What We Talk About When We Talk About Rural Society, Nongmin and Nongmingong

Notes for the Mutianyu Workshop on Intellectuals and Land (Educated Elites and Rural Society) in Contemporary China

Chan Koonchung （陳冠中）

6/2010

Intellectuals talk (well, it’s true they also think and write and maybe have a life). Paraphrasing Raymond Carver’s famous short story title “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, I would like to ask, honestly, what are intellectuals in China talking about when they talk about rural society, nongmin and nongmingong?

Some may indeed talk about love, as sinologists, anthropologists and classicist literati are sometimes being criticized, mostly unjustly I think, for allegedly falling in love with the idyllic pastoral past of their imagination.

If love is too un-intellectual a word, “desire” is supposedly more effable if you are adept at some arcane post-structuralist discourses. Aren’t all intellectual pursuits informed by desire and the will to discursive power one way or another and the rural society and nongmin are just another rarefied objects of desire to someone like ……us?

But even to intellectuals of a more empirical orientation, talking about rural society, nongmin and nongmingong in present-day China is by no means unproblematic. Not only  “rural” and “society” need to be put inside quotation marks, so should nongmin, nongmingong and the famous three nongs, with their common rendition into English as farmers/peasants, migrant workers/farmer-turned workers, farming/agriculture, rural area/countryside and farmers/peasantry. Even some tangentially related terms such as the mass, the subaltern, the grass-root, laborers, itinerant labors, floating population, migrants, settlers, dwellers, residents, workers, proletariats, lumpen-proletariats, industrial reserve army, urbanites, locals, citizens, nationals, countrymen, civil society, the people, the public, the commons, the communal, the social etc. are all problematic in the context of present-day China.

The following notes hold the views that these terms not only desperately need re-framing, but their unexamined use may have inadvertently contributed to social prejudices and perpetuated injustice, not to mention posing an obstacle to the understanding of China’ morphing reality, social formation, class configuration and political economy. In short, it is about the refashioning of how intellectuals talk about an increasingly liminal sector of the multitude (previously conveniently labeled as nongmin ) who are not yet and probably still for some time to come will not be legally “permanent” (read: hukou-ed) urban settlers.

While I still used terms such as nongmingong for heuristic reasons, I shall explain in a moment why such terms are inadequate. For the sake of clarification, I sometimes preferred the use of the rather cumbersome term “post-rural multitude” to describe this vast liminal populace which, combined with the remaining rural settlers, still make up the majority of the Chinese population.

1

The Chinese character gong in nongmingong is often construed to be an acronym of gongren (workers), but in Chinese the same gong can mean gongju (instruments). The latter meaning is uncannily truer to reality. A nongmingong is less a worker with entitlements; he or she is more an instrument, a man/woman-machine among the phalanxes of similar man/woman-machines, devoid of his or her human individuality, job and social security, and a claim to be a full social being in the cities. Their only value as laogong (manual instrument) is the quantifiable laboring output they can provide to the employers. Even by the standard of an average medium-income urban person in China, most nongmingong’s working condition is unacceptable – low pay, long hours and over-regimented. Their living condition is demeaning and almost sub-human. Their leisure time is barren if any. The stipends would not buy them a decent living in the cities. Of course, it depends to a certain degree on which occupation the nongmingong is engaging – mining, construction, manufacturing or domestic and other services?

Most of them do not live with their family (like early laborers in overseas Chinese diasporas) and have no communal life to speak of (unlike early laborers in overseas Chinese diasporas where there were communities of clans and regional associations).

Qin Hui (秦暉) has recently compared the plight of nongmingong to the indigenous laborers in South Africa during the apartheid time and found that at least the South African laborers could have a life with family and community in their shanty towns such as Soweto. In China, such settlements within or at the outskirts of the cities, or even clusters of shingle houses where some nongmingong tried to live with their families, may be tolerated today but could be demolished without compensation tomorrow in the name of urban renewal or gentrification. (Yes, the powerful state of face-loving China would not allow Brazilian favela-style settlements amid our radiant cities.)

Why the urbanites can tolerate such treatment of their fellow citizens and countrymen? Because they are nongmingong, not urban gongren – gongren, workers, belong to a nominally dignified class who together with the nongmin class are putatively the true masters of the people’s republic.

Nongmingongs are neither nongmin nor workers. The word itself is oxymoronic – in the orthodox categorization of the Chinese communist discourse, you are supposed to be either nongmin or workers; there should be no in-between. Nongmingong’s liminality contributed to their predicament – nongmingong stay in the cities but can have no claim to the urban working class’ entitlements.

Why can’t they just be regarded as workers, but instead be framed as nongmingong and stayed as a liminal non-class?

By calling them nongmingong, the urbanites do not need to treat them as fellow urban residents. In the urbanites’ mind, they are essentially nongmin. The urbanites have the knee-jerk reaction that nongmingong as nongmin can always go back to their idyllic rural village and farm for their subsistence. Nongmin come to the cities on their own initiatives (read: willingly). Their pay though low by urban standard is higher than what they can make by farming. So urbanites do not have to pay them like urban-dwelling working men and women, and city governments do not have to extend any urbanite-only social security, medical treatment, schooling and public welfare to them. Supposedly it is a win-win situation for both nongmin and urbanites.

The label nongmingong short-circuited urbanites compassion for fellow citizens. Nongmingong are instruments, for the development of the economy and the cities; they are instrumental in the success of the China model where a significant number – including many urbanites and some nongmin -- of the 1.3 billion Chinese have improved their living standard and a minority – mostly state employees and urban settlers – have even made a fortune. When Nongmingong are not needed, they are supposed to return to their rural villages and revert back to be nongmin.

By continuing using the word nongmingong and assuming they can all be nongmin again, we helped concealed their plight, made their situation opaque and short-circuited our understanding.

Imagine if we now stop using the term nongmingong and start calling them gongren/workers!

They are in fact “workers” already residing in the urban areas. They are entitled to all the treatments of urban working class, including the right to be represented by trade union.

No cities can then use any excuse to ask the workers to leave their cities and return to the rural areas. They have worked in the cities, and have every right to stay in the cities.

Of course, we all know in reality they (and their second generation) are going to stay in the cities one way or another, hukoued or not hukoued.. They came, they worked, they stayed.

But we and many other people have chosen to remain in a state of denial.

The city governments and some urbanites are still putting up resistance and have not made adequate preparation to come to term with the new reality.

But like it or not, it is a fail accompli that rural people have come to the cities.

Maybe it is really time to drop using the word nongmingong as a label and calling them gongren.

But for the moment, many urbanites and most city governments still prefer to see them as a breed apart from urbanites – they are nongmingong.

This attitude of course is reinforced by the state’s long-standing hukou and city-countryside dualist policy, which we are all familiar (see Appendixes 1 and 2). As of a matter of fact, since 1949, the state has been the engineer and the perpetuator of a country with two disparate classes of citizens, nationals or countrymen – nongmin and urbanites, with structural exploitation against the former, making a mockery of the socialist ideal of equality but undeniably contributed to the initial industrialization in pre-reform-and-opening-up first 30 years in the name of nation-building (albeit with relatively low productivity and high human costs), and ultimately to the continuous spectacular economy growth of the reform-and-opening-up second 30 years, now commonly dubbed the “China model”. While the pre-reform model was based on the economic exploitation but not necessarily social discrimination of the rural residents, the China model is based in the classic Marxist sense on the full exploitation AND discrimination of both workers and nongmin, especially the nongmingong.

China is a country of uneven development. It contains within itself a developed world and a under-developed world, a first world and a third world,

And it still did not treat all its citizens or nationals as equals, as one people.

2

Before nongmingong came to the cities to work, they were nongmin, a social class engaged in farming and cottage industries in the rural areas (see Appendix 3).

Regardless of their material scarcity, they are a part of a human society, albeit a class society in a socialist state. They survived (or failed to survive) the bad years, bad collectivization and bad state policies such as the policy-induced famine that killed more than 30 million people in 1959 to 61. But they also have seen some good harvests, and retained some of their produce depending on the state policy on cultivation at “private” lots. They lived with their family, in a pastoral environment and a community of known people, as their ancestors from antiquity did. They did not migrate.  

As a boon, the sometimes ideologically inspired state had over the years fittingly tried to eradicate illiteracy, campaign against feudal cruelties and superstition, promote greater gender equality and dispense some rudimentary preventive and social medicine to the rural areas with some positive statistics to show in the long run – something that had led not a few Indian Maoist commentators to believe in the superiority of the Chinese system.