In rural China, a new test of a generation’s will
What does it take to get by in an aging society with a dwindling pension reserve? Our veteran China correspondent went deep into the country’s rural northwest to find out. She joins our “Why We Wrote This” podcast to discuss her reporting.
When the Monitor’s Ann Scott Tyson visited China’s countryside for a story recently, she was struck by the warm welcome she received as a rare foreign visitor – and one who spoke the language.
What also stood out as she visited homes, some of them carved into the yellow soil, was the economic inequality between rural and urban China.
“I kept coming across people in their 60s and older who were just hard at work,” Ann says on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast. On top of farming, these older adults “were also taking extra jobs, like ... digging ditches,” Ann says.
While China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty, some 200 million, most of them rural, still live on very little. Rural elders receive an average monthly pension of $25; urban retirees get $500. A traditional source of support – adult children – is largely weakened, as many leave home for cities.
Rural/urban inequality poses a tremendous challenge to China’s rise, scholars argue. With no clear plan to help China’s have-nots, the country is heading into “uncharted territory,” says Ann. Yet she admired the resilience of those she met, some of whom lived through the Great Chinese Famine around 1960. One 64-year-old woman is “climbing up apple trees and working on road crews,” but “there wasn’t any twinge of defeat in her voice or her demeanor,” Ann says. Some elders are trying new farming ventures – growing cash crops and setting up irrigated greenhouses.
“I give them great credit,” says Ann, “for trying these new things.”
Episode transcript
Jingnan Peng: There are two Chinas: one urban, one rural. While the urban China makes most of the headlines, the rural, “invisible” China may hold the key to the country’s future prosperity. The steep inequalities faced by rural folks are “the biggest problem China faces that no one knows about,” argues scholar Scott Rozelle in his book, “Invisible China.”
[Ambient audio: Sound of rooster crowing. People speaking Chinese.]
Peng: The Monitor’s Ann Scott Tyson recently visited China’s countryside. She came back with four stories. And one of them looks at how millions of elderly farmers are getting by in an aging society with a dwindling government pension reserve. In some ways, it’s a story of desperation. It is also a story of resilience and perseverance.
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Peng: Welcome to “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Jingnan Peng, your guest host for this week. I grew up in Beijing, and currently work for the Monitor in Boston. Today we have Ann joining us from Beijing. She has reported from China starting in the mid-1980s, and she returned to her post as our Beijing bureau chief in 2018. Welcome, Ann. Huanying.
Ann Scott Tyson: Xiexie, Jing! It’s great to be here.
Peng: You told me earlier about how on this trip you met many people who have never met a foreigner. So A lot of Westerners, and many Chinese people too, have had little contact with China’s countryside. Could you give us a picture of the places that you visited?
Tyson: Absolutely. This was really off the beaten track. So it took me about 12 hours on China’s slowest kind of train, known as the “hard-seat train,” to reach a small town in northern Shaanxi province. Shaanxi is a landlocked province in northwest China. And it’s really famous for being both a cradle of ancient Chinese civilization – that’s where the city of Xi’an is, and more recently, it’s the place where Mao Zedong and the Red Army set up a revolutionary base after the long march in the 1930s. This area that I went to is really hilly, arid, a lot of wind, and it’s famous for its fine yellow soil called loess. People have been eking out a living here farming terraced fields for many generations, and it’s still relatively poor. In fact, a lot of people still live in caves that are dug out of the hillsides.
Peng: Wow.
Tyson: I was definitely the only foreigner around. When I would stop to talk, big crowds would form. So different from Beijing or Shanghai. And sometimes it would just turn into one long photo op and I had to go around while everybody would get a chance to take my picture.
Peng: Yeah, that feels really different from urban China. And so why did you decide to write about China’s rural elders?
Tyson: Well, for the last three years, China’s been under very strict COVID controls, as you know, and travel outside Beijing was hard, if not impossible. So I wanted to reconnect with China’s villagers, and basically just go out there and see what I could find. I knew that rural areas had been hugely impacted by mass migration to cities in recent decades. What I found was many villages that were populated almost entirely by older people, because their children have moved away to cities.
Overall I think that their living standards have improved, but their incomes do remain far lower than in cities. I kept coming across people in their sixties and older who were just hard at work. And they weren’t just doing the traditional subsistence farming that I knew from this area. They were also taking extra jobs, like picking apples or digging ditches. And they were only getting paid about $17 a day for this type of work, but they were still eager to have it. So I was impressed both by how exhausting their jobs were, and also how they just accepted this need to work for as long as they could to make ends meet. And I thought, I wanna learn more about this and tell our readers about this part of China that we just rarely encounter.
Peng: What is it like to approach and interact with these rural elders?
Tyson: They were very, very warm. I think that many people just assumed, even upon seeing me, that I could never speak their language. So they were very happy that we could communicate. They did speak a strong local dialect that was hard for me to understand. But I got used to it over time. They invited me into their homes. Pretty much all of them were in caves. They’re dug out of this yellow soil. They’re fairly deep. They’re a little bit dark, but compared with in the past, they do have electricity. They don’t really have running water that I could see. Again, there are some minor improvements, but these are very, very similar to what people there have been living in for many generations.
Peng: Right. So these rural elders are living a very different life than urban elders. Could you tell us a bit about the divides between rural and urban China?
Tyson: Yes, it’s so true. Their lives are really nothing like most people in China’s cities. In cities, the average pension for a retired worker is about $500 a month. But rural elderly get on average just $25 a month in a pension. So this really leaves them no choice but to keep working until they no longer can. One couple, for example, was growing corn, mostly to eat, but also to sell if they had some left over. And their crops depended entirely on rainfall. This is a dry area where that is often uncertain. And Mr. Ren, a man I met, said: “We depend on heaven to eat.” And he and his wife each got a tiny government pension of about $17 a month. While this is still an improvement, because rural pensions didn’t used to exist at all, it really isn’t making much of a difference in their lives. The reason for this partly is that under China’s traditional Confucian concept of filial piety, children have been obligated to take care of their aged parents. But with family size shrinking under China’s one-child policy, and children now farther away, that tradition is breaking down. So Mr. Ren has two children, but they’re struggling to make ends meet and take care of their own children. They really aren’t able to help them. Not that they don’t want to.
Peng: Yeah. So combating rural poverty has been one of the main goals of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Back in 2021, he announced that the country had eradicated extreme poverty. So what was your sense of the role that the government played in the lives of these elders?
Tyson: There’s no question that China’s poverty alleviation campaign has been a huge success, and it did systematically improve lives for the poorest of the poor. But China set a very low bar for that. To qualify for that program, you had to earn $1.90 a day per person. So these were people in extreme poverty. The government assigned workers to track them, and about 700 million people were lifted above that line. But China’s poverty line today is $2.30 a day, which is still low. The World Bank suggests that based on China’s status as a moderately prosperous country, the line should really be at about $5.50 a day. And by that measure, about 200 million people in China still need government help. China’s anti-poverty work is still ongoing and needs to be ongoing, based on the rural-urban divide and the large number of have-not people in the country.
Peng: The value that you picked [as a focus] for the story is resilience. Could you give some examples of it?
Tyson: Yes. I think mostly they showed resilience in their strength of character and their attitude. I met a woman named Mrs. Gao, for example. She’s 64. She’s working incredibly hard. She’s climbing up apple trees and working on road crews, just going anywhere she can to earn $15 a day. She also does the farming because her husband can no longer do that. But she was upbeat. There wasn’t any twinge of defeat in her voice or her demeanor.
And there were also some older farmers who were launching into new types of farming ventures, like planting apple orchards, and growing some cash crops that could earn them a little bit more money. And others were trying greenhouses with, in some cases, irrigation. And they weren’t as dependent upon rainfall. There were a few who were making substantial improvements in their livelihood. And again I give them great credit for trying these new things at their age.
Peng: Right. I wanna circle back to what I mentioned in the beginning: the biggest problem China faces that no one knows about. So the author Scott Rozelle argues that hundreds of millions of migrant workers in China may become unemployable eventually after factory jobs leave China for countries with cheaper labor. Unemployable, because inequalities in rural education and healthcare have left many of these working-age people unfit for other jobs. And add to that what we just saw about the plight of these more elderly, rural folks. Will all this lead to major social upheaval?
Tyson: Now I can say that there is a lot of support for the central government in rural areas. And one thing you have to keep in mind is that many of these elderly were born at a time when China was in famine. Some of them still remember having to eat leaves. They have enough to eat now, you know. They have clothes to wear. That is the standard that in some ways they’re comparing their lives with now.
I think that the problems that you’re raising are very real. I encountered a lot of illiteracy among the rural people I met. They would have trouble transitioning to more advanced or better-paying jobs. They certainly would have trouble applying more advanced technology to make their farming more lucrative. A whole nother issue is the tremendous debt that local governments are facing in China now, so that they lack the resources to address some of these issues you mentioned with education and so forth. So looking ahead with currently no real clear plan to help the rural elderly, and China’s big population of have-nots, we’re really heading into some uncharted territory.
Peng: Right. You also mentioned in your story that for China’s urban population, the government is planning to raise the retirement age. So in other countries, like France and Uruguay, we’ve seen this issue of delayed retirement causing some popular pushback, and not just from older citizens. Do you see popular anger in China around this?
Tyson: I do think that it’s sort of the only option that they have is to get people to work longer. Because they are not going to have enough labor to support the elderly. So I think that there may in some ways be a recognition among the urban workers that this has to happen. The government has indicated that the plans are underway. They’re going to gradually raise the retirement age for urban workers to 65 for both men and women. And it’s currently 60 for men, and then 55 for white-collar women, and 50 for blue-collar women. On one hand, it sort of equalizes things, because now urban people will have to work a little bit longer. But it for sure is not going to be popular among the city workers, because they’re looking forward to their time off. It’s not great for young people because they might have a harder time getting promoted. So there aren’t any easy solutions to this. And I think the main thrust of China’s effort now is to just emphasize: how can we keep our elderly healthy so that they can live independently and keep working longer? That’s where we’re at right now in China.
Peng: Well, thank you so much Ann, for all of your insight, and for making this trip into China’s countryside. Thank you again for being here.
Tyson: It’s my pleasure, Jing. So great to chat with you.
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Peng: Thanks for listening. You can find our show notes, which include a link to Ann’s story, more stories on Asia, and stories about resilience at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Jingnan Peng, and Clay Collins. Alyssa Britton is our engineer, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
