Why Do Young People Leave the Countryside? An Analysis of the Main Reasons
"Leaving the countryside" has become the consensus of almost everyone and the direction of their efforts. What parents tell their children most often is "Study hard, otherwise you can only be a farmer"; what teachers tell students is also "If you can't get into university, you're useless, and you can only be a farmer." The examples society sets for people, one after another, are all typical cases of how to strive successfully to leave the countryside.
When we talk about Chinese farmers, the first thing we associate with them is the farmers' concepts of "sticking to the land" and "sticking to routine." Farmers will not easily leave the land they love and the homeland where they rise at dawn and rest at dusk. This is because "leaving one's hometown" and "being separated from wife and children" carry extremely miserable connotations. But it is not known from when people's attitudes suddenly changed. "Leaving one's hometown," "wandering everywhere," and "having no fixed dwelling" were not only accepted by people, but instead became fashionable behavior. A fellow townsman told me: "Now rural girls are all willing to find young men who work away from home; no one is willing to find one who stays in the countryside as a farmer." In our surveys, whether in the Northeast or the Southwest, one of the most commonly heard sayings was "Only a fool stays in the countryside." It may be precisely under this kind of psychology that China's "migrant worker tide" was formed.
Every year around the Spring Festival, whether you are on a journey or watching television, you must have seen the mighty ranks of migrant workers. This contingent is huge and complex, with all kinds of men, women, old and young, some in ragged clothes, some brightly dressed, pushing and pulling huge bundles of luggage, crowding every station like a tide. That scene of swarming crowds deeply shocks everyone who has witnessed it. According to the 2005 1% population sample survey data, China had nearly 150 million rural migrant workers. Today, it is generally believed that the number of migrant workers who have left home has already exceeded 200 million. By 2015, China's rural areas would still have at least 200 million people to transfer out.
So what exactly has prompted these people, who have always relied on the land for their living, to bid farewell to the native soil that raised them and set foot on the road of working away from home, enduring wind and dew and facing an uncertain future? And what has made them leave the land on which their ancestors depended for survival for generations and pour into cities of steel and concrete, where they must endure loneliness and solitude, endure harsh living conditions, endure extremely intense labor, and also endure discrimination from some people who entered the cities earlier than they did, and even endure lower incomes than in the countryside... living a life completely different from their past?
"Depending on heaven for food" was the comment of almost all interviewees on the income situation in their hometowns. Yes, for the hundreds of millions of rural people living on this vast land of China, what can determine the harvest of their crops more than the weather? Favorable weather is the year that countless people pray for. For farmers, what autumn harvests is not only grain and fruit, but also the happiness after a year of toil, and at the same time the accumulation of a beautiful future life. However, spring planting does not necessarily mean autumn harvest. Farmers can decide what seeds to plant in their fields, but they cannot decide whether autumn will harvest the fruit borne by those seeds. Because nature can at any time use its cruelty to turn the farmer's hard work into nothing in an instant. Without harvest there is no income, and without income there is no hope...
Therefore, many people choose to leave the land, leave those prayers that are entirely uncertain, and go under another sky to pursue and build a way of life that they believe can be controlled as long as they work hard.
Among the people who have come out, men are generally at construction sites doing manual labor; women may be workers on assembly lines, or they may work as nannies and cleaners. Among those who have come out, there are young people who dropped out of school to work before finishing junior high school, and there are also elderly people over sixty. I once interviewed an old man who was already 83 years old and still had not gone home. He watched a door for a restaurant, earning 20 yuan a day, but with food and lodging included, which was still attractive to this elderly man. In his words, "One person eats his fill, and the whole family is not hungry." At home there would not even be anyone to cook for him, so why not do it?
For the vast majority of migrant workers, living at the very bottom of the city can only be described as arduous, but life in the countryside, besides being arduous, also includes "poverty." Many people are forced to leave the countryside precisely because they are poor. Nowadays, the vast majority of these people who have come out are no longer willing to return to the countryside, and have even begun to detest the rural living environment. Many rural families have even migrated as a whole household. Especially for the younger generation, the rural home has become only a concept. Only during the New Year and festivals do they go back for a few days each year, and then they quickly return to the city.
There are many reasons for leaving the countryside and agriculture. Besides low income and the hardship of agricultural labor, there are probably deeper reasons as well. This is because we found that although some large-scale growers and large-scale livestock breeders have very substantial incomes, their children are still enthusiastic about the life of working away from home. In the eyes of some young people, life in the countryside is so dull. They think there is nothing more monotonous and insipid than rising at sunrise and resting at sunset. The life of farmers can actually only be considered survival, not life at all, let alone a life of quality. The longer one stays in the city, the more one yearns for city life. This is because what the city can offer is not only a relatively stable income and one more substantial than in the countryside, but also a more superior living and educational environment. This feeling is like a vibrating wave, spreading ring by ring to more people.
Therefore, "leaving the countryside" has become the consensus of almost everyone and the direction of their efforts. What parents tell their children most often is "Study hard, otherwise you can only be a farmer"; what teachers tell students is also "If you can't get into university, you're useless, and you can only be a farmer." The examples society sets for people, one after another, are all typical cases of how to strive successfully to leave the countryside.
A girl who ran away from home to take a master as a teacher to learn farming told me that because she failed the college entrance examination, her parents, teachers, relatives, neighbors, and classmates all put pressure on her, leaving her no space to live in the village.
In such an environment, "leaving the countryside" became people's strongest desire. The ways of leaving are various: going on to higher education is the most respectable; working away from home is also glorious; if one can marry into the city, that is the most envied; marrying into a one-child family in a town as a live-in son-in-law is also an effective route.
Through face after face, whether excited, blank, or weathered by time, can we interpret the helplessness of leaving home, or the longing for the future? One ruthless reality after another raises this question for us: Why has "farming" become a profession that punishes people or a threatening phrase? Why do the descendants of farmers actually take leaving the countryside as the goal they strive for?