Chapter 36: Excerpts from Notes on a Trip to the Countryside

Editor’s Note from the Lingao Times:

As we approach the final year of the “First Five-Year Plan,” the challenges in agriculture and rural work are immense and unprecedented. This newspaper will be publishing a series of “Notes from a Village Stay” by Comrade Yun Suji, a Yuanlao active on the agricultural front of the Senate. Through the vivid examples he presents, we can more clearly feel the current reality of “lagging agricultural development, weak rural grassroots, and unsatisfactory peasant life,” and more profoundly understand the important directive from State Secretary Ma at the Twelfth State Council Meeting: “The policy of transforming the countryside and transforming the peasants cannot be changed, and its intensity cannot be reduced.”

Main Text:

Only by being grounded can one have confidence. Faced with the myriad tasks of rural work, only by calming down and going deep into the front lines can we understand the thoughts and hopes of the peasant masses, grasp the reality of current rural work, and seize the initiative in the “three rural issues.” To solve the difficult problems of agricultural and rural development, we need more of this kind of down-to-earth investigation.

Recently, I have been going to the countryside frequently, sometimes running through five or six villages in a single day, from dawn to dusk. But these trips are often fleeting, like looking at flowers on horseback. I don’t learn much about the real situation, nor do I study the difficult problems thoroughly. It was only during my recent stay and investigation in a village in the Haikou countryside that I was able to make up for the shortcomings of my previous rural surveys.

Cloudy with a chance of sun, northwest wind shifting from 3-4 to 5-6.

Early this morning, I rushed to Tankou Village, a new immigrant settlement at the foot of Pingshen Ridge. This trip could be considered “light and simple.” I only brought two guards and took a Heaven and Earth Society fishing boat up the river. To avoid layers of escorts and not to disturb the work of the county and township comrades, I didn’t greet them at all. I wanted to go straight to the bottom, quietly stay in the village, and as much as possible, “not disturb the people in the village, and not disturb the officials in the county.”

Just after 9 a.m., we arrived at Tankou. This is a standard village on the west bank of the Nandu River. The villagers’ houses are as neat as a military camp. The whole village has more than 160 immigrant households with over 500 people. The dry land is mainly used for planting sweet potatoes, while the irrigated land has two seasons of rice plus one season of green manure. Various miscellaneous grains are planted on the marginal lands. According to the county cadres, its economic level is on the lower side among the immigrant villages, but it is not the poorest.

I had thought there would be more people in the village during the slack farming season, but I didn’t see many people after entering. It was only after finding the village chief that I learned most of the villagers had gone to do labor duty. After entering the village, I didn’t look for a place to stay first. The first thing I did was to propose to the village chief, Old Huo: “Now is the time for farmland and water conservancy construction. Accommodation is not urgent. Let’s go to the construction site to see the situation first.”

Village Chief Old Huo is in his 40s, simple and honest, an outstanding cadre we selected from the Shandong immigrants. He didn’t want me to go. “The construction site is all water and mud. It’s enough for you to just take a look, Chief.” I insisted on going. “It’s alright. If I’m afraid of getting dirty and tired, what’s the point of coming to the countryside? I’m staying in your village tonight, so there’s definitely enough time.”

On the way, Old Huo mentioned that there was too much low-lying wetland around the village, which often led to waterlogging during the rainy summer. “Good land, but it can’t be planted!”

It was only after walking for a while that I realized there was indeed a lot of low-lying land here! This land was formed by the silting of a meander of the Nandu River, a veritable water country. Ponds and pools were scattered everywhere. It was really a long detour before we reached the water conservancy project site. As soon as we arrived, I saw a young man in his 20s driving a “Simmental” breed of yellow ox to turn a water wheel.

Many people were gathered on and below the ditch, digging and carrying earth. The tools were relatively simple, basically just digging by hand and carrying on shoulders. There weren’t even many wheelbarrows. The water table here is very high. It’s the dry season now, but there was still water up to the calves in the bottom of the ditch. They had to use the ox to constantly turn the water wheel. The workers had all rolled up their trousers and were working in the water. Although the weather here is much warmer than on the mainland, the water temperature in winter is still very low. I couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of the hardships of the peasants.

The person directing the construction on the embankment was a young girl, who looked to be less than twenty years old, yet her work was very professional. I asked and found out that she had designed the project here and was also responsible for supervising the construction.

I was secretly surprised that she was already designing and supervising projects at such a young age. After asking further, I learned that she was a top student of the architectural planning titan, Yuanlao Ji Runzhi, and had been studying with him for five years. She was a rare, all-round naturalized citizen architectural engineer. She and her senior, Ji Shu, had been engaged in design and construction work since they were sixteen. They had designed and built projects all over Hainan, Taiwan, and Jeju. Truly, heroes emerge from the young.

I asked about the specific construction situation. Ji Yuan explained that this was a drainage system, including drainage channels and supporting gates and ponds. Once completed, it could drain the excess water from about 1,000 mu of land.

“The terrain of Tankou is not conducive to agricultural production,” Ji Yuan told me. “Part of the cultivated land here is in the hilly area by the river, with high terrain that requires water to be lifted for irrigation. The other part by the river is low-lying and requires drainage.”

Hearing her words, it seemed that for agricultural production here to reach a new level, more labor and resources would have to be invested.

Seeing the bustling labor scene, I couldn’t help but want to participate. I had my guard lead the ox in front, while I drove it from behind. In no time, I was sweating profusely. I took off my coat and threw it into the grass at the edge of the field. The young man immediately picked up the clothes and held them in his arms. This small detail moved me.

The “Simmental” ox pulled the water wheel with effort, but it was very obedient. An old woman boiling water nearby told me, “This cow is due to give birth in about 10 days. We can’t let it walk too fast, for fear of tiring it out.”

I asked whose cow this was. The old woman said it was a jointly owned animal. It turned out that most of the villagers were relatively poor and couldn’t afford a large animal. Finally, at Old Huo’s suggestion, seven or eight families pooled their resources to buy this cow. Even then, it wasn’t enough, and they had to apply for a partial loan.

“We take care of it better than our ancestors,” the old woman said. “We’re counting on its calf to pay back the loan.”

Hearing this, I felt a pang of sadness. I didn’t expect the peasants here to still be so poor! It was a world apart from the few advanced villages I had visited. The gap between villages has already widened.

Because it was still the New Year holiday, work ended at around four in the afternoon. I returned to the village with everyone. Tankou Village is also a standard village built by the Senate to settle refugees. The houses and streets are very neat, but the cleanliness is not satisfactory. Some farmers let their pigs run loose on the streets to find food, which is not only unhygienic but also easily spreads disease.

I talked with Old Huo about the villagers’ living conditions: the land yield here is low, and the village generally still has two meals a day, dry in the morning and thin in the evening. During the busy farming season, they switch to two dry and one thin. The total grain consumption is similar to other better-off villages, but the proportion of fine grains is even lower, and even the proportion of miscellaneous grains has decreased—Old Huo reported that many households in the village often use pumpkins as a substitute for grain. I wanted to know how much grain the farmers had in storage, so I went into the village’s collective granary, only to see a brand-new small steam-powered water pump inside. I asked Old Huo, and he said it was for the irrigation system on the high ground.

Following the clue, I followed him to the north end of the village. The terrain here is high, but the land is very flat. Old Huo said this piece of land was over 200 mu. The land had been leveled, and the pipes connecting to the irrigation canal at the foot of the hill were neat and intact. Even the foundation for installing the water pump had been built, but there were no signs of use. I asked, “Why isn’t the water pump installed?” The accompanying village cadre looked around and said, “We don’t know how.”

Later, Old Huo told me that this “Water Diversion to the Mountain” project, a red flag project for agricultural demonstration in Qiongshan, had not been used since its completion because installing a steam pump was a technical job, and the operator had to be trained. But there was no one in Qiongshan who could install it; they had to wait for someone to be sent from Lingao.

“We’ve been waiting for months, and we don’t know when they’ll come to install it.”

Standing on the concrete base of the water pump, I saw a water conservancy project by the Nandu River that also seemed not to be in use.

“That’s the ‘Thousand Women Dike.’ Last year, the county organized thousands of immigrant women to build it. Even people from the central government came. It was in the newspapers and everything. But the canal broke in the spring, and the supporting gates and other things haven’t arrived yet. The Heaven and Earth Society submitted a request for material allocation, but it hasn’t been approved by the higher-ups yet. Without cement to repair it and without gates, even if there’s water, we can’t use it!” Old Huo’s frustration at seeing the water but being unable to use it was palpable.

The embarrassing situation of the “Water Diversion to the Mountain” and the “Thousand Women Dike” exposed a blind spot in our work. Project construction must solve the problems of support, use, and management; otherwise, it is a waste of labor and money.

Although Qiongshan is one of the few major agricultural counties in Hainan, the problems of engineering-related water shortages and poor utilization of water conservancy projects exist simultaneously. This is a common problem. To implement the Senate’s agricultural spirit, we must not only increase investment in construction projects but also improve and perfect the management system and mechanism.

It was already past 1 p.m. when I returned from the fields. The village chief’s wife had cooked sweet potato porridge in the kitchen and stir-fried some pancake flowers with oil, salt, and scallions. I had worked in the morning and walked a lot in the paddy fields. Plus, there were no side dishes. I drank two bowls of sweet potato porridge and ate a large bowl of pancake flowers and still didn’t feel full. I then ate two more local eggs. No one accompanied me, and there was no ceremony. Lunch took only a little over 10 minutes. In contrast, at some official functions, eating becomes a burden that wastes time and money. In fact, this burden is “uncomfortable for both sides.” The way to change official reception can be very simple: first, don’t have people accompany you, and second, strictly implement the principle of paying for your own meals. If these two points are achieved, the “stubborn disease of eating and drinking” can be easily solved.

After lunch, I went to the village office. The main cadres of the village were all there. The militia captain had served in the army in Shandong and had returned after retiring due to his age. He was honest and sincere, yet shrewd, and spoke the new dialect well. The accountant was a young man we had trained ourselves. The account books here were incomplete. At my request, Old Huo found a few materials from a cabinet: there were records of village cadre meetings, registration of Heaven and Earth Society affairs, and records of the activities of the Red and White Affairs Council, and so on.