The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly · 1 Mar 2006
help the poor was to sponsor tube wells for irrigation during the dry season so farmers could grow two crops a year. Yunus gave the farmers a loan out of his own money to finance the scheme. The farmers reaped a good harvest. Ironically for the founder of the idea that the poor
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can be a good credit risk, the farmers didn’t fully repay Yunus, and he lost money. But he persisted, with the city boy visiting as many rural villages as possible to try
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not paying or by not delivering the service. I can arrange to have fresh meat, tomatoes, chilies, cilantro, and onions delivered to my taquería by farmers. It has to be worth the trip for them to deliver the produce, so they will demand payment in advance. Now they might not show
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also may have a competitive advantage over outsiders because they share technical knowledge with one another. Economists Tim Conley and Chris Udry found that Ghanaian farmers shared technical knowledge within their social network about a new opportunity to grow pineapples for export to Europe, such as how much fertilizer to use
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named Nasibeko of Kuphera village, Malawi, reports, “Our life was fine until one day when our cattle were stolen. After that, our lives became miserable.” Farmers in Mtamba, Malawi, say, “We can’t grow cassava these days to support us when the maize is finished because thieves will come to steal
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even more complicated if the land is used for different purposes by different parties (for example, for grazing by pastoralists and for growing crops by farmers). Poorer societies define land ownership more by oral tradition, customary arrangements, or informal community agreement than by formal titles. An expensive system of land titling
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opportunities, with no state intervention, with no structural adjustment or shock therapy to promote cell phones. These are not just consumer pleasures. Cell phones help farmers, fishers, and entrepreneurs check out prices, suppliers, and consumers; arrange meetings; transfer funds; and lots of other things that are logistical nightmares in societies without
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, the dynamism of the poor at the bottom can sometimes lead to emergence out of stagnation of the wider society. Miracle in Xiaogang In the tiny village of Xiaogang, Anhui province—the heart of China’s rice-growing region—twenty families held a secret meeting in 1978. The villagers were desperate because they
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the land’s output. You got your rice share whether you worked hard or not, and as a result people hardly worked. The villagers of Xiaogang reached an agreement: they would divide up the land and farm it individually, with each person keeping the output of his own land. They kept
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their agreement a secret out of fear of the Communist authorities. Rice production in Xiaogang shot up. The results were too spectacular to stay secret for long. Neighboring villages wanted to know how Xiaogang had increased its rice production so much. Other villages also put into place individual farming. Before
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the Inca empire, called the mita, drafting indigenous people to do the unpleasant work in the mines. The boom spilled over into profits for European farmers growing maize, wheat, and coca leaf for mine workers. Under the encomienda system, well-connected conquistadores got large grants of land with rights to the
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America; wheat was the crop of choice. Wheat could be produced on a small scale, hence a middle class was formed made up of family farmers in the United States and Canada. Heavy reliance on tropical commodities and minerals was also associated with inequality elsewhere in the world. Fig. 13. The
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offers a rare detailed case study of an aid project by an independent outsider. A Canadian International Development Agency/World Bank project was to help farmers in the mountains of Lesotho (the Thaba-Tseka region) to gain access to markets and develop modern methods of livestock management and crop production. The
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infrequent rainfall.” The project managers complained that the local people were “defeatist” and didn’t “think of themselves as farmers.” Perhaps the locals didn’t consider themselves farmers because they were not farmers—they were migrant workers in South African mines.21 The main accomplishment of the project was the building of roads
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that brought South African lorries carrying grain into the region (driving the few existing local farmers out of business). Aid agency watchers should be tough on such disasters, if only with the aim of strengthening the accountability lobby in foreign aid
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polluted river. Villagers, especially children, had been getting sick from the contaminated water—with some of them dying. Children had been kept out of school, farmers away from farming, all to pursue the all-consuming and backbreaking task of fetching water. Now life was better. Some of the money of the
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British and French colonizers in Africa, bringing benefits to the locals. The colonizers’ railways (and later roads) facilitated the access of African cocoa and coffee farmers to the world market.38 Cocoa in Ghana fueled per capita growth somewhat more rapidly than in British India: 1.3 percent per annum from
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British colonial officials’ next bright idea in Sierra Leone was to introduce long-staple cotton to replace the short-staple cotton already grown by local farmers. The results were disastrous: heavy rain eroded long-staple fields. The peasants had not chosen their methods by accident: intercropping short-staple cotton with food
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local British officials also introduced irrigated rice in Sierra Leone, whose yields rapidly declined due to irrigation’s by-products of acidity and salinity. Local farmers were already getting high yields from rice grown in mangrove swamps. Not yet convinced of their own fallibility, the Brits introduced tractors into Sierra Leone
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farm. They offered the standard solution of ridging to combat soil erosion, and were at a loss to understand why Malawian farmers resisted the tried-and-true technique of British farmers. Unfortunately, ridging in the sandy soils of the Shire Valley led to more erosion during the rainy season, while exposing the
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. By 1975, there were 335,000 whites in Angola, 5 percent of the population. The whites made up most of the economy’s managers, commercial farmers, business owners, and technicians.25 Even more than in other African colonies, the colonizer made a mess out of decolonization. In 1975, after a socialist
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declaration in 1872: Centuries have elapsed since schools were first established…. Because learning was viewed as the exclusive province of the samurai and his superiors, farmers, artisans, merchants, and women have neglected it altogether…. There shall, in the future, be no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an
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computer—made in China. The laptop computer itself—made in China. The exploration of free markets that started with the end of agriculture communes in Xiaogang in 1978, as told in a previous chapter, spread to industrial as well as agricultural enterprises. On December 24, 2004, the New York Times did
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agencies probed and experimented their way toward effective interventions—such as saving the life of a child with malaria, building a road for a poor farmer to get his crops to market and support his family, or getting food and dietary supplements to people who would otherwise be stunted from malnutrition
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economic growth in formula for success of high-technology exports markets in growth of takeoff in ten best per capita growth rates tuberculosis project in Xiaogang Chinese, overseas Chowdhury, Zafrullah civilization, Europeans see themselves as bringing civil law civil service, merit-based civil society Clemens, Michael Clinton, Bill cocoa coffee cold
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Outlook World Health Organization (WHO) and AIDS Chinese tuberculosis project creation of on health spending in poor countries in international aid bureaucracy vaccination campaigns of Xiaogang (China) Yamagata Aritomo Yeltsin, Boris Yugoslavia Yukos Yunus, Mohammad Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) AIDS in Belgian Congo cellular phone network in government
Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg · 14 Sep 2020 · 505pp · 138,917 words
? The economist Charles Wheelan once asked us to imagine the best machine possible.3 It would turn soybeans into computers. That would be fantastic for farmers. They could do what they are good at, and still get the computers they needed to control their irrigation system. And even better, the same
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ten times larger than another is seventeen times more innovative, and one that is fifty times bigger is 130 times more innovative.32 More efficient farmers could feed not just priests and scribes, but also bakers and brewers, spinners and weavers, metalworkers, brickmakers, jewellers, barbers, gardeners and artists – and they could
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hold slaves. And these could in their turn provide the farmers with clothes, tools, weapons, buildings and entertainment that they could never have produced on their own. This is why these early Mesopotamian cities record the
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refrigeration made it possible for cheap American grain and meat to reach hungry Europeans, and for cheaper European manufacturing goods to enter American homes. European farmers and American capitalists responded by trying to block competition. Before World War I this did not hurt trade much since falling shipping costs more than
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that his maternal lineage originated in the Eastern Alps but his paternal DNA came from far, far away. It was actually more similar to ancient farmers in Sweden and Bulgaria, which raises the possibility that Ötzi’s parents came from different parts of Europe and had a fling in the Alps
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of the continent. While archaeologists used to think this happened because of cultural transmission, modern DNA tests have revealed that migration was the cause. As farmers multiplied in Anatolia, present-day Turkey, many of them moved north into southern Europe in search of new, fertile land. They cleared the forests, grew
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innovative technologies and started to interbreed with the native hunter-gatherers. One of them was probably the father of Ötzi. Around 5000 bc these migrant farmers had reached northern Germany. By then they had transformed the whole culture and the genetic make-up of Europe from bands of hunter-gatherers to
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a continent of farmers. After having hesitated for more than a thousand years, for some reason that still confounds us Swedes, they even defied the cold and the deep
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population. Europe was the original melting pot. My own DNA test reveals I am a quite typical north European mixture of African huntergatherer, Middle Eastern farmer and pastoralist from the Eurasian Steppes. I also found out that I am 0.9 per cent Denisovan and 2.4 per cent Neanderthal. And
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individual mobility and multilevel social networks were already in place’.6 The major waves of migration did not end because we settled down and became farmers. The new cities were created by largescale mobility from rural areas to towns and cities, and they became so productive because they were meeting places
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next print. With this method hundreds and sometimes thousands of copies of text were printed quickly and relatively cheaply. City folk were fed by innovative farmers who over a short period had doubled output and were turning ‘into a class of adaptable, rational, profit-oriented, petty entrepreneurs’ because of secure property
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to that land, and also the right to sell. The area of cultivated land grew dramatically and would not be surpassed until the modern era. Farmers also constantly adapted new and higher-yielding crop varieties. Increased efficiency made many agricultural workers redundant, who moved to cities and manufacturing sectors. Tea traders
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the dynamic, bustling Song China. Here was instead a stable, paternalistic society that gently guided (with purges, censorship and spies) duty-bound scholars, self-sufficient farmers and obedient traders who only dealt with locally produced goods. They did not need innovations, and when they came upon mechanical clocks and other similar
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slow progress.12 This tendency is sometimes referred to as ‘Vladimir’s choice’, after an Eastern European fable. God appears before Vladimir, a poor peasant farmer, and tells him he will grant him one wish. Before Vladimir chooses, God adds a caveat: ‘Anything I give to you will be granted to
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to design new exotic securities that are little more than regulatory arbitrage. The EU spends 41 per cent of its total budget on subsidies for farmers, major energy producers rely on government favours and handouts, and residents legislate to block new construction so as to keep the great unwashed out and
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monthly The Household Narrative had a special segment on ‘accidents and disasters’. Landowners complained that the railways destroyed the landscape and the fox hunts, and farmers were concerned that they would ruin the hens’ laying capacity and the cows’ grazing habits. The Victorian literati described the railway as ‘contamination’. Wordsworth claimed
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that began to dismantle the Maoist command economy did not emerge from the heads of planners but from the initiative of starving villagers. Peasants in Xiaogang in Anhui province started to privatize their land in secret in December 1978, which increased production dramatically, and inspired others to do the same. Private farming
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spread ‘like a chicken pest’, as one farmer put it. ‘When one village has it, the whole country will be infected.’52 Soon other villagers started small
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will make them rich in return for total power. A severe economic crisis would tear up this social contract. Anyone can raise productivity by moving farmers to factories (even the Soviet Union could do that) but it is much more difficult to make sure that those factories constantly experiment and innovate
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right way to reduce CO2 emissions. ‘It’s coming, and government can help,’ with billions in subsidies and mandates to blend it into gasoline. Many farmers switched from soybean to corn, which resulted in much higher grain prices. But ethanol turned out to pull less of a punch than gasoline and
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1 per cent, kulaks, leftists, globalists, class enemies, the fake media or any of the nine black categories during Mao’s Cultural Revolution: landlords, wealthy farmers, anti-revolutionaries, bad influences, right-wingers, traitors, spies, capitalist roaders and ‘the stinking old ninth’ – intellectuals. A necessary condition is difference – real or perceived – since
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time, before governments were supposed to be involved in everything, we didn’t have professional politicians working fulltime in a capital far away, but teachers, farmers, workers, businessmen and journalists who worked part-time as politicians and only went away to the capital for the few months when parliament was in
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’, Washington, DC, The Cato Institute, 2015. R. Coase and N. Wang, How China Became Capitalist. Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 52 K. X. Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People. Boulder, Westview Press, 1996. 53 N. R. Lardy, Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China. Washington
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anagrams, 83 Anatolia, 42, 74 Anaximander, 127 Anaximenes, 127 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Andromeda, 88 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Anhui, China, 315 anti-Semitism, 11, 94–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 254, 255 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Antoninus Pius
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, Impossible, and Stupid (Isenberg), 296 Wozniak, Stephen, 304 Wrangham, Richard, 226, 227, 229 Wright, Robert, 249–50, 251 Xenophanes of Colophon, 130, 131 Xenophon, 132 Xiaogang, Anhui, 315 Yamen, Guangdong, 173 Yamnaya people, 75 Yangtze river, 172 Yangzhou, Jiangsu, 174, 352 Yankees, 58 Yellow river, 172 Yemen, 75, 111, 365, 366 YouTube
Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl · 30 Oct 2012 · 780pp · 168,782 words
imprisoning the landlords and dividing up the land among the peasants. Yet unlike some other leaders, he eschewed radical Marxist doctrine in favor of giving farmers incentives to produce. “People should be taxed according to the average production of recent years and any amount exceeding that average should entirely belong to
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of the White Revolution was a land-reform plan that broke up many of the big inherited landholdings and parceled them out to former tenant farmers. It also included a national literacy campaign, introduced suffrage for women, and nationalized forests, pasturelands, and water resources. Other legislation privatized state-owned enterprises and
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faced them. One of Hua’s deputies, Vice Premier Ji Dengkui, gave a speech that frankly acknowledged the dire state of China’s 700 million farmers, who made up the overwhelming majority of the country’s citizens. In not so many words, Ji acknowledged that the twists and turns of official
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policy during the Cultural Revolution had left farmers unsettled and confused. He proposed a few technical remedies: increasing the supply of seeds and fertilizer, boosting the volume of agricultural credits, and significantly raising
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the price the state paid farmers for their grain.16 Ji’s speech did mark a departure from the sterile sloganeering of the Cultural Revolution era. Even so, party policy remained
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in the regions that had been hit hardest by the Great Leap. In the late 1970s there were rural areas—especially in the provinces of Anhui, Sichuan, and Guizhou—where many people still lived under the threat of starvation. Very quietly, some of them began to make deals with local officials
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, who were only too eager to improve their own living standards. Farmers paid bribes for the privilege of cultivating extra plots on vacant lots, raising animals on the side, or keeping surplus produce for their own use
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looming in remote corners of the province, he was already moving to lift restrictions on private farming for some of the hardest-hit areas. In Anhui Province, on the other side of the country, another provincial party chief, Wan Li, was considering similar measures to prevent a recurrence of starvation. At
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1955.18 So the notion of reintroducing the early 1960s principle of farming by household (baochan daohu) was clearly on the minds of the delegates. Farmers needed incentives in order to get agriculture going again—but this implied discarding one of Mao’s most treasured policies, the nationwide collectivization campaign of
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the Great Leap, when he had forced farmers together into “people’s communes.” Mao had reacted with indignation to any suggestion of a return to family farming, a policy he regarded as a
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the Work Conference that ventured into this delicate territory. It was time, he said, to take measures that would awaken the private initiative of the farmers. Those who heard or read his speech understood immediately what he had in mind. Yu Guangyuan, a Deng associate who chronicled his own experiences as
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if—with a light poke of the finger through a thin piece of window paper—the four characters would appear. . . . He maintained that once the farmers’ initiative was aroused, China had enormous potential for increasing agricultural production.” Given the times, merely implying the need for such a policy was an act
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excessive bureaucracy and overcentralization and explicitly encouraged shifting authority away from central planners and dispersing it among lower-level managers and officials. It even promised farmers greater latitude in using private plots and pursuing side businesses (though there was still no talk of family farming). The communiqué most certainly did not
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. He witnessed the famine conditions that still plagued the peasantry years after the end of the Great Leap. He heard about the injustices committed against farmers and workers by party activists who claimed to hold their best interests at heart. The experience changed him forever. After Mao’s death, as the
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wide enough to allow for a single road that winds steeply up along terrifying defiles. Here and there ledges and plateaus allow for terraces where farmers grow apricots, almonds, and wheat. The people who live in this place inhabit a relatively self-contained world, and their spirit of fierce independence was
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the tasks assigned to each group of workers.11 At seven, well after dawn, the team leader arrived to unlock the door. By this time farmers in most parts of the world would have already been out in their fields. But the members of Production Team No. 12 saw no reason
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all afraid that that the others will sneak a few minutes more of leisure.” It was around a quarter past eight by the time the farmers shouldered tools and headed slowly off to their jobs. The team head later explained why the impression of stasis was deceptive. “People aren’t lazy
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of the same stagnation witnessed by Mosher. There were a few communities where both farmers and officials were quietly testing the limits of the possible. One of the most intriguing was the village of Xiaogang, in a part of Anhui Province that had been hit especially hard by Great Leap starvation. Fengyang County
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had lost ninety thousand people—a quarter of its population—between 1958 and 1960.13 In the 1950s, Xiaogang village had thirty-four households; by 1979
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in the village were boiling poplar leaves and eating them with salt; others roasted tree bark and ground it to make flour15 The peasants of Xiaogang were locked into the commune system, which forced them to cultivate collectively owned farmland. In return for their efforts, they received “work points” that could
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any village leaders who were arrested or shot as a result of the agreement. The Xiaogang villagers had no way of knowing that farmers all around China were trying to get away with similar plans. But Anhui Province was a bit different. The food situation there was so dire that some officials were
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willing to turn a blind eye to what the farmers were doing17—even while others persisted with obstruction, denying fertilizers to the experimenters.18
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The new party chief in Anhui, another victim of the Cultural Revolution, had his own ideas. Wan Li had assumed the
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realized that the comeback of household contracting was the only way to make sure that people avoided starvation. He gave his official blessing to the Xiaogang experiment, as well as allowing other places to try out similar measures (always under the proviso that the peasants involved were in particularly desperate straits
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). Farmers were allowed to divide up the land of the commune into household plots. They were required to provide a set quota of grain to the
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state. The rest could be sold off in private markets. The effects were dramatic. Grain output in Xiaogang rose sixfold in the course of the year. The per capita income of the villages went from twenty-two yuan to four hundred.19 This
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, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole country will be infected.”20 In 1979, by one estimate, 10 percent of Anhui Province was practicing the household-responsibility system. In June 1979, after paying a visit to Fengyang County to see the results for himself, Wan Li
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-owned enterprises to produce some goods in response to market demand and to use the resulting profits as they saw fit. Many of his own farmers still labored under threat of starvation, so he, too, began to allow them to deviate from the collective pattern. In 1978 he had begun allowing
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it emerged, was about to prove a more powerful force than the Maoists’ invocations of revolutionary purity. In August 1979, encouraged by Zhao’s permissiveness, farmers in Sichuan decided to take an even more daring step. They set about dismantling Xiangyang People’s Commune in Guanghan, a town about forty miles
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and other Sichuan officials provided them with discreet political cover. The dissolution of the first commune was a step of far-reaching implications. The Guanghan farmers divided the assets of the commune into subunits, some of them economic (having to do with agricultural production), some of them purely administrative. This set
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became prime minister, and he played a crucial role in directing the economy during the early reform period. As for Wan Li, the peasants of Anhui immortalized him with a saying: “If you want to eat rice, look for Wan Li.” Wan had the extra advantage of sharing Deng’s favorite
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up to, they usually waited for evidence of success before they committed themselves unambiguously. Wan Li and Zhao Ziyang could claim credit for letting the farmers do what came naturally. When the experiments of the peasants bore fruit, Deng publicized their success, recognizing a good thing when he saw it. But
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he certainly could not take credit for giving farmers the idea. The irony, as American anthropologist Stephen Mosher realized, was that Western scholars at the time regarded the Chinese as incorrigible collectivists. “Group thinking
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were able to arrange for another ride. The walk was not a total loss; the little group passed by a rural private market where local farmers were hawking all manner of produce, something that none of the Americans in the group could ever remember having seen before. Finally, after a full
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Solidarity continued to collect union dues and paid assistance to workers who lost their jobs or fell ill. Workers signed petitions for arrested union officials. Farmers sent food to the families of people who had been arrested, and workers reciprocated by supplying them with underground literature. Taken together, these gestures attested
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“shock therapy,” surely this was it. But it was a form of therapy that was warmly welcomed by its intended patients. To be sure, these farmers did not actually own the land they were working. But they could do much of their work as if they did. No longer did peasants
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, who for years had emphasized grain to the virtual exclusion of all other crops. But there were other dramatic manifestations of the new policy. Now farmers could grow whatever made sense under their own economic and climatic conditions. Suddenly, a whole range of other foodstuffs, long neglected, became available in the
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private markets that proliferated across China. Farmers in Guangdong now grew sugarcane in addition to rice. Northerners cultivated not only wheat but also cabbage and eggplant, mushrooms and beets. “Sideline occupations” like
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fish farming increased the range of available products and boosted farmers’ revenues. Favored meats like pork or goose, once an unthinkable luxury for most Chinese, became widely available. Within the course of a single decade, China
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Great Leap Forward, melted away like spring snow in the course of a few short years, following the pattern established in Sichuan Province in 1979. Farmers focused on cultivating the agricultural land that was split off from the old collective farms, while the new “townships”—the village administrations that emerged from
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that gave industrial enterprises more autonomy and allowed them to retain more profits for themselves. He also presided over agricultural reforms that extended the term farmers were allowed to rent land from the state, thus reinforcing the principle of private initiative. His term also saw an expansion of the Special Economic
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and the Third Plenum (November-December 1978), Yu Guangyuan, 21. 15. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Vogel, 233. 16. Ibid. 17. How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People, Kate Xiao Zhou, 53–54. 18. Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World, Yu, 52. 19. Ibid., 44, 46. 20. Deng
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-in-asia-for-love-songs.html. 10. Interview with Muir. 11. Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese, Steven W. Mosher, 37–38. 12. Ibid., 40. 13. “Xiaogang Village, Birthplace of Rural Reform, Moves On,” Wang Ke, China.org. cn, December 15, 2008, http://www.china.org.cn/china/features/content_16955209.htm
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. 14. How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People, by Kate Xiao Zhou, 56. 15. “Xiaogang Village, Birthplace of Rural Reform, Moves On,” Ke. 16. Ibid. 17. “Farmers Who Provided the Spark,” Raymond Li, South China Morning Post, November 17, 2008
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. 18. How the Farmers Changed China, Zhou, 53–54. 19. “Xiaogang Village, Birthplace of Rural Reform, Moves On,” Ke. 20
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. How the Farmers Changed China, Zhou, 53–54. 21. http://mengwah.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/3–1-reforming-the-agricultural
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China, James Palmer. Basic Books, New York, 2012. An Historical Guide to Kabul, Nancy Hatch Dupree. 2nd ed. Afghan Tourist Organization, Kabul, 1972. How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People, Kate Xiao Zhou. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1996. How We Got Here: The 70s, the Decade That Brought You
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, 99, 212, 228, 261, 262 (see also Taraki, Nur Mohammed: and Hafizullah Amin) People’s Republic of China, 18–20, 21–32, 215, 327–337 Anhui Province in, 250–251 Baoan Foreign Trade Base in, 256 Canton Trade Fair in, 254 Central Party Work Conference (1978), 117–118, 123, 127–129
Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan · 1 Jan 2002 · 350pp · 103,988 words
are generated. The vendors make others—as well as themselves—better off by making food available to the urban poor, and by providing income to farmers with which to buy necessities like clothing. Thus they exemplify Adam Smith’s analysis of the merchant: “By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes
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friend reported that the rice harvest in the north was going to be bad. Chozaemon promptly bought the future Nagoya-area rice harvest, paying the farmers 10 percent upfront and owing them the rest. After the harvest came in, he stored the rice for several months, selling it for a tidy
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sellers. In some villages in rural India, the villagers have banded together and bought a computer. In Bagdi village in the state of Madhya Pradesh, farmers use the village computer to get printouts of the prices wheat, garlic, and other crops are fetching in nearby markets. This increases their bargaining power
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it to him,” said wheat grower Satya Narayan Khati. “Otherwise I’ll take it to market myself.” The improved information has made the pricing to farmers more competitive.8 While the internet has helped buyers by changing the balance of their bargaining power with sellers, there is another sense in which
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to improve the quality of milk. It provided inexpensive machines to measure butterfat content of the milk at each stage of the distribution chain, from farmer to wholesaler to vendor, and set up payment schemes under which the prices paid for the milk reflect its measured quality. At the final, consumer
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fry would almost become sacrosanct for me,” he said later, “its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously.”1 He sent employees with hydrometers into farmers’ fields, rejecting potatoes lacking the optimal water content. He devised a way of curing the potatoes to convert natural sugars into starch. He developed the
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production in the late 1970s. This change gives us a reasonably clear-cut experiment in the force of property rights. Food production boomed with the farmers’ new individual incentives. The marketization of agriculture lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of dire poverty. It was the biggest antipoverty program the world
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has ever seen. A tiny beginning sparked this massive reform: a clandestine meeting of the householders in a small rural village. Desperation had hit the farmers of Xiaogang village in China’s Anhui province by 1978. The commune on which they worked collectively was dysfunctional. Known as the granary of China
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, Anhui contains some of the nation’s most fertile land. But Xiaogang’s twenty families were not producing enough rice to feed themselves. They had been reduced to relying on begging in other regions. In
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jailed, the others would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. They signed the pact with their thumbprints. A rapid turnaround followed. The farmers of Xiaogang immediately became more productive. “Now is different from the past,” one said. “We work for ourselves.” Working their own plots of land, they could
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or to sell. The amount of land planted in rice nearly doubled in one year, and the village began producing a rice surplus. As a farmer said, “You can’t be lazy when you work for your family and yourself.” Word got out, despite their oath of secrecy. No one understood
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the inefficiencies of communal farming better than the farmers themselves. All over China, farmers were ready to change. With wildcat breakups of communes in other villages, the movement quickly proliferated. Individual farming spread “like a chicken pest
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,” as a farmer put it. “When one village has it, the whole county will be infected.”5 The grassroots reforms were initially resisted from the top. Foreseeing a
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loss of their power and perquisites, the local bureaucrats punished Xiaogang by cutting off its supplies of seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. But the villagers were lucky: their uprising coincided with a change of mood in Beijing
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Mao Zedung, to oust the Maoists. Provincial Communist Party officials visited the village and gave their blessings. Then a high-level Beijing official traveled to Xiaogang and neighboring villages to study the effects of individual farming. His report, which concluded that individual farming increased output and improved living standards, became influential
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when it was circulated among the national leaders. At a Communist Party conference in 1982, four years after the Xiaogang villagers’ meeting, China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping endorsed the reforms. In 1983 the central government formally proclaimed individual farming to be consistent with the
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socialist economy and therefore permissible. By 1984, just six years after Xiaogang started the movement, there were no communes left. The communes had relied on appeals to work for the common good more than on individual incentives
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. Attempts had been made to create some personal incentives, but they were mostly ineffectual. Farmers worked in production teams. Each team member was assigned work points, which purported to measure how effectively he or she had worked, and pay depended
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also in China: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” The upshot was that the farmers in the communes had little incentive to exert effort. It made little difference whether a farmer worked himself to exhaustion or dozed all day under a tree. Either way, the amount he took home
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to feed his family was much the same. “The enthusiasm of the farmers was frustrated,” said Yan Junchang, a Xiaogang village leader. “No matter how hard I rang the bell or blew the whistle, I couldn’t get anyone to go into
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commune, patiently let her finish her tale. Then he dryly responded, “He lied.”6 In the reformed system, each farmer has a long-term lease of a plot of land. The farmer must deliver an annual quota of produce to the state (which can be thought of as a rental payment for
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the use of the land) and may sell any above-quota output in markets. As a result, the farmer faces full market incentives, in the sense that any increased effort translates directly into increased income. Whereas in the commune system decisions were made by
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the collective leadership, in the new system farmers were free to decide what crops to grow and what animals to keep. Farmers experimented with new seed varieties and began to plant a diverse range of fruits and vegetables. As one
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farmer said, now “everyone uses his brain.” In addition, as the communes were being broken up, the government raised the price
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of rice. Between 1978 and 1980, the prices the farmers received rose about 30 percent. Food production grew by over
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60 percent between 1978 and 1984. Farmers’ incomes grew by 20 percent each year over this period. This growth was the direct result of
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the introduction of market incentives. As agricultural output boomed, rural marketplaces developed rapidly. Farmers living near highways set up stalls to sell their fruit and vegetables. In the towns and cities produce markets were created. In his novel Waiting
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be moved into industrial production. Rural factories were set up at a rapid clip, creating employment for people who otherwise would have been underemployed as farmers. By 1989, a decade after individual farming started, almost one-fourth of the rural workforce was working in industry. The rural factories, along with the
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grew at a rate of over 8 percent for more than twenty years, meaning that the average person’s income quadrupled. Most of China’s farmers were crushingly poor at the start of the reforms. The number of rural poor, according to World Bank data, fell by 170 million in the
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obviously doing good for themselves at the same time.”9 Robinson wrote her fulsome assessment of the communes in 1976, just two years before the Xiaogang peasants, who really did know what it was like to live on a commune, risked arrest to disagree. A system based on exhortations to work
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incentives have great force. There is an additional lesson, though, which is less conventional. The productivity gains were achieved without formal legal recognition of the farmers’ ownership rights. China obtained the benefits of private property without actually having private property. The reforms did not change the ownership of land, which remained
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essentially state-owned. Farmers were assigned individual plots but had no legal right to the land beyond that of a contract (the term of which initially was just three
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years, and later was lengthened to fifteen years). The farmers could not sell the land they farmed, nor did they have the right to use it for an indefinite period. Some property insecurity came from
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a share of the output. Far from punishing the raiders, the village government terminated its contract with Chen. It then leased the orchard to another farmer at more than double the rent.10 A government constrained by laws does not behave in this way. The government has taken the position that
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farmers have no claim to be compensated for any land taken, for all land belongs to the state and farmers are merely granted rights to use it temporarily. The insecurity of property has had perceptible effects
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. One study found that farmers apply less fertilizer and labor to plots that have a higher risk of reallocation. Another
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found that farmers are less likely to make long-term investments such as wells and drainage on land that is
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not that property insecurity has consequences. Rather, it is how small these consequences seem to be. Despite the absence of ownership, productivity is high. The farmers act as though their rights to the land are reasonably secure. Cases of people being evicted from their land have been the exception, not the
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are able to renege on contracts, they have refrained from doing so with sufficient predictability that the farmers are motivated to be productive. Because the contracts have been maintained in a reasonably credible way, the farmers work under their lease contracts almost as assiduously as if they owned the land. They willingly
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major part of the puzzle remains to be filled in. Just how have China’s bureaucrats resisted the temptation to abuse their power over the farmers—or how has the hierarchy kept that temptation in check? The answer probably lies in the specifics of time and place (and therefore there is
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was ad hoc but secure enough that market forces could operate reasonably well. The system was showing signs of strain by the 1990s as the farmers, unable to sell or rent out their land, were obliged to keep farming their small, increasingly uneconomical plots. Riots, sometimes violent, broke out, as peasants
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protested the high taxes and fees levied on them by local officials. One farmer said, “There are corrupt officials at every level—township, county, and city—and they have been collaborating to get more for themselves.”12 What is
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ownership have to be written. Judges and lawyers must be trained to adjudicate disputes.13 The Japanese government, for example, began a drive to formalize farmers’ landownership in the late nineteenth century and did not complete it until the middle of the twentieth century. Ownership, then, is society’s way of
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controlled the transition, or tried to, in China the government was largely passive. Its main role was to repeal prohibitions: it removed the ban on farmers working individual plots, the ban on entrepreneurs forming new firms, and the ban on state firms trading on markets. It left in place the existing
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four can get by on less than $20,000.) To see the distinction between the two concepts, inequality and poverty, suppose the income of tenant farmers in India, who are barely getting by, has risen 12 percent over the past two years. Has this change improved things? By the poverty criterion
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. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Zahavi, Amotz, and Zahavi, Avishag. 1997. The Handicap Principle. Oxford, U.K., Oxford University Press. Zhou, Kate Xiao. 1997. How the Farmers Changed China. Boulder, Westview Press. Zwi, Karen, Söderland, Neil, and Schneider, Helen. 2000. “Cheaper Antiretrovirals to Treat AIDS in South Africa.” British Medical Journal 320
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
by Evan Osnos · 12 May 2014 · 499pp · 152,156 words
next, and it affected each in a different way. Some months later, when the police in Xiajia tried to search the home of a local farmer, the man told them to come back when they had a warrant—a word he had learned from Expert Detective Heng Te. When I moved
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who chose the day and the hour in which to alter his fate. It is the age of the changeling, when the daughter of a farmer can propel herself from the assembly line to the boardroom so fast that she never has time to shed the manners and anxieties of the
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peasants: “If you want to eat, look for Ziyang.” When change came, it came from below. The previous winter, in the inland village of Xiaogang, the local farmers had been so impoverished by Mao’s economic vision that they had stopped tilling their communal land and had resorted to begging. In desperation
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, eighteen farmers divided up the land and began to farm it separately; they set their own schedules, and whatever they sold beyond the quota required by the
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socialism,” but wiser leaders allowed their scheme to continue, and eventually expanded it to eight hundred million farmers around the country. The return of “household” farming, as it was known, spread so fast that a farmer compared it to a germ in a henhouse. “When one family’s chicken catches the disease
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the island—a Thunderbolt Operation, as they called it—involving a hundred thousand people, including soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children. They tore open farmers’ storehouses and probed the ponds with bamboo poles. Then searchers found the first clue: at the end of the mine-laden trail, from Mount Ma
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to discover that Chinese parents did not approve of Barbie’s study habits. Home Depot found that the last thing the sons and daughters of farmers and laborers wanted was DIY. Some of the choices that Chinese consumers made did not translate easily to outsiders. A brand of stylish eyeglass frames
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own. I met scores of Li Yang students that winter, and I always asked them what purpose English had served in their lives. A hog farmer wanted to be able to greet his American buyers; a finance worker, studying during his vacation, wanted to get an edge in the office. Michael
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the villages. As it reached people who had long waited for a chance to escape their origins, the pursuit of fortune intensified into magical thinking. Farmers in remote villages embarked on audacious inventions, earning the nickname “Peasant da Vincis.” Some ideas were grimly pragmatic—a man with kidney disease built his
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much as the bottom tenth, up from 8.9 times the previous year. Public protests, often staged by workers angry about unpaid wages or by farmers whose land had been seized for development, soared to 87,000 in 2005, up from 11,000 a decade earlier. The more that people became
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help you?” he said later. Lau was especially uncomfortable because he was acquainted with the intended victim; in his mid-twenties and the son of farmers, Lau had worked as a teahouse delivery boy, crisscrossing the neighborhood in his gold-painted Toyota. He occasionally dropped off food at Wong’s village
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, and bulldozed underground artists’ villages. But the influx of money transformed the relationship between artists and the government. By 2006, Chinese painters such as Zhang Xiaogang were selling pieces for close to a million dollars, and a younger generation of artists, raised in the boom years, let it be known that
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her sixteenth birthday, she was sent to the countryside to experience the rural revolution. What she found there astonished her. “It was ridiculous,” she recalled. Farmers had no reason to work. “They just wanted to stay lying in the field, sometimes for two hours. I said, ‘Should we start work?’ They
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was coming out for a look: a man in a dark suit, sweating and smoothing his hair; a construction worker in an orange helmet and farmers’ galoshes; a bellboy in a uniform with so many gold buttons and epaulets that he looked like an admiral. Some of the younger spectators were
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had yet to be redeveloped, called Cotton Flower Alley. It was lined with poplar trees and run-down courtyards popular with migrant workers from Shandong, Anhui, and elsewhere, who stuck out because they were shorter, darker, and more alert than city people. The migrants shared bunk beds in tiny rented rooms
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fraudulence had reached into every corner of life, most dramatically in the case of the dairy industry. In 2008 a milk producer, Sanlu, discovered that farmers had been adding melamine to boost the protein levels, but the company did not order a recall; instead, it persuaded the local government to bar
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small, exuberant crowd of fans waiting to catch a glimpse of him. Among them was Wei Feiran, a wiry, spiky-haired nineteen-year-old from Anhui Province, who seemed on the verge of levitating with anticipation. He’d read Triple Door when he was in tenth grade and was deeply affected
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to agree; it scarcely bothered to acknowledge Charter 08 in public. But in the months that followed, the charter began to attract signatures from intellectuals, farmers, teenagers, and former officials. Eventually the number reached twelve thousand—an infinitesimal minority in China’s population, but symbolically significant: it was the largest coordinated
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, you can tear your balls.” * * * The railroad minister, Liu Zhijun, did not initially look like a candidate for a dramatic public disgrace. Liu was a farmer’s son, small and thin, with bad eyesight and an overbite. He grew up in a village outside the city of Wuhan and left school
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a woman named Ding Shumiao, who perhaps more than anyone embodied the runaway riches created by China’s railway boom. Ding was an illiterate egg farmer in rural Shanxi—five feet ten, with broad shoulders and a foghorn of a voice. In the 1980s, after Deng Xiaoping launched the country toward
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was managed by one of the country’s most corrupt agencies. In the case of the tainted infant formula that killed children in 2008, dairy farmers and dealers first bribed state inspectors to ignore the presence of chemicals. Then, when children fell ill, the dairy company bribed news organizations to suppress
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in office, his family amassed assets worth $2.7 billion. The family was not previously known for its wealth; the father had been a pig farmer, the mother a teacher. But the family fortune was now large enough to rank it on the Forbes list of the world’s richest families
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dig holes … Birth determines class.” The Great Gatsby no longer read as a tale of a self-made man. A blogger wrote, “Mobsters running wild, farmers leaving their land rushing towards the big cities on the east coast, farming life declining. Money inscribing itself on morality … These are the very things
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a market society.” Sandel mentioned a story from the headlines: Wang Shangkun was a seventeen-year-old high school student from a poor patch of Anhui province who was illegally recruited in a chat room to sell his kidney for $3,500, a transaction his mother discovered when he returned home
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began to feel different. That was one year ago. And today, I often ask myself, what is the moral dilemma here?” Her parents had been farmers, until her father went into the seafood trade. “I accompanied my mom to visit the Buddha to pray and to put some food on the
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always worked in secrecy; they never publicized their orders, but now directors were taking their complaints to the public. In April 2013 the filmmaker Feng Xiaogang was giving a mundane acceptance speech for the Director of the Year award when he seized the chance to make a bold statement; he cut
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would not allow them to issue their own debt, so they raised cash by selling land they already owned or by offering low prices to farmers (the source of many of China’s protests). In Beijing, one of Lin Yifu’s former students, a professor named Yao Yang, published a view
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the district sanitation department. Many were migrants from the countryside; they swept the alleys, cleaned the public restrooms, and collected the trash. Some wore straw farmers’ hats that cast a shadow across their faces, and the matching uniforms made it difficult for me to keep them straight. I didn’t know
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Tea Leaf Nation. PROLOGUE I am indebted to Yunxiang Yan for sharing with me his recollections of the village of Xiajia, where he was a farmer during the Cultural Revolution and where he later returned, as an anthropologist, for a series of long-term studies. He has documented changes in Xiajia
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, 1990); Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); and Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 2. THE CALL For a narrative history of the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, see
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Binxing Fang Cai Fang Kecheng Fang Lizhi Fang Qingyuan Fang Zhouzi Fan Kuan Faye Li Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Feng Boyi Feng Guifen Feng Xiaogang Feng Zhi financial crisis financial risk Financial Times First Opium War Fitzgerald, F. Scott Five Nos floods Forbes Forbidden City Foreign Affairs Ministry, Chinese Foreign
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Qiji Zeng Kewei Zeng Liping Zhai Xiaobing Zha Jianying Zhang, Charles Zhang and Zhang Zhang Dazhong Zhang Dejiang Zhang Hua Zhang Lijia Zhang Shuguang Zhang Xiaogang Zhang Xinwu Zhang Yihe Zhang Yimou Zhang Zhiming (Michael); Basic English started by; in Beijing; new apartment of; textbook written by Zhao Jian Zhao Jing
Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet and Shawn Low · 1 Apr 2015 · 3,292pp · 537,795 words
Shan Taiyuan Pingyao Around Pingyao Qikou Jincheng Around Jincheng Shaanxi (Shanxi) Shaanxi Highlights Xi’an Around Xi’an Hua Shan Hancheng Yan’an Yulin Mizhi Anhui Anhui Highlights Tunxi Around Tunxi Huizhou Villages Huangshan Jiuhua Shan Hefei Henan Henan Highlights Zhengzhou Nanjiecun Song Shan & Dengfeng Luoyang Around Luoyang Guoliangcun Kaifeng Zhuxian Zhen
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here), renowned for classic images of mossy-green jagged limestone peaks providing a backdrop for weeping willows leaning over bubbling streams, wallowing water buffaloes and farmers sowing rice paddies. Ride a bamboo raft along the river and you’ll understand why this stunning rural landscape has inspired painters and poets for
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tempo. Pingyao China’s best-looking, best-preserved walled town – by a long shot – warrants thorough exploration. Hongcun Within easy reach of Huangshan, this delightful Anhui village is a primer in the Huizhou style. Wuyuan Take time off to village-hop in the gorgeous Jiangxi countryside and dream of abandoning urban
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towns of Jiangsu and north Zhejiang – including Tongli, Luzhi and Wuzhen – are within easy reach. From either Suzhou or Hangzhou, bus it to Tunxi in Anhui province to spend several days exploring the delightful ancient Huizhou villages of Yixian and Shexian and to scale gorgeous Huang Shan. Bus it again across
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Ox Horn in about 90 minutes. 4Sleeping & Eating Yang ErGUESTHOUSE ( %6161 1794, 136 9307 0117; Xizhazi Village No 1; r ¥100; aW) The first nongjiayuan (farmers-style courtyard) you come to as you enter Hamlet No 1 of Xizhazi village. Rooms are set around a vegetable-patch courtyard, and are simple
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took to get here, you'll want to stay the night – it's definitely worth it. As the sun sets, the sounds of village life – farmers chatting after a day in the fields, clucking hens, kids at play – are miles away from the raging pace of modern Chinese cities. Xingshui YuanGUESTHOUSE
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. Great Wall The Great Wall (Changcheng) is far less spectacular here than the restored sections found near Beijing. Its Ming bricks – too useful for local farmers to leave alone – have all but disappeared, so just picture rammed earthen mounds, parts of which have crumbled away into nothing. DeshengbaoVILLAGE ( ) A good
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prices are generally cheaper than elsewhere. Xiyang Shi is a narrow, crowded alley running east and west of the Great Mosque where Terracotta Warriors, Huxian farmer paintings, shadow puppets, lanterns, tea ware, Mao memorabilia and T-shirts are on offer. Near the South Gate is the Qing-style Shuyuan Xiang,
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Huangshan. ADec The snowcapped rooftops of Xidi’s Hui houses look a picture. Best Mountains AHuangshan AJiuhua Shan AQiyun Shan Best Villages AXidi AHongcun AChengkan Anhui Highlights 1 Catch the sunrise from the iconic Chinese mountain, Huangshan. 2 Explore the grottoes and dilapidated temples at Taoist Qiyun Mountain. 3 Soak up
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Heaven Inn in Xidi for a fantastic meal. 9 Get your camera out at Shexian’s astonishing Tangyue Decorative Archways. History The provincial borders of Anhui were defined by the Qing government, bringing together two disparate geographic regions and cultures: the arid, densely populated North China Plain and the mountainous terrain
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wasn’t settled until the late Tang dynasty. Traditionally impoverished and today a primary source of China’s hard-working army of ayi (nannies), rural Anhui’s fortunes have begun to reverse. Some say the massive infrastructure improvements in the hitherto remote areas are partly due to former president Hu Jintao
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different from their ancestors). However, they are never ashamed to declare their origins. And rightly so. 8Getting There & Away The historic and tourist sights of Anhui gather in the south around the town of Tunxi and are easily accessible by bus, train or plane from Hangzhou, Shanghai and Nanjing, or any
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in the Yangzi River delta area. Compared with the region’s pedestrian capital, Hefei, Tunxi makes for a far, far better base for exploring southern Anhui. Tunxi 1Sights 1Old StreetC2 2Wancuilou MuseumB2 4Sleeping 3Ancient Town Youth HostelB2 4Harbour Inn & BarB2 5Hui Boutique HotelB2 6Old Street HostelC2 7Tunxi LodgeA2 5Eating 8Gaotang HundunA2
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rarely saw, funnelling their profits into the construction of lavish residences and some of China’s largest ancestral halls. Consequently, the villages scattered throughout southern Anhui (also known as Wannan; ) and northern Jiangxi are some of the country’s loveliest, augmented by their lush surroundings of buckling earth, bamboo and
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’s. The most elaborate examples are the Tangyue Decorative Archways outside Shexian. Western Villages (Yixian) Yixian is home to the two most picturesque communities in Anhui: Xidi and Hongcun. Even with soaring ticket prices and when spilling over with crowds (most of the time), these are, hands down, the most
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for ¥220. 1Sights ChengkanVILLAGE ( admission ¥107; h8am-5pm) A real working community, Chengkan presents a very different picture from its more affluent cousins in Shexian – farmers walk through town with hoes slung over their shoulders, tea traders dump baskets of freshly picked leaves straight out onto the street, quacking ducks run
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Longhu Mountain Jiangxi Pop 45.2 million Why Go? An interconnected web of rivers, lakes and shimmering rice paddies, Jiangxi is defined by its water. Farmers in ponchos and heavy boots till the fields in drizzling rain as snow-white herons whirl overhead, and off at the edges of the province
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the empire’s granaries, transporting vast quantities of rice to the embattled north. By the 19th century, land shortages and feudalism caused widespread unrest among farmers and hill-dwelling minorities. These economic disparities galvanised the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s, ensuring widespread support by the 1920s for the Chinese Communist Party
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hours. The Nanling National Forest Park entrance is at the southern end of the village of Wuzhishan, which is small enough to cover on foot. Farmers nearby do their weekly shopping and stock clearance at Wuzhishan’s lively Sunday market. Staying in Orange House here will give you access to the
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ctrip.com. It can arrange transportation to and from the park. Feng’s KitchenCANTONESE (Fengjiacai %138 2799 2107; mains ¥10-40; h7am-8.30pm) A farmer restaurant that cures its own meat and grows its own vegetables (¥10 per plate). Reservations necessary. Mr Feng can arrange for car hire of any
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the 600-year-old Dragon Bridge (Yulong Qiao). From Yangshuo, cycle along Pantao Lu and take the first main road on the left after the Farmers Trading Market. Continue straight, past the hospital and through the village of Jima, before following the road round to the right to reach the start
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of exploration by bike, boat, foot or any combination thereof. Scenes that inspired generations of Chinese painters are the standard here: wallowing water buffalo and farmers tending their crops against a backdrop of limestone peaks. Some of the villages come alive on market days, which operate on a three-, six- and
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opera house, and on performance nights music would reverberate over the moonlit water. An exquisite four-cornered pavilion sits on the rooftop. 5Eating Liugong Gupu Farmer RestaurantGUANGXI (Liugong Gupu Nongjiafan %892 3581, 136 6946 2263; mains ¥16-98; h7am-late) All visitors to Liugong come here for fresh river fish,
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he may let you in. It's a 30-second walk down the first alley that leads west away from the river, past Liugong Gupu Farmer Restaurant. It's the one with wooden doors and steps, just before the concrete building with red lanterns. Getting There & Away To cycle there,
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intellectual types and the hotel's white walls and minimalist aesthetic showcase their literary collection and paintings by their artist friends to great effect. oDailong Farmer Restaurant GUANGXI (Dailongqiao Longjia Fanzhuang %131 0054 9638; Zhongxing Jie, at the start of Dailong Bridge; mains ¥15-80; h11am-8pm) Rarely does a
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more traditional pace of life. When the sun obliges, Xijiang is lovely. Head away from the village on paths that weave through rice paddies, sidestepping farmers and water buffalo, and recharge your soul in the surrounding hills. A lovely trek is the 50-minute hike past terraced fields and rice paddies
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even more important than Xi'an's Terracotta Warriors. Art and archaeology buffs will need at least a half day here. Throughout the 20th century, farmers around Guanghan continually unearthed intriguing pottery shards and dirt-encrusted jade carvings when digging wells and tilling their fields. However, war and lack of funds
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¥110/55 winter; h6am-6pm) is one of China’s four sacred Buddhist Mountains (the others being Putuo Shan, Wutai Shan and Jiuhua Shan). A farmer built the first Buddhist temple near its summit in the 1st century CE, marking Buddhism's arrival in the Eastern world. Later adorned with brass
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tenuous at best. A Uighur kingdom based at Khocho thrived from the 8th century and oversaw the Central Asian people’s transformation from nomads to farmers and from Manichaeans to Buddhists. It was during Kharakhanid rule in the 10th to 12th centuries that Islam took hold in Xinjiang. In 1219,
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visit to Kashgar is complete without a trip to the Livestock Market, which takes place once a week on Sunday. The day begins with Uighur farmers and herders trekking into the city from nearby villages. By lunchtime just about every sellable sheep, camel, horse, cow and donkey within 50km has
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by the Yellow River (Huang He), there is a distinct Grapes of Wrath feel to Ningxia. Outside the cities, it’s a timeless landscape where farmers till the yellow earth just like their ancestors did. Yet Ningxia was once the frontline between the empires of the Mongols and the Han Chinese
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of Mongol might. The Mongol retreat in the 14th century left a void that was filled by both Muslim traders from the west and Chinese farmers from the east. Tensions between the two resulted in Ningxia being caught up in the great Muslim Rebellion that convulsed northwest China in the mid
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divide-and-conquer policy by the Qing led to the creation of an ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Mongolia. The Qing opened up Inner Mongolia to Han farmers, and waves of migrants came to cultivate the land. Outer Mongolia was spared this policy and, with backing from the USSR, it gained full independence
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Grasslands surrounding Haila’er. You can glimpse some of their history and culture at this modern museum. The Ewenki have traditionally been herders, hunters and farmers; they are one of the few peoples in China to raise reindeer. The museum is on the southeastern edge of town. Regular minibuses (¥4,
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owned by the monastery and serves fried rice, thugpa (noodles), dumplings and lashings of milk tea. It's cosy and always full of characters. Sakya Farmer's Taste RestaurantTIBETAN (Sajia Nongmin Meishiting %824 2221; dishes ¥10-35) Looking over the main street, this Tibetan place has a cosy atmosphere amid Tibetan
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three-day trip along the paved Friendship Hwy to the town of Lhatse (Lazi), where there are several hotels, including the friendly budget Lhatse Tibetan Farmers Hotel (Lazi Nongmin Luguan %832 2333; dm ¥25-45, d without/with bathroom ¥260/90), and the excellent new mid-range Dewang Manor (Dewang
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of magic. China Today A highly idiosyncratic mix of can-do entrepreneurs, inward-looking Buddhists, textbook Marxists, overnight millionaires, the out-of-pocket, leather-faced farmers, unflagging migrant workers and round-the-clock McJobbers, China today is as multifaceted as its challenges are diverse. From the outside, China’s autocratic decision
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s ancient walled towns. Fenghuang Exquisite riverside setting, pagodas, temples, covered bridges and ancient city wall. Hongcun Gorgeous Huizhou village embedded in the lovely south Anhui countryside. Tianluokeng Tulou Cluster Overnight in a photogenic Hakka roundhouse. Shaxi Flee modern China along Yunnan’s ancient Tea-Horse Rd. Zhenyuan Slot into low
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abandoned. The first highly symbolic move of the ‘reform era’ (as the post-1978 period is known) was the breaking down of the collective farms. Farmers were able to sell a proportion of their crops on the free market, and urban and rural areas were also encouraged to establish small local
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other. The cooking traditions of China’s ethnic minorities aside, Han cooking has traditionally been divided into eight schools (zhonghua badacaixi): Chuan (Sichuan cuisine) Hui (Anhui cuisine) Lu (Shandong cuisine) Min (Fujian cuisine) Su (Jiangsu cuisine) Xiang (Hunan cuisine) Yue (Cantonese/Guangdong cuisine) Zhe (Zhejiang cuisine). Although each school is
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meat juice squirting everywhere and scalding the roof of your mouth (or blinding your neighbour) requires some – quite enjoyable – practice. With a lightness of flavour, Anhui (huicai) cuisine – one of China’s eight principle culinary traditions and firmly in the eastern cooking sphere – puts less emphasis on seafood. Braising and stewing
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in the noughties, with larger-than-life films like Hero (2002; Zhang Yimou), House of Flying Daggers (2004; Zhang Yimou) and The Banquet (2006; Feng Xiaogang) leading the way. Epic historical war dramas such as Red Cliff (2008 and 2009; John Woo) and The Warlords (2007; Peter Chan) belong to a
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of the world’s mightiest rivers – the Yangzi (Chang Jiang). Over 1.2 million tons of transparent plastic sheeting is used annually by China's farmers to reduce water loss from evaporation, but much of the plastic is later ploughed into the earth, polluting the soil and decreasing crop yields. Mountains
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(with almost 20% of its population), the liquid is an increasingly precious resource. A region of low rainfall, North China faces a worsening water crisis. Farmers are draining aquifers that have taken thousands of years to accumulate, while industry in China uses three to 10 times more water per unit of
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of further trees. Fields & Agriculture China’s hills and mountains may surround travellers with a dramatic backdrop, but they are a massive agricultural headache for farmers. Small plots of land are eked out in patchworks of land squashed between hillsides or rescued from mountain cliffs and ravines, in the demanding effort
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and to my dear aunt, Pat Rose, for road-testing my research during her latest trip to China. Thanks too, to Mike Freundlich and Jessica Farmer for inspiration in Hunan and to my colleague David Eimer for all his work on the Beijing chapter. As ever, all my love to Taotao
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and writers. We share Tony’s belief that ‘a great guidebook should do three things: inform, educate and amuse’. Our Writers Damian Harper Coordinating Author, Anhui, Henan, Hubei, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang After graduating with a degree in Chinese in the days when it was still an unfashionably exotic choice, Damian relocated
Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
by Johan Norberg · 31 Aug 2016 · 262pp · 66,800 words
, returned to Nätra in northern Ångermanland, Sweden, with several bags of wheat flour in his cart. He came from a family of ‘south carters’, northern farmers who flouted Sweden’s trade barriers and monopolies by going on long trading journeys. Eric Norberg sold country-woven linens in the south of Sweden
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underestimated its ability to innovate, solve problems and change its ways when Enlightenment ideas and expanded freedoms gave people the opportunity to do so. As farmers got individual property rights, they then had an incentive to produce more. As borders were opened to international trade, regions began to specialize in the
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fertilizer. Nitrogen helps plants to grow and some of it is available in manure, but not much. For more than a century, the world’s farmers used bird droppings accumulated over centuries on the coast of Chile, which contained huge quantities of sodium nitrate. But not enough of it was available
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begins in Mexico in 1944, when he started working there for the Rockefeller Foundation on agricultural development.25 The programme was initiated to teach Mexican farmers new methods, but Borlaug was obsessed with coming up with better, higher-yield crops. He grew up in the US Midwest, and noticed that horrible
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dust storms and crop failures had the least impact where farmers had begun with high-yield approaches to farming. He wanted more countries to have access to this. After thousands of crossings of wheat, Borlaug managed
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expended a lot of energy growing inedible stalks and also collapsed when it grew too quickly. When he introduced this new hybrid, Borlaug also showed farmers how modern irrigation and artificial fertilizer increased the yields. The new wheat was quickly introduced all over Mexico, and amazingly in 1963, the harvest was
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1965. Despite a rapidly growing population, both countries are much better fed than they used to be. Borlaug also convinced many governments to pay their farmers world market prices for their grain, rather than forcing them to sell at a fixed, low price. This widespread price regulation was a policy intended
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, 4.7 million fewer Peruvians experience undernourishment. One reason is that Peru introduced an open trade regime, property rights and transactions reform, which gave more farmers access to credit and incentives to improve their farms. As a result, agricultural productivity has soared. Similar reforms in Vietnam, including the opening up of
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, farmland increased by only twelve per cent, while farm production increased by about 300%. It has been estimated that, had agricultural yields stayed the same, farmers would have needed to turn another three billion hectares into farmland – immense continental areas, about the size of the USA, Canada and China put together
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in the crowd began to cry.36 But the experience of North Korea is an outlier: in general, communism has collapsed and empires have fallen. Farmers have received the formal titles to their land, which has given them an incentive to invest in better equipment and irrigation systems. Trade across borders
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productive agricultural sector, but it did not change because of a top-down decision. It was started by a few brave peasants in the Xiaogang village in Anhui province in December 1978. The eighteen families of the village were desperate. The communist system did not supply them or their children with enough
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the regime. The villagers agreed that if word got out and any of them were jailed or executed, the others would raise their children. The farmer who had drawn up the contract hid it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house, and hoped that the officials would
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never find it. In the end, word of this secret privatization got out. The result was just too good to keep a secret. The farmers did not start the workday when the village whistle blew any longer – they went out much earlier and worked much harder. There was a dramatic
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surge in production. Grain output in 1979 was six times higher than the year before. Other villages could see that Xiaogang did better, and that people there were better fed, and tried to find out what they had done differently. Individual farming spread ‘like a chicken
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pest’, as one farmer put it. ‘When one village has it, the whole country will be infected.’39 The communist party was hostile to individual initiative and should have
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punished the farmers. But the grassroots reforms were incredibly popular and the party realized this was the only way to put an end to hunger and inefficiency. In
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in history just two decades earlier now produced a surplus of food for the world markets. Guan Youjiang, one of the original signatories of the Xiaogang agreement, remembers that people used to die of hunger in his village. He used to roam the countryside begging. The freedom to choose one’s
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work, and to reap the rewards, made all the difference. ‘Before, farmers were happy if they had a meal a day. Now they have three – and sometimes a drink too.’40 2 Sanitation It is things going
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villagers had started small businesses and began to improve production. As we saw in the case of the farmers in Xiaogang, they often did so without official recognition, but it inspired the leadership to think differently. In its efforts to raise the country out of its
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, for a long time almost synonymous with deforestation, the annual rate has declined by seventy per cent since 2005, thanks to better forest protection and farmers boosting yields on existing farmland.12 As we saw in the chapter on food, farming technologies employed since the early 1960s have saved an area
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bigger world. They discuss wars on other continents and global prices. Bhagant now owns a tractor, and his grandson uses it to work for bigger farmers. His granddaughter Seema will never work on the land – she is becoming a computer technician. When I have visited different Indian cities I have always
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vote. But step by step, more people were included in the democratic process. In the mid-nineteenth century the middle classes and the property-owning farmers had been given the right to vote in western European countries, and the cause of suffrage was taken up by the labour movement, and by
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Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books, 1999, chap. 7. 39 Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, p. 56. 40 ‘Xiaogang Village, birthplace of rural reform, moves on’, China Development Gateway, 16 December 2008, http://en.chinagate.cn/features
When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques · 12 Nov 2009 · 859pp · 204,092 words
lords (daimyo), society was organized into four levels in such strict hierarchy that it possessed a caste-like quality: these were the warriors (samurai), the farmers, the artisans and the merchants respectively. One should also, strictly speaking, include the burakumin, Japan’s outcasts or untouchables - descended from those who worked in
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clothes he could wear, the foods he could buy and the type of house he could live in. The daimyo took a portion of his farmers’ rice every year and out of that, apart from catering for his own needs, he paid his samurai. The samurai possessed no land: their formal
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shed the country’s feudal legacy. The new ruling elite was drawn not from the daimyo but primarily from the samurai, including those sections of farmers that had been latterly incorporated into the samurai class, together with some of the merchant class. There was clearly a shift in class power. And
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people, plus more than 3 million who move in and out of the city every day seeking work of one kind or another, including many farmers who occupy numerous pavements trying to sell their fruit and vegetables.16 Shanghai, like many cities in the region, encapsulates a remarkable juxtaposition of the
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rather than a single tradition, with four schools often identified, namely Shandong, Sichuan, Jiangsu and Guangdong; and sometimes eight, with the addition of Hunan, Fujian, Anhui and Zhejiang; or even ten, with the further addition of Beijing and Shanghai.85 From very early on, Chinese cuisine incorporated foreign foodstuffs - for example
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of every conceivable kind. Played out before my eyes was the most extraordinary juxtaposition of eras: women walking with their animals and carrying their produce, farmers riding bicycles and driving pedicabs, the new urban rich speeding by in black Mercedes and Lexuses, anonymous behind darkened windows, a constant stream of vans
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were 87,000 ‘mass incidents’ (demonstrations, strikes, occupations, etc.) recorded by the Ministry of Public Security, many of which concerned the appropriation of land from farmers through sweetheart deals between developers and local government, from which officials benefited financially. Although these cases usually have little or nothing to do with the
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national authorities, the government has been seeking, in the face of gathering unrest, to strengthen farmers’ land rights in order to prevent such seizures. Details of a proposed new rural reform package that were divulged in October 2008 suggested that the
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rights of farmers would be strengthened by enabling them to trade in their thirty-year land-use contracts, a move which ought to have the effect of bolstering
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the more modern parts of their economies. This is already evident in China with the increasing power of entrepreneurs and the steady decline of the farmers. A byproduct of these trends might be to embed fundamental divisions in these countries between the developed and developing parts, disparities that are a function
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a Beijing auction, the highest price ever paid for a piece by a Chinese artist. With auction sales of $23.6 million in 2006, Zhang Xiaogang was second only narrowly to Jean-Michel Basquiat in the ArtPrice ranking of the 100 top-selling artists in the world: altogether there were twenty
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modernity multi-state system overseas empires share of world population and United States European embargo European exceptionalism European Union evolution Fairbank, John K. family systems farmers, land rights farming population fashion industry fast-food restaurants Fausett, Bret Ferguson, Niall feudal system filial piety Filipinas film industry financial crisis see also Asian
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Di) yellow races Yoshino, Kosaku Yu Yongding Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) Yuan Shih-kai Yukichi, Fukuzawa Zambia Zhang Qingli Zhang Taiyan Zhang Wei-Wei Zhang Xiaogang Zhang Yimou Zhang Yin Zhang Yunling Zhang Zhidong Zhao Suisheng Zhao Ziyang Zheng He zhongguo Zhou dynasty (1100-256 BC) Zhou Enlai Zhu Feng Zhu
Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic · 23 Sep 2019
legally tied to the land and banned from offering their labor to others), and petty-commodity production carried out by independent craftspeople or small-scale farmers. Even as recently as one hundred years ago, when the first incarnation of globalized capitalism appeared, the world still included all of these modes of
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for the purpose of estimating the demand for textiles “found disastrous conditions: women in Szechuan were not wearing skirts because the rural devastation had left farmers without the means to purchase cloth, and in many households family members shared one item of clothing” (Shiroyama 2008, 127). Vietnam at the same time
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1978 and the introduction of the “responsibility system,” which allowed private leasing of land, almost the entire output has been produced privately—although of course farmers are not wage-workers but are mostly self-employed, in what Marxist terminology calls “petty-commodity production.” This was historically the typical way Chinese agriculture
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is less than 16 percent. In rural areas, de facto land privatization under the responsibility system has transformed almost all rural labor into private sector farmers. Finally, the contrast between socialist and capitalist modes of production is seen most dramatically in decentralized production and pricing decisions. At the beginning of the
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is that it has emerged from the soil, so to speak, as almost four-fifths of its members report having had fathers who were either farmers or manual workers. This intergenerational mobility is not surprising in view of the nearly complete obliteration of the capitalist class after the revolution in 1949
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Chinese institutions. 53. The beginning of the responsibility system, which would eventually cover all of China, goes back to twenty farm households in Fengyang Xiaogang village in Anhui Province who, like medieval conspirators, swore to stick by each other and secretly signed a document in which they agreed to divide the land
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quotas to the government while keeping the rest for themselves. The possibility that such “capitalist-roaders” would be severely punished was not negligible. So the farmers vowed that “[they] will not regret [their decision] even if [they] have to face the death penalty. The rest of the members promise to take