CAPÍTULO II. LA DEMOCRACIA Y SUS DISTINTAS ACEPCIONES
4. Clases de Democracia
Apart from doing in-depth studies in Shijia and Baijia, I also collected data in three other hamlets. All the hamlets come within the jurisdiction of the same township in Lotus County, Chuxiong Prefecture. I now outline the basic profiles of these hamlets, giving particular attention to how they differ from Shijia and Baijia.
33 In 2001, the State Council issued The Decision on the Reform and Development of Compulsory
Education (available on the website of Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China http://old.moe.gov.cn//publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/moe_16/200105/132.html), which explicitly requires the educational quality of rural schools to be improved by adjusting the locations of schools and integrating resources. Since then, a great many small primary schools located in remote villages have been closed down and merged into larger schools.
Two of the hamlets, North Hamlet and Walnut Hamlet, are located in mountainous areas, with over 90 percent of the residents belonging to the Yi ethnic group. North Hamlet is the most isolated field site. Located at the top of a mountain, 2,100 m above sea-level, it is 5 km from the village committee office and 23 km from the township. The steep mountain road linking the hamlet to the location of the village committee is totally inaccessible by cars, and barely accessible by motorcycles or tractors. There are 25 households with a population of 91 in the hamlet. The hamlet is very far away from any surface water sources. Drinking water is obtained from a 10 m deep collective well, which has been in disrepair for many years. There are no collective reservoirs, water pipes or irrigation channels in the hamlet. Villagers build water cisterns next to their farmland to harvest rain water for irrigation purposes. Tobacco production contributes the largest share of household income.
Walnut Hamlet is 2,025 m above sea-level. The hamlet is 4.5 km from the village committee office and is 14.5 km from the township. There are 47 households and 235 people living in the hamlet. Despite the long distance and rugged terrain, the road connecting the hamlet with the township is well paved. More surprisingly, even the intra-hamlet paths are in very good condition. Households in the hamlet depend on groundwater for domestic purposes. All the households have access to tap water through pipelines connected to the two well-functioning collective wells. A public reservoir and household cisterns have been built to facilitate irrigation. Villagers used to rely heavily on tobacco for generating income, but nowadays, walnuts are the dominant crop, generating the largest share of agricultural income.
As mentioned in the previous section, cash crops were introduced by governments at provincial, prefectural and county levels to farmers in Chuxiong as a strategy to promote their incomes. Informants from different field sites reported that, over the years, the strategy has shifted from promoting chestnuts to Chinese herbs, and recently, the crops promoted most have been walnuts in the uplands and mulberry trees for silkworm raising in the lowlands.
Walnuts have been grown for centuries in the mountainous area of Lotus County and had gradually developed into a distinguished variety. This local variety was identified as a “high quality export product” by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic
Cooperation (MOFTEC) in 1983, and became a registered local trademark in 2009 (Editorial Committee of Lotus County Chronicle 2010, 68). As a local specialty, walnuts have been enjoying a stable market, and hence, have been an important source of income for many mountainous villages. Walnut Hamlet is one of them. In the mountain lands, local people have been growing walnuts for over 40 years. After an initial processing,34 products are mainly sold to procurement stations in the local
townships and county seat. In recent years, farmers have started to attract buyers from other provinces, who pay a premium price for their products. In 2012, villagers in Walnut Hamlet established a professional cooperative to further broaden sales.
In fact, walnuts are grown not only in Walnut Hamlet. Being considered an effective measure to boost the green economy, walnut growing has been greatly promoted by local governments. Over the last decade, prefectural and county governments have launched a series of campaigns to encourage upland farmers, including villagers in Shijia and North Hamlet, to plant walnuts. By 2014, the acreage of walnut trees in Lotus County reached 1.54 million mu (Editorial Committee of Lotus County Chronicle 2015, 72). The annual production was 2.1 ton and the total output value of walnuts reached 678 million yuan (Ibid.). Meanwhile, in 2012, pepper was also introduced by the county government in order to further raise farmers’ incomes.
As with tobacco production, in order to accelerate the development of walnut and pepper growing, the county government sets quotas, and the responsibility for fulfilling the quotas is transferred to local authorities. Again, villagers are pushed hard to engage in walnut and pepper production, even though these cash crops may not be suitable for the local context. In Shijia and North Hamlet, despite the county government offering farmers free walnut seedlings, villagers complained that they are forced to grow unwanted crops, and have to bear the cost of grafting, pesticide and fertilizer by themselves. This increases their financial burden; a particular problem in dry years, when household incomes were severely eroded. Moreover, they cannot profit immediately from growing walnut and pepper trees, as it takes 10 to 20 years for a walnut or pepper tree to bear fruit.
Meanwhile, lowland villagers in Lotus County are actively involved in silkworm raising. One of the field sites, Silk Hamlet, is an example. Silk Hamlet is a Han hamlet 1,620 m above sea-level. It is connected to the township by a well-paved concrete motor road 5 km long. There are 107 households with a population of 411 in Silk Hamlet. Nowadays, 85 of the 107 households are engaged in silkworm raising.
Similar to walnut production, silkworm raising is a traditional industry in the research area. Located on the ancient southern silk road, Lotus County has a history of silkworm raising dating back to the Qing Dynasty (Editorial Committee of Lotus County Chronicle 1999, 205). In 1958, the county was recognized by the State Council for its remarkable output of silkworm cocoons (Agricultural Technology Extension Station of Yunnan Province 2013, 207). However, in the 1960s, large proportions of mulberry trees were removed and by the end of the 1990s, only 7,000 mu of mulberry trees were left (Ibid., 208). In 2007, silkworm raising was reintroduced to the area through a state program launched by the National Cocoon and Silk Coordination Office and the Ministry of Agriculture. The program, known as the “East-to-West Silk Industrial Restructuring (dongsang xiyi 东桑西移),” aims to further improve the silk industry in China by optimizing divisions of labour between provinces. Under this framework, technology-intensive work such as silk reeling, and semi-finished and finished product processing are assigned to traditional silk production bases in the coastal areas of East China, while labour and space-intensive work such as growing mulberry trees and raising silkworms is transferred from east to west. The western provinces of Shanxi, Yunnan, Gansu, Sichuan and Chongqing are identified as key provinces for production transfer. Within each province, certain counties are targeted for silkworm raising. By 2014, 30 of the 128 counties in Yunnan had been identified as key counties for silkworm raising (Editorial Committee of Lotus County Chronicle 2015, 97).
As one of the key counties, Lotus County has seen a rapid expansion of silkworm raising. By 2014, the area of mulberry trees in the county had reached 72,000 mu, 28 administrative villages were identified as key villages and over 15,000 households were involved in silkworm raising (Editorial Committee of Lotus County Chronicle 2015, 97). To encourage villagers to engage in silkworm raising and further increase their production, subsidies for seedlings, tractor-ploughing and production equipment were
provided by the county government. Meanwhile, the construction of farmland irrigation and water conservancy facilities was also enhanced to support cocoon production.
As a consequence of these polices, infrastructure is highly developed in Silk Hamlet. Tap water is accessible to all households and in addition to three well-functioning wells and one well-maintained reservoir, a collective irrigation system has been built and covers most arable land in the hamlet. Before they began raising silkworms, tobacco production was the main source of income for villagers in Silk Hamlet. According to villagers, so far at least, silkworm raising provides them a more reliable and steady income than tobacco production. The price of silkworm cocoons in the last five years has remained at 45 yuan per kilo. More importantly, unlike tobacco farmers, silkworm farmers are not worried about sales. In 2008, a cocoon and silk company was established in the county city to purchase and process cocoons, combined with five cocoon stations which were set up in different townships. This means that silkworm farmers are confident about the sale of their produce.
Conclusion
To achieve a context-specific analysis, in this thesis, I selected five hamlets to explore people’s experiences of and responses to drought in local contexts. These five hamlets are located in the most drought-affected regions of Yunnan and share a broadly similar historical, social and economic background. However, they vary in their ethnic composition, degree of isolation, the condition of local infrastructure and specific type of economy. Walnut Hamlet and North Hamlet are ethnic minority hamlets with most residents belonging to the Yi ethnic group. Shijia, Silk Hamlet and Baijia are predominantly Han hamlets. North Hamlet and Walnut Hamlet are located in upland areas far from any local political centre or market town. Shijia, Baijia and Silk Hamlet are physically close to at least one township. Local infrastructure, in particular road and water conservancy facilities, is much more developed in Baijia, Walnut Hamlet and Silk Hamlet than in Shijia and North Hamlet. In terms of village economy, tobacco production is the most important source of livelihood in Shijia, Baijia and North Hamlet, while walnut production and silkworm cultivation are the primary sources of livelihood in Walnut Hamlet and Silk Hamlet respectively. In addition, despite the strong
agricultural focus, villagers from Baijia are also engaged in local industrial employment, and in all the studies sites, a large proportion of young adults participate in migrant work and are away from home for most of the year.
The next chapter examines how differences between the field sites hamlets with respect to geographical location, ethnicity, infrastructure and local economy have fed into community-level variations in experiences of and responses to the drought.