How Part-Time Farming Achieves Self-Balance for Peasant Families

I

This time, going back to my hometown for the Chinese New Year, several new buildings had appeared in the village. The young people are all working away from home, so the heavy responsibility of building houses naturally falls to the elderly. I could not help but marvel at how busy the rural elderly can be: not only farming and looking after children, but also building houses. In almost every household in the village, buildings have gone up, the low ones two storeys, the tall ones four or five storeys. Building such a house costs at least 200,000 yuan, and for many, 400,000 to 500,000 yuan. Building a house is a major event for every rural family; building a house, taking a wife, and having children are the three great tasks of life. Only when a young small family has a house does it have its own little home, and only then can life be comfortable. For a young rural man today to marry, a building is a necessary condition; a girl with good prospects not only requires a building in the countryside, but also a commodity apartment in the city.

Uncle Jiegeng is 64 years old this year. He is an old rural carpenter with exquisite skills; he can also paint and carve, and writes quite good brush calligraphy. He has taken on nearly 20 apprentices over the years. He says he has built houses three times in his life. The first was at age 27, just after marrying and setting up a separate household, when he built an earthen house; the second was in the 1990s, when he built a grey-brick house and added an earthen storey on top, two storeys in total. At the time, such a grey-brick house was the best in the whole village; the third is the four-storey reinforced concrete building just completed in recent years, with a particularly deep foundation. He says it would not fall even in a magnitude 7 or 8 earthquake.

Uncle Jiegeng's children did not contribute money to build this house. This was a question in my mind. The old couple farm a little over one mu of land, and the income from farming is very meagre. What is known is that in the past two years, land was requisitioned for an expressway, and the government compensated them 100,000 yuan, but that is still far from enough to build a four-storey building. Only after talking with Uncle Jiegeng in detail did I learn that from the start of construction to the completion of the frame, this building took two and a half years. Much of the labour that should have been hired was not hired at all; Uncle Jiegeng did it all himself. He used his slack farming seasons to lay the foundation, carry bricks, and haul sand. As long as he could do it himself, he did not hire anyone. This is semi-contract labour.

According to Uncle Jiegeng, for building a building, semi-contract labour and full-contract labour differ by more than 100,000 yuan. At present, much rural house building is semi-contract labour. If you ask carefully, you will learn that many rural families' buildings were built by the older generation using the money they had saved and then using their slack farming seasons for semi-contract labour. In some families, the young people working away from home brought back part of the money; in others, they did not.

II.

For an ordinary family, without the help of the elderly, building such a building is almost impossible. Quite a few young people told me that without the support of the older generation, they would not know how to live. Even if they stayed in the village, it would be very hard for them to accomplish as much as their parents did: they would have to work in the fields, look after children, and build houses. Without full-contract labour, just building a house would wear them out! They would rather go out to work.

In most families, a child is left at home to be cared for by the grandparents just a few months after birth. If the child were brought to the city, not to mention that protections such as education and medical care do not cover the migrant worker group, even if all kinds of institutional conditions were in place, bringing the child to the city would require at least one person to stay at home specifically to care for the child. If the grandparents from the hometown were brought to the city to help, not only would the family lose one source of income from the hometown, but the young people's burden of supporting the elderly would also increase by one layer. Income from working away from home is very limited. Although leaving children behind at home is not very good, it is probably the optimal choice for many families under current conditions.

When young people have just married, the small family they establish is in the initial stage of the family life cycle, and they need support from the older generation in all respects. The elderly must look after their children, give them a stable place to live when they return from working away, a place for family reunion during the New Year and festivals, comfort for bodies and minds exhausted by working in the big cities, basic living security when they return to the countryside during the slack season for work, and a place for their drifting emotions to rest.

The elderly staying in the countryside is not a bad thing. In the countryside, the elderly can work in the fields, look after their grandchildren, visit neighbours, chat, and bask in the sun. There are fields, greenery, and friends. Compared with the city, they toil hard but can live more healthily. It is very common in the countryside for two elderly people to look after three or four grandchildren. Several sons go out to work, and their children are all handed over to the parents. This kind of “work intensity” and “work efficiency” exists only in the rural society of acquaintances, because “holding this one and holding that one, the day just passes”, and there is almost no need to worry about safety. Once in the city, the elderly become pure consumers, but in the countryside they are a productive force.

III.

Of course, the above analysis is for general agricultural-type areas. In coastal rural areas, suburban rural areas, or resource-based villages, such problems mostly do not exist. For the general agricultural-type villages that make up the majority of the country, it can be said that the balance of peasant families hangs by a thread. This balance is built on the part-work part-farming model based on the intergenerational division of labour, and here, part-time farming appears especially important. It can be said that part-time farming maintains the safe value of the rural family dependency ratio in general agricultural-type areas, enables the older generation to provide the necessary support to the younger generation, allows the younger generation's families to transition smoothly, realises the promotion of the city by the countryside and the leading of the countryside by the city, and allows the urbanisation process to proceed smoothly.

In this sense, part-time farming does not hinder urbanisation; rather, it boosts steady urbanisation. In plain terms, part-time farming means the older generation farming at home, looking after children, and building houses. Relying only on part-work, the balance would immediately tip into imbalance, leading to family instability and even social turmoil. Part-time farming is also very simple and easy to carry out: let the older generation stay in the countryside and have land to farm. For the older generation, although it is very hard, toiling in the place where their ancestors lived and worked for generations is also a kind of enjoyment. It must be said that part-work part-farming is an ingenious family structure. If land transfer were forcibly promoted, or villages were forcibly wiped out, the consequences can be imagined. Wiping out a village is easy, but restoring the already fragile ties of rural society would probably be very difficult.

The rural elderly, with a self-rolled cigarette in their mouths, whether sitting in the shade of a tree or walking along the edges of the fields, have eyes full of contentment. This sense of meaning and spiritual satisfaction is bound to the soil of their homeland. The part-work part-farming model today also transcends ordinary political-economic significance; it is also about rural civilisation and the dignity of many people.