Renhe Cun, a Prosperous, Commercialized Village

The capital of Renhe qu is Renhe zhen , a town of about 20,000 residents about twenty minutes' drive on a smoothly paved highway from the southern edge of Panzhihua city proper. We interviewed in Renhe cun , an area of about 1,200 households stretching eastward from the outer streets of the

[7] All retrospective questions designed to elicit information on family composition reached back to 1949, but my impression is that the data are less reliable before about 1970. For that reason and because the conference dealt with changes since the beginning of the reforms, I have chosen to concentrate here on the period from about 1970, which covers several years under collectivization as well as the period since.

[8] To be precise, in Renhe we selected five of the ten production cooperatives (formerly teams), according to local cadres' descriptions of their economic activities. Thus one of the two grain-growing cooperatives was sampled, one of the two where fish raising was important, and so forth. In each selected team, we took a random sample of all households. Where a household could not be interviewed because there was no competent adult, we selected the household immediately below it in the household registers. In Yishala, we took a random sample of the main village (80 households) and a random sample of the satellite village of Xiachang (10 households). In Zhuangshang, we took a random sample of each of the village's three cooperatives.

[9] Geographic differentials in economic development in rural Panzhihua have also been treated by Li Shaoming in a paper entitled "Panzhihua shi gongyequ de jianshe dui zhoubian nongcun de yingxiang" (The effect of the construction of the industrial district in Panzhihua city on surrounding villages), presented at the Conference on Urban Anthropology held in Beijing in December 1989.

Map 4.1.
Panzhihua and Vicinity

town itself into the foothills surrounding the rich valley where the town is located.^[10] Renhe and the other cun that make up Renhe zhen , along with the neighboring xiang , or townships, of Qianjin and Zongfa, are probably the wealthiest villages in all of Panzhihua city; we chose Renhe partly as a contrast to the poorer, more remote villages that were our other interview sites. The mean per capita income in our sample households in 1987 was 1,024 yuan (with a household median of 4,800, or about 1,000 per person),^[11] which puts Renhe comfortably above the national rural average, though still short of really wealthy villages in the Pearl River delta, as described by Johnson and Siu in this volume, or on the Chengdu plain or the Jiangnan area outside Shanghai.^[12] About four-fifths of Renhe villagers' reported income was in cash. Most houses in Renhe are still built of mud (people say brick housing is too hot in the summer), but modern appliances such as televisions and tape players are ubiquitous, and several families own refrigerators, color televisions, or washing machines.

There has been a market at Renhe since at least the early nineteenth century, but the area remained a sleepy backwater of north central Yunnan until it was given to Sichuan in 1965, when the construction of the Panzhihua steel complex was begun. At that time, the flat land in the valley surrounding the town was converted to vegetable cultivation to serve the markets of the new city. To this day, eight of the ten cooperatives that make up Renhe village are engaged in vegetable cultivation; the ninth and tenth, in the hills to the east of town, cultivate grains.^[13]

[10] The village and the urban area of Renhe district town overlap spatially, with farmhouses interspersed between the apartment buildings occupied by government and construction company employees. The difference between village and town residents lies technically, not in the type of housing, but in the hukou registration: if you have nongcun hukou , or village household registration, you belong to Renhe cun ; if you have danwei hukou , or unit household registration, you belong to the urban population of Panzhihua city. Some families have both; a man, for example, who has a state-sector job in the city will not have his household registration with his family, even though he lives with them. When some of the former agricultural areas of Renhe were taken over by Shijiu Ye (19th Metallurgy, which is actually a giant state construction company) and some residents took Shijiu Ye jobs, the affected production teams lost population, even though nobody actually moved.

[11] The absolute level of these income figures should not be taken too seriously when comparing these villages with communities in other parts of China. We did not have access to the official methods of calculating income in kind (agricultural goods both produced and consumed by the household), and so we devised our own formulas. My impression is that our method yields a figure about 25 percent higher than the methods used in official reports.

[12] I visited a village in Jiangyin county, Jiangsu, where the announced per capita income was over 1,200 yuan in 1985. It did not look much different from the surrounding villages. But officially reported average household incomes for Chinese province-level units showed only rural Shanghai to be slightly above Renhe at 1,059 yuan; the richest provinces were Guangdong at 644 and Jiangsu at 626. See Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian 1989 , 746-47.

[13] Called production "teams" during the collective period, these groups of up to a hundred or more households changed their name to production "groups" in the early 1980s; in 1988 the name was changed again to "cooperatives," though this does not indicate a recollectivization of agriculture.

Vegetable growing, in its own right, can be very lucrative. The figures for the vegetables sown by one family on their tiny plot of .63 mu , or about a tenth of an acre, illustrate why.^[14] Multiple cropping gives them a sown area of about 2.4 mu , on which, in 1987, they grew tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, green beans, cabbage, "Chinese" cabbage, and a kind of greens known as wosun . The family has minimal production costs for seed, fertilizer, and paying someone to plow their land; subtracting these from the total market price they gained for their vegetables, about 2,400 yuan, shows a probable profit of over 2,000 yuan. And they have much less land than certain other families that specialize in vegetables and sometimes make as much as 4,000 per year. There is skill in growing vegetables and in knowing when to sell to get the best prices, and some families do not do nearly as well. But vegetables are far more profitable than grain farming, even with the tiny plots available to Renhe villagers.

Only nineteen of the eighty households we interviewed in Renhe obtained all their income from farming, however. This is a great change from the 1970s and is attributable to two kinds of changing economic opportunities that are a direct result of the rural reforms.

First, there is salaried labor. While only four of our sample families earned all their income from wages, another twenty-six combined wage labor and farming, four wage labor and capital investment, and eight wage labor, capital investment, and farming. Wage labor has become increasingly available as industrial development spreads outward from Panzhihua city proper into the near suburbs such as Renhe. When industrial enterprises take over farmland, they are required to offer jobs to the farmers they displace. In the 1980s this has meant that most of the families in the seventh cooperative, which houses a large plant of the city construction company, have given up farming altogether: only three of the twelve families interviewed in that cooperative still received any income from farming, while eleven had some wage income and six lived partly by entrepreneurship. Wages vary, of course, and the wages of one worker are usually insufficient to support a family of more than two or three. For example, the family income of a man whose 110 yuan per month as a tractor driver is supplemented only by sale of an occasional pig is on the low side at 2,100 per year for four people. Another family, with three wage earners supporting six mouths, manages to make about 4,500 per year, still below average for Renhe, but enough to allow the family to save nearly 1,000 a year after expenses.

[14] It might be useful for nonfarmers to visualize the size of this plot: a square of about 20.5 meters on a side.

It is in entrepreneurial investment of capital, however, that the real opportunities lie. Sometimes this can be something that one person can do alone, as in the chicken-raising business run by the wife in the vegetablefarming family described above. Her husband orders fertilized eggs from Chengdu, or even from Beijing or Shanghai, several times a year; his wife raises them until they are at about the transition from furry to feathery, at which point she sells them for .20 yuan profit each. At 30,000 chickens per year, that is a net income of 6,000 yuan for one person's labor. Added to the aforementioned vegetable gardening and a fledgling fish-raising business, this pushes the family very close to the fabled category of wanyuan hu (ten thousand) household.

A few families in Renhe have made it to wanyuan hu status and beyond; there were five in our sample. As an example, take the leader of the ninth cooperative, a grain-growing community in the area called Longtangou, in the hills to the east of town. His family has three trucks used to haul sand and gravel. His two grown sons drive two of the trucks; he hires a driver for the other vehicle, as well as about three laborers to load and unload the construction materials. After paying wages and operating costs, this business netted the family about 18,000 yuan in 1987; added to about 1,000 from pig raising and another 1,000 from fish farming, plus in-kind income from grain farming, this brought the family's income to about 22,300, the second highest of any family we interviewed. The family head thought he was probably about the eighth wealthiest in Renhe cun . He had just enlarged his family mansion to twenty-nine rooms (six of them currently empty) built in two stories around a spacious courtyard, for a total of about eight hundred square meters of floor space.

From these few examples, it is easy to see how much the possibilities for family economy have changed since the basic reliance on collective agriculture came apart at the end of the 1970s. I should emphasize, however, that not all families have benefited equally, or even benefited much at all from the reforms. The closest neighbors to the family with the twenty-nine-room house live in a one-room mud cottage, and the poorest families in our sample had incomes of 300 yuan or less per person. In addition, families with several televisions and a truck live side by side with people who do not even own a watch or a radio.^[15]

A visitor to Renhe thus goes away with a general impression of a dynamic economy. Families have a variety of economic alternatives, many of them involving investment of capital, and those who are successful in this have not only increased their wealth dramatically since the reforms, they

[15] The topic of reemergence of social classes in prosperous parts of the Chinese countryside ought to be addressed systematically. The official position, cited to us by Panzhihua vice-mayor Tan Huizhang, is that differences in income, because they do not involve exploitation, represent divisions among strata within a class rather than differences between classes.

have also positioned themselves for further growth in perhaps new and as yet unknown directions. There are almost no Renhe families whose major income still derives from subsistence farming; except for some of the families in the ninth and tenth production cooperatives up in the hills, even the farmers are in business for profit through the growth and sale of vegetables.