“Inseparable from the Soil:” China’s Urban-Rural Divide in the Language of Fei Xiaotang

In 2019, I backpacked across rural Yunnan, China with an interest in understanding the dynamics between urban modernity, rural history, and the farmers caught in-between. This paper is a discursive exploration of these concepts framed within the language of one of China’s leading sociologists, Professor Fei Xiaotong.

“I remember that one of my teachers, Dr. Shirokogoroff, once told me about some Chinese who had moved to Siberia. In total disregard of the climate, those Chinese still planted their seeds just to see if anything would grow…the Chinese really are inseparable from the soil” -Fei Xiaotang, from “Into the Soil”.

The gaps between rural and urban China are vivid and distinct. The bustling streets of urban China—Beijing, Shanghai, and even the larger cities of distance provinces like Kunming in Yunnan—offer a distinctive view of China to foreign observers.

Heading to the Beijing International Airport and leaving the Kunming airport to a hostel in the northwest part of town, I never needed to hail a cab because the dense urban environment was a perfect market for the proliferation of China’s leading ride-sharing at Didi. Peering at my English App (equipped with its internal translation mechanism to simplify communication between foreigners and Mandarin-speaking drivers), I found a plethora of available vehicles ready to pick me up and take me to my desired location in the city. Yet, as I left Kunming and pushed further north into the green mountains of Yunnan, transportation was more challenging. Trains (and occasionally airplanes) connected larger towns which attracted both domestic and international tourists, like the route from Kunming to Dali. Transportation connecting smaller towns on the thoroughfare was primarily by long bus rides. Finally, transportation between the villages of some rural communities exists only by way of difficult mountain roads, traversable only on motorbike and four-wheel drive vehicles. The rise of urban centers like Kunming and the push to develop the rural peripheries is slowly building bridges (literally and figuratively) to connect these communities to urban China. But, with these new linkages, the sociocultural and economic survival of rural communities faces an impending change.

This reflection applies an anthropological framework of spatiality in order to analyze rural and urban China through the period of Chinese independence to the Great Leap Forward. It asserts that ideas of spatiality and geography are important factors in the positionality of rural Chinese communities.

In this view, physical delineated features of nature including mountains, rivers, lakes, and (in some instances) even the physical soil are critical points of cultural and historic linkages. That is to say, natural features tie the people to the land and the land to the people. As the famed Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong writes in his seminal work Into the Soil (Xiāngtǔ zhōngguó), “Country people cannot do without the soil because their very livelihood is based on it (37).” This intrinsic relationship serves as an important point for understanding the complexities of China’s rural history.

While the periphery of China historically experienced a variety of early societies like the nomadic Mongolian pastoralists, western China’s tradition is one of sedentary life, bound to agricultural subsistence. Farmers are rooted, just as their crops, limiting their mobility. Life develops around farming, as opposed to pastoralists who must seasonally migrate in search of water and grass for their flocks. In this sedentary life, farmers and farming villages are isolated collectively from the outside world, relying only on those within their community for survival. Taken as a whole, this characteristic of Chinese society is significant to understand the early formulation of China prior to, during, and following independence. As Fei writes, “…the Chinese are really inseparable from the soil. To be sure, out of this soil has grown a glorious history, but it is a history that was naturally limited by what could be taken from the soil. Now it appears that these very limitations imposed by agriculture will hold China back, will prevent the nation from moving forward (38).”

The Chinese Communist Land Reform

Certainly, from Fei’s point of view, that is writing from the post-World War II period, agriculture was seen as the way forward at the beginning of the new communist state in China. For the early Communist period—including the early Communist land reform policies up to the Great Leap Forward, grain production remained a strong indicator of national production. But it was the farmers who bared the burden of production. In theory, this process of land reform in the early Mao period elucidates questions about the nature of land and people in rural China. Did the Communist land reform policies functionally sever the land-individual relationship that Fei references?

It begs further questions about the historic foundations of Chinese society within this rural-urban divide. Mao’s vision of revolution was by that of the urban proletariat, not the rural farming communities. In many ways, this vision of revolution unevenly burdened the rural farming class, who while gaining land through the forced redistribution of land from the landlord class, ultimately suffered the greatest during the Great Leap Forward. Observing the urban-rural divide, Fei writes, “In the eyes of those living in cities, country people are ‘stupid’ (yu). Even those who advocate rural work regard stupidity, sickness, and poverty as symptoms of everything that is wrong in Chinese rural villages (45).” His criticism here is important insight into the rural reconstruction of revolutionary China because he refers to those intellectuals and officials leading the Rural Reconstruction Movement (footnote 1, 45).

The development of rural agricultural societies meant the deconstruction of traditional societal values linked to patrilineage, family values, patrimonialism, and Confucianism (to name a few). In many ways, these values, while abstract, are also linked to the land. The undoing of this society began as early as the advent of modernity in the 18th and 19th century. However, it was a process largely hastened under the Nationalists and continued under the Communist party. While the nationalists sought to undo social values through the reformation of society by a new moral code, the communists more carefully dissected society through the language of revolution. This approach utilized the concept of revolution as the means to undo lineage, traditional values, gender roles, and landlord-servant class relations. It separated father from son, friend from friend, and poor from rich. This approach is important for two reasons. First, it severed the social relationships which underpinned traditional societies in rural China. Second, it seems to have severed the land-individual relationship Fei outlines.

From a broad perspective, the separation of Landlords from their land was an important development because it severed their abstract connection to the land. Then, as the land was redistributed to the poorer classes, this land-individual connection lacked the same strength among the new land owners. Perhaps, this is a contributing factor for the ease of collectivization in the decades that followed. The organization of communes brought people together onto the land of former landlords and peasants alike. Without full ownership of property nor a historic relationship with the land, it was easier to convince the mass of rural farmers that collectivization was the next logical step in the reform process. In short, this type of rural development is perhaps better defined as social planning or, in some extreme cases as the Great Leap Forward, it can be categorized as social engineering. It asserts the singular importance of knowledge. While knowledge (in the intellectual sense) is of lesser importance in Chinese rural society (where experience remains most important), it became a sort of power to the Communist party whose planned approach to rural development enabled them to weaken the influence of traditional societies and impart a new, state-driven value system.

It is important to note, however, that this knowledge was not always exercised well. The Great Leap Forward left a disastrous scar on China both in terms of human life and natural destruction. Millions starved as the result of bad planning and human error. Sitting on the shore of Kunming Lake southwest of the city, I saw what was once a clean and lively lake. It is now heavily polluted and largely uninhabited due to the consequences of agricultural over-production. The destruction of the environment in Kunming and other areas of Yunnan forced rural farmers into urban poverty where many starved and died. This was the story across many areas of China.

Concluding with my own observations from a trip through both urban and rural Yunnan, the image of urban China I observed against the backdrop of rural Yunnan is a juxtaposition of old and new; traditional and modern; as well as simple and advanced. Below the ancient Naxi villages of Yulong Mountain, two large scale cable bridges are being constructed over the upper Tiger Leaping Gorge along a tributary of the Yangtze river. Planned development (or social planning) is well on its way. Much of the path I walked in the mountains was carved in the mountainside by Red Guard youth after the Cultural Revolution. Many of the villages populated by China’s rural minorities still hold to traditional life styles. Those I met held close traditional values, but found space for China’s own state view. In one sense, the rural-urban divide will always continue to exist, but it is a reaffirmation of Fei’s words: “the Chinese are inseparable from the soil.” The way of farming will remain rooted, as will the farmers themselves, in the land for decades to come.

© Jesse Marks, Coffee in the Desert