In 2004, NPR correspondent Rob Gifford went “On the Road in China,” traveling 3000 miles from Shanghai to Korgaz along China’s Route 312 through Nanjing, Hefei, Xinyang, Xian, Lanzhou, Jiayuguan, and Urumi over 14 days. His seven-part report is available at <http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2004/aug/china_road/>.
Part Two of Gifford’s report comes from the Anhui province, “the country’s rural heartland.” In rural China, just 250 miles outside Shanghai, Route 312 splits symbolically into a new superhighway and an old road, but as Gifford reports, “both are doing the same thing – draining the villages of people.” While Anhui, where China’s first experiments in “free-market reforms…launched 25 years ago, after Deng Xiaoping succeeded Mao as supreme leader,” should be a prosperous region, “life is poor here,” 66 year old farmer Wu Fanliang states as he whips his water buffalo, “you can’t make a living off the land these days. Both my sons have one off to the city, and I’m left here with the grandchildren.” Left behind in China’s rural outmigrations are the old or the very young, and life in the rural provinces with corrupt local authorities is hard. Gifford describes the scope of China’s outmigrations using Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, whose grand numbers are “too small even to describe the single province of Anhui.” And in China, poor land is not the main push factor: powerful, corrupt local authority, with its taxes and land grabs, is. Zhou Jiangming, a local resident, describes the “dead weight” of the Communist legacy through her experience with land grabs – the peasants only subcontract the government’s land, and can’t do anything about their displacements. “One of the amazing things about traveling in China,” Gifford reports from flashy Hefei, “ is that you suddenly come across a city you never even heard of before with a population of more than 4 million people -- that’s twice the size of Dallas. But even these cities are just clusters of prosperity in the sea of poor rural villages.” At the end of the report, Gifford is stopped for speeding by a local policeman, who is authorized under local law to impose a huge fine and to confiscate the car and license for two weeks – “it’s a great money earner,” Gifford reports after an hour of bargaining down the punishment to a month’s wages, “for police…in their little fiefdoms.”