Despite huge leaps in recent decades, rural living standards remain an issue of widespread popular concern in China. A heating crisis in Hebei last winter, for example, became the focus of intense online discussion and subsequent censorship as the withdrawal of natural gas subsidies and a ban on traditional coal heating left many rural pensioners shivering. These concerns are not confined to the countryside: recently deplatformed influencer Hu Chenfeng first came to prominence in 2023 by highlighting the meager pension of a 78-year-old woman in Nanchong, Sichuan’s second most populous city. But many city-dwellers, encouraged by rose-tinted official media coverage and idyllic clips from “New Farmer” influencers, hold romanticized views of rural life and its supposed perks that are at odds with the daily reality for millions of the one-third of Chinese citizens still living in the countryside. Because prosperous urbanites are the most common points of contact for most foreigners, these misconceptions can easily spread beyond China’s own borders.
At 9:00 last night I did my second livestream, with guest Zhou Jian, known online as “Uncle Zhou.” He blogs as “Uncle Zhou Walks the Countryside,” and is chairman of the Beijing Gan’en Philanthropic Foundation. We’re both originally from Sichuan, and got to know each other through the rural pensions issue. After our first meeting, we decided to do a livestream together. We ended up chatting until nearly midnight last night, and only wrapped up then for the sake of viewers who’d have work the next day.
I particularly wanted to talk to Uncle Zhou because he’s been to places I never have: he’s visited nearly 3,000 villages in 150 of China’s impoverished counties, conducting in-depth interviews with some 2-3,000 rural people. I have more faith in people like him and Zhao Yushun and Yuan Zhenzhen from “Chronicles of True Encounters” than in “Three Rural Issues” experts who go on about the “protective dual urban-rural system” or the rural-development crowd with their claims of “revitalizing the countryside.”
I had only one core question in this conversation: How far apart, really, is rural reality from city-dwellers’ impressions?
1. Do farmers “own land” that they can fall back on?
This is an unavoidable question, because in the eyes of many urban residents, farmers’ “land ownership” is a huge advantage. I asked Uncle Zhou: In all the many places you’ve been to, and among all the many farmers you’ve met, have you ever come across a family that got rich from working the land?
His answer was extremely direct: “Not one. I’ve been to more than 150 counties, and never even heard of a farmer who’d managed to do that. Basically, the whole income from farming covers only a part of their living costs—it’s nearly impossible to generate cash income beyond that. That is, in the countryside today, a family that doesn’t have anyone bringing in income with migrant work elsewhere will most likely be on welfare.”
This is at heart because the rate of increase of production and labor costs in recent decades has outpaced that of grain prices many times over. Uncle Zhou added that when they abolished agricultural tax in 2006, one important reason was that the combined salaries of the tax collectors were greater than the revenue that it generated. In other words, the value of agricultural production had fallen so far that it couldn’t even pay the tax collectors, yet there are still people saying farmers can pull a fortune out of the soil. What kind of sense does that make?
Take Sichuan, where the paddy field per capita may be less than a mu [about a sixth of an acre]. Even by the most optimistic estimates, you’d be lucky to earn 800 yuan [about $120 U.S.] from two annual crops after seed, pesticide, fertilizer, and machinery costs. A family plot of two or three mu might bring in one or two thousand yuan [about $150-300] a year. That amount “means you can catch a cold a few times, or buy a couple of months’ medication for high blood pressure or diabetes, and it’s all gone.”
And that’s for those who can still farm. But the farmers’ pensions issue we were discussing is about the elderly, not able-bodied people of working age. This is a key point that many urban residents, consciously or not, overlook. So I asked Uncle Zhou: “Can these elderly people still do the work?”
“It’s not a matter of whether they can do it or not,” he answered. “They have no choice but to do it, because a month’s pension won’t even cover the most basic necessities. If they don’t farm, what will they eat? It’s a matter of life and death.”
He went on to describe a long list of common health issues he’d seen among the rural elderly: an excess of chronic conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Minor ailments go untreated, and major ones are simply endured. When they can’t be endured any longer, you go to hospital; the doctor takes a quick look, and if they say it’s gotten serious, you go home to wait for death. He met a Five Guarantees recipient [food, clothing, medical care, housing, burial expenses] from Zhongjiang, Sichuan last year who cut his toe on a piece of glass. His medical insurance would have covered hospital treatment itself, but he couldn’t afford food or travel costs, so he just cut the toe off with a kitchen cleaver. A living, breathing human treating his own body like expendable parts. Later, he fell ill again, spent two days on an IV drip, and died the day after returning home.
City-dwellers think the rural elderly can live off the land. The reality is they don’t have the physical strength for farm work.
2. Farmers “have land,” but it’s not really theirs.
Beyond the fact that, as we’ve seen, you can’t make a living from farming, there’s a still more fundamental issue: legally speaking, farmers don’t actually own their land.
Uncle Zhou explained a property rights issue that a great many people don’t have a clear understanding of. After 1949, land was appropriated from wealthy landlords and redistributed to farmers, but the collectivization movement that began in 1953 put farmland under collective ownership. After Reform and Opening, the “village group” became the smallest unit of rural land ownership, but these village groups don’t even have legal standing as entities; they’re artificial grassroots organizations that are actually run by the village committees. So legally speaking, farmers only have usage rights to the land, not ownership rights, still less full rights to dispose of the land as they see fit.
This means that farmers have no say in cases of land expropriation; they can’t borrow a cent using the land as collateral. You’re using a bowl passed to you by others, which can’t be passed on. The minute you lose your connections with the village collective, the bowl’s taken back.
What’s even more absurd is that state subsidies don’t go to individual farmers, but only to large-scale operations. Uncle Zhou met one farmer who’d originally had a private plot that was part of a larger field. When that field was consolidated into a bigger operation, his plot went with it. The only way the old man could eke out a living was by moving the wall of his courtyard a metre and a half [five feet], opening up a little patch of land between the wall and the road where he could grow vegetables.
So subsidies are out of reach [for small farmers]. In many areas, the subsidies have a minimum threshold, and only large operations qualify.
Urbanites think farmers’ land ownership is a special privilege, but in fact “their” land doesn’t bring in any money, doesn’t get them any subsidies, and isn’t really theirs at all.
3. Homestead land is a plus, right? But the downside is location.
Another thing city-dwellers often envy is the rural homestead. In a country where land is owned by the state, and most urban residents can only buy apartments, having your own patch of land seems like an enormous perk.
Uncle Zhou’s response is straightforward: “A rural homestead isn’t worth a fart.”
Anyone who’s bought property in the cities can understand his reasoning: location is invariably what determines property value. A 50-square-metre [538-square-foot] apartment inside Beijing’s Second Ring Road is simply a different kettle of fish to a villa in Sichuan’s Daliang Mountains. I can’t understand why city-dwellers treat “location, location, location” as the golden rule when they buy homes, but as soon as talk turns to rural homesteads, they suddenly forget this basic common sense.
What’s the use of a homestead in a mountain village where the ambulance wouldn’t come even if you had the cell signal to call it? Uncle Zhou’s mother-in-law lives outside the Fifth Ring Road [of Beijing], and even she always complains about the distance, saying “I’d be a goner before the ambulance got out here.” As for a housing plot in a rural village, do you really want to retire somewhere where you can’t even call an ambulance?
All that aside, you don’t have full property rights to the homestead. It can’t be inherited, and if you sell it you can only sell the structure itself, not the land beneath it. This kind of “ownership” is more like a temporary residence permit.
4. The countryside’s low cost of living? Maybe it’s cheap because it’s flooded with fakes.
Another talking point in urban fantasies of the countryside is that “rural prices are low; living there is cheap.”
Uncle Zhou topples this argument with his own personal experience. He saw a lot of market data for electronic goods while working at CCID some years back, and concluded that manufactured goods sold for lower prices in big cities, where there were price wars. Smaller markets saw fewer sales, businesses had no incentive to compete, and consumer prices are inflated by various layers of taxes and transportation costs. By way of example, he cited the purchase of new curtains for Wenquan Elementary School in Yunnan’s Mengla County. When volunteers checked the price, they found it “too expensive,” and challenged the principal. Deeply aggrieved at this, the principal urged them to talk directly to the supplier. The supplier walked them through the numbers: At each step of the way from Shanghai to Kunming, from Kunming to Xishuangbanna, from Xishuangbanna to Mengla, and from Mengla to their own town, there were new shipping costs and taxes. After those four legs of the journey, the cost was more than 50% higher than it would have been in Shanghai.
That’s the case with genuine goods. What about counterfeits?
Uncle Zhou said that rural areas have long been a dumping ground for counterfeit and substandard goods, and that small village stores are flooded with shanzhai versions of all kinds of products from big brands. From goods that won’t sell in the cities to government project procurement, anything that can be bundled off to the countryside, is. “They’ve really become the intermediaries of this economy—anything that can’t be sold, anything that should really be written off, they’ll happily accept it all.”
This includes the livestream commerce that’s booming at the moment, which has an inferior class of goods for rural customers. As we discussed in my last livestream with Zhao Yushun, the system will send lesser-quality “B”-grade items to customer addresses that it identifies as rural, because rural consumers have less awareness of their rights and nothing to compare against.
The conclusion is very simple: in the countryside you can choose between paying more than urbanites for the same thing, or paying less for an item of lesser quality. The supposed “low cost of living” is a myth. [Chinese]
Part Two will follow shortly.
