footsteps of Sichuanese migrant workers can be found everywhere in China – in the factories, down the coal mines and brick kilns, on building sites in every metropolis. Rural poverty in Sichuan, the country’s fourth-largest province and western China’s largest source of migrant workers, has driven 20 million peasants to the cities. Among them, more than 11 million have left the province entirely.
Numerous government programmes have attempted to deal with Sichuan’s poverty. The ‘8–7 Plan’, launched in 1994, sought to eliminate absolute poverty within seven years. Whether that goal was reached depends on the definition of ‘absolute poverty’. China’s criteria for rural poverty reflected one of the lowest thresholds among developing countries. In 1986, the ‘absolute poverty’ line in China was 206 yuan per year. In 1988 it was raised to 1,067 yuan, then to 1,196 yuan in 2009, 1,274 yuan in 2010 and 2,300 yuan in 2011. The raising of the poverty threshold has put three times as many people below the line: since 2011, 128 million among the rural population.
Back in 2005, a five-year plan was launched to reduce the income gap between town and country, which had increased dramatically as a result of the reform and opening up. Yet the gap has continued to widen. Rural per capita income remains below subsistence level: by official measures it was 4,140 yuan (£350) in 2008, less than a third of urban per capita income, and all of the Sichuanese migrants I met were earning below this level. Meanwhile, what the state considers the problem of ‘superfluous labour’ has worsened in rural areas over the years: Lacking state social security provisions for their elderly, peasant families create their own by having more children, in defiance of China’s one-child policy. The government has lost count of the scale of the problem. In the 1990s, when it roughly estimated 200 million unemployed in rural China, 50 percent of rural Sichuan’s workforce was described as ‘superfluous’.
I set out for Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, just a few months after the 8.0 degree earthquake of 12 May 2008. The Information Office of the State Council placed the province’s death toll at 69,197, with 374,176 injured and 18,379 missing. Wenchuan and Beichuan, at the epicentre, had suffered the most. At least 60,000 Wenchuan residents were missing and there was little hope for their survival; nearly half of Beichuan’s 20,000 residents were dead. Even today, the government has not released a final death toll for Wenchuan, and meanwhile other natural disasters resulting from the quake, such as landslides following rainstorms, have killed more people, and fifty sources of hazardous radioactivity have been discovered in Beichuan’s affected areas. When I arrived in August 2008, four months after the quake, residents were still waiting for the local government to clean up the rubble. Between May and June more than 600,000 Sichuanese migrant workers left their badly needed jobs nationwide to visit their families. Life, they knew, was not short of natural disasters – which would always be accompanied by man-made catastrophes. But it was only acceptable to speak of the first.
I had been to Chengdu before, in 1997, and I remembered it as a haven. Known as a city of poets – a bohemian city – its relaxed atmosphere was a welcome change from the constant social struggle that many visitors feel elsewhere in China.
Chengdu sits in a sheltered basin surrounded by mountains, far from the Yellow River Delta where the dominant Han Chinese culture has historically been centred. Through the centuries these conditions attracted poets and writers, most of them travelling hermits, the most famous being Li Bai, whose family migrated from Central Asia and settled in Sichuan. Famed for his wild lifestyle and his unrestrained, individualistic literary style, a style unknown in the court-influenced writing of ancient China, Li Bai came down in legends as a Chinese Robin Hood (xiake). He helped the poor as he travelled with the money he begged from the rich; he caroused and played his lute (dombura) to accompany his poems.
We drink face to face in the midst
of these mountain blossoms,
one glass after another, and another;
Let me go home, I’m no longer sober;
In the morning I shall return with my dombura.
Sichuan was never far from his mind – many of his poems describe his delight in the beautiful landscape and his joy in the music of others, including his famous ‘Listening to the Sichuanese monks’, in which he describes feeling overwhelmed by the monks’ performance of music in the misty Emei Mountains:
For me, he waved his hand,
strumming and sounding
like millions of pine forests;
Mind as clear as water;
the echo remains
when the bells toll the dawn;
Forgetting even when dusk comes
In many layers of autumn clouds…
The romantic image of Chengdu – what the Chinese call a shi wai taoyuan, ‘a peach garden not of this world’ – has lasted for centuries; the city was a sanctuary even during the final years of the Qing dynasty as the country was being carved up into concessions by the Western powers. I can imagine the Sichuanese strolling in parks, playing majiong on the street, and chatting away in teahouses in their provincial capital while the imperial dynasty fell apart 1200 kilometres away. Since that time, the number of teahouses in Chengdu has continued to grow: from 454 in 1900 to 598 just before the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949, and up to the present day, when there is one on every street. Every day, one in five Chengdu residents visits a teahouse. And Chengdu’s literary scene also continues to flourish, with poets and poetry lovers alike gathering in clubs throughout the city to recite the poems of ancient masters and exchange notes about their own creative work. Even in the open space in Renmin Park, such a scene can be witnessed. I saw a group of poetry lovers of all ages, men and women, gathered inside the little pagoda, displaying their work on the marble table, some reading their poems aloud as others applauded.
After the earthquake, Chengdu’s authors produced an outpouring of work. The forty-five-year-old writer and poet He Xiaozhu was writing a novel on the second floor of a teahouse in Chengdu when the earthquake struck. He was terrified and tried to find a place to hide. He escaped injury, but when he heard of the deaths, he was heartbroken and wrote the poem ‘Elegy’, which was circulated all over the country:
Thousands upon thousands of anguished cries;
Return to silence and tranquillity;
Heavenly acts cannot be predicted;
The moon over Wenchuan;
Still, a question mark;
Aftershocks extend to Chengdu;
Sorrow engulfs half the world;
Tears turn to ice;
Let candlelight melt them away;
Children, climb on a dandelion
and line up for heaven.
I thought of the words of the ancient poets as I travelled by train to Chengdu – a twenty-five hour trip, across Hebei, Shanxi, and Shaanxi provinces. Though the ancient poets loved the region’s liberalism, they, too, had dreaded the long journey:
The path to Sichuan is filled with hardships,
harder than going up to the blue sky.
– Li Bai
I had boarded the
