3  

But nongmingong can no longer be nongmin as butterflies cannot be larvae again.

Objectively, agriculture – including subsistence farming, for-the-city produce farming and larger scale agribusiness for distant markets -- cannot make good use of so many rural laborers –the issue of so-called surplus labor power or rural under-employment.

Market economy entails the all-importance of household disposable cash income, which is difficult to accumulate through subsistence farming.

Subjectively, once they worked in the cities, nongmin were transformed and could not be the same person when they went home.

Some were landless. Nongmin in People’s Republic never legally owned the land to begin with. Many had lost their assigned farm lots due to urbanization, public works and misappropriation by corrupt officials. Some (especially in the Western provinces) had given up farming in exchange for state subsidies following the policy of conversion of farmland to forestry.

Some were born or raised in the cities with nongmingong parents. They had never been nongmin and could not be turned into nongmin.

Even for those who stay in the rural area, some parents had preferred to send their children to schools (often living in school dormitories in xiang and county towns) instead of asking them to toil in the fields to get used to the hardship and learn the skill of being a farmer.

With the ubiquitous TV sets and mobile phones and the increasingly prevalent internet connection, not to mention interaction with home-visiting nongmingong, most rural settlers now know a lot about life in the cities and one can understand why a large proportion of them, especially the karaoke-singing, pop-star-chasing younger generation, aspired to be urbanites.

Fei Hsiao-tung （費孝通）had made similar observations way back in 1947, but the trend was arrested during the first few decades of the People’s Republic. Now it comes back with a vengeance and the scale is much, much bigger.

Nongmingong and many rural settlers are now in fact para-urbanites.

This time there is no turning back. The genie is out of the box again. Urbanization is an one-way street.

But they have not arrived yet – the door is not freely open to them yet. They are stuck in liminality.

Yu Jianrong (于建嶸) has said nongmingong formed a “floating society” (漂移的社會), adding that their personal identities are unfixed and culturally they have no sense of belonging.

While I agree with his observation on nongmingong’s liminality, I challenge the use of the word “society”.

There is no society or community for the nongmingong.

Nongmingong had not formed a society, if “social” relations signified meaningful relations between humans.

As nongmin, they belong to a community of known people.

Once they become nongmingong working in the cities, their social capital has been drastically impoverished.

They are not networked either.

The words network, connections, contacts etc, even the concept of civil society, are the constructs of urban settlers.

Nongmingong only have disjointed threads to a few relatives, acquaintances and clansmen, if at all. That is it, disjointed threads.

They are not living in a community, they do not form a society of migrant workers -- not even secret societies in the line of overseas Chinese diasporas.

One can imaging Margaret Thatcher’s reactionary saying that society does not exist may ring true from the point of the nongmingong.

Karl Polanyi’s insight of self-protective “society against the intrusion of the market and the state -- that society is “discovered” on the onslaught of the market -- would sound like wishful thinking to a majority of the unorganized nongmingong.

Unlike the industrialization process in places such as England, where peasants left their land and settled in the industrial towns, albeit in bad living condition and sometimes without decent work,  here in China, the post-rural multitude were for the longest time not expected to have the right to settle in the towns and cities after they finished their itinerant work.

They are not supposed to be turned into workers or proletariats in the Marxist sense.

They do not fit the description of urbanized industrial workers who played a prominent role in the narrative of the socialist state.

They are not the urbanized lumpen-proletariat, and they could not be called the industrial reserve army, which implies teleologically a final absorption to the working class.

The social, in the Marxist sense, is always about a class with its oppositions. Nongmingong is a liminal non-class, a post-rural multitude, and before they become members of a class with entitlements, like the workers in the cities, they are an undifferentiated and non-stratified multitude, a faceless, atomized herd.

To be a “social” entity again, they must breakthrough the stigma of liminality and be recognized as a member of the working class.

Also in the Marxist sense, the social is understood through two angles: emancipation and production.

In a sense, the nongmingong non-class constituted the potential for the most important social emancipation of the century – over 400 million or more rural people are expected to be relocated to the cities and become full urban citizens within two to three decades.

That is why though nongmingong have no society now, the concept of the social is still important – it is the idea of social justice and equity that is motivating many people to help changing the plight of nongmingong. Nongmingong’s struggle for full citizens’ entitlements and rights entails a new social consensus, a more inclusive social contract.

As to how that will impact the production mode of China needs more informed discussions.

4

If nongmingong can no longer be purely nongmin again, and their descendants will leave for the towns and cities one way or another, what is left of nongmin and rural society?

There will be fewer nongmin, or farming population.

Nongmin as a class is a dwindling class, but it will not disappear.

The remaining rural settlers of course have every right to have a decent life. Their living condition and welfare should be improved and their community life must be respected.

The important point is we must not think of post-rural multitude and even all rural settlers as essentially nongmin. To call everyone from rural areas as nongmin is again a short-circuited mind-set. It makes one failing to see the vast liminal population of post-rural multitude (who split their time between urban and rural areas and engaged in non-nongmin works) and non-farming rural settlers.

Many former nongming had given up their farm land for urbanization and public works and were compensated and lived a leisurely non-farming life in the countryside.

Even the increasingly numerous first-generation nongmingong returnees and retirees who chose to live in the native villages again would not be full-time farmers again. They are often the nouveaux riche of the villages, and many of them sometimes engaged in showy activities such as gambling and throwing big banquets for their children’s marriage. They may take up some farming of fresh produce again on their own lot but that is mainly for supplementary self-consumption, more like a hobby gardener.

The saying that China is a country of peasants is an anachronism. The unexamined idea of farming as the foundation (以農為本, putting agriculture first) or a nation based on agriculture (以農立國) is now totally ungrounded and even dangerously misleading.

That does not mean we should abandon our rural settlers – we need to treat them better. That only means there is no returning to a society of largely self-sustaining farmers.

Moreover, much farming are now for urban markets.

Agri-business including mechanical farming and factory farming of livestock goes without saying produces for distant urban markets.

Large scale farms employed locals as well as imported laborers, as laborers. For instance, Gansu farm hands collectively – with transport support from the county-level governments there -- left for Xinjiang to pick cotton in the harvest time.

Commodity crop or cash-crop farms of various scale run by entrepreneurial nongmin at the outskirt of towns and cities send their daily produce to the still existing (and popular among the common city folks) fresh vegetable markets in the urban areas. Their produce are deemed better than those available in the supermarkets.

Sustainable farming advocate Wen Tiejun (溫鐵軍) has organized a co-op connecting urban consumers with some selective farms in the Beijing outskirt. These farms grow “sustainable” and perhaps healthier produce for their urban subscribing co-op members. Wen’s intention is laudable, and perhaps a win-win situation has been created, and it may have helped to maintain bio-diversity, but it also proves the point that boutique farms (organic or not) at the city outskirts, appealing to the more health-conscious urbanites who can afford them, are there for the city consumers.

Medievalist Henri Pirenne and urban economist Jane Jacobs and others have made the point long time ago: agriculture is created by the cities and for the cities.

Subsistence farming -- as opposed to agriculture -- is not the only mode of farming and probably not always the dominant mode even in the past.  

So it is not helpful to imagine China’s rural society as before, a society of largely self-sustaining farming communities. A modern rural society of subsistence farmers or small-scale peasant economy (小農經濟) is untenable. It is not viable to ask the rural populace to go back to the small-scale peasant farming condition of antiquity.

Many rural families can still lay claim to a piece of land for residence, cottage industries and farming. But one should not expect them to go back to subsistence farming, nor would they be willing. The meaning of the piece of land to them has changed:

For those who still have a piece of land, their thinking is that the land is their compensation for being exploited for so many years by urbanites and the state and when one day the land has legal market value they can keep it or rent it out (they are already doing it), or they can finally exchange it in the market and have their first capital and that is their ticket to settling in the cities.

Now the urban sprawl has spread beyond the city limits (because there is no clear city limits), the meaning of the countryside is also changing. The urban rich now boast their living in the countryside, in their gated communities. Countryside and the romantic allure of a rural setting are often packaged for the consumption of the urbanites.

While “township” enterprises owned by county and village collective cooperatives had dropped out of public attention and contributed much less to the GDP, equally polluting small workshops, factories, warehouses and garbage dumps are strewn all over the rural area., not to mention random homestead settlements. Many mega resident houses in the countryside were built by the rural settlers themselves through the remittance of the nongmingong to their families.

So, rural society is not the same rural society we know from antiquity up till the last few decades of the People’s Republic.

While the rural environment is rapidly deteriorating, its “society” is also mutating – it is now determined by the vicissitudes of the vast post-rural multitude (often able-bodied adults) rather than the remaining rural settlers (often children and elderlies).

Though it is a welcome move that the central government decided to do some transfer payments to redress the pressing problems of rural dilapidation and provide the rural settlers a minimal safety net of long-overdued social welfare, we must bear in mind it should not be construed as a move toward reviving the old system that rural populace must stay in the rural area and that rural economy can support its vast population without subsidies. Well-intentioned romantic euphoria of rural revival apart, we should not have the illusion that the younger sets will stop aspiring at migrating to the cities.

5

As I have argued, the term nongmingong short-circuited the understanding of the educated urbanites toward the former’s predicament. However, no better Chinese descriptive terms have emerged to replace nongmingong apart from the cumbersome post-rural multitude that I have suggested.

Admittedly, the phenomenon of post-rural multitude is unprecedented in Chinese history. Therefore, applying other traditional terms on the post-rural multitude is inappropriate.

Strictly speaking nongmingong or the post-rural multitude are not youmin (遊民wanderers) or liumin (流民 floating people or internal refugees), two castes of people existed in pre-modern Chinese society（see Appendix 4）.

It is also misleading to call them migrant workers, when the word migrant suggested there is a clear destination for settlement. In the case of nongmingong, no urban destination accepted them as settlers. If they are migrants, they are migrants without destination, making the term migrant itself problematic – migrating to where? So one could say they are more like (but again not quite) refugees and itinerant workers, whose destination is by no means certain.

This post-rural multitude has no subjectivity now. All old identities are inadequate if not bankrupt and are often mobilized to further disable them by the state, the city governments and the urbanized populace. They have few representatives in the state apparatus or at any level of governments. They are not encouraged to organize, and their collective voice is still weak, though now a few poets and story tellers (Appendix 5) as well as documentary makers have emerged among their fold or to speak on their behalf.

8

Some recent developments:

- Canceling the agricultural tax greatly helped to ease the perennial tension of nongmin and local-level bureaucratic apparatchiks.

- Transfer payments in the name of new countryside building may have incrementally improved the depleting condition of certain rural areas and even revived a sense of the commons and public life. More college-educated young people have chosen to work in the countryside and some NGOs are allowed to do volunteer works in the rural areas. Apart from token palliatives, public medical cooperatives in rural areas will benefit those with rural hukou -- nongmingong who are still working in urban area now routinely go back to their hukou-ed rural place to claim expenses for medical treatment

- Demand for higher pay and less over-time at Foxconn and Honda plants have started to spread to other factories. Young workers (often called “second-generation” nongmingong) at these plants are less willing to accept strident working conditions. They would not go back to their rural places, and they are frustrated to find that they cannot afford decent urban living with the pay they are getting. They demand pay hikes and shorter overtime work hours. To adult nongmingong, higher pay would mean they can hope to afford the living cost in the urban areas and eventually bring over their families to the cities for reunion. To the young workers, it means they can see their future as full urban residents.

- Central government has talked of introducing a resident identity card system to replace the hukou system.

The post-rural condition is an urbanization condition. Admit the inevitable and start preparing to accommodate the post-rural multitude to the cities.

Gear urban planning, schooling, public housing, social security etc to this.

Sure it takes political will power, governance skill, change of perception, bullet-biting and some luck (e.g. no drastic economic downturn anytime soon).

There are resistance to allow nongmingong and their families to live amid urban settlers. The justifiable fear of the urbanites and the fiscal limitations of the local governments need to be addressed.

What should intellectuals do? The least they can do is when they talk, question the key words in their code-- including such terms as rural, society, nongmin, nongmingong -- against the “realities” which it may obscure or conceal, in the hope that it will help to bring about a kind of clarity instrumental in a small way toward finding the way out of the labyrinth of social discrimination, exploitation and injustice, without derailing reasonable economic development.