ONE summer day about two decades ago, I was watching a philharmonic orchestra performance on TV in my rustic home in north Jiangsu Province.

A relative in his early 50s came in, watched the show for one minute, and frowned: Just think of the money wasted in keeping these people alive.

Twenty years later, I feel nostalgic about how our peasants used to feel about the soil they worked.

Although farming has never been profitable, Chinese peasants used to take such pride in earning a living from the soil, that they could barely conceal their contempt for the all and sundry employments that they deemed parasitic at best.

There used to be pervasive envy for the independence enjoyed by a peasant who had paid his taxes.

Disappointed but proud officials talked of giving up official titles and returning home to be consoled by farmland.

Rural scenery and events had inspired Chinese men of letters, whose writings celebrated what they saw or imagined.

So precious had land been to Chinese peasants that the Communist Party of China began to gain popular appeal after it shifted its focus from cities and the urban proletariat to the countryside, by promising land to all laboring peasants.

After the Kuomintang was defeated and retreated to Taiwan, the Kuomintang started to redress past neglect of rural issue by launching a successful land reform in the island.

But during the past two decades as China consolidates its status as a global factory, land is more valued as a support for factories, high-rises, or roads.

Peasants? time-honored affinity to land has also been steadily eroded, to the degree that land tilling today has become a residual existence left to the aged, the shiftless, and the hopeless.

The cheap labor thus unlocked from the soil fueled a decade-long growth widely considered a òmiracle.ó

Immediately after the Spring Festival there were extensive reports of labor shortages in coastal areas.

Many migrants workers, the reports claimed, were put off by soaring property prices, inflation, and sky-high living costs in big cities on the east coast and chose to stay at home.

Some explanation is needed here. òChose to stay homeó by no means means they have returned to the soil.

For some, there might be no land left to till.

Professor Yu Jianrong from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences opined at a recent seminar at Beijing University that ò30 years of reform had fundamentally changed the social structure of danwei (work unit), which is essentially egalitarian.ó

As social inequality worsens, intensified social stratification has become a salient feature of China today.

Professor Yu has recently been in the limelight for initiating a microblog campaign urging Internet users to photograph beggar children and share the photos online, to help the children ? a few of them abducted ? become reunited with their families.

Yu?s microblog initiative was an instant sensation, but his insight into China?s rural issues will be of lasting value.

òTo comprehend the rapid changes in China and what they might lead to, it is necessary to first understand the social underclass,ó Yu cautioned at the seminar.

This statement alone immediately set Yu several notches above the hordes of experts who would wax self-congratulatory whenever òmiracleó is liberally applied to China.

Public outrage

By bandying about such standardized concepts as òurbanization,ó these experts nearly all end up by making a compelling case for òaccelerated urbanization,ó and in so doing successfully sanitized the plight of the underclass from our perception.

Yu then identified land problem as the core rural issue, as epitomized by the chaicun (tearing down villages) movement.

òWhy were we so anxious in 2010? The biggest problem is that the year had witnessed a tearing-down-village movement. In Shandong, Shanxi, Hebei and Henan provinces, very grave land-grab incidents occurred,ó Yu said.

Yu believed this to be a historic moment when tearing down villages is arousing public outrage. Why?

òIn the past this movement to pull down villages was more restricted to areas immediately around cities, but last year I was greatly troubled that this movement had extended to remote villages,ó Yu said.

The difference between urban and rural land grabs is that in urban areas the grabs are ultimately motivated by developers. In villages, the local government is directly responsible.

The local government, by driving peasants to live in multi-story buildings, could characterize their former home as farmland, and thus could set aside more real farmland for development in a trade-off scheme.

Yu illustrated such deals by citing the musings of a peasant he met in Shaanxi Province.

Yearnings

The local government tried to persuade the peasant to agree to the deal in which he would be compensated 30,000 yuan (US$4,500) for one mu (667 sqm) of land. That?s about what the land could yield in 100 years.

The peasant rejected the deal by pointing out that though the money appears to be a lot, 30,000 yuan in cash could easily be spent in two years. But as long as there is land, its modest yield would provide for his children and grandchildren, from generation to generation.

Yu said that as peasants and officials think differently, they conceive of two distinctive judgments about the future living.

As a matter of fact, the peasant is talking about farming as the only responsible way of living for the peasants.

But this wisdom is now peculiar to only a small minority.

Xinhua reported last week that the central government would deal harshly with the practice of dachai dajian (large scale demolition and then construction) and forcing peasants upstairs into apartments.

The question is: Can local officials be easily dissuaded from the grab?

More important, how many peasants are resisting, rather than looking forward to, the grab?

Sanitized perception

In more progressive areas such as Shanghai, it can be argued whether there are any true peasants left.

Here peasants fall into two categories: those who have been generously compensated for having their lands and residences taken away by developers, and those eagerly anticipating similar good fortune.

On February 10 the Beijing News newspaper reported that peasants in suburban Nanjing have mostly turned their back on the land, and look forward to compensated appropriation of their home and land. The land they do retain is rented out to real peasants from Anhui Province.

After enjoying modern amenities in cities, few migrants laborers can still meet the physical challenges of farming.

Thus, China News Service on Monday reported that the lines before Foxconn in Shenzhen are getting longer by the day. The Oriental Morning Post reported on Tuesday that in Kaixian, Chongqing, of the 120,000 peasant workers who had returned home for the Spring Festival, 113,000 had already returned to their jobs, about 90,000 of them on the east coast.

Kaixian has 1,650,000 residents, about a third of them working outside as migrant workers.

This massive human movement makes for huge GDP potential and impressive statistics, when their left-behind children and aging parents have been erased from our sanitized perception, for the time being.