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Rural life produces hardier stock, not so in need of help from condescending urbanites
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A recent report commended initiatives helping rural people gain access to knowledge of hygiene and medical care (“Health or death for rural mountain children,” January 29, Shanghai Daily).
There is no denying our achievement in this respect. But there are some biases we are prone to, as well.
One is the rather standard perception of rural life as lacking in “hygiene.” A chief reason that some urbanites consider themselves a cut above their rural cousins is urban estrangement from the soil. I remember how a few years ago my son trod tremulously on the unpaved soil on his first visit to my native village.
Rather than viewing the soil as life-giving, some see our distance from the soil as a reliable gauge of our modernity. From time to time, some privileged urbanite condescends to take an idyllic view of rural scenes, but when scrutinized, this vision invariably presupposes a tacit critique of traditional farming methods as practiced by our forefathers. They are seen as limiting, unhealthy, and in need of amelioration.
This provides one of the most compelling and persuasive arguments for the drive for urbanization. This is a deeply biased view because it justifies more urban conditions, rather than the rural way of life. I won’t go into details about why modern farming, with its liberal use of chemicals, can be dirty and polluting. Interested readers can read my review of “Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat,” published last Friday.
Spartan conditions
My contact with rural life, while limited, suggests how difficult it is for an urbanite to see, experience or feel as a peasant does. Unlike in cities where parents (or more often grandparents) have to use all kinds of guile and ruses to induce the grandchildren to finish a meal, many rural children still have good appetites for plain food. They can still afford to idle away some of their childhood outdoors.
With their sturdier physiques and difficulty of access to hospitals, they do not rush to hospitals at the first sign of disease, and thus might be spared overuse of antibiotics.
My son is one of the many urban children afflicted from a very early age with serious asthma and rhinitis, blamed on urban pollution, which might not be so serious in some villages. From what I have seen and heard, children in rural areas are generally of a hardier lot.
Several times I had to pass a roadside vegetable market taken care of by a family of three. Once I saw the man in the process of heartily enjoying a bowl of noodles, right next to a pile of innards and feathers removed of slaughtered chickens, while he son was engrossed in a book, leaning against the base of a concrete overpass bridge, quite oblivious to what was going on about them.
The Spartan rural conditions often mean the people who live there have not been softened by modern amenities, and this quality is necessary for them to function properly in a traditional rural landscape.
For instance in my rural native place, the winter temperatures can drop well below zero Celsius. Like our ancestors, the villagers there endure the winter without any heating facilities in their rural dwellings, which are virtually bare of any ornaments or accessories.
Soil efficiency
Some of my colleagues from time to time flirt with the idea of one day retiring to the soil. But their bucolic vision always assumes they will have the amenities they have taken for granted — air-conditioning, flush toilets, and paved floors. They definitely refuse to rough it.
I think the real challenges confronting villagers is not their distance from modernity, but the fact that they are being closed in by industrial development, mega farming, industrial parks, real estate development, mining and garbage produced as a result of modern material affluence.
This development has left a legacy that proved damning in the past two decades: poisoned soil, water and air.
It’s time to take stock. Recently, Shanghai decided to stop making GDP growth a target. Shanghai Party Secretary Han Zheng, while participating in a group session during the recent municipal People’s Congress, said that we should be sparing in the use of suburban lands and no longer follow the old road of “development first, management later.”
This is quite an enlightened view.
A key policy document released by the Party and government on Sunday reiterates the need to consolidate the position of agriculture as the foundation of the economy.
While interpreting this document in an article in Sunday’s South Rural News, professor Hu Jing, an expert on rural issues, said the government has realized that agricultural modernization should not mean a single-minded pursuit of soil efficiency.
These are big issues, for they concern our food security in the future.
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