In our county, a number of vocational and technical training colleges have just opened, not only in the main town but also in the smaller towns. Training courses include lowly stuff like sewing and electrical welding. Afterwards, the students will go to factories in the coastal areas to work. For more and more children and their parents, this is the only realistic road in life. Even if you study at high school and spend a lot of money on education, there is no guarantee you will get into university. And if you do, it doesn’t mean it will be any use.

I certainly don’t see university as the only option in life for them either. But I do think university can at least give you self-awareness, some understanding of society, and for ever free you of the ignorant aimlessness of country life.

Here, of course, is the paradox for the man of education: who is better off in the end, the enlightened or the benighted? Is it more painful to know, or not to know? Should people be allowed to remain in blissful ignorance until one day they awaken naturally, or should they be awoken? And what happens when they awaken?

That day in the classroom, I drew on the blackboard a pyramid. I told these 17 and 18-year-olds that they should not expect to reach the top, but hoped they did not end up at the bottom of it, either. I only hoped that they could find a place for themselves in the middle. That, I said, would be enough.

Sometimes my parents say, half in jest and half in anger, it would have been better to have kept me out of university, “for if we had done that, we now would have had a grandson to hug.” Nearly all people of my age in the village have produced a grandson for their parents.

This was hard to swallow. It was not what my parents really thought. They were simply voicing a widespread prejudice among country people.

The minimum subsistence allowance

In the countryside, some things happen that just boggle the mind. An example is the minimum subsistence allowance. On this subject, I just read the following on Baidu, here paraphrased:

The minimum subsistence allowance is designed to be an open, fair and just livelihood guarantee. You become eligible through a process of individual application, case review, audit, report approval and supervisory checks. Responsibility for approvals lies with the county Civil Affairs department, with specific cases handled by local authorities and village (Party-affiliated) committees.

The basic process for applying for the minimum subsistence allowance in the countryside is as follows: An application is made by the head of the household to the village (town) government or the village committee. The committee then launches an investigation, and arranges an initial canvassing of opinion. After a review by the local government, approval is given by the county Civil Affairs department. The local government and county Civil Affairs department conduct an investigation into the economic circumstances of the applicant’s household, get an idea of the family’s income, assets, labour capacity, and actual living standards. Combined with the canvassing of local opinion, opinions are forwarded on review and approval. In the process of submitting and checking the application, the applicant is required to give full information about his own and his family’s income, and actively cooperate with the investigations and reviews of the examination and approval authorities, in line with regulations. The authorities must promptly report back the results of their investigation, and clearly explain reasons when approval is not granted.

In our village, there is a four-person household, including an infant, in which everyone is getting the minimum subsistence allowance. In many cases, healthy people of working age are also receiving it, while my grandfather and grandmother, both past 80 this year, are not. Given our family circumstances, we do not have any difficulty in looking after them, but this kind of thing really makes people angry.

When my father talked about this with me, he was furious, saying “anyone who gives gifts to the Party secretary gets the allowance; anybody who has higher level connections can get it.”

All this stuff about formal application, asset investigation and fairness is a joke. The minimum subsistence allowance has become part of the brigade leader’s armory of carrots and sticks, a tool for rewarding and attracting allies.

The allowance amounts to nearly 1,000 yuan a year, and in every sense has become a kind of supplementary welfare benefit. But those who deserve it do not get it, and people who do not need it do. Members of influential households get it, the well-connected get it, the givers of gifts get it, and households that make a nuisance of themselves also get it.

My family does not get it, although my grandfather is now 85 years old and my grandmother is 80.

I hope I’m not being overly critical in all of this. I only wanted to write down what I have seen in my own village. Neither I am not trying to say that I have sloughed off the last traces of peasant thinking. Whoever I talk to, I always speak frankly. After all, I too am the salt of the earth.

What’s more, I certainly do not agree that country people should be allowed to flood the cities (though expert claims that this would create slums and ghettos is really laughable). But you cannot just stand by as country people are fed into the machine of modernization - bled white, their youth spent, and crushed into husks to be discarded.

It is my solemn conviction that nobody has the right to sacrifice the rural population on the altar of national modernization, for whatever reason, on the pretext that “they were born to be peasants.”

Political issues in the countryside

“I always keep two bullets on me, one for self-defence, and the other for joining the next Cultural Revolution.” These words were spoken by a 70-year-old man standing in our doorway on the morning of Spring Festival eve.

He has no official duties, he is not even a member of the Party, but he always enthusiastically takes part in village activities, such as checking the village committee accounts and joining petitions to county authorities.

My father said nowadays he is busying himself writing something at home. What is he writing? I asked

“No idea … he’s writing about big issues,” my father said.

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