Word: peasant
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Wang Bingnan remembered how Mao, coming in from the march that first evening, had been offered a bed. He was to sleep on a spring mattress, after 15 years of sleeping on a hard board with only a thin peasant's pad between the board and his body. Wang remembered meeting Jiang
...deceive. This has been a great year in China: a prospective record harvest, record incomes. Yet peasant prosperity is fragile. Here was Sichuan in green spring, the wheat turning yellow, soon to be golden. But if the rains fell at the wrong time, the wheat would be beaten to the ground and lost, and there would be a slim rice crop in the fall. This huge province lives on the margin of hunger...
...responsibility system" in Sichuan has demonstrated that peasants work best when they tend their own fields. For Westerners this recognition seems equivalent to the rediscovery of the wheel. But with a crucial difference. The state, via the commune, has replaced the old landlord. It owns the fields; the peasant rents an allotted share of land; if he meets the state's quota (once called the landlord's rent), he keeps the rest. This is progress. It is harsh; yet the Great Cultural Revolution was far more cruel...
Days later I visited "a big brigade" in the province of Hubei that was beginning to refer to itself, not as a brigade but, again, as a cun, a village. The brigade chief, a bald-headed veteran Communist, explained once more that peasants could now decide on their own crops and routines. "Responsibility" made them care about the harvest. Then, as an afterthought, he added, "It is not only the attention of the farmer that helps. He now uses his own organic material, also the organic material of the chickens and buffaloes to enrich his fields." I read very precisely...
...countryside, the government is reduced to persuasion, propaganda, occasionally coercion. The new "responsibility system," with each peasant gardening his little plot on his own, makes children useful again; they grow up to weed, plant, harvest; above all, to take care of their parents in old age. Peasants who now begin to prosper do not want just one baby; if the first baby is a girl, the matter is very serious indeed ? girls go off and get married. Thus, a situation that the Chinese themselves find appalling and the government denounces ? the killing of infant girls...