Outside Looking in – Understanding Strategies for Rural China

A unique and genial invention in Chinese labor policies was to bring young sons and daughters of peasants into the cities to build the new environments and man the industrialization. This provided a cheap, reliable and abundant work force in the period when China took on its huge share of world production. Immigration to the cities happened within the framework of the “Hukou” system which restricted demographic and social mobility by not giving the new work-force the full rights of citizenship. Formally their status, democratic rights and accessibility to welfare services – like free kindergarten and schooling for children – were linked to the village or town from which the worker had left for the rapidly growing cities. The policy somehow worked brilliantly seen from a perspective where growth of production, modernization and urbanization were the prime intentions. However large parts of the Chinese countryside deteriorated in terms of economy and offered living conditions far behind those of the new middle-class in Chinese cities. A typical village consisted mostly of children and grand-parents, the productive generation earning their living in cities far-away. Maybe even more serious, the situation affected food-production. The arable land in China amounts to 9% of the world resources – being reduced every year due to land use for urbanization – while the People´s Republic hosts 19% of the world population.² Agricultural land is therefore a scarcity, and the situation turned into a problem when Chinese agriculture did not show the needed increase in productivity. This resulted in discussions on ownership, property rights, innovation and the possibilities for industrialization of food production in the Chinese countryside. To quote Lv Pinjing, Vice President at CAFA in a publication from the Countryside Construction program in 2018, “With the increasing rate of Chinese urbanization, the decline in rural areas in recent years became the focus of our society. Issues regarding the countryside and agriculture are essential in Chinese policies, and the central government now is paying extraordinary attention to these problems”.³

Chinese culture has been centered around “the peasant” and “the village”, and both during the war of liberation and in the decades after 1949, rural development was at the core of governmental policies. From 1978 onwards, after the introduction of a more marked oriented system – Socialism with Chinese Characteristics –, rural reforms were on the agenda, but most economic interests were linked to urbanization. A whole range of World megacities arose, mostly in the eastern and coastal areas. These cities had the generic characteristics of complex urban regions containing a high-rise CBD-district, central city areas developed on the basis of a new established generic architectural pattern, vast areas for industrial production, housing areas situated at different locations related to centrality, and infrastructural systems interwoven in the surviving landscape. The agglomerations sustain a patchwork of agricultural production, villages incorporated in the regional system, and town/cities that have merged into the general fringed urban agglomeration

In terms of economy these patterns of Chinese development have been extremely successful. Development in cities was governed by a liberal and marked oriented way of handling land-use and building permissions. The excessive transformation of urban areas has been the rule and this policy has managed to organize and pull through an urban growth in a scale not comparable with any earlier processes of urbanization and modernization on the planet. In terms of sustainability, the need to reduce CO2 emissions, the ability to handle urban ecology and urban landscape, the goal of controlling urban architectural quality outside the CBD and prestigious cultural investments, the quality of new housing, the ability to handle heritage and historical structures, the development of an economically sustainable infrastructure, and the general qualities of urban life, the success-story of Chinese mega-urbanism may be disputed.

The issues surrounding the quality of urban development and the urban-rural relationship were raised at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the Congress that elected Xi Jinping as General Secretary. One of the main challenges established in 2012 was to modernize the Chinese countryside. This policy was linked to intentions to improve food-production, reduce rural poverty, improve welfare services and to develop a stronger rural consumer marked within China. In the preparatory material experts assumed that urban growth in the next twenty years would occur at the same scale as in recent decades. In order to be able to handle urban growth in an operational way, The Congress stated that at least half of the increase of the urban population in China during the next decades should happen in small and medium cities, and that policies, strategies, and economic funding for addressing rural challenges should be established.

Of the 1.4 billion people living in China, around six hundred million live in the countryside, most of them in the flat and almost entirely cultivated plains along and between the great rivers in Western China, where villages lie close to one another.⁴ A total of 280 million people are “migrant workers” who are entitled to live in the countryside but who live and work in cities.⁵ Due to lack of commonly agreed upon definitions, the number of villages in China is disputed. Searching the net the estimations range from 1 million to 3 million, some claiming that 1/3 of the world villages are found in China.⁶ The most generous of these numbers must certainly be historically based and include “urban villages” that have merged into metropolitan development, as well as the categories “administrative villages” (the 5th level in the Chinese system for government), “natural villages” and “ethnic villages”. The two last categories, natural and ethnic, having no governmental role, being villages defined by morphological criteria and functional criteria based on the villagers’ rights to cultivate their land and the culture of ethnic minorities.

Europeans tend to be overwhelmed by the density of the Chinese settlement structure. From the air the east of China looks like a carpet of villages that gradually merge into urban structures. The pattern is a function of climate, agricultural resources and availability of water, but the peculiar Chinese village habitat with its small and intensely cultivated family plots is also a product of history. Referring to the illustration showing an East-Asian and European rural production system (Hellenic and Chinese), the differences are striking. Mediterranean culture was a slave society, with estates handling large properties, the owners often based in the “Polis” that was the city. The Chinese production was based on the peasant family and constituted of family units often tied together in village clans. There is no need to glorify this picture, the situation of a group of slaves and a debt-ridden peasant family renting their cottage allotment from a rich peasant, shows similarities. Chinese policies after 1949 have reorganized village rights to the land from family based entitlements to collective ownership and back again. But the basic morphology of the Chinese countryside and the villages has survived through history. While in most of Europe (and most of the world) rural areas are dominated by large farms, industrialized agriculture often handled by co-operations, Chinese agriculture is still primarily based on the intensively cultivated family plot. Politically speaking, the very sensitive question of land-reform and industrialization of agriculture, is looming, but so far not confronted. On the other hand, the 2 million or so villages in China show great variety and complexity, from poor to super-rich, from isolated to fully integrated into the global culture and economy. The setting for these villages varies from paradise-like fertility to barren, dry land with little productivity. In this complex situation, rural policies and governmental strategies for the countryside are many-faceted, sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory.

Rural areas might be seen as a resource, as a habitat, and as valuable nature and cultural landscapes. Resources in agriculture and mining are vertically linked to sites. Abundance of area, often beautiful scenery, low land prices and local government that primarily seeks investment and new activity makes it possible to locate projects in rural areas that might be hard to pull through in the cities. Seen in this light, the Louna project in Guizhou represents a type of strategy for rural development bringing in land-demanding new activities and industries; In this case substituting a traditional village pattern in a scenic environment with a new activity – a structure to be used for Chinese and international architectural events and training.

The different strategies might be discussed according to dimensions. One dimension expresses the difference between the countryside as a resource, and rural areas as habitat. Another way of categorization is to distinguish between grand-scale strategies and small-scale, in terms of economic interventions. A third way of establishing strategies is to define governmental led programs as opposed to private enterprise, and even to distinguish between top-down and bottom-up strategies. A substantial difference can also be defined between strategies that try to sustain existing settlement structure, and a dominating trend to erase villages and move villagers into towns in order to improve their economic condition, the quality of housing, and their access to social services.

The categorization in this article is, however, based on a thematic point of view. Firstly, it is notable that new technologies and the search for clean energy, lead to a more extensive use of natural resources (1) mostly situated in rural areas. The Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze river erased (numbers are disputed) 13 cities, 140 towns, and more than 1,600 villages which have been submerged under the world's largest reservoir. An official count of 1,3 million people was relocated to other parts of China. Demand for rare minerals in computer technology adds a new layer of mining activities in remote rural areas like the Xinjiang Autonomous Region where the projected reserve of coal amounts to nearly 40% of the nation’s total, while petroleum and natural gas reserves accounts for 25 percent of Chinese resources.⁷ Travelling in Guizhou one may observe huge hillsides covered with solar panels, like in the case of the mountain pastures belonging to the Banvan village of the Buyi ethnic minority.⁸ Preservation strategies for national parks and natural habitats somehow affects traditional use of rural areas in a similar way, like strategies for the more than 7500 meter high Mount Gongga massive in Sichuan, some two hour drive on the new motorway from the 15 million metropolitan area of Chengdu. Partly the strategies seem to be consisted of building heavy infrastructure to access the mountain, partly the establishment of protected areas provided with light infrastructure.⁹

The most influential governmental policies most directly and visibly affecting rural areas this decade, are probably the national scale connective infrastructural programs (2); highways, high-speed railroads, electric and gas power lines and digital networks. Wherever travelling in the Chinese countryside you come upon elevated and tunneled roads and railways – somehow passing horizontally through the topography, following an infrastructural logic, not the logic of local landscape. Railroad investments have during the last 5 years amounted to around 100 billion RMB each year. These networks strengthen connectivity within rural areas and between rural areas and cities, and equally important, link Chinese border areas to the “Belt and Road” initiative, a massive trade and infrastructure project, railroads and gas-pipelines (“Belt”), harbors and shipping routes (“Road”), that aims to link China — physically and financially — to dozens of economies across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania. So far 900 billion RMB are invested in projects along the “Belt and Road” .¹⁰ Within China this leads to a situation where remote rural regions may gain centrality.

The countryside provides space for large-scale activities and industries (3) that without huge economic and social costs fit into urban areas. In his lectures at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), running studios in preparation for the AMO/OMA exhibition at the Guggenheim museum in New York in 2019, Rem Koolhaas illustrated these kinds of locations with the new battery-factory for Tesla in the deserts of Nevada, USA. Tesla in this project seems to avoid neighbors, but this kind of projects might also have the character of “theme parks” that intend to attract visitors and attach to the new systems for mobility, often in rural parts of what internationally is called “Cittá Diffusa” (Italian), “mellomlandet” (Danish), “desacota” (“desa” meaning village, and “cota” meaning city in an Indonesian language), or in English simply “peri-urban areas”. The Hengdian World Studios in the township of Dongyang in Zhejiang province constitute more than “ten shooting bases” providing different historical settings from most Chinese dynasties. According to their home-page, more than 1200 films and TV-series have been produced in these studios.¹¹ Another part of the business idea, is that these studios work as theme parks and attracts visitors, illustrated by the huge parking lots surrounding the different studio locations.¹² The Louna project does not entirely fit into the characteristics of this strategy, but does represent a new non-rural program substituting traditionally rural activities.

Probably the strategy: Restructuring and improving the output of agricultural production (4), should have been ranked first in this overview. The revision of Chinese agricultural policy is both the most crucial and one of the most controversial of the Communist Party’s strategies. The main challenges concern the degree of future industrialization and above all the issue of rights to and ownership of arable land. Chinese agriculture still consists of small farming units run by families who inherited rights to plots that are owned by the state, as is the case with all land in China. Many argue that more intensive management of rural land is the prerequisite for mechanized production, higher productivity and higher quality levels in agriculture. Reform of agriculture is closely linked to the question of “rights to the land”. Outside looking in, this question might seem unproblematic with the government as the deciding owner, but looking deeply – like Peter Ho did in his book on land ownership in China from 2005 – the question is complicated and linked to the “Hukou” system and fundamental village and family rights, and not at all easy to handle, not to say change.¹³

A fundamental transformation of Chinese land ownership and production is not the aim for all agricultural policies. Ranked according to ambition: there is a policy to provide loans for investment and modernization for the single family-based farm. Villages are encouraged to act collectively to reform production, and there are highly acclaimed villages where this is achieved, like the huge green-house complexes for vegetable production owned collectively by the farmers of the restructured Shouguang village. Inventive and eager villagers are encouraged to obtain the rights to cultivate larger areas, and a new concept is established in Chinese – The Farm Complex. This will be the ultimate industrialization of agriculture; plots are added together in huge estates and production systems, the most modern technology provided by the international marked is employed, the peasant becomes a farm-worker, and ownership lies with big corporations. Farm Complexes have been established in China, and different international cooperation’s specializing in high-tech agriculture, do – like the illustrations shows – provide plans for modernizing rural China in a fundamental way.

While the future of agricultural production is handled by a complex set of policies, poverty alleviation (5) is a consistent governmental initiated program with explicit goals. Poverty alleviation concerns the array of measures aimed at raising wages in rural areas, a strategy that often entails transplanting villagers to new settlements and giving them new types of work. As gauged by the national poverty limit, the number of poor people has been reduced by fifty million people over the past five years, a result of the new strategy “Precise Poverty Lift Up” launched in 2013.¹⁵ Poverty alleviation projects are, according to this strategy, no longer seen as solely responsibility of the government, but managed and financed in close collaboration between government, state-owned enterprises, private enterprises and social organizations on all levels. The huge Ali-baba corporation has, for example, recently started to engage themselves in poverty alleviation projects. The involvement of the Hengda Group (English name Ever-Grand) in a number of village relocation projects in Guizhou and in other provinces, has been written about in a book edited by this author.¹⁶ The old villages are torn down, people are resettled together in a new town/village, they still have the rights to the land, new housing is provided and Ever-Grand invests in green-houses, irrigation systems and livestock farming. It seems a little unclear if the peasant should still be considered a peasant or a farm-worker.

In many countries, we find organizations and institutions that intend to make it easier for people in urban areas to resettle in the countryside. The strategy might be called “Back to the land” movements – or rural gentrification (6). To raise the quality of the rural economy and rural life, rural talent has to be kept in the countryside, people that are part of the “floating population” in the cities should choose to resettle in the villages, and families perceive the real possibility to move to the countryside without disastrous consequences for their economy and way of life. The ambition of the Chinese Green Cross, is partly to make it more convenient for urban people to move to the countryside, working with different training programs for farmers and removing obstacles urban settlers comes across in this process. To estimate the strengths of these bottom-up movements and the quantity of people moving “the other way” is rather difficult. Somehow this strategy is in line with Chinese policies for rural recovery, and urbanization directed towards the countryside. A movement like the Green Cross may also be discussed in relation to global interests in healthy living, closeness to nature and organic production.

A new logic for settlement is made possible by digital technology. The strategy therefore might be labeled “rural gentrification”, substituting or complimenting farmers with highly educated representatives of the middle class that are able to create new occupations in the villages, bringing in new competences, or being able to perform their occupation through digital means. The Bishan experience is a well-known Chinese example, where well-known intellectuals resettled into a village with high architectural value and scarce tourism, promoting the village and their actions digitally.¹⁷ A tradition of establishing art-villages (or artist-villages) is also well known all over China.

Investment in domestic tourism (7) has been the easiest accessible way to Chinese rural development, both working as a top down strategy following up central and provincial policies, and as a result of local bottom up processes. Both including large scale projects for whole villages, and small scale family based investments. Domestic tourism is booming. While Chinese international travel and international tourism to China is growing slowly, the amount of domestic tourism has multiplied in recent years. The reasons are very simple; “holiday” was not a Chinese concept until recently, a fast-growing middle class has spare time and resources to pay, travels are made easy by the fast-moving infrastructure, and there are many attractive, picturesque and historic landscapes, sites and villages in easy reach of heavily populated urban areas. Governmental policies for rural tourism were established first from around 2010 onwards. The Government, as part of this process, selected demonstration towns to promote rural tourism. Some of these projects are booming, like Wu Zhen situated optimally between Hangchou and Shanghai, and – functioning as a theme park – adding new “Chinese-ness” to its traditional lower Yangtze architecture.

Some of the Tourism, as a “bottom up” process, is characterized by a multitude of actors and small scale projects. Locals are investing in tourist facilities, most typically, hostels and restaurants that reach a wide audience on-line. Finance often comes from people from the village who have saved while working a decade or two in the city and bring back the competence they have acquired during these years. These facilities might also provide the possibility to move back. Some of these projects have a high quality. Published Chinese architecture from recent years include many rural projects for tourism. Typical spots are scenic landscape areas, historical villages, locations presenting intangible cultural heritage often linked to ethnic minorities, and different kinds of agricultural theme-parks like tea farms, fish farms, wineries, sites for high technology farming or advanced organic farming. The latter combining production with tourism.¹⁸

The consequences of the rural strategies are often resettlement of villages to towns, relocalization of the villages, or that the old structure is torn down and substituted with new housing. However, there are different practices, some of them addressing local culture, heritage and historical quality by revitalization of traditional villages (8). Best known internationally is probably the works at the village Wucun near Hangchou conducted by the Pritzker prize winning architect Wang Shu. New housing is put into the village and public space is renovated, but neither the basic structure of the village nor the plot structure of the land is transformed. A project like this raises the quality of rural living, and attracts visitors giving the village an improved economic basis. Banvan, an ethnic village of the Buyi people in Guizhou province, is redeveloped by the architect Lv Pinjing, including full renovation of local-infrastructure, a new school, employing a very skillful reinterpretation of the old wooden housing. Students and teachers at CAFA have for many years renovated the historical Han stone village Yubulu in Guizhou. These three projects have the common intention with many other village initiatives to preserve and renew the traditional settlement and village structure, to employ an architecture of high quality, and to rely on heavy public funding canalized through local government. In order to make local cultural heritage sustainable, a better economic foundation for the villages is needed. Tourism, development of local handicraft and industries, modernization of family or commune-based agriculture, and gentrification by locals moving back from the cities, are among the set of tools used for improving the local economy.

One of possible key to unlock the challenge of economic inequality between urban and rural area is through the use of digital technology, in marketing, sales, customization and production. Decentralization of small-scale industrial production (9) becomes an option that in China is channeled through the Taobao system. Taobao is, according to Stephan Petermann, “Alibaba´s marriage of Ebay and Amazon” marketing and selling local products on the net “fueled by the Aliwangwang messenger app, which allows consumers and producers to talk directly and customize their orders, shaping them to their exact needs.”¹⁹ Starting out with furniture, the flat-packing being inspired by IKEA, the number of Taobao shops in “Tabao Villages” reached 16000 during 2017. Investigations by students at the CAFA studios (2017 and 2018), uncovered that the villages are spread all over China, with the highest density in the vicinity of Shanghai, and the system offers more than 35 000 jobs. Taobao was initially a bottom up initiative made possible by the Alibaba software, but is also stimulated by public policy. Rural areas with a certain concentration of “online shops and a collective ten million RMB turnover qualify as a Taobao village, which provides the village with additional support for training, marketing and expanding the infrastructure connected to the platform.” according to Peterman and the information collected in the CAFA studios.

The rural space program continues. In line with the recent policies for more substantial linkage of urban and rural policies to central governmental institutions, both a better evaluation of outputs and cost-benefits, and certain refined policies given priority are expected.