The High Yuangudui Village: Poverty Alleviation Series Volume Two

By Ling Qin

The Targeted Poverty Alleviation programme was proposed by President Xi in 2013 and aims to give poor people the resources to lift themselves out of poverty. No fewer than three million cadres have been sent to the least developed areas of the country to educate, inspire and help the most impoverished people with financial support, jobs and business opportunities. The authors of this series of books visited some of the villages that were previously very poor, to document how developments in education, agriculture, health and tourism had created positive change. The authors wrote about what they saw, what they heard, how they felt in these areas and rendered them into touching and vivid stories.
The High Yuangudui Village, describes how Yuangudui, a deeply impoverished village in Weiyuan County, Dingxi, Gansu Province, gloriously transformed from a 'well-known muddy place' into a national demonstration village for poverty alleviation, and was awarded 'Gorgeous Gansu – Top Ten Beautiful Villages.' Adopting a cross-narrative approach, and from multiple perspectives such as history, reality, and culture, the book reproduces the mentality change and fighting spirit of the people of Yuangudui Village from a conservative and closed status to their awakening and self improvement, and reflects the historical changes and social process of this poor rural area in China. This is a narrative, literary, and speculative work full of authentic Gansu elements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unicorn
• Release date: Dec 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781911397212

Ling Qin

Ling Qin

Book preview

7

High Rises Yuangudui

(The Author’s Preface)

Qin Ling

Yuangudui, a village that emerged with rammed earth dwellings among the wide expanse of nature sometime in history immemorial.

Yuangudui, the three syllables which embody infinite time and space and carry profound cultural genes constitute the name of a village that is very common and in the raw. It lies unnoticed on an elevation among the vast land of China. If you are yet ignorant of the overtone of the old saying that ‘Dingxi is the poorest place in the world’, you will fail to understand how doomed to impoverishment Yuangudui was as the poorest place of Dingxi. The city of Dingxi has six state-level poverty-stricken counties and one district, and Yuangudui, sequestered in a corner of Dingxi, is nothing but a mound piled up by drops of bitter tears fallen in its lowest tide and frozen in winter!

Guo Lianbin, the village head and nicknamed ‘micropedia’ of Yuangudui, told me: ‘In the past, Gansu used to be the poorest place in China, Dingxi the poorest in Gansu, Weiyuan the poorest in Dingxi, Tianjiahe town the poorest in Weiyuan and the poorest in Tianjiahe is…’ He listed these places and compared them in detail, like an old farmer sifting corn flour by a stone mill, again, again and again…

And the small handful of chaff left turned out to be the note to the ‘Yuangudui as the poorest place of Dingxi’.

It seems to me that an impartial observation of a changing village requires no more than three perspectives: rise, stagnation and demise. Yuangudui belongs to the first, without doubt. During the campaign against poverty, it took Yuangudui only six years to transform itself into one of the most beautiful villages of Gorgeous Gansu and one of the model villages overcoming poverty from a wretched village reputed for poverty far and near. This amazing metamorphosis was a riddle and the reason for my trip to Yuangudui.

A radical change has its reasons and justifications, and moreover requires 8verification and representation. I will provide as many truths, mysteries and legends exclusively about Yuangudui as I can find.

An old man in Yuangudui once told me: ‘Mr. Qin Ling, when you write about our battle against poverty, you must give enough room for our distress. Don’t only write about our happy life. We have happy life firmly in our hands now and won’t let it escape. But if poverty and hardship are not recorded in your book, who’ll know how Yuangudui has changed?’

His word was epiphany to me. Illiterate as he was, he had wisdom and logic in his life philosophy, and admonishment and warning as well.

I said: ‘You are the very person that should tell me all the bad old days you have had.’

‘My parents have long been dead, and I have no children. How unfortunate I am…’ He looked up to heaven and felt like crying.

I felt a tightening in my heart, as if rough seas were rising in my mind.

Where was the way out for Yuangudui in this wild mountain? When I wrote documentary fictions The Other Side of the River and Out of the Heart Shock Zones, I set foot in many villages across the country. But when I set my eyes on Yuangudui, I was surprised to find it was an alien among the numerous villages in China.

There was indeed, however, a road that lay ahead. In 2013, Yuangudui and the anti-poverty project had an unprecedented meeting that has bound them together ever since. Helpers from all walks of life and Yuangudui vowed solemnly to pool their resources, to commit their utmost efforts to this painful task and never yield to any difficulty for the final success. Six years was not long for those who worked for the same goal, neither was it short for those who marched hand in hand. Yuangudui had finally made it through and saved itself from falling off the precipice of fate. 2018 marked the rebirth of Yuangudui that was lifted out of poverty two years earlier than previously planned. Since then, it has become a beautiful landscape peculiar to Gansu like a young woman who dries her tears and shows her radiant grace.

If 2013 is the threshold for Yuangudui to bid farewell to the old age and usher the new, 2018 is then a commanding height for it to move further ahead. The threshold was not possible to come from nowhere and the commanding height did not stay there and wait. 9

In High Rises Yuangudui, I did not choose to arrange tragedy, hesitation, ruins and scars in the understratum narration on this side of the threshold and happiness, peaceful life, warmth and beauty achieved after the anti-poverty campaign on the other. I satisfied that old man’s wish by placing them face-to-face right at the door as permanent commemoration of the bygone days. Moreover, the commanding height in my mind is a point where we can look to the distant future instead of a place that we cling to in complacency and intoxication.

The success of the poverty-alleviation effort in Yuangudui is not a mirage. It is reputed and exemplary because it is out of the poor soil that a giant tree has grown, and the once ‘poor’ branches are now heavy with blossoms.

I was very conscious that it is easier to write about change than poverty, as the torn and tattered past has faded into yellow negatives in people’s memory. In order to have the negatives ‘exposed’ in the big picture of poverty alleviation, I chose Yuangudui as the centre for my investigation of the historical changes, population evolution and custom and folkways characteristic of the towns of Tianjiahe and Huichuan, and of the counties of Weiyuan, Lintao, Dingxi, Tianshui, Huining, Longxi and Tongwei by tracking from outside to inside and scanning from inside to outside. They are very important as they were closely connected with the ant-poverty campaign in a historical sense and inextricably with reality. They constitute the cultural environment in which Yuangudui has grown from a cocoon into a butterfly and the social background for the rebirth of Yuangudui. Thus, Yuangudui looms before our eyes with its veil gradually lifted to show its past and present marked by the beginning of the anti-poverty battle.

Hence was my search high and low, also a process of my looking for a narrative context. Western China is a special part of the country, so is Yuangudui, which distinguishes itself in language, lifestyle and custom. I felt it responsible for me to consciously get out of the box of the large and impractical ‘public narrative context while highlighting moderately the original folk characteristics’. As for my narration, I considered the overall presentation of the story to some extent; meanwhile, I focused more on people’s well-being which immediately concerns about how people in Yuangudui live their life. That is somewhat like that the road under my feet is more than a road itself, and the water under my pen is well beyond water itself. When I write a latrine as a water closet, I will consider everything about life. 10

I liked the title High Rises Yuangudui. The editor of the People’s Daily hoped that I would select some parts of the book for full-page publication. I still adopted the title for the independent article.

‘I am curious about your High Rises Yuangudui. What is your perspective?’ An agricultural expert once asked me.

I said, ‘When stood upon Yuangudui, I was close to my perspective.’ This is my preface.

Written at Guanhailu, Tianjin, on 10 February 2020.

11

CHAPTER ONE

Village and Family: Two Bitter Gourds Grown From an Impoverished Root

The tattered fur-lined coat I wear has more lice than nits. I threw it over the wall and it became the nest for sparrows. There are so many poor people in the world, and I am one of them.

A Song of the Poor, a Huaer folk song of Gansu Province

Peer support with a policy for each household. Get rid of poverty for a well-off society.

Slogans calling for anti-poverty efforts in Yuangudui Village

Introduction

A village is poor because it has a root of poverty and a family is poor because it has a root of poverty, too.

A village and a family like this are no less than two bitter gourds grown from a root of poverty. If the village is poor, the family is poor. And if the family is poor, the village is poor, too. People in Yuangudui used to look up at heaven and heavily sigh: ‘Alas, how do we relate our life aforetime at Yuangudui? To mention that we feel a lump bigger than a stoneroller weighed on our mind. Life then was…’

With the word, one was already in tears. ‘Aforetime’ is a local word for ‘in the past’ and ‘in the early days.’ In a sense, the ‘aforetime days’ is a village history and the ‘aforetime family’ is a family history.

The poverty-relief battle, at bottom, requires us to locate the root of poverty, to seize it and eradicate it with concerted efforts and wisdom. The gourds are visible above the ground but the root lies below. In order to find out the root of poverty in Yuangudui, I resorted to the measures that people in Dingxi country adopt to 12dig out potatoes and Chinese angelica and dig a cellar, and in so doing, I traced back to the aforetime Yuangudui.

The aforetime Yuangudui is age-long and dolorous.

Would a new life spring into the dream of people at Yuangudui?

An Incomplete Village History

‘Baidu Chinese’ explains that a village is a place where farmers gather, and a place where villagers congregate.

Well, What about Yuangudui? A man has a life and a village has a history, but few could tell what happened to Yuangudui. Like the legendary ‘flying peak’, Yuangudui was a mound resulting from a collapse of a klippe.

Yuangu is a Chinese word referring to the Palaeozoic period.

Strangers to Gansu may mistake Yuangudui for Yuangudai, meaning the Proterozoic era, when they hear people in Dingxi talk about Yuangudui in the mid-Gansu dialect. Does no one who is acquainted with some geological knowledge have any idea of the Proterozoic era? It is a geological age that followed closely the Archaeozoic era when the earth was monopolised by algae and bacteria. It was not until the Cambrian Period about six hundred million years ago that life exploded. We did not know if there were any human traces then, neither did the early settlers in Yuangudui.

Before I made a visit to Yuangudui, I had consulted many experts and local cultural scholars about Yuangudui that seemed very archaic a word to me. Most of them judged: ‘In fact, there is nothing round (yuan) and nothing archaic (gu). It is only a mound (dui), which looks round; therefore, it should have been called a round mound. Gradually, for the sake of convenience, people began to call it round archaic mound, and some time later, they called it Yuangudui, meaning an ancient mound.’

That is how it got its name. It is a name of a common village that gave me a false surprise.

Yuangudui lies at an elevation of 2,440 metres and at the edge of the forest in a corner of Dingxi, with a total area of 124 square kilometres, of which the arable land amounts to 5,500 mu, and 2.78 mu per capita. Bedsides, it has 4,800 mu of 13woodland, 3,850 mu of grassland, with annual precipitation of 508 millimetres and 130 frost-free days. Featured by a cold and damp climate at high altitude, crisscrossing ravines and gullies and isolation from the other places, Yuangudui resembles a huge scar made by Suoyelin Hill and Baojiawa Slope running into each other. As an administrative village, Yuangudui comprises thirteen natural villages including Yuanyi, Yuaner, Yuansan, Yuansi, Yuanwu, Liangshan, Shangtan, Xiatanxia, Xiatanshang, Yinwa, Tuchengmen, Liumiantan and Diaodi, with a population of 1,917 of 447 households, with a little more than 140 people of thirty-four households in each natural village on average. As a matter of fact, there are only fifteen households in Yinwashe, the smallest village, and sixty-eight households in Shangtan, the biggest village. In addition, there are twenty-one households in Mianliutan and only nineteen households in Diaodi villages.

It is said that one place is different from another no matter what or how near they are. This is true of all natural villages that have been isolated from one another by ravines and dales for ages.

Chinese villages are often named after their founding ancestors, such as Wangjia village and Zhangjia Sandbar. In contrast, the natural villages under Yuangudui are either numbered one, two and three or called ‘up,’ ‘down’ and ‘small’ in a simple and direct way. That is why Fang Wenjun, an old man in Yinwa village sighed: ‘Alas, our forefathers did not leave us a proper village name. They must have been too poor to think about it.’

The figures that I obtained show that, by the end of 2017, there were 48,000 towns, 691,510 administrative villages and 1,865,247 natural villages in China, of which how many villages are named Wangjiazhuang, Lijiaping, Zhaojiayao, Yequewang, Shagengliang or Xingshupo is beyond my knowledge. However, I know that Yuangudui is individual and irreproducible, and different from other villages in constituents in terms of clan and kinship.

I was surprised to learn that Yuangudui, a village as it is, has nearly seventy names, including a few rare and archaic names. They are Guo, Wang, Dong, Man, He and many others.

That was a statistic report I made according to fathers’ names, with a few exceptions according to mothers’ names. Most of them belong to individual households whether they were named after their fathers or mothers. In other 14words, be it an administrative village or a natural one, it is hard to simply call it a Wangjiazhuang, Guojiayao or Dongjialiang.

There are several natural villages in which one family, and sometimes two, share the same name. Families like this are quite different from the traditional Chinese families who share one ancestor’s name or whose offspring still adopt that name.

In Yuangudui, there is a small river called Big-Stone River. By the river lies a village that had only two households when the People’s Republic of China was founded. By the 70s of the last century, the number of households had increased to little more than twenty. The extra families were not descendants of the first two households; instead, they moved from outside. There are still a little over twenty families, i.e., the population in this village has remained stable in the past forty years.

Little fluctuation and change in population in village precisely reveal gnawing and unbearable stagnation, break or split in procreation. This indicates that a family once filled with children and grandchildren remained undivided.

A villager who helped me sort out the changes to the names kept silent for two pipes of tobacco and took a gentle breath before heaving a deep sigh: ‘Heavens! I am clear now. Were it not for you to have come all the way to Yuangudui to get to the bottom of everything, we would care little about what has happened to every family behind the door….’

Behind the door! He refrained from uttering those horrible phrases lurking ‘behind the door’, such as a family’s sole heir, a family’s disappearance, no posterity and adopted sons-in-law. When autumn frost occurs, there are few human traces; when everything begins withering, low water turns cold. Yuanguadui is lost in boundless loneliness and desolation, just like scenes in Tune to ‘Sand and Sky-Autumn Thoughts’ by Ma Zhiyuan, an ancient Chinese poet, who wrote: Dry vine, old tree, crows at dusk; low bridge, stream running, cottages; ancient road, west wind, lean nag; the sun weltering; and the one with a broken heart at the sky’s edge.

These years, many villages in the developed regions have been busy compiling village chronicles and editing village histories on the strength of rejuvenating fine traditional culture. I have read some records as a cultural consultant or preface writer and been surprised to find that some villages could be traced back to the 15Northern Song period and even the early Tang Dynasty period, the longest one spanning almost 2,000 years, and the shortest one 300 years. Some records include the changing history of a village in several, a dozen of or tens of generations. Villages depicted in records are lively, expressive, emotional and picturesque in history. But what about Yuangudui? It seems it had nothing to do with a village history.

An Xiaodong, a dispatched cadre in charge of Tianjiahe Village, said to me: ‘Yuangudui sounds as if a story of an ancient origin had already been built up there, but actually it has no village history.’

I had tried to look for information concerning Yuangudui in Weiyuan County Annals, but regrettably, I found nothing about it.

I had also interviewed a few aged people over eighty who were regarded as living fossils of Yuangudui. Most of them were unable to provide any clue specific to Yuangudui three or four generations before, even a few words or fragments about it. An eighty-five-year-old man told me: ‘Although I am so old, I don’t know my grandfather’s name. My old neighbours used to say that my grandfather had gone out begging and never returned. It was rumoured that he had either been eaten by wolves or starved to death. And my pa ran a high fever, which caused brain damage so severe he could barely remember his own birthday. When I was a child, I heard that my ancestors had fled Hezhou, the present Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, to seek refuge here. They dug a cave and settled down.’

‘Food is the paramount necessity of the people’, and ‘water is essential to the production of food’. This is very plain to human ancestors. In fact, Yuangudui in the early days was by no means a place suitable for humans to survive and make a living because it is high topographically with a cold and damp climate making it impossible for people to dig caves as shelters and live on a low yield of crops. The underground and spring water in Yuangudui and nearby places is rich in complex minerals and fluorine content but severely deficient in iodine. The shortage of food and clothing, poor natural conditions and unsafe drinking water have decreased immunity in some undernourished villagers and inflicted them with endemic disease like goiter, Kaschin-Beck disease and Keshan disease. Zhang Kuifeng, a doctor working in a local clinic, said: ‘When a general survey of the endemic diseases was carried out in Gansu in the 90s, Zhang Ruiqing, my father 16who was then a village doctor, and I participated in the survey of the endemic diseases in Yuangudui. There were over fifty endemic patients in the village and most of them were intellectually disabled.

Calculated by the proportion of the population back then, there was one endemic patient in thirty people.

This statistic was near the top in Dingxi or even in Gansu in the 90s when reform and open policies had already been launched. What would it be like if we went back further to the 80s, 60s, 30s or 20s of the last century? It would be undoubtedly more shocking!

‘When I was a child, there were a few endemic patients crawling on all fours, with hands and feet in shoes. All of them failed to live to twenty,’ another old man added.

An expert told me that Yuangudui with its surrounding area was most likely to be a pasture for the villagers in the early days, but the date was never recorded.

Yuangudui residents would say, ‘This used to be a location where ghosts would not deign to appear.’

Well, if this was not a place where ghosts would appear, why were there thirteen natural villages afterwards? And why are there 1,917 residents now?

To make a comprehensive study and analysis of the origin of Yuangudui, I had to mobilise my stock of knowledge in sociology, history, demography and other branches of learning, in close combination with the modern history and social development history of Gansu province. The preliminary conclusion that I drew turned out to be a shock to myself. I think that there were only a few households settling in Yuangudui, engaged in animal husbandry during the Xianfeng reign of the Qing Dynasty. The increase of population in this village underwent four periods. During the first period when Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigned in the Qing Dynasty, people living in Shaanxi and Gansu were heavily troubled by social unrest, complicated ethnic problems, warfare and banditry, so they had to flee here with their families. During the second period, victims of the world-shocking famine that happened in the 18th year of the Republic of China, in 1929, flocked here in rags. During the third period when the KMT army was defeated and retreated in disorder, many young peasants trekked over mountains to find a shelter here in order to avoid forced enlisting. During the fourth period, a number 17of hungry beggars swarmed in during the three years of natural disaster at the end of the 50s of the last century.

The four periods combined amount to no more than 180 years. New settlers came from a dozen of counties of Sichuan, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Gansu, and a large majority came from counties like Lintao, Hezheng, Zhangxian, Gangu, Wushan, Tongwei, Zhuoni, Kangle, Guanghe, Xihe, Longxi, Minxian, Lixian and Wenxian.

These people came here in unpreparedness