Building the New World 3

The Origins of Development



It is said that in Huaxi village (华西村), in Wuxi county, Jiangsu, two thirds of the village families own their own car. Three quarters of them are said to have travelled outside China. Pensions, medical fees and school fees from kindergarten to university are refunded by the village council. The spectacular success of Huaxi, “China’s Number One Village”, is famous throughout Jiangsu. Each year apparently it attracts more than one million visitors: officials from around China, eager to investigate Huaxi’s economic model, but also tourists. When I asked my students about nearby places to go, some of them recommended that I too go to see the village “where everyone has a car.” Interestingly, many of the explanations for the village’s wealth on the Internet credit the village’s leaders, and in particular that “Huaxi village has always stuck to path of the collective economy and shared wealth.” “华西村一直坚持走“集体经济，共同富裕”的道路”


Elsewhere in the vast urbanizing, industrialized, hubristic Yangtze delta region there is still fairly severe poverty. But it is not surprising that Huaxi is here and not in a different part of China. Arriving from Sichuan last year my first impression was that I had entered a far wealthier area. There is no shortage of people making excellent descriptions of the changes that this has brought to the region. I have often found it interesting, to ask, on a slightly different track, people’s opinions on why south of Jiangsu, the Yangtze delta region, is far more prosperous that the northern part of the province. Below are some replies.

“The people here work harder. Basically, they spend all their time earning money. They don’t relax.” –An English teacher at my college, from Jilin in north-eastern China.

“People everywhere work hard. The people in Sichuan work hard too. Southern Jiangsu is rich because of the government’s policy.” –A politics teacher at my college, from Anhui province.

“The people in the north have lower suzhi [roughly “quality”]. I know someone from Lianyungang [a port in northern Jiangsu], he has three kids. How will he be able to give them all a good education? My kid will get a better education, and his suzhi will be higher. The north is poorer because the people’s suzhi is lower.” –A taxi driver.

“Lianyungang people! They have a lot of bad habits, they always fight and they don’t work hard.” –The head of a factory-owning family.

“Education is better here, and there’s also a cultural difference. In the north, people think that to become rich you have to save money. Here people think that you don’t necessarily have to save money, the key is to get an income… Also, from when they are small, their aim is to become a boss. Since they were small they’ve been thinking about what kind of boss they will be, so they’ll to take the opportunity when it comes. People in the north don’t have that much ambition. Here they are very ambitious. The major industry in this region is textiles. They have been producing textiles for more than 100 years –initially there were foreigners who invested, but now they do it themselves, I think the way they do business is clever. ” – A migrant worker from Yancheng (a city in the north of Jiangsu), who now repairs motorbikes, and in the past has worked as a foot masseur and an air-conditioning repairer.

I don’t think I have ever heard what would probably be one of my first guesses: the sluggish, blind waters of the Yangtze itself. It seems difficult to avoid using the ultimate major river cliché and call it an artery to that runs through the heart of China, bringing trade-based prosperity to those on its banks.
What I had not considered before I wrote ‘development’, ‘Jiangnan’ and ‘history’ into Baidu, was the role of government policy before the twentieth century. In fact there was a strong government-sponsored textile industry in this region well before either the current boom or the late nineteenth century arrival of western investment. The early Ming government required peasants in the Yangtze delta region to either grow cotton, hemp, mulberry trees for silk farming or to pay taxes in cotton. ( http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/4788999.html ). This policy was revised after the government became aware of the conflicts between its policy and environmental realities. It continued, however, to encourage the Jiangnan textiles industry with tax cuts for textile producers and the dissemination of education on their cultivation and production.
The Ming-Qing transition, or cataclysm as one scholar has labeled the Qing conquest, was particularly devastating to this region. (The Qing army’s 10 day slaughter and pillage of Yangzhou is recorded in the Yangzhou Ten-Day Record 《扬州十日记》written -perhaps with some bias- by Wang Xiuchu, a survivor from the staff of the losing Ming general http://baike.baidu.com/view/420704.htm .) However the region’s textile industry recovered and continued to flourish at greater heights during the Qing. Amid orgies of tourist attraction construction in several major cities, the Emperor Qianlong also found time to make a number of Deng Xiaoping style “Southern Tours” during which he too called for the further promotion of commerce and development in this southern special economic zone.

Reading about this interested me because I think there is a tendency to imagine that economic planning; the promotion of new industries and technologies; and government sponsored education are the properties of modern governments. Pre-modern governments, I think it is commonly assumed, raised taxes to fight and build palaces, but tended not to think in terms of “the economy.” However to explain the current economic success of the region, I think it is necessary to see how, over hundreds of years, an economic foundation has been actively constructed.