Peking University sociologist Zhou Feizhou 周飞舟 is an outstanding social scientist, who has made both empirical and theoretical advances. In a recent speech to sociology students, he astutely links poverty alleviation, a current top-line policy issue with the lofty tradition of Fei Xiaotong.
This tradition has been a theme of earlier episodes of Beijing Baselines:
Were that not enough to merit our attention, Zhou stunningly invokes the discourse of sincerity that has in part) motivated this whole platform.
…the most important thing about sociology is attending to the psychic links between people. You don’t have to be smart to feel the sincerity of others. Sometimes you are too smart—too shrewd to feel it or believe it. Then tell me whether you are really smart or really stupid.
Below is my translation of that speech1 (in parallel text format here).
Zhou Feizhou 周飞舟 Professor of Sociology, Peking University
Can poverty alleviation take root in the PRC?
I just completed a poverty alleviation research project this summer; I'll share my feelings about it today. Field research methods are a big issue, which we’ll get to later in the Q&A. First, the background of poverty alleviation (PA) which may not be clear to you.
in the PRC, PA underwent great changes around 2015, before which it was a routine task. Every province and county had a PA office to do some routine PA work. Great changes took place since 2015, reflecting PA with ‘Chinese characteristics’. This is no empty concept, but has many specific connotations. The state now calls PA a ‘siege on poverty’, deeming it ‘battle’. ‘Battle’ implies it's unconditional, we can’t be afraid of hardship; no one, even if slightly injured, can exit the line of fire.
No simple slogan, it’s linked to the guoqing (国情 ‘national conditions’) of the PRC development path and stage: it has historical inevitability. The state, as we all know, has spent much manpower, material and financial resources on it, vigorously promoting, supervising and inspecting. Many officials have been dismissed. In an effort to promote targeted PA, a system for registering rural poor households has been rolled out since late 2014. The National PA Office chose some poor villages nationwide for ‘fixed-point observation’, with some 5-6 villages in each province. Inspectors are constantly sent to track the changes there and conduct sample surveys.
My students and I visited 45 villages this summer, in nine provinces:
Hebei, Shandong, and Henan in North China;
Hubei, Hunan, Anhui, and Jiangxi in Central and South China
Yunnan and Guizhou in Southwest China.
Most were in what we call the ‘midwest’, especially the central region. The poverty found there is quite typical. Visiting some five villages in each province, we wrote investigation reports in each. After going there, I’d like to share some feelings, findings, and thoughts with you today.
With its vast land and huge population, China’s regions, times, and people vary greatly. When discovering and studying Chinese society, this is what we need to pay most attention to. We cannot draw conclusions at once. China is very big, and different regions have very different natural conditions, resource endowments, life customs and cultural traditions. I like to divide it into four major regions
from Anhui and Jiangxi to the west, from central to Sichuan and Yunnan, called ‘spicy-eating areas’
Anhui and Jiangxi in the central part to the east, from the southern coast of Jiangsu to Guangdong, the ‘sweet-eating area’
Northern and Northeastern provinces, called the ‘noodle-eating areas’
the northwest including Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai and Tibet are called the ‘lamb-eating areas’
Logically confusing as this division may seem, I do think it makes sense. For example, Shaanxi is at the junction of spicy, noodle, and sheep eating, so people in the Guanzhong area eat sheep, noodles, and spicy food. Things like mutton soaked buns and noodles are typical examples.
In such a large country, all localities are required to grasp the spirit and intention of central government policies, but they cannot be ‘one size fits all’ and when issued must be ‘adapted to local conditions’ at all levels. How to actually do so is a major issue. As the state expands and has more layers, many things become harder to handle, harder to deal with. The more you investigate, the deeper your grasp will be. Our field survey this summer, given the short time and heavy tasks, was quite rough-and ready. Field surveys can be divided into two types:
the ‘squatting type’, which is the case in many anthropological surveys
the walk-through type, which is mostly done in sociology
What Fei Xiaotong did in his later years was basically the latter. Both types have their hallmarks, suited to different problems. Neither is good or bad in itself: what matters is how it is used. There’s much for us all to learn from this.
My investigation this time was mainly into how a village gets rid of poverty step by step. I started mainly from four aspects:
natural conditions and infrastructure
industry
endogenous power
PA work and mechanisms
Most villages rely on one or more of these four aspects to alleviate poverty. Time is limited today, so I will mainly talk about industry issues.
Situations vary a lot from place to place. Regions have many similarities on the surface, of course. Our investigation this time mainly involved the North China noodle-eating, and the central and southern China spicy-eating areas. There’s nothing but crops on the North China Plain; natural resources are scarce. The roads are well built and easy to build as most of it is flat. Things are quite different when it comes to the spicy area. When building a highway, basically not a mile is built on flat ground.; it either goes through mountains or bridges are built, all high bridges over yawning chasms, which is very difficult.
Poverty in ‘spicy regions’ has some common traits. In many villages, it’s not because they have nothing, but because transport is poor. Poor transport goes with poverty: you may have plenty of produce that can’t be monetised. Some call this ‘poverty of affluence.’ I lived in a poor village in Liuyang on the Hunan-Jiangxi border. Every family there has a mountain covered with bamboo forests, but there are no roads. It takes a long time to carry a bamboo down the mountain. A bamboo sells for CN¥ 15. Now that a road is built, nongmin sit at home and hire people to cut bamboo and transport it down the mountain. They can earn 10 yuan for each. This is called ‘enlivening’. In fact, it’s different in Hebei. The roads were repaired long ago, but there are no such resources.
When we study Chinese society, we must not arbitrarily say that if it is this or that, it will definitely be good. Roads, water, electricity and the internet are very important, especially in certain areas. This kind of infrastructure is also closely related to the exchange of personnel and information. Without exchange, not only will resources be closed, but so will ideas. We went to villages in the Nu River Basin. In one of them, there were no migrant workers; they couldn’t even speak Mandarin because there was no signal and no TV. Infrastructure issues such as roads, water and power grids also involve issues of returning home. I won’t go into details on this.
What I’m concerned about above all in fact is PA via industry: To get rid of poverty, a region must have industry. Without it, it’s hard to alleviate poverty successfully. To help the poor, if you help them up, they must be able to move forward on their own. You can’t let him collapse as soon as you leave. Industry issues are complex and there are many ways to solve them. What industry are we talking about? Rural industry is completely different from finance or manufacturing industries that everyone talks about. Rural is completely unlike urban complexity. The latter is extremely heterogeneous. As all who have studied sociology know, this is called organic solidarity. Because the countryside is closer to nature, its complexity is manifested in diversity and the non-standardisation of many things. We talk about rural industries: planting, breeding, processing, service, and tourism. Each of these five major industries is quite different. I classify tourism as a separate category because it is very special and different from opening restaurants and hotels. Each of the five is very diverse, such as farming, whether growing wheat or tobacco, corn or strawberries, each one has its own approach.
Not having grown up in the countryside, I learned a lot about it and agriculture via rural surveys. When I went to Enshi for research some years ago, there was a village growing tobacco. Tobacco leaves, the nongmin told me, were divided into over 50 grades. What they were most concerned about was its quality, which relates to how much it sells for. Growing it is unlike growing wheat or rice. It’s like raising pets, no end of trouble. If you see corn planted next to a tobacco field, it means that relations between two families must be bad. Tobacco is most afraid of corn: if corn blooms and pollen falls on the tobacco, the tobacco leaves will lose quality. If a farmer hates his neighbour, his solution is to plant corn next his tobacco field. Without doing research and understanding some ‘local knowledge’, you’d have no knowledge of such social relations .
Complex conditions are needed for success in rural industry, varying greatly from place to place. It is not easy to talk about ‘law’. Investigation and summarising seemed to me like climbing a staircase: you have to go slowly, step by step. Each step up requires a particularly strong basis. Making some discovery, it would be quite stupid to just announce ‘I found a pattern’. For example, this time we went to Gujiatai and Luotuowan Village in Fuping County, Hebei—villages visited by President Xi. Located at the foothills of the Taihang Mountains they are the gateway to the Wutai Mountains on the North China Plain. The villages used to be very poor, later developing industries, including walnuts and jujubes, none of which were successful. Two years ago, the county there began promoting shiitake mushrooms everywhere, relying on the ‘state-led, enterprise-driven, villagers take part’ model. A government financing platform provided some of the funds, and a firm was responsible for investing in high-end greenhouses. Each of these cost hundreds of thousands. Shiitake mushrooms are grown in greenhouses, where nongmin [peasants] contract to grow them. As a result, the industry was quite successful. From our research, we can’t simply say that this was due to factors such as strong state efforts or high corporate participation. In fact, the key factors are hidden. We argue that it solved the quite critical problem of ‘industry taking root’. But it can’t be deemed always successful wherever tried: it may be unsuccessful if it is put in elsewhere. I’ll return to this issue of ‘taking root’.
Let’s focus on industry in the spicy food area, whose natural, economic and social environment are quite unique. The main geographical axis here is the Wuling Mountains. The highest range runs through western Hubei, western Hunan, and eastern Chongqing, all the way to Guizhou and Yunnan, with hills extending on both sides.Here, the natural form of each village is similar. I sum it up in four words: ‘fields, soil, mountains, forests.’ A village is typically located at the foot of or halfway up a mountain. There is a river in the valley and rice fields on both sides. The gentle slopes of the mountainside are dry land, which nongmin call tu; there are mountains further up on which there are bamboo, economic or secondary forests. In many villages, there is a saying that ‘seven mountains, two soils and one field’ and ‘eight mountains, one soil and one field’.
The economic model here is very similar. It used to be a typical natural economic model. Rice is grown in the fields, and corn, sweet potatoes, and potatoes are grown in the dr. Two pigs are raised at home. Corn and sweet potatoes are used to feed the pigs. At New Year, one is killed and sold, one made into bacon and eaten over a year, and the other is sold as food as the source of cash for the next year. I call this model one of planting-raising whereby ‘people eat rice, pigs eat corn, and people eat pigs.’ This traditional model is a non-monetary economy that basically does not require cash, a typical form of traditional farm economy. It needs cash, but not a lot. It relies on selling a pig to cover cash transactions. Weddings and weddings are actually equivalent to a ‘farmer bank’. I gave you the money for your wedding, but I just gave it to you. Next time I hold a wedding, you can give me the money again. One of the functions of weddings and funerals is to collect money to do things. Hence the main form of traditional farm economy is planting and raising. In the past two decades, the traditional economic form has been broken, and a new form has emerged—i.e., working outside the home. A rural family has a fixed life cycle. When the children are young, fewer people are working and more eating. As the children grow up, there are more people to work and fewer to eat. When they have grown up, they want to go their own ways, and the labour force is scarce. In the migrant labour era, nongmin in their twenties don’t farm at home, but go out to work. This has a great impact on agricultural and nongmin lives. If no one in the family goes out to work, or can’t for some reason, the family will be unable to get out of the old economic cycle, and its ability to ward off risk will be very poor. If someone gets sick, or a child’s school fees are raised slightly it’s easy to fall into poverty. You’ll find that working matters a great deal to nongmin.There are nearly 300 million migrant workers at present, an issue that sociology devotes great effort to study. To sum up the natural economic form of spicy food areas, it can be summarised in the above eight words. Nature is fields, soil, and mountains and forests, and the economy is planting, raising, and working, all of which are based on the family.
Industries in spicy eating areas can be divided into two categories: ‘conventional’ and ‘special industries’. They are called ‘conventional’ as this is the only path of development in these areas, given their natural environment. We can’t develop some industry all-out just because we think it is ‘good’. Rural industries are often determined by the natural environment. If you go to many villages in spicy areas, for example, you’ll find some of the same industries, such as growing tobacco and tea, raising sheep and bees. Thus sheep and beekeeping can be seen in most villages, but the scale is not large. If you think that as they’re easily raised, you should go all-out developing it, it won’t work. Sheep need to be grazed, and bees need to fly everywhere to feed on flowers, but they have a problem of feeding radius. No matter who raises over thirty hives of bees in a village, there will be no place to collect honey. If you do research, you will know what can be done a little bit, what can be done all-out, and what cannot be done. There are more complex questions: who will do it, how, and where the money will come from. This is where agricultural development and industrial development are very different.
To develop industries, we must develop them at scale and efficiently, that is, to develop ‘special breeding industries’, many of which are industries with economies of scale. But whether it can be successful and whether nongmin can benefit is a very complicated issue. Fei Xiaotong said that rural industry ‘grows out of agriculture’ and is closely related to a region’s natural conditions and traditional economy. If we develop some ‘flying’ industries, we must solve the problem of adaptability.
For example, we went to a village in Hunan to promote the cultivation of white juhua (chrysanthemum). In fact, from the natural conditions, Hangbaiju (juhua liquor) is very adapted to this area. When we went there, they gave us this to drink, and it was very delicious. But nongmin don’t like planting juhua, mainly because they find it tedious. They are planted in March and April and harvested in October. They are also inseparable from people. Juhua are hard to harvest at harvest time. In fact, it will be too late to pick them when they are in full bloom. Sometimes I had to pick them before dawn. So does this mean that nongmin are lazy? We conduct field research, just like archaeology, in a layer-by-layer manner. You have to dig layer by layer, and you can’t look at the problem from the surface, and you can’t say, ‘It’s just nongmin who are too lazy.’ Juhua are too clingy. nongmin are actually very busy, so there is a reason not to plant them.
Poor nongmin have family troubles that are harder to deal with. The reason why one doesn’t go out to work may be because his old man is bedridden at home. Unable to go out to work, he can’t grow juhua here. This is the same reason. He can only grow rice because it doesn’t need work every day. By ‘adaptability’, I mean that industry must survive in this place. It does not mean that the water and soil are suitable, so adapting to them will work here, one must adapt to its ‘local conditions’.
‘Adaptability’ means having ‘local hallmarks’, a major, very sociological issue. Many people fail to grasp sociology, knowing only about counting and settling accounts. In fact, the more they calculate, the more they suffer. Nowadays, there are many capitalists who have leased a lot of land from the village—land in the village is cheap anyway—and they plant whatever they see to make money on a large scale. In fact, it is difficult to transfer the money in the end. We can’t just calculate economic accounts.
The ‘flying geese’ theory is discussed in development economics, arguing that coastal industries can be moved inland. This is extremely dogmatic. In fact, many labour-intensive enterprises that have moved to the hinterland fail to make money: labour costs there are higher than in the east; all the decent labour force has left. What do you mean by ‘decent’ or ‘not decent’? We did some research in a poor village in Fuping County, Hebei. There was a luggage workshop where women who stayed in the village were organised to sew luggage for 60 yuan a day. This is a good income chance for poor villages. Yet the factory has failed to make money for two years, and is barely breaking even, making no profit at all. The problem it encountered was that these women’s labour force was not ‘decent’. Hardworking, they suddenly said they wanted to go home to cook and take care of the children, and they left as soon as they said they wanted. Making bags and bags is an assembly line, and if one link breaks, it will be very troublesome. Nongmin are always leaving at the drop of a hat. The problem is complex. She is not a good ‘worker’ or ‘labour force’ in the factory, but she is a good ‘daughter-in-law’ and ‘mother’ in the village. Because the factory has already invested in this village, she’s already employed, so she can only keep working, and can’t just move out.
This is the actual situation of rural industry. Loose, or ‘humanised’ management, is a common management model in rural enterprises in China, because the objects of management are not ‘labor’ [sic] in the standard sense of capitalist society. This is defined as individualised, rational, maximising self-interest, but this is not the case for nongmin. If you punish a woman, she feels so humiliated that she cries and leaves; Not just by herself, but taking her sisters with her. They can’t be called low quality or bad character—someone who cares about face can’t be that bad in character. It’s just that the criteria we use are different from those of nongmin.
Another story, about a poor village in Yongzhou, Hunan: paying the nongmin a transfer fee, a local businessman leased over 1,000 mu of land to grow peaches on a large scale. Initial investment for peaches is huge, with no return for three years: what is called ‘three for peaches, four for apricots’. This is a model approach for poverty alleviation. It not only pays nongmin transfer fees, but creates lot\ of jobs for them in the peach orchard, paying them wages. Nongmin themselves have no capital to plant peaches. Now the capitalists have come, capital and labour are combined to kill two birds with one stone. Isn’t that great? But the actual situation is not so simple. You should all realise that when you go to the fields in the future, what you initially see can only be deemed sizing up the situation, not investigating it. You have to do some talking to the point of breaking barriers before you can enter into people’s real situation. The conversation I had with the business boss started out as a self-commendation meeting for his ‘going to the countryside to help the poor’, but later became an airing of his complaints. I’ve observed this issue before, when researching ‘capital going to the countryside’: People ‘building nests to attract phoenixes’ everywhere. When you’re waiting to invest your capital, you are like a phoenix, flying around to inspect, which is very exciting. Once you find a place to invest, you will no longer be a phoenix, but a dog. The place will close its doors and beat dogs, and you won’t be able to leave anyway. That peach-growing boss, this was his third year of planting them. The trees were testing fruit of which they had 500,000 kg. There should be some profit, right? In the event, a third fell to the ground, another third were stolen; only a third were collected, and the remainder stolen. This is the adaptability issue, that of ‘rooting in the local area’. Putting down roots is very difficult. Our social structure is very strict. How foreign people and things can take root is a very complicated problem.
Industry PA is a key issue in PA, but few of the projects that have been really done well have done much, and many of them have been rushed up and dispersed. One of the primary reasons is that it only calculates economic accounts and does not take into account ‘people’ or nongmin. If outsiders or robots are employed rather than local nongmin, that’s a different matter. But agricultural production has some special difficulties. Being lazy or idle is easy, supervising is difficult. This is unlike in a factory, where you have a workshop director and install some cameras, and whoever is lazy will get a bonus. Can you install cameras everywhere in your fields? The critical issue in PA hence is neither facilities nor funds, but people. The most important issue in developing a good industry is to enable people to return home - these things cannot be done well by outsiders, nor can they be done by those who cannot do it on their own. Rural talents and industrial development are mutually reinforcing. This is a very important principle and should be emphasised.
Furthermore, poverty alleviation work and its mechanisms are extremely important. My deepest feeling during this survey was of experiences I’d never had before. I’d failed to grasp what ‘fight against poverty’ meant. It seems like there are a lot of formal things. What’s visible to you as outsiders are entire sets of forms, materials, and texts: people keep coming to inspect and supervise. I think you’ve all seen lots of complaints about the formalisation of PA. In fact, forcing cadres to be stationed in villages is quite a formal matter. But there are limits to complaining about formalities—things themselves are more complex than you imagine. Once you get off the scene and chat a bit much with PA cadres, they’ll talk to you' a lot of things. If they’re are forced to be sent down, they may be unwilling , and have little peace of mind. This is a problem. A cadre I met had a child who was set to take college entrance exam the following year, but could only sit for it in this village. His dissatisfaction was mounting. Yett he still did a lot of good things—not according to him, but to his PA recipients.
His PA target‘s child was sick, and the cadre helped find a doctor via his connections. What nongmin in rural society lack most is connections. I mean, the things he did and the practical good deeds done by many PA cadres cannot be buried. Many people use the word formalism to deny their hard work. Formal things also have two sides. Even if you don’t want to go, you are forced to go, and then you see the situation of the poor households, and you can’t bear it, so you do something. This is ‘sincere’ assistance. Sincere help, the most important thing is not to help, but sincerity. As long as you are sincere, the other person will feel it. The most important thing about sociology is attending to the links between peoples’ heart-minds. You don’t have to be smart to feel the sincerity of others. Sometimes you are too smart - too shrewd to feel it or believe it. Then tell me whether you are really smart or really stupid.
This article is the author’s speech at the Peking University Exchange Meeting on November 16, 2018. It was originally published on the ‘Peking University Society’ public account.
Zhou Feizhou, "‘Building nests to attract phoenixes’ has become ‘closing doors‘ to them. How can PA take root?”, Aisixiang, 7 October 2023 [周飞舟:““筑巢引凤”变成“关门打狗”, 扶贫怎能落地生根?”,爱思想,2023年10月 7日 (in Chinese).].