Chapter 13 Chapter 12 We are all from the countryside

"I am not a migrant worker, but I am from a rural area." He first stated to me after listening to the interview topic of my trip to China. His name is Yan Renjie. When I interviewed him, he was still a fourth-year undergraduate student at East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. When this article was published, he might have started working, and it was a real "white-collar" job-he told me at the time, An enterprise in Zhangjiang High-tech Industrial Park in Shanghai has already signed an employment contract with him. But I decided to interview him anyway.It was because he came from the countryside and was an out-and-out farm boy.

Urbanization is not only about farmers going to cities for work and business, but also about rural children going to cities to study and stay in cities to work.It has been 30 years since China resumed the college entrance examination. There must be millions of rural children who have realized their own urbanization by going to university. However, when people talk about urbanization, they think of migrant workers, and few people pay attention to it. Focusing on these peasant children who are studying in universities, it seems that since the moment they stepped into the university gate, they have no relationship with the word "agriculture".

But Yan Renjie did not shy away from his rural background.He said that part of his college expenses was funded by the money earned by his two sisters who went out to work.When talking about his hometown, his tone of voice and eyes clearly carry a kind of nostalgia, yearning, and even melancholy. His hometown is in Anhui, with a very peculiar geographical location, located on an island in the middle of the Yangtze River. "There is a township and seven villages on the island. There were more than 13,000 residents in the past. In 1998, a flood almost destroyed the island. Many people emigrated, moved away, and moved to the shore. Now There are only 8,000 to 9,000 residents on the island." In the student cafeteria of East China University of Science and Technology, Yan Renjie described his hometown to me in this way.

"The pace of life in our village is improving quite fast." He has a strong Anhui accent and speaks very fast. "When I was young, I didn't have enough food and clothing. Now I basically have no worries about food and clothing, and my life has reached a moderate level of prosperity." "Is it mainly on agriculture, or on other sidelines?" I was curious. "Agriculture accounts for a very small proportion, mainly relying on the money earned by children working outside." Yan Renjie recalled that when he was in the third year of high school, he began to realize that he had to study hard: "I had a lot of ideas at that time. I thought, even if I couldn't get into college, I would be a migrant worker and go to the city to make a living. At that time I was more interested in scientific research and determined to be admitted to a national key university, so I studied very hard at that time."

But Yan Renjie loves his hometown very much, because many of his childhood memories are associated with this Jiangxin Island.He said sadly that his dream hometown may disappear in the future, because the small island is often threatened by the flood of the Yangtze River, and the government plans to move all the residents on the island to the shore. "The old people in the village are unwilling to leave. Their ancestors have lived on the island for two hundred years. But even if the government doesn't force them to relocate, the island will eventually be empty. The young people in the village are basically dead: they all arrived. I went to work outside. Some people started a family outside." Yan Renjie was very delicate, thin, wearing glasses, and well-mannered, just looking at his appearance, he could not be guessed that he was a farm boy.

"Will you start a family outside too?" I regretted it a little after I said it. He smiled and didn't answer. Recently, the TV at my house in outer London failed and I called someone to fix it. When it was time for a home repair appointment, two mechanics who spoke broken English knocked on my door.After the repair work was over, we chatted casually.The two technicians are from Poland. The older one is about 30 years old and has been working in the UK for four years. The younger one is only in his early 20s. He has just come to the UK for a month. He is catching up with the new wave of working abroad after Poland joined the European Union. The tide came to London.

"Did you know each other when you were in Poland?" I asked curiously. "He almost became my brother-in-law ("brother-in-law" in Chinese)," the older one said with a smile, and then made a face at the younger one, "but he doesn't like me , so we did not become relatives." I told them that I just went to Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and had a great time. "Really? I haven't been to Warsaw yet." The older one said absent-mindedly as he removed the digital tuner box on top of the TV. "Then which city are you two from?" I was a little surprised.

"We all come from the countryside, from the same village," the young man said in English with a strong Polish accent. After Poland joined the European Union, more and more Poles came to work in the UK. You can hear Polish English everywhere on the streets, in trains, in shops, and in front of bars. These Polish migrants include not only "Polish countrymen", There were also many well-educated "Polish urbanites".Globalization has blurred the urban-rural boundaries of immigrant-sending countries. Poor countries as a whole have become the "rural areas" of the world, while rich countries have become "cities" on our planet, which has shrunk dramatically due to globalization.

I was reminded of my recent trip to Germany, Poland.On the night train from Berlin to Warsaw, I met a young man from Warsaw who is fluent in English. He obtained a doctorate from a German university but chose to stay and work in Germany, but every Friday night, he would take this night train to go home to spend the weekend with my parents. "If I were working in Warsaw and my parents were in Berlin, I wouldn't be able to afford the money to see them every week," he told me as we chatted in the corridor of the sleeper car, the lenses of his short-sighted glasses , reflecting the flickering lights of a German city the train passes through.

He told me that after Poland joined the European Union, a large number of young people went to work in Western European countries. There was a labor shortage in Poland, and many Polish companies even had to go to India and other South Asian countries to recruit workers.He also said that in history, Poland has always been a country of immigrants, and most of the famous Poles went into exile abroad, such as musician Chopin, chemist Marie Curie, film director Polanski and so on.When he said these words, there was a hint of helplessness in his tone. I also told him about my trip to China in May this year.He was very interested in hearing about the experiences of various migrant workers I interviewed, and asked many questions. I also tried my best to explain to him in English the exact meaning of the Chinese word "migrant worker".

"I am also an international migrant worker." He said suddenly. In fact, there are also many Chinese in this growing army of "international migrant workers" traversing the earth.They may be farmers from Guangdong and Fujian, laid-off workers from the three northeastern provinces, or former students from Beijing and Shanghai who stayed in developed countries such as Europe, America, and Japan after completing their studies.In this sense, I am also a member of the army of "international migrant workers". However, due to the existence of national borders, Chinese people looking for a better life are still more restricted from moving within China.Still, the effects of globalization are pervasive in China.Due to chance, China has caught up with the golden opportunity of global industrial transfer and has become a "world processing factory"; Chinese farmers, who were originally looking for a better way of life, broke through the obstacles of various systems, went to work in factories, and went to cities to make a living. The three elements of heaven, earth and man have jointly created the largest wave of industrialization and urbanization in human history in China. If someone asks what is the most significant change in China since 1840, in the past I might have chosen political changes such as the 1911 Revolution or the Communist Revolution, but now I would choose Chinese cities that took place in the late 20th and early 21st centuries Although this process has not undergone a change of dynasty, nor has it flashed the sword, but its significance is extremely far-reaching, because only the changes in the way of life and civilization form are the most profound and substantive changes. Many scholars interviewed during my trip to China also spoke highly of the far-reaching significance of China’s urbanization process—— Ge Jianxiong, a Shanghai scholar who once edited the six-volume research monograph "History of Chinese Immigration", told me: "I once wrote an article that said: Without immigration, there would be no modernization of China. In other words, China's modernization process , to a large extent, is the reconfiguration of population and resources, and must be a process of urbanization.” "I think that urbanization is something that every country in the world has to go through." Beijing scholar Mao Yushi began to answer my question in this way, "The output of agriculture is very low, so to get rich, you must rely on non-agriculture. The characteristics of China Yes, this process is going very fast, because China’s economy is growing very fast, and the proportion of farmers in China is also very high, and in this process, there has been a large-scale population movement.” "In the history of mankind, there is no country whose urban population can increase by 400 million people in less than 30 years." Hu Angang, director of the National Conditions Research Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences-Tsinghua University, quoted a series of statistics to explain to me that Chinese cities "Because of China's large population base, China's urbanization will not only have an impact on China, but will also have a major impact on the world." “Personally, I think it is hard to overestimate the role of migrant workers in China’s economy and society when they migrate to cities,” Peng Xizhe, director of the Population Research Institute at Fudan University in Shanghai, told me.Professor Peng also believes that China's urbanization process "is also a cultural and intellectual enlightenment movement, because more than 100 million farmers work and live in the city, and they accept the urban way of life, life philosophy and entrepreneurial concept... in the whole During the process, the government did not spend any money, but completed the re-education of more than 100 million farmers, which will have an immeasurable impact on China’s future economic development.” Liu Kaiming, director of the Shenzhen Institute of Contemporary Society Observation, believes that China's urbanization process has benefited from globalization. "Some people say that our Chinese money is earned by foreign companies. But how much money did we make? We had nothing before, we participated, and we got this benefit. The most important thing is that so many of us Get job opportunities. Because so many people have job opportunities, so many industries can develop, our entire supply chain in China can grow, and all industries can grow. Shenzhen and Dongguan are the most typical examples. Shenzhen , Dongguan is so rich, it shows that China has become the biggest beneficiary of globalization." Whether it's good or bad, whether it's a blessing or a curse, so far, industrialization, urbanization and globalization have turned more than half of the earth's population into "urban animals", and also made China the largest population in human history. migration tide.According to Hu Angang's forecast, by 2030, China's urbanization rate will reach 900 million to 1 billion. Cui Chuanyi, a researcher at the Rural Department of the Development Research Center of the State Council of China, wrote an article for FT Chinese.com, calling on all levels of government in China to follow this wave of urbanization, speed up the reform of the dual household registration system, and allow migrant workers with stable employment to integrate into cities and achieve permanent urbanization. sexual migration. However, don't forget that compared with thousands of years of agricultural civilization, human beings began to evolve from "village animals" to "urban animals", probably only a short history of more than 200 years. In 1800, only 3% of our planet's population lived in cities.The history of urbanization in China is even shorter. In 1900, China's "urban people" accounted for less than 10% of the country's population. Until 1977, before the start of reform and opening up, more than 80% of Chinese people were still out-and-out "country people." In a sense, no matter where we live on the planet now, we ourselves, or our not-so-distant ancestors, came from the countryside. My father is reticent by nature and rarely talks to me.This time when I went to China, I went back home to visit my father, who was over eighty years old, during the interval between writing and writing the "Series of Reports on Urbanization". One day, out of nowhere, my father told me about his teenage years.I always thought that my father was a farmer, and he had been farming at home until he joined the army at the age of 19.But that day he told me that although he grew up in the countryside, he had hardly ever done farm work for a day. Worked until he joined the army. On a whim, he also told about the life of my grandfather whom I only met a few times.Grandpa is an out-and-out farmer, but when he was young, he caught up with the "Crossing the Guandong" trend in his hometown in Jiaodong, and those who stick to the poor village would be laughed at. The tide of migrant workers went to the Northeast to seek a living, working all the way there, and even "broke" as far as Vladivostok. This is the first time I have heard such long-standing stories from my parents and grandparents, and it is also the first time I have thoroughly figured out my origin: Although I was born in Beijing, studied in Shanghai, and later studied in Toronto, the largest city in Canada, and I have lived in London, the capital of the United Kingdom, and can be described as an out-and-out "urban animal". Grandpa's generation. It was at this time that I suddenly understood why Yan Renjie laughed and didn't answer the question "Will you also start a family outside?" I guess, the subtext in his heart is—— "I personally will not go back to that Jiangxin Island to start a family and settle down, because even if the small island is not flooded, it will be abandoned by the younger generation, but I will always return to my hometown in my dream, because I know that I Where did it come from..."