The Chinese Village Modernization Left Behind

This Chinese New Year, my husband and I spent the holidays with his family in Taiyuan, the capital of coal-producing Shanxi Province. The lunar new year, China’s major holiday, is a chance for many to collapse in a lugubrious heap, but for an inquisitive Englishman like me, who has spent seven years making the country feel like home, it’s an opportunity to get outside of the capital, Beijing, and gauge how Chinese elsewhere are feeling about their country. Each winter since 2010, I’ve talked politics with my astute father-in-law, helped my mother-in-law with housework despite her protestations, and watched as rows of skyscrapers fill out the skyline of what was once a drab, flat northern cityscape.

And best of all, while we are in the Taiyuan area for our annual pilgrimage, my husband and I zip along the new but already pockmarked highway leading away from the city and towards Mud Village, where my mother-in-law grew up and where a number of her family members still live off the land. I relish going there. Unlike so many historic hamlets in China, their land sold off to developers who have bulldozed centuries-old farmhouses to make way for row after row of sterile high rises, Mud Village still buzzes with tradition and intangible culture — people still live in yaodong, or cave houses, most of which are kept spotlessly clean. It is also a chance to see just how unequal China’s development has been, and how unstable are its foundations.

Mud Village’s historic architecture suggests it was once a thriving place, with its own aristocracy and grand courtyards. Now it is little more than a shell filled with the old, the very young, and the unemployed.

Particularly keen this lunar holiday was the creeping sentiment among the younger adult residents that they weren’t getting a square deal. My husband and I spent Feb. 9, the second day of the new year holiday, in the home of one of the village’s most vocal supporters of the Communist Party, his house plastered with garish posters of Chinese President Xi Jinping and late ruler Mao Zedong. And yet, with a bit of prodding, this official began talking about how average Chinese, colloquially called “old hundred names,” were getting squeezed. “Town or country — it’s not easy for anyone,” he sighed. (He did not wish for his name to be published, for obvious reasons.)

Mud Village is one of the few places in its part of Shanxi without a village head or local official who has been nabbed for corruption during Xi’s years-long crackdown. But keeping their noses relatively clean has done very little to improve the villagers’ fortunes. The fact that Shanxi is home to so many prominent “tigers” and “flies,” slang for the high-level and the low-level corrupt — and has very little to show for even the obscene amounts of money wrung from the now rapidly collapsing coal industry — is a source of intense anger. On a later visit to relatives in a neighboring village, one distant cousin, scandalized by the fact that Shanxi was listed among China’s ten most corrupt provinces, angrily demanded to know when the ill-gotten gains would be re-invested in the local economy. 

The surrounding villages have sold off their land and been turned into housing projects and power plants — but as another friend of the family noted, that doing that just meant moving into a high-rise, not the same thing as a genuine improvement in quality of life. That might explain why everyone in Mud Village still prefers living in their furrow in the Loess Plateau, with its gorgeous sunsets, fresh tofu, and famed walnut trees.

Keeping Mud Village’s cultural identity on life support is now the duty of its old. This year I learned that the village’s oldest resident, a distant relative of my family who still had bound feet, had passed away in autumn. I remember visiting her when she was already bound to her kang, a stone-framed, heated bed common in Mud Village, and how careful she was about protocol and niceties, apologizing for not being able to stand to welcome us, and offering us tea in a specific order — eldest first. She was raised in one of the village’s aristocratic families, and her old courtyard remains one of the most impressive, though like all the other historic buildings in the village, it is now falling apart with neglect.

This difference between young and old was crystallized when we called on my mother-in law’s cousin and his family, who now occupy the clan’s main courtyard. The parents are struggling to get their daughter to engage with others. She’s extremely pretty, blessed with cropped chestnut-brown hair framing pale the buttermilk skin, Roman nose, and green eyes so common in Mud Village, and rare almost everywhere else in China. But she spends the bulk of her spare time watching costume dramas on television. In a house we visited further down the hill, three smartly-dressed and well-coiffed teenage boys lay sprawled on the family kang, tapping away at their smart phone screens. Most children age out of Mud Village — into work in Taiyuan or a neighboring power plant, factory, or slaughterhouse — but those that remain are increasingly housebound, glued to cable TV or the Internet. While the adults of Mud Village continue the traditions of visiting one another’s homes and chatting on an almost daily basis, the youth are becoming invisible.

On the drive back to Taiyuan, our trunk stuffed with gifts of wild herbs, apples, and pears, my husband observed that the Communist party line was that despite widespread poverty in China, the poorest had never had it so good. That’s a hard assertion to swallow in Mud Village. Once, its generally affluent residents sneered at the neighboring “mountain people” and, more justifiably, took immense pride in their produce, their neat and clean homes, and their attractive children. Now, once-immaculate courtyard residences are collapsing back into the yellow earth of their foundations. The arrival of cheap digital technology means younger residents are plugged in to the information superhighway, which only shows them just how much prosperity continues to pass them by.

In Mud Village, there are still roseate sunsets, firecrackers, mounds of steaming fresh tofu, and the finest walnuts. But for even the dyed-in-the-wool red households, the relentless onward march of the China Dream is changing the conversation. On an earlier visit, we’d stopped by the home of a local relative my husband had nicknamed “iron man” for his resilience and irrepressible work ethic. Iron man had lain sprawled on his deathbed, rotting on the inside from a malignant stomach cancer that his family could no longer afford to treat after having spent $7,600 on hospital bills. This year, iron man was no longer with us. Word was he’d died in agonizing pain. Would his fate have been much different in the old China?

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