A road has finally come to Xin Cun, a hamlet perched on a sandy ridge beneath a blank grey sky in China’s Shaanxi province. On one side of the village, the slope slips away to a wooded valley. On the other, the haphazard apple orchards stretch down to a river, swollen after recent sharp and heavy rains. In either direction the horizon is a mass of similar hills, valleys and apple trees.
But this is no rural idyll. The river leads to an oil refinery and a vast new chemical factory. It is the latter that has brought the road — and its trucks coughing exhaust fumes into the heavy, humid air 24 hours a day. They pass a few metres from the doors of the house of Dong Pang’s parents-in-law.
Dong Pang, in his neat trousers and clean shirt, stands out among the farmers of the village. He is visiting his wife’s former home and is quick to point out that he now lives in the city of Xi’an in an apartment and works as a paediatrician. He sits gingerly on the edge of the single bed in the one-roomed home, a vaulted single chamber with patchy electricity and sanitation which, built half into the hillside, is known as a ”cavehouse”.
”I like to come back and visit the simple people of the countryside,” he says. His wife sits quietly on a thin plastic mat stretched over the surface of the brick and plaster platform that serves as a bed. An iron stove is built into it, a traditional way of combining cooking and heating. There is little else in the house — an old television, two carved wooden chairs and two large and garish posters. One is of a large and very chubby baby, the other of an array of plastic fruit and bottles of European brandy. Dong Pang’s wife turns away and holds a small child to her breast. A small cat crosses the vegetable garden outside the house and stretches in the evening sun.
To market
The villagers of Xin Cun are very happy with their new road, Dong Pang’s in-laws say when they come back from the fields. Now they can take their apples to local markets rather than wait for the buyers to come to them. As a result they get three times as much for their produce — 60 000 yuan (about $9 000) annually — and this year their entire crop is being bought up by the government. ”Something to do with the Olympics,” they add.
A 160km north and east of Xin Cun is another village, Zaho. Here, too, ranks of ridged hills stretch away to the horizon and the slopes of sandy soil are terraced into thin orchards curling along the contour lines. And here, too, a road is coming. The village lies at the end of a 160km stretch of bitumen currently being rammed through the gorges and the hills. With its dozens of bridges, its cuttings, its scores of bulldozers and hundreds of workers, the road would be a major national engineering feet almost anywhere in the world — except in China where it is the equivalent of a bypass extension in rural Wales.
Zaho used to be a tobacco village. ”Conditions were very tough,” says Wang Zhi Hong, the 44-year-old local village head. ”We used donkey carts to bring the water up for irrigation.” But tobacco earned just 500 yuan a month — $73 — so they also turned to apples. Zaho is still dirt poor — most villagers eat meat merely on festivals a dozen times a year — but much more money is coming in.
New water mains run to the village fields and, though Zaho’s 280 inhabitants are too poor to pay the fee to have their homes connected, pipes now irrigate the fields. Those fields are an increasingly rare commodity. Desertification, reforestation schemes, urbanisation, road-building and a host of other factors has resulted in a shortage of farmland in China. From the 120-million hectares that remain — seen as a crucial national security asset — somewhere between 500 000 and one million hectares are lost each year.
Changing demands
As China gets richer food demands are changing. Many outside the country fear that the new appetites and the new wealth of 1,3-billion people, whether in Zaho or in Shanghai, will drive up global food prices.
In fact, some economists argue, the situation is more complicated and the impact of emerging economies on the world’s food prices is exaggerated.
Firstly, they say, studies have shown that it is not the amount of food that is changing but the type. The Chinese now want more higher-quality products, more processed food, more meat and more dairy products — but not simply more food. The country remains more or less, self-sufficient and is likely to be so for the next decade. So the apples produced in Zaho and Xin Cun go some way to off-setting a big deficit in oil seeds, for example. Even the new appetite for dairy products may well be satisfied by increased internal production.
Yet, for anyone used to travelling in India or Indonesia, it is not the absence of land but the absence of the crowds, of people or of livestock, in China that is striking. Wang Zhi Hong himself has had four children — a flagrant breach of the country’s one-child policy that has resulted in a series of onerous fines — who have all left the village to work in local towns or faraway cities. What is needed, the economists say, is to increase the productivity of the 320-million people, 43% of the active population, who work the land. But no one is sure if the Chinese government want to sacrifice their self-sufficiency in low-yield grain to risk higher-value crops whose price is heavily determined by international commodity markets.
Behind the doors of their mud-and-brick homes, the people of Zaho refer obliquely to the problems so common in the countryside everywhere in the emerging world: corrupt or self-seeking officials, brutal police, avaricious relatives, poor schools and worse medical care. ”I’m a member of the Communist party but that doesn’t help much round here,” said Wang ruefully. Some talk about the famines and random violence of the years of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution or even the widespread starvation of the earlier Great Leap Forward. Those days were safer, surer, more equal, even if people were poorer, they say. Then they pause, reflect, and return to praising the new road and the price of apples.
As elsewhere in China, slogans are painted on walls. ”Rule of law keeps the village well-run,” the side of one Zaho farm reads. The road back to the nearest city is lined with more injunctions. ”Oil and coal strengthens the country”, ”Openness is the driving force” and ”Fruit and vegetables make us rich”. – guardian.co.uk