Yao Yang, "The Vanishing Town"

Yao Yang, “The Vanishing Town”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

Yao Yang (b. 1964) is a well known economist at Peking University, Director of the China Center for Economic Research and the Dean of the National School of Development.  In the context of my Reading the China Dream project, I first became interested in Yao because of his engagement with Confucianism and his argument that reembracing Confucianism would be the best way for China to “sinicize Marxism” (see here and here).    

​When the organizers of the project “The Exterior of Philosophy—On the Practice of New Confucianism” kindly invited me to present a paper at a conference they are holding in Switzerland in late August, 2022, I decided to focus on Yao and his “Confucian pragmatism.”  I find it intriguing that a senior professor at a prestigious university in China would “change course” in a way that, at least at first glance, appears to be bold and even radical.  Consequently, I have been reading a lot of Yao Yang for the past few weeks, which means that, for better or worse, I will be sharing my Yao Yang translations with you for the month of August.
 
Most of Yao’s dozens—if not hundreds—of books and articles focus on economic topics, and I rarely read academic work in economics in English, to say nothing of Chinese.  Luckily for me, throughout his career, Yao has produced both technical, granular studies of whatever he was interested in at the time, as well as “big picture” essays where he conveys the results of his and others’ research in broader, more accessible terms, as a way of contributing to public debate and solving important problems. 

​These big picture essays are often both interesting and enjoyable, and a worthwhile research project might be to look at Yao’s writings as a public intellectual over time; the arc of his concerns might shed considerable light on the interaction between formal economic research and public policy debate between the late 1990s, when Yao began his academic career, and today.  Ultimately, I think that Yao’s advocacy of Confucianism is a problem-solving exercise as well, and thus perhaps not quite as bold or radical a move as I initially thought, but I will have more to say about this when I update the blog in mid-August with more of Yao’s writings about Confucianism and liberalism.

In the course of my recent research, I also discovered four essays by Yao that treat neither economics nor Confucianism, but instead are quite personal statements based on his experiences in his father’s home village in Jiangxi.  I translated all four, and include them in this update.  In addition to this one, the other three are “Before My Grandfather’s Portrait,” “Three Days Back in the Village,” and “My View of Revolutionary History.”
 
Yao was born in Xi’an, but spent most of the first eight years of his life in the small, single-surname village of Hujiangbei, where he was raised by his uncle and aunt.  The emotional ties forged by this experience led Yao to return when he could, even as an adult, and his visits prompted the reflections that led to these essays, three of which appear to have been written in the 2000s, and one in 2019, a further reflection based on the three texts already composed.   All four essays are well-written and interesting in their own right, not the least for their autobiographical nature, which, while not unheard of among public intellectuals in China (see here for one example) is not something I run across on a regular basis. 
 
In terms of the themes explored in these texts, two stand out.  One addresses the effects of reform and opening on village life after 25 or 30 years.  Yao applauds the material success that reform and opening have brought to many Chinese villages, but at the same time notes with sadness and frustration the diminishing sense of community and public spirit—even in single-surname villages like his, where kinship should help, but hardly seems to.  Villagers encroach on public land and goods to build homes that respect neither aesthetics nor tradition, and often leave old homes to decay (in part as a de facto claim on the land, should they ever need to build another house).  They build pigsties in ways that pollute public space, and village “authorities” are incapable either of penalizing those responsible or mobilizing the village to dig sewers to solve the problem.  Part of the problem is that village elites were largely eliminated during the Cultural Revolution, and village government largely abandoned during reform and opening.  It is surely significant that Yao Yang says not a word about village elections. 
 
The other theme is Yao’s reflection on the meaning of China’s revolution.  Yao’s grandfather was a revolutionary martyr, having joined the Chinese Communist Party (as well as the Kuomintang) in the 1920s, to be executed by the Kuomintang after participating in the Nanchang Uprising in 1927.  The grandfather’s portrait still hands in the family home where Yao grew up, which prompts Yao to wonder about what his grandfather would have thought about the twists and turns of China’s long revolutionary journey, and what the revolution has ultimately come to mean in his village.  What struck me was less Yao’s conclusion—“the revolution was indeed necessary, but now it is time to move on”—and more his willingness to think out loud about the revolution, something I find to be surprisingly rare in the writings of most Chinese public intellectuals.
 
The text translated here focuses on one of Yao’s great-uncles, who lived in a small town not too far from Yao’s village.  The point of the text is to highlight the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, which punished and often destroyed local elites—Yao’s great-uncle was a doctor—ultimately leaving China’s rural areas without natural leadership.

 
Translation

Dazhou Market is a small town in central Jiangxi, and our village is three miles outside of the town. Whenever I think of Dazhou, I think of my great-uncle. My grandfather had two brothers. He was the oldest, and died before I was born.  The youngest went to high school in Zhangshu in the 1920s, and during the revolution returned to the county town to join in the revolution.  People in the countryside understood nothing about the revolution except that it meant killing people, so they sent the middle brother to the county town to try to talk the younger brother out of it. The middle brother was educated as well, and when he arrived in the county, he at least knew where to find his brother. When they met, the younger brother laughed and said to his older brother, "You don't understand what’s going on. Go back home!"

Who would have thought that that the wisdom of the country people was greater than that of this high school graduate. When Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Communists in 1927, the younger brother went on his own to Nanchang, apparently to join the Nanchang Uprising,[2] and then stayed on to do underground work under the cover of teaching elementary school. The Nationalists searched for him everywhere, and finally caught a fellow villager with the same surname. This man knew my great-uncle, but did not know he was a Communist, and thought he was merely a teacher.  So he led them to my great-uncle, who was arrested.  It is rumored that the Kuomintang tried to win him over by offering him an official title, but he resolutely refused and was eventually beheaded, his head displayed to the public.

At the same time, the hometown militias[3] began to seek revenge back in the village. The young son of my youngest great-uncle died while trying they were to get away, and my great-uncle’s wife remarried.  My two other great-uncles took refuge in a distant mountain region, staying in a village of people with our Yao surname for three years.  It was then that my grandfather’s brother learned to practice medicine. Twenty years later, my great-uncle met the relative that had “informed” on his brother on a ferry.  This man was already fairly wealthy, and when he saw my great-uncle, he apologized and offered him a hundred silver dollars. But my great-uncle refused, saying, "Let bygones be bygones." Soon after liberation, this person died of an illness, meaning he escaped what awaited him in the "Three Antis and Five Antis" campaign.[4] 
 
After liberation, the status my middle great-uncle was that of a small land renter,[5] meaning he was neither a class enemy nor a comrade-in-arms. He made his living by practicing medicine in town. In the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, his life was quite peaceful. In my vague memories from my early childhood, I still have an image of his pharmacy. He had a big house in the town, a typical kind of Jiangnan house with gables and upturned eaves. The part of the house that faced the street was the pharmacy, behind which was the courtyard, with a well, and behind these were the sleeping quarters.  Completely typical for houses in southern towns.  

I vaguely remember that his former tenant also lived in the house, and the two families had a good relationship. The tenant's son was also my first grade teacher. I originally did everything with my left hand, including writing, and he insisted that I write with my right hand instead. But I never saw the tenants in the pharmacy. As far as I can remember, my great-uncle’s pharmacy was always neat and tidy.

The pharmacy was divided into two parts by a counter. On one side of the counter was the area for seeing patients, a narrow space with a few chairs and probably a table. On the other side were medicine cabinets, all along the wall with many small drawers containing different Chinese medicines. What I remember most clearly is the small copper scale on the counter, which was used to weigh the herbs. The street outside the pharmacy was wide (I later discovered it is not so wide after all—this is surely childhood memories at work), and the middle part was paved with stone slabs, the road leading in one direction to our village and in the other to the dock on the river.  

The other families around my great-uncles house also had stores. I remember that the family across the street had a cotton loom, and the machine was powered by a foot pedal.  The noise was never-ending. I didn’t know what they were doing, so I asked my great-uncle, and he said people were "working." The word was too abstract for me, and for a long time, I associated the idea of "work" with the noise made by the foot pedal. Next door, there was a grocery store selling rare kinds of seafood, such as seaweed and dried cuttlefish, something that people usually enjoyed when they had guests or during the holidays. Because of this small store, there was always a faint salty smell in the area, and this smell came to be part of my memory of holiday times.

Next to the river bank, there was a small abandoned temple occupied by a cooperative making bamboo ware. A distant relative from our neighboring village was in the cooperative, and whenever I was on my way to town with the adults, I would visit the small temple and the relative would sharpen a pair of chopsticks for me or give me some other little gift. I especially loved the smoothness of the thin bamboo strips and the sight of the skillful movements of the artisans as they wove the bamboo baskets, the strips fluttering in their hands. 
 
People in our village call the town the "street," and there was a market on the street. Whenever I went to the market with the adults, I would usually go to my great-uncle’s house. Once I saw a pimply-faced young man from my village at my great-uncle’s pharmacy. I myself once went there for "emergency" treatment. It was noon one day, my aunt was frying vegetables, and I was standing on my tiptoes, stretching my neck to look into the pan, when a large drop of oil splashed onto the back of my neck.  I burst into tears. My aunt and uncle panicked and picked me up and ran down the street. By the time I arrived at my great-uncle’s place, I had stopped crying and my grandfather probably put a little salve on me and left it at that. 
 
These are fond memories. But before long, the Cultural Revolution began. One day at noon, I ran home to see that our wok was gone and my aunt was wiping tears from her eyes. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, "Uncle is being struggled." I ran to the threshing floor and saw my uncle kneeling in front of a group of people with our family’s wok on his head, being criticized by an outsider he didn't know. It turned out that someone had found out that our family fed rice to the pigs and denounced us for wasting food. For some time after that, every morning before breakfast, my uncle had to face the image of Mao on the wall, and intone with me "sailing the sea depends on the helmsman." Uncle could not read or write, so God knows how he learned this song.
 
What happened to my other great-uncle was even worse. After the Cultural Revolution began, he was reclassified as a rich peasant and began the suffering that would color the last years of his life. First, his apprectices rebelled against him, ransacked his house, and took away some valuable things. My great-uncle was known far and wide as a kindly old man, and I don't know what he had done to offend these apprentices.

His only son, my uncle, was also affected. My uncle was an officer in the provincial military district, secretary to the commander, and married to the most beautiful female soldier in the military district at the time. My father's photo album contained a picture of my cousin's uncle in full military dress, which I admired so much that I stole it and carried it in my wallet, which finally destroyed it.  However, because his family had been reclassified as a rich peasant, my cousin's brilliant military career came to an end. He was ordered to change careers, and became secretary of a party branch in a factory. This blow was fatal to him.

However, the worst was happened to my great-uncle. During the Cultural Revolution, he looked completely haggard. His deep sunken eye sockets, high cheekbones, high and narrow nose, and wispy goatee all spoke of the vicissitudes of his life. One of the most memorable events happened when he was about to be driven back from the town to his village. That winter, my parents decided to bring me back to live with them in Xi'an, after I had spent nearly eight years in the village, and my uncle and aunt agreed, even though it was as painful as cutting flesh.

One day, they brought me to my great-uncle’s house in town, saying that a colleague of my father’s would come by and take me back to the village. So they dropped me off and went back  (I can't remember why they left, maybe my great-uncle told them to).  However, my father’s colleague never showed up, and I got impatient and started running back to the village by myself. My great-uncle chased after me. He was already in his seventies and couldn't catch me no matter how hard he tried. He had to stop when he reached the river bank, by which point I was already a long way away. He stood there and yelled out my childhood name. In the cold wind, his body seemed so thin, and his cry so helpless. Despite my youth, the scene could not but move me. However, I did not turn around and instead let the old man cry out helplessly in the wind. Whenever I remember this scene, my heart aches.
 
My great-uncle finally wasn't able to make it through that winter. He was driven back from the town to the village. The good thing was that the family house is roomy, so there was no problem for the two of them to live there. But my great-uncle was depressed. Finally, one night, when everyone was warming themselves around the fire, he sighed and said "I might as well die.  Living is not worth it." No one said a word. Then he went to bed, and before long I was awakened by a noise, and my aunt told me that my great-uncle had died. That night, the entire family of a dozen or so people was thrown into chaos. My lasting memory of that night is fear. 

At that time, communication and transportation were difficult, and my uncle in Nanchang did not get to the village until the day of my great-uncle’s burial. I remember that it was raining that day, and my uncle was wearing a military raincoat that was rare in the countryside, which made me envious. Although he complained that his father's status had ruined his future, he was still sad that he had not been able to see him one last time, and I still remember his pained expression when he heard that my great-uncle had already been buried.  Later on, when she was thinking about this incident, my aunt reckoned that my uncle is quite “deep.”  I don't know what she meant by "deep".
 
When my great-uncle died, the other businesses in town also closed shop. In their place was a supply and marketing agency near the highway. The face of the town changed dramatically as a result. The supply and marketing agency was very large, but its red brick walls stood out jarringly among the surrounding gray bricks and tiles, making it look inappropriately big. The old street was basically abandoned, and nearby villages switched their focus of their activities to the supply and marketing agency. From time to time, we still saw wealthy people from the town who came to walk the streets of our village. They banged a small gong in their hands and shouted, "I am a bad element!" A rope was attached to their bodies, and cadres followed behind holding a rope.  Although my great-uncle had died, my great-aunt was still a rich peasant, so she often had to go to construction sites to reform herself through labor.
 
After the Cultural Revolution, the house in town was returned to my great-aunt but she could no longer live there, so she sold it for 800 RMB [approx. $120 USD] to the tenants who were living in it. In the 1980s, the government tried to revitalize the town by setting a day for people to go to the market. However, the human environment that once sustained the town's existence had been destroyed, and government intervention could not make the town's commerce thrive again.

I went back to the town once in the mid-1990s and found that the face of the town had changed dramatically, with the number of new houses greatly exceeding the number of old ones, and new houses were the same small two- or three-story flat-roofed buildings you see everywhere, with no traditional flourishes. The town's supply and marketing agency is still there, but it is no longer the commercial center of the surrounding villages. Each village has its own small store; because of the convenience of transportation, when people go shopping they either go to Shuibian, 10 kilometers away, or to the county town.

Shuibian was originally the headquarters of a commune, and later became the seat of the county government of the neighboring county, so it prospered. Dazhou used to be a town like Shuibian, and used to be able to rely on its tradition of commercial culture to compete with Shuibian, but after the Cultural Revolution, the commercial tradition disappeared with the removal of the businessmen, so it was no longer able to keep up with an administrative center like Shuibian.
 
The economist Douglass North (1920-2015) says that there is path dependence in the process of institutional change. This theory ignores the role of episodic events on the process of institutional change. The Cultural Revolution was just such an episodic event. It broke the social and cultural structure of Chinese grassroots society, thus removing the cornerstone of Chinese cultural continuity. Some people might wonder if the evolution of Chinese culture after the Cultural Revolution does not reflect precisely the impact of this event,  but such a sweeping statement is unhelpful to academic research.

I wrote this story about a town close to my village both to fulfill a long-standing desire and to provide a small example of institutional evolution. Through this case, I hope to show that institutions, especially informal institutions like culture, are carried forward and transmitted by specific groups of people, and when these people are suppressed or removed, the continuation of such institutions will be extremely difficult. In the past, most people only discussed the destructive power of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese culture at the macro level, but few people paid attention to its impact on Chinese grassroots society.

The general view is that the grassroots level is more stable and therefore more likely to preserve traditional elements of Chinese culture. The title of Edward Friedman, et.al.’s book on Wugong Village in Hebei is Chinese Village, Socialist State, and the mere title reflects this point.  If by "Chinese village" we mean only the lifestyles and mentalities of the farmers, then Friedman is not wrong. However, the transmission of culture beyond basic habits and ways of thinking at the grassroots level is very fragile because, in rural China, the transmission of culture depends on a small number of elites, and when these elites are suppressed or eliminated, only the dregs of rural culture remain. The collapse of culture at the grassroots level inevitably changes the overall face of Chinese culture, and thus makes the recovery of traditional culture very difficult.
 
Notes

[1]姚洋, “消失的小镇,” published on the Sina website on August 31, 2004. 

[2]Translator’s note:  The Nanchang Uprising was the first military action undertaken by the Communists after the rupture of the United Front with the Nationalists.  Communist forces succeeded in taking Nanchang city, but shortly thereafter were forced to retreat.

[3]Translator’s note:  The Chinese word for these militias is huixiangtuan/还乡团, although this generally refers to groups that appeared in the 1940s, taking revenge on those who had supposedly helped the Communists.

[4]Translator’s note:  These campaigns, launched in 1951 and 1952, targeted capitalists and other symbols of “corruption.”

[5]Translator’s note:  This is not the same as a landlord, and applies to people who had small amounts of land and practiced professions other than that of farmer.