Forty Years of Water Bamboo Shoots: The Past and Present Transformation of Sanzhi's Countryside - Hsieh Te-pao, the First Leader of the Production and Marketing Group

Passing on the Memory of Water Bamboo and the Land

At the peak of water bamboo cultivation, Xie Debao's water bamboo team even had more than twenty members. Everyone switched from growing tea and rice to growing water bamboo, and it could be said to have become a trend.

However, the good times did not last. In response to the impact of the impending WTO accession, the central government began promoting several policies such as "rice field conversion programs" and "paddy-to-dryland conversion," again and again pushing farmers' livelihoods and lives to the margins of society.

To ease the import of low-priced foreign agricultural products, the government promoted a vicious cycle of fallow-land subsidies, causing the use of farmland to decline beyond recovery; a large number of young and middle-aged people left their hometowns to work elsewhere, further causing the water bamboo cultivation area in the Sanzhi area to fall year after year.

Xie Debao said that in the past his water bamboo team had considerable output, but now the team has only seven people left, and most of them are not full-time farmers. Apart from him, the output of the others combined might not exceed his own alone.

Mr. Xie Debao is already a rare full-time farmer in the relatively coastal plain area of Sanzhi. Because water bamboo cannot be cultivated mechanically, harvesting requires going into the fields oneself, and the passing on of technique and experience depends even more on descendants being willing to return home to learn farming before it can continue.

However, with fragmented land, no matter how rural income is calculated, it cannot compare with a salary in the city. It is not that the children are unwilling to come back to farm, but that rational human thinking tells them that it is simply easier to find work in the city.

Still, because Mr. Xie Debao's farmland is relatively large and his production techniques are quite good, he is in fact the farmer in this rural village most likely to support a livelihood through agriculture. Xie Debao said that although he has a house full of descendants, and dozens of children come home every New Year and festival, at present only one grandson is relatively interested in agriculture and is now by his side learning the techniques of growing water bamboo.

He also lamented that his grandchildren in fact spent very little time in contact with the land from childhood, so naturally they cannot be as familiar with everything in the fields as he is. Xie Debao believes that being eighty is not yet old, and while he can still work in the fields and pass on the secrets of farm management, he will certainly do his utmost to guide the children, so that this feeling of passing on the land will not break off with time.

As the interview drew to a close, Xie Debao warmly invited us to eat the President watermelons he had grown, and kept saying that we must come visit him again next time. He said it had been a long time since he had chatted so happily. In his eyes, farmland is a memory worth passing on, and also a farmer's lifelong support. And children are the most beautiful hope that holds up this home.