Opinion

China in One Village

For a good part of Chinese history, rural society has comprised an overwhelming majority of the population and has been the fundamental pillar of the country. But since the Reform and Opening Up in the late 1970s, urbanisation has expanded at an unprecedented speed, resulting in a shrinking rural population and the drastic decline of villages nationwide. Rural society, once the stronghold of civic virtues and traditional values, has gradually been seen as a liability for the nation and the opposite to the country’s pursuit of reform, development and modernisation. In 2010, a significant demographic change came – the national population census stated that roughly half of the population now lived in urban areas, marking dramatic progress in China’s urbanisation endeavours. 
 
It is against this backdrop that a book on the lost countryside captured the attention of many readers. In 2010,  Liang Hong’s non-fiction work,《中國在梁莊》(literally “China in Liang Village”) was published by Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, recounting the seismic changes in her ancestral family village in landlocked Henan Province, over the past 30 years. The book was an instant success and won the People Literature Prize of that year. 
 
This year, when China’s rural population further fell to just 36%, the English version of the book, entitled China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World, was published by Verso Books. Shortly before its release on June 22, a webinar was organised, during which Liang Hong, the English translator Emily Goedde, and a number of translators and literary scholars discussed the book’s ongoing impact. 
 
“I didn’t start writing on Liang Village as a big project, but as an attempt to find a sense of reality,” said Liang Hong in the webinar. Having lived in Liang Village for some 20 years, she left to study and work in Beijing for decades, and became a writer and literary professor at Renmin University of China. 
“In 2007 and 2008, I was feeling particularly distraught. I had been doing studies and writing academic papers, but deep down I always felt a kind of deprivation, as if I was missing some kind of connection with reality. It is perhaps a tradition of intellectuals that drove me back to my hometown somehow, an entirely natural and spontaneous move.”
 
With the hope of finding that missing link, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown. “When I returned to the village as an observer, I felt completely different from before. I realised that although most of the people in the village were my relatives, I was a familiar stranger to them. My understanding of their lives and emotions was so vague and insufficient,” Liang recalled. 
 
For five months, she walked the roads and fields of her village, recording the stories of her relatives with the help of her irascible, unforgettable father, and talking to everyone from high government officials to the lowest of village outcasts. 
 
What unfolded before her was an extended family riven by the profound changes in Chinese society and a village turned inside out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Despite the rapid economic growth of the country, acute problems had arisen in the village: young people had left to seek livelihoods in cities, leaving children and the elderly at home; Christian beliefs had penetrated the countryside and led to conflicts with conventional concepts; rural politics were entangled, and reforms advocated by local leaders were always changing; the ponds and lakes, once the paradise of children in summer, had become dirty puddles of water, and in some areas the ground descended several metres as a result of brickyards’ over-digging. 
 
The author is determined to present a realistic full view of the village from the inside, detailing the sharp contrast of past and present. The book combines family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, and Liang’s sometimes lyrically poetic and sometimes movingly raw investigation into the fate of the village seizes readers’ hearts. 
 
In one of the stories “Chunmei”, the author witnesses the heart-wrenching suicide of Chunmei, the young wife of Liang’s cousin, Ge’r. Chunmei badly missed her husband, who was working in a coal mine far away and hadn’t contacted her for over a year, but her mother-in-law wasn’t happy about it and said she couldn’t live without a man. Chunmei wrote many letters to Ge’r but never got his reply. Out of despair, she drank poison. “She opens her eyes and looks around, and then suddenly grips her mother-in-law’s hand tightly. In a hoarse voice she says, I don’t want to die, I want to live, I don’t want to die, save me, I’ll be good. She says it again and again and then loses consciousness, her hand still gripping her mother-in-law, as if it were the lifeline that might save her. In the short time she was awake, she also managed to spit out: If I live, I’ll make you a new pair of shoes.” 
 
 
Attempts to revive her eventually failed. Chunmei died. Ge’r came back three days later, but he seemed to have no tears, perhaps because he was numb or in a state of shock. He didn’t seem to understand why his wife had killed herself when their lives were getting better and better. “They finally hold Chunmei’s funeral, and she is buried in the field where she hadn’t spread her fertilizer, her own body given to enrich this soil. On the seventh day, Ge’r goes to Chunmei’s grave and lights firecrackers for her. Then he leaves to return to work.”
 
Such captivating stories about family members and childhood acquaintances and the author’s to-the-point commentary make many readers see the book as a mirror of their own lives. Liang’s observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the most shocking and distressing Chinese reality through one clear-eyed, literary observer, one family, and one village, and it stands as the first book of the much acclaimed Liang Village Trilogy, the other two being 《出梁莊記》 (Out of Liang Village, 2013 ) and 《梁莊十年》 (Liang Village: A Decade, 2021). 
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