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The ‘state-made’ development programmes or economic models have changed the local economy from rice production to cash crop plantation and also incorporated it into the market economy — in the name of socialism. However, if we can take

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villagers' everyday practices more seriously into account, we will find the villagers still maintain their own conception of economy which is revealed in their daily life practices. They have a different logic of economy which is quite divergent from the official notion of market economy. It comprised of their beliefs and morality, their conception of land, profits, and labour, their perception of guanxi and zeren. I do not intend to exaggerate that shifting from rice production to pomelo plantation had no effect on the villager’s economic practices and conception, but they were not simply passive recipients of intervention of the state, but active participants who processed information and strategies in dealing with the state policy through making them something quite different from what the policy makers had in mind, and adapting it to their own interests as well as their own ways of life.

Land and Natural Resource for Survival

Based on Polanyi’s interpretation, to a formal economist, value is determined by scarcity and use is made of the concepts of supply and demand, price, capital, and other words like profit, maximizing and so on which represent tools of economic inquiry. Land is treated by economist as a resource and capital factor which is to invested and reinvested for profit (Polanyi, 1949, 1959). To Ku villagers, land was the central resource which was the root of their livelihood. From generation to generation, they depended on land for survival. Their life was bound up with the soil. In their everyday conversation, they shared with me their view of land. I remembered that Uncle Jin said "having a piece of land, you can survive in any condition.” Aunt Lan also made a metaphor of land as such: "What do fanners rely on? A piece of land and two hands. Land is like the milk, we are like the baby; without milk we cannot survive." The barren and sterile land was analogized as cmeinai de ma ’ (the mother without milk) or ‘ying)>ang buliang’ (the mother lacking nutrient). I think these metaphors, made by a woman, to some sense revealed their guanxi with land. People in Ku Village have a deep sentiment and respect to land. They treat land as their mother and themselves as children. Mother feeds the children and the children will feed their mother in return when they grow up. It is a mutual obligation. Land provides food to them, and in return it is their zeren to maintain the fertility of land. Their guanxi with land is moral rather than instrumental; in other words, land is for

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survival, but not for profit maximization. In the village, there was a custom of worshipping tudigong (earth god). On the side of field, on the hill, imder the tree, they set the shrine of tudigong. They offered them sacrifices just as offering to ancestors. They humanized the land rather than treated it only as material or means of production.

Land provided a sense of security to the villagers. Although under the influence of industrialization, many young villagers left their land and entered into factories, their life was bound up with the land as before. The job insecurity and high pressure alienated them from city life. The hukou system also made it difficult for them to become real urban residents. Most of them knew that the city was only a temporary place to stay. They made money in factories only for building new houses in the village. After several years, most of them returned to their homeland and rebound themselves to the soil. Jing, Li, Liao-ma and other young villagers were all the cases. To them, factories were not their eternal guisu (home to return to). I have interviewed some of them. Let us hear what they said.

Jing: It is meaningless to work in a factory. There is no security. I entered a factory only because I wanted to see the world and enrich my experience. I returned home because my root is here. I feel the soil gives me security.

Li: Comparing my life in factory, I prefer the life in village. I work freely. Having a piece o f land, I will not die.

Liaoma: This is my home. I feel my affection is deeper to the land than to the machine in factory.

O f course not all young villagers thought this way. In Ku Village, Uncle Man's three sons did not want to return to the village. They identified themselves as urbanites. Uncle Man's youngest son told me, "the village is so backward (luohou), I cannot get used to staying in the village any more."

Because the villagers treated land as their means of survival rather than capital for accumulation or making profit, the Ku villagers did not try to control land as much as possible. People controlling extra land would be criticized or gossiped as

‘shengren ba shidi’ (the live man occupies the dead land, i.e. greedy). Their area of

land was often determined and correlated to the number of family members and household labour forces. In Table 4.5, we can find that most of households only have 3.1 to 4 mu in contracted land and 2.1 to 3 mu in private plot.

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Table 4.5. The Land Area and Village Household

Land Area Number of Households (total: 45)

Contracted Field Private Plot

no land 2 11 Less than 1 mu 7 5 1 to 2 mu 6 9 2.1 to 3 mu 7 12 3.1 to 4 mu 16 2 4.1 to 5 mu 5 1 5.1 to 6 mu 1 / 6.1 to 7 mu / 1 7.1 to 8 mu / / more than 8 mu 1 4

Sources: my own survey.

As a person who came from urban and capitalist society, at first I really could not understand why some villagers in Ku Village disposed of or decreased the amount of land. Land was one kind of scarcity which could make high profit in city. But villagers, like Uncle Si, had transferred the contracted land to other households who had sufficient labours. The new landholder took up the zeren to pay the agricultural tax for Uncle Si. One day when I was walking with Uncle Si along the small path in the village, I asked him why he was so nice to transfer his land to other households without any reputation. He laughed and said: "My brother's son, I know what you mean. But don't be foolish, as the saying goes, 'you brought nothing to this world when you was bom, and you would not bring anything back when you died' (sheng bu

dailai, si bu daiqu)." Brother Kan also lent out two pieces of land to a couple coming

from Jiangxi province without charging rent. As I knew, the five guarantee households and the households — just having one or two old family members — which, lacking of labour forces, also transferred their land to other households. And the new holders only had to pay the tax of the contracted land and afford the living expenses of those old people. The money the new holders paid was not our concept of rent or profit. The underlying idea was the relationship of reciprocity and zeren among the kinship group, but not market relations and profit maximization. Because of that, there was no any formal contract to bind their zeren and land giving-returning. They made an oral promise based on mutual trust. To this day, there are still no conflicts between the villagers regarding the land exchange.

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In Ku Village, there are four kinds of land -- wet fields, dry land, private plot and wasteland. To the villagers, wet fields and dry land belonged to individual households after dividing the land to the household. To the old villagers, they often perceived this only as the returning the land, which was seized by the Communist government during collectivization. There was a severe discrepancy in interpretation of land ownership between the state and the villagers, which caused conflicts in land taxation during 1985 (I will discuss it in detail in Chapter 6). To them, wasteland and other natural resources like rivers and forests were freely available for use and everyone had rights of access to it. They adopted the principle o f ‘first come, first serve’. While the land was being used, one had exclusive right to it. The forest was also an integral part of their subsistent base. Although the forest had been defined as the state's property in terms of forest law12, to the villagers, the forest was a natural resource which belonged to nobody. They collected the firewood in the forest as usual. The villagers did not know when they began this practice because collecting firewood was 'as natural as eating and shitting'.

It was often reported by the Chinese press that there was serious poaching in the state's forest area. The government had ordered the concerned department to punish poachers severely. In Ku Village, poaching in ‘state's forest’ area was also serious. As the wood could be sold a high price in market, the young villagers often felled the trees in back mountains of the village. According to Brother San, a young villager, one cubic meter of wood could sell for about 300 yuan. As it was strictly prohibited by government, they usually took action at dusk and late at night. But actually, all the villagers, even the village cadres, knew they were felling trees at the back mountain. But poaching in villagers' mind was not a crime since they actually did not think the forest was state’s property; rather, it was only part of natural resources and cutting down the trees was only part of their traditional practices. But now the state redefined the forest as government property and then imposed a whole series of ‘regulations and law’ to the rural society. Villagers practicing their routine life now suddenly were committing what Michel Foucault called "state created

1 2 . 1 will discuss the villagers' poaching in Ku Village in detail in coming chapter. In the behaviour o f poaching, we can find the battle o f knowledge between peasant society and the state.

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crime". In this sense, I agree with E. P. Thompson (1991) that the most important fact about poaching is that:

The activity itself was part of the traditional subsistence routine of the rural population, an activity embedded in customary rights. Poaching as crime, therefore, entails less a change of behaviour than a shift in the law of property relations. It is the state and its law which suddenly transforms their subsistence routines into everyday forms of resistance (Thompson in Scott, 1989:9).

The river to Ku villagers also had special meaning, because it was also the source of their life. It brought up the Ku villagers from generation to generation. The Ku villagers related the river to the fengshui (geomagnetic omen) of Ku Village.

Fengshui to Ku villagers was veiy essential important because it would affect the

continuity of their kin line. Following is a short dialogue between Brother Li and me at the hillside.

Li: Brother Hok-Bin, look at the river.

Hok-Bin: What’s different?

Li: My father told me that the river is the root o f our fengshui. Can you see that the range o f mountains surrounding Ku Village is like an ancient folding chair, and the stream running across the village is like a jade waistband o f traditional officials?

Hok-Bin: It looks like what you said. But what is the relation to fengshid?

Li: This natural geography brings our village good fengshui. The teacher offengshui told us that this land o f fengshid makes many descendants obtain high honours in education and become officials. The founder o f our village was the successful candidate in the highest imperial examination (Jinshi) o f Ming Dynasty.

I repeatedly heard the same story from other older villagers. Through fengshui I think we can in some sense grasp the villagers' cosmology which reveals their view of nature as an organic world. Fengshid stands for the power of natural environment. To them, violating the guanxi with the natural environment will bring bad fortune. Apart from the religious meaning, the small river closely influences their everyday life. In Ku Village, the river provides the drinking water for the villagers. The river also provides irrigation for the fanning. Every day and every year, the women in the village washed their food and clothes in the river. In leisure time, people also fish and swim in the river. So the river is part of their life. But after the construction of the dam for the hydroelectric power station, there was a great impact on their life. In a later chapter, I will explain the conflict between the hydroelectric power station and

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Ku Village on the issue of electric fees, through which we can understand the villagers' view of the river and their relationship with the river. After the introduction of the pomelo plantation, people increasingly used the chemical fertilizer and pesticides in production which had polluted the water. The villagers no longer got the water from the river for drinking. The people in village also told me that swimming in river would cause their skin to itch. It was the cost they had to pay for making money. But in recent years, some villagers consciously and actively decreased using chemical fertilizer and pesticides for the protection of the environment. They bought the chicken feces from the chicken farm instead of using chemical fertilizer. I think the idea came from their indigenous idea of guanxi between nature and human beings which is rooted in their living experience, rather than the modern concept of environmentalism.

Labour without Wages

Labour in Ku Village can be divided into three types. The most important one is the family labour or self-employed labour; the second type is the exchange labour; the third type is the hired labour. In Ku Village, the family is the basic unit of production and consumption. Before the introduction of pomelo plantations, village households employed no hired wage labour and they depended solely on the work of their own family members. In harvest, all the family members had to participate into the collection except the children and the elders. In harvest season, most of the village households chose the day of collection of pomelo on Sunday because their family members who were away, studying in secondary school or college, would return for assistance. The married daughters also came home to help the harvest. Some daughters also came home accompanied by her husband and his family members. All these labours are non-wage labour.

Wage is an important concept in the capitalist economy. The essential characteristic of capitalist enterprise is that they operate with hired workers in order to earn profit. However, in the villagers' conception of economy, they had no idea of wages for individual family members. We inevitably had to take the entire family household as a single economic unit. Because of the absence of wages, other concepts like net gain, rent and interest on capital, could not work out for peasant

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farms. In my small survey in Ku Village, the result showed me that the villagers could not divide clearly the income of an individual item of production. They could only tell me a single return based on their annual product minus their output such as the seed, fertilizer, pesticide and so on. For them, there were neither wages nor net profits because the family members knew roughly how many days they had worked. By its nature, their return was unique, indivisible and undifferentiated. In other words, it could not be broken down into wage and other factor payment.

In the harvest season, exchanging the labour between households was a popular practice in Ku Village. The exchange labour could not be calculated in wages. It was based on the principle of reciprocity such as mutual aid, obligation and so on. To most villagers, the exchange of labour was one of the important ways for them to maintain and promote their guanxi and ganqing with other family. Therefore, even if a household harboured sufficient labour, they still exchanged their labour. Of course, some villagers’ motivation for obtaining the labour assistance was only for rapidly harvesting a ripened crop. Last year when I was staying in the village, I noticed most village households exchanged their labour with other households in the harvest of Shatian pomelo and in the spring ploughing. They cooperated in a proper way (see Picture 4.2). In the grove of pomelo tree, there was lots of laughing: some were working, some were sharing jokes with each other; some were sharing their news of harvest or other households' matter; some were just engaging in a small talk; some were also making fun of each other. They really enjoyed their work. They did not intend to make accurate calculations of how many tasks the exchanged labourers had done or how much effort they had made. They only roughly knew the number of days they would exchange. Of course, it cannot made sense from the logic of wage.

After the pomelo plantation becoming the dominant activity, hired wage labour had occurred in Ku Village. But it would be a mistake to think that there was a new mode of production accompanying the new production relationship in Ku Village, because the operational logic was still the same as the other form of labour that aimed at seeming the family's needs rather than making profit. In Ku Village, the households hired the outside labour for a short term. Only two households employed labour longer than one month. Brother Kan employed two long-term labourers. Brother Xin employed three short-term labourers for less than half year. All the hired

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labour came from other provinces such as Jiangxi and Fujian. They set the payment not 011 the basis of maximizing profit, but on the basis of giving a reasonable payment. Brother Kan paid his hired labourers three hundreds reminbi per month including three meals. Brother Kan told me:

I think my payment is quite reasonable. It is higher than the salary of some workers in the factoiy. Compared to other villages, my payment