Liu Guancheng: Grassroots Practice Connecting Rural Areas and Campuses

Text and photography by Liu Kuan-cheng

In the autumn of 2010, on the campus of National Tsing Hua University, a school known mainly for its science and engineering departments, we took over the Toucianku Society, which had been founded during the Wild Strawberry period, and set out on our journey to connect university students with rural villages. We knew that many like-minded partners across Taiwan were walking a similar road, but we also looked forward to sharing with everyone the unique scenery we saw. Below, we explain our attempts in three parts.

Listening to agriculture on campus

Our campus work focused mainly on two parts: lectures and reading groups.

We positioned the lectures as a foundation for stirring up the campus, drawing in students who were interested in rural or agricultural issues but did not know how to get involved. In one academic year we held five lectures in total, inviting speakers who had worked hard in various fields to share all kinds of topics with us.

Teacher Chang Wei-chi of National Hsinchu University of Education shared with us Japan's food and agriculture education policy, opening up a whole new imagination about food for us. Food not only provides the energy we need for a day of life, but also contains the context of production; for those of us living in the city, it is the most direct starting point for developing a relationship with rural villages.

Teacher Lin Hsiu-hsing of National Chiao Tung University talked with us about some ways of entering rural villages, giving us a foundation in both methods and concepts.

And Teacher Peng Ming-hui of National Tsing Hua University gave a lecture that packed the hall, with students and people from all walks of life gathered together to think about the importance of food security on the eve of the oil crisis. Teacher Peng offered a penetrating analysis of the international situation, reminding us that the food problem is a national security problem, and that at the policy level, Taiwan's response was already many beats behind other countries.

As for the reading group, we positioned it as an advanced course for club officers and members, reading somewhat more specialized theoretical books in order to grasp, from an academic angle, ways of thinking about rural villages and agriculture; or reading some literary works in order to draw close to this land from an emotional and artistic angle.

We read novels by Zhong Lihe and Wu Zhuoliu, coming to understand the appearance of Taiwan's rural villages in the eyes of early intellectuals. We also read Peasant Economic Organization by the Russian agricultural economist Chayanov. Chayanov analyzed rural production methods from an economic angle, explaining the different ways in which the traditional rural economic organization based on the family unit and the modern capitalist economic organization operate.

Beyond books and lecture halls, it is equally important that we must step off campus, actually enter rural villages, walk into farm fields, and carry out farm work, so that we can truly experience the joy and bitterness within it. One of the club's most important missions is to drive the connection between the campus and local rural villages.

Connecting with rural villages through activities

The local connection work assisted by the club mainly consisted of National Tsing Hua University's service-learning course and the Go Local activity co-organized with Youth Platform.

The service-learning course led students to take part in local affairs. Many students, precisely because of this opportunity, joined the sweet potato festival held by the Zhudong Farmers' Association in Sanchongpu, becoming staff members there, working alongside local people, chatting and having fun together. At the end of the semester, the students in this course also produced a work of their own, recording the bits and pieces of their semester in the rural villages and recording the rural scenes they had seen. The Go Local activity, meanwhile, led students from various places to experience rice farming, covering the whole process from transplanting seedlings to harvesting. Club members played the role of both staff and participants, learning farm work on the one hand and driving the connection between city and countryside on the other.

Go Local drove close connections between students and the local area. Many participants, outside the regular activity times, went to the local area separately to help with farm work. In addition, gatherings and other activities were held from time to time, so that while sweating together, everyone also laughed together.

The service-learning and Go Local activities described above drove connections between students and the local area. In addition, we also assisted with activities of the Ludi Community University, getting to know the history and culture of Erchongpu and Sanchongpu together with the community university's students. Many of the community university students were themselves of rural origin, and their farming experience was far richer than ours, who had grown up in the city. In this kind of interaction, we learned even more than they did. For them, coming here was returning to the scenes of their childhood; for us, it was rediscovering the hometown that we had constantly heard about from our parents or grandparents but had seldom drawn close to.

Participating in movements through practice

Because of club members' individual connections with movement groups, and because the Zhudong Erchongpu and Sanchongpu areas where we had long been active suffered from the scourge of excessive land expropriation, the club had always actively taken part in related protest actions and local organizing work.

This year (2011) was mainly about assisting the Erchongpu Self-Rescue Association, the Protect Rural Villages Alliance, and the Taiwan Rural Front. In helping the local self-rescue association, we mostly made banners and protest props; on 4/19, when the county government brought the development unit to survey the site for the Sanchong interchange and would not let members of the self-rescue association get close, we helped the day before by making more than a hundred scarecrows and planting them all over the places the officials would visit. In assisting the Protect Rural Villages Alliance, besides sporadically going around Taiwan to help self-rescue associations connect with one another, we also co-organized the alliance's first consensus camp and cadre training. Most club members also took part in the protest against the Kuokuang Petrochemical project, the 7/17 return to Ketagalan Boulevard, and other social movements.

The club has always firmly believed that movements, as a process of self-teaching, can bring personal change to those who act. Besides throwing ourselves in, we also encouraged classmates and younger schoolmates around us to take part in movements together.

Further reading   Youth Supporting Agriculture series

01  Ho Hsin-chieh: The Typhoon Morakot disaster area, rural reconstruction, and me
02  Chen Wei-pin: A farmer's son rediscovers rural villages