringe stuff, there was a set that thought alex Jones was just part of the new media. That he deliberately tried to cause trouble at demonstrations and discredited causes merely by association. Old piers corbyn association with David ike during covid anti vax business got caught taking money from people pretending to be Astra Zeneca. To say their vax was safe over others. The proper ‘conspiracy loons’ like Mark Lombardi, don’t normally make it public for long.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/metro.co.uk/2021/08/01/piers-corbyn-tricked-into-taking-monopoly-money-astra-zeneca-bribe-15019838/amp/

Last edited 1 year ago by B Emery
Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago

Well thanks for the degree of objectivity you managed to helpfully apply to your interpretation of Mr Zeihan’s musings – sounds like it’s a real challenge for you to keep the dogs of your own conspiratorial prejudices at bay!

Phillip Arundel
Phillip Arundel
1 year ago

Have you ever fallowed Peter Zeihan? He is everywhere on the internet – everything he says sounds so plausible, and his shtick is China will be done as a nation within a decade. For a living he talks to Corporate Headquarters, Business Clubs, Military, Security Services,,, and loads of youtube

His main thing is Demographics, and he is a very compelling talker. Watch a long one and he will convince you a billion people will soon starve, China and Russia will be destroyed, and most of the world a disaster. Energy is the key to everything he says – and it all is so convincing – he studied Chinese and lived there a bit, and it is his specialty… This is his home page on youtube – check out any on China – you will learn a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/@ZeihanonGeopolitics/videos

I do not believe what he says, only he is really good at his talk of global (except some parts) Armageddon coming at us very fast. His insights on Xi are what is really interesting – and if he is right it puts China in a whole new light – a lot of things make sense there that just seemed crazy…

My problem is he is 100% pro vax – so I know he has some huge biases – also his Ukraine (something he talks of a great deal) stuff I do not believe – but one never knows. I rather suspect he is ‘Controlled Opposition’ and really a sort of tame conspiracy person who is actually part of the whole Agenda thing. But then that is how deep a conspiracy loon I am – that I think other conspiracy loons must be really working for the other side….haha, a sort of agenda Ray Epps, haha..

But if you wish to hear a lot of good China stories check him out – the Urbanizing of the Chinese is a big part of his story, so on topic here – although Xi is the main story, that and energy and aging of the Chinese…..

Andrew Boughton
Andrew Boughton
1 year ago

My God, how unremittingly bleak. Like the title of the film, positively funereal. Cities which feed off the farmers tend to impoverish them everywhere, because the markets for commodities are monolithic and dictated by city folk, and because those in control of the retailing take all the profits. It’s the Economy, Stupid. It’s about economic power. Not quite Marxism 101, not quite Capitalism 101. More like the Eternal Triangle.

Andrew Boughton
Andrew Boughton
1 year ago

My God, how unremittingly bleak. Like the title of the film, positively funereal. Cities which feed off the farmers tend to impoverish them everywhere, because the markets for commodities are monolithic and dictated by city folk, and because those in control of the retailing take all the profits. It’s the Economy, Stupid. It’s about economic power. Not quite Marxism 101, not quite Capitalism 101. More like the Eternal Triangle.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago

Just went and checked the plot of the story.
Bleak and beautiful. And I can see why the Chinese govt hate it, because it highlights how morally bankrupt, “price of everything and value of nothing” society becomes in a Marxist / communist system that has destroyed all concept of religion, local community, humanity in the name of “progrss”.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago

Just went and checked the plot of the story.
Bleak and beautiful. And I can see why the Chinese govt hate it, because it highlights how morally bankrupt, “price of everything and value of nothing” society becomes in a Marxist / communist system that has destroyed all concept of religion, local community, humanity in the name of “progrss”.