Wen Tiejun: Understanding China's small farmers

Wen Tiejun: Understanding China's Small Farmers : The Preface to the Chinese Edition of Four Thousand Years of Farmers

　　2011 is the centenary of Xinhai and the centenary of the publication of the English edition of "Four Thousand Years of Farmers".

　　In the state of remembrance and remembrance of many people who have not understood foreign affairs but have not eaten foreign food in China in the past hundred years, the Chinese of being willing to seriously reflect on the cost of institutional change in the course of a hundred years of radical modernization has made my two doctoral students who are down-to-earth and hard-working to do the experimental research of "localization" ecological agriculture take the time to translate and publish the book "Four Thousand Years of Farmers", which has become a rare empty valley qingyin!

　　The background of the book is -

　　Just two years before the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution, the director of the Soil Institute of the United States Department of Agriculture and a soil expert at Wisconsin State University traveled to China, Japan and Koryo with his wife to investigate the ancient farming systems of three East Asian countries. These two elderly Americans, who have passed the age of flower armor, are eager to communicate with the farmers of the three ancient farming peoples of East Asia! Because their awareness of the problem a hundred years ago was also very urgent relative to today's people, "we are eager to understand how today, after three or four thousand years, how the (limited) soil produces enough food to feed the dense populations of these three countries." Now we get that opportunity."

　　However, what stimulated Professor Jin's strong interest in agriculture in the three East Asian countries was the serious challenge facing American agriculture at that time. In less than a hundred years of large-scale exploitation under the conditions of foreign colonists killing indigenous people and slave trade, the fertile soil of the North American savannah was lost in large quantities, which seriously affected the sustainability of the farming system, and the agricultural production efficiency was far lower than that of the three eastern countries.

　　Although the crime of colonization is almost a "heart shield" that most Western scholars cannot take off, good scientific literacy still makes Professor Jin quickly discover the difference between the agricultural production models of the three East Asian countries and the American model without involving the indigenous peoples of East Asia and not being completely colonized by the West, as well as the resource constraints and the superiority of the East Asian agricultural production model that cause these differences. The characteristics of agricultural production in the three East Asian countries are concentrated on the efficient use of time, space and various resources that can enhance soil fertility in the production process, even to the extent of miserliness. But the only resource that is not hesitant to invest and is overused is the peasants' own labor.

　　That is to say, the traditional smallholder economy in East Asia has always been a sustainable development of "resource conservation and environmental friendliness".

　　Today's earthlings almost all know that China's arable land resources account for only 7% of the world's land resources, water resources account for 6.4% of the world's total, and the ratio of water and soil to light and heat is less than 10% of the national land area; if we look at the principle that population and resources should be basically balanced, 2/3 of the Chinese mouth originally lacked living conditions!

　　Moreover, most of China's territory is located between 20 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude, controlled by subtropical high pressure, and the 30 degrees north and south latitude areas are mainly dry and sunny weather, so most of the world's major tropical deserts are distributed near the north and south latitudes of 30 degrees. It can be seen that China is geographically part of the arid zone of northern latitudes, and if it were not for the seasonal precipitation brought by the Pacific monsoon, most of China would face more severe droughts.

　　According to this, it is believed that in the case of limited resources and the overall natural conditions are not suitable for agricultural production, China has nourished about 20% of the world's huge population, and without the hard work of farmers for thousands of years and the wisdom from practice, no matter who and what radical ideas and advanced institutional designs are imported, I am afraid that it will not help the people's livelihood.

　　It is the shortage of natural resources and the huge population that have shaped China's traditional agricultural production model of resource conservation, recycling, and intensive farming, as well as the chinese peasants' extreme frugality, restraint of desire, and hard work and resentment. For a long time, whether it is a share of rents or a fixed rent, the nominal rent rate has changed by about 50%, while the actual rent rate under the intensive farming production mode is generally lower than 50%. It can be seen that despite the large population, labor is still the most critical factor in China's traditional agricultural production, and its factor return rate is even higher than that of land for a long time.

　　It can be seen that the "family rationality" role of small farmers is related to the increase in the population of farmers.

　　For, in the case of men, it means the expectation that there will be a relatively low-risk, stable cumulative return from agricultural production in the future; if there are more women, they will be able to participate in more commercialized and monetized work in the production and circulation of more commercialized and monetized farming, handicrafts and cash crops in exchange for short-term income to subsidize the family. The characteristic of the family rationality of this small-scale peasant economy, which can internalize external risks, lies in the fact that the investment mechanism of the labor force portfolio within the peasant households is based on the high land productivity promoted by "intensive farming + planting and breeding".

　　Combined with the investment mechanism of the labor force combination within small-scale peasant families to examine China's developed commodity economy in the era of agricultural economy, it is not difficult to understand that the surplus labor derived from the production of small-scale peasant families receives extremely low remuneration into the production field outside agriculture. Whenever the royal power can guarantee the basic stability of society, the surplus labor force will be greatly absorbed by the five elements and eight works within the countryside, and what emerges from it is the "village community rationality" that can internalize and deal with external risks. Even if the village community cannot absorb it, the surplus labor force will be absorbed by the three hundred and sixty lines of the people in the city and the market town.

　　At that time, when the situation was turbulent and the hundred industries were withering, the surplus labor force flowed back into the countryside and agriculture, which aggravated the tension between the population and resources of small peasant families and reduced the pressure of the urban commodity economy to absorb employment. However, this adjustment process does not always work out smoothly. Unfavorable climatic factors have long affected agricultural production on a large scale, or the failure of the crown to control corruption in time, the consolidation of land by bureaucrats, or external aggression, these external non-economic factors are often intertwined and cause small peasant families to collapse and collapse, eventually leading to peasant uprisings and dynastic changes.

　　It can be seen from this that small peasant families and village communities in East Asian vernacular societies actually play the role of a "reservoir" of labor, providing a steady stream of cheap labor for economic development during periods of stability, and becoming the bottom line for the transfer of various social crises in difficult times.

　　Further analysis of the influencing factors of the depth of the "reservoir" is not difficult to find that agricultural productivity constitutes the material basis and main influencing factors of the reservoir effect of the labor force of small-scale peasant households, and good village community governance and macro-system design are also beneficial to improving the water storage capacity of the small rural social system. In fact, the impact between the production of smallholder households and these factors is mutual. Because the population is more abundant than other resources, it is possible to derive a model of intensive and intensive farming and intensive agricultural production.

　　It is because thousands of years of local Chinese civilization have endogenously diversified economy and society, which is originally a normal and historical "ecological civilization"; for today's people, there is no need to be proud nor "nihilistic"! It is only as a Chinese should have a minimum of historical common sense - this kind of intrinsic economic rationality of small farmers and village communities has promoted the vigorous development of all walks of life and infrastructure construction, and ultimately cast the overall prosperity of the Chinese nation as the oldest nation-state, which belongs to the same diversity.

　　Professor Kim may not have had these analyses back then. Therefore, after reflecting on the American agricultural production model, he fell into a myth and did not know the direction of development of the American agricultural production model. Although there are many unsustainable drawbacks of the US agricultural production model, it is impossible to turn to Chinese intensive farming due to the small number of agricultural workers and backward artificial farming technology, which can be attributed to the unprecedented relaxation of land resources brought about by Western colonial plunder, and indeed it cannot form a driving force for the transformation of agricultural production mode.

　　Scholars a hundred years ago have recognized that there are huge factor endowment differences in the agricultural production models of China and the United States and it is impossible to fully imitate each other, but at present, whether in the policy community, academia or mainstream society, there are many people who insist that China's agriculture should turn to the "large-scale + intensive" model in the United States, which really makes people feel shocked by the proliferation of this "ignorant fearlessness", and also have to strangle the "double negative externalities" brought about by the long-standing deviation in agricultural policy - ecological and environmental losses and food safety out of control.

　　The First National Pollution Source Census Bulletin, released in February 2010, showed that China's agriculture had surpassed industrial and domestic pollution as the largest source of two major water pollutants. In just 30 or 40 years, China's large-scale use of agricultural chemicals has recklessly transformed agriculture, which used to be able to absorb urban pollution and create positive externalities for a long time, into an industry that produces serious negative externalities.

　　The more complicated trouble is that the short-term transformation that occurs so radically during the high-speed expansion of industrial capital is mainly the driving force of a combination of external factors. Since it does not originate from within the agricultural system, if we want to completely reverse the spread of environmentally hostile agriculture, we must explore the crux of the problem from outside agricultural production and prescribe the right medicine. In this way, it is understandable why we constantly emphasized when we began to raise the issue of the three rural areas in the 1990s: the solution lies outside the three rural areas.

　　Therefore, Professor Jin's analysis of the value of traditional agriculture a hundred years ago can still not be ignored, and it should be combined with the applicable scientific and technological innovations required by the versatility of modern agriculture and the corresponding organizational system innovations, and intrinsically make China's traditional agricultural production model play a greater value.

　　As one of the three East Asian countries visited by Professor Kim, Japan suffered serious environmental disasters caused by the excessive use of agricultural chemicals and external industrial pollution as early as the 1950s and 1960s, and had to completely abandon the previous agricultural policy with "quantitative security" as the main orientation, and instead put forward a three-rural policy that emphasized the multi-functional function of agriculture that took into account multiple goals such as quantitative security, rural development, quality safety, and ecological environment. Beginning to promote environmental conservation agriculture, the focus of the policy is no longer just "agriculture", but "food, agriculture, rural"; the policy goal is no longer limited to increasing agricultural productivity, and the development route has changed from simply pursuing scale expansion and efficiency improvement to attaching importance to the multi-functionality of agriculture and the maintenance and promotion of natural circulation functions.

　　In 2004, Japan's agricultural environment and resource conservation policies were discussed as basic issues of agricultural policy, and in March 2005, the new "Basic Plan for Food, Agriculture, and Rural Areas" proposed a policy to "comprehensively shift japan's agriculture to an emphasis on environmental preservation." Guided by this agricultural policy, traditional agricultural production patterns were quickly restored and strengthened by the integration of modern and applicable technologies.

　　In addition, it is worth learning from Chinese: the transformation of agricultural policy is strongly supported by the Japan Comprehensive Agricultural Cooperative.

　　The comprehensive agricultural cooperative is an important organizational system innovation carried out by the Japanese government to protect small peasant families, and its status as a national strategy in Japan was established long before the Japanese fascists launched a war of aggression against the outside world - the war required a large number of young and middle-aged laborers and other resources from rural communities, and the government had to organize the left-behind personnel to give preferential policies in order to avoid the decline of rural communities.

　　The continuation of this comprehensive agricultural cooperative policy has protected the interests of Japanese farmers and the sustainable development of rural areas for nearly a hundred years, until in recent years, Japan's agricultural population has been seriously aging and has to relax the protection policy, allowing natural persons outside the rural community to invest in agriculture, but external enterprise legal persons are still prohibited from intervening. In addition to the protection in the field of agricultural production and operation, the comprehensive agricultural cooperatives are also allowed to use the financial capital accumulated by monopolizing the financial insurance and other businesses mainly based on the realization of rural land to directly participate in the international financial market, and obtain high profits through capital operation and then return them to all farmers who are shareholders of the agricultural cooperatives. These preferential policies have long made the per capita net income of Japanese farmers higher than the average income of citizens, and more than 60% of the per capita net income of farmers comes from various preferential treatment and subsidies given by the Japanese government.

　　Only a slight objective analysis of the different directions of the development of world agriculture will inevitably lead to a comprehensive and systematic reflection on the process of modernization of human civilization.

　　This is the case with Professor King.

　　He gained insight into the many factors that posed a threat to sustainable human development in the process of urbanization in the West at that time. At that time, China's large cities had the highest population density in the world, for example, cities like Shanghai did not have a developed sewer system in the West, and the excrement and sewage of the urban population were completely dependent on farmers from the surrounding rural areas to transport buckets to the countryside every morning, made into organic fertilizer and then applied to the soil, and finally completed the harmless treatment of urban waste. Further estimates reveal that applying one million adults' manure to the field each day can bring more than 1 ton (about 2712 pounds) of phosphorus and more than two tons (about 4488 pounds) of potassium to the soil. From the perspective of the material cycle of agricultural production, Professor Jin realized that the use of developed sewer systems in the West to directly discharge human feces and domestic sewage into the water body not only causes environmental pollution and health risks, but more importantly wastes valuable resources that can be used for agricultural production. The treatment of urban waste in China can not only fertilize the soil under the condition of reducing external inputs such as fertilizers, but also use the soil to harmlessly treat human excreta, avoid direct discharge into external water bodies and lead to pollution and health threats, and create employment, which perfectly reflects the versatility of agriculture.

　　If the Western countries of that year had adopted Professor Jin's advice in time to learn the principles of waste recycling in agricultural production and urban planning in the East— they might have avoided the formation of dead sea areas densely distributed along the coastlines of old Europe and North America due to eutrophication of water bodies.

　　As a famous soil scientist in the United States, Professor Jin has never been influenced by the traditional Chinese farming culture, and has never had the interest of the traditional Chinese scholar "picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence, leisurely seeing the South Mountain", but his praise for the small farmers in the three East Asian countries is heartfelt, "This group of people has a high moral cultivation, smart enough, they are waking up, they have the ability to use all the science and inventions in the West in recent years; this group of people has long loved peace deeply, but once they are oppressed, they will and have the ability to fight for self-defense." ”。 In the same way, although Dr. Yan Yangchu, who graduated from the United States in the 1920s and returned to China, gave the Chinese peasants a "poor, stupid, weak, and selfish" judgment in the early stage, he then transformed himself in the practice of going deep into the countryside, put forward the proposition that "if you want to transform the peasants, you must first be peasantized", and actively carried out far-reaching civilian education and rural autonomy movements.

　　Although these two scholars, both of whom belong to the deep foundation of Western studies, have come to a similar understanding from the perspective of different disciplines, they have also enabled today's people to reproduce the truth on the basis of the cognition of the sages and piece together a more comprehensive small farmer's face.

　　Only by understanding small-scale farmers and the natural agriculture and multi-functional village communities on which they depend can we have the basis for understanding China's history and foreseeing future development.

　　I dedicate this book to the small chinese peasants who are still not fully understood by the world.