Beijing Countryside: Living With Farmers

At the end of last week, we all had to decide where we were going to go for our week-long social study project between the first and second four weeks of class. As much as this week was one of my main reasons for choosing HBA, I knew the pressure would be on to pick a worthwhile study location. The options were many and varied, including everything from touristy trips to Qingdao and the Shanghai World Expo to more culturally significant excursions to Inner Mongolia to staying in Beijing and studying local businesses.

Despite my original excitement about the oversubscribed Inner Mongolia trip, during which students enjoy a day riding horses and sand-surfing in the desert, followed by an authentic Mongolian barbecue that night, I elected to travel with a few others to the nearby province of Hebei, where we will be investigating the life of a developing farm-town. The schedule is still not set in stone, and much of it will depend on the research topics we choose, but it looks like there will be opportunities to visit an elementary school, work and talk with local farmers, attend a farmer's market, and eat a few meals with some of China's poorest and hardest working people.

I have no idea what my research topic will cover, but I'm sure it will come to me when I get there with little need for brainstorming. Last Wednesday HBA had a professor and former Chinese government think-tank member come to talk to us about the disparities between life in Chinese cities and life in the surrounding small towns. One of China's most pressing social issues is accelerating the development of these poor areas to match the living conditions of cities like Beijing and Shanghai. The problem is that high-paying city jobs attract both families who want more for their children and top graduates from China's best universities. The result has been a surge in urban population with little hope for development in poverty-stricken rural areas, and according to this article, a rapid increase in job competition amongst recent college graduates. The government's plan is essentially to solve many of these problems at once by developing a number of medium-sized towns around large cities like Beijing within the next ten years. I don't know if it's possible to force-feed suburban sprawl to a people in such a way, but it's certainly interesting, and serves as an affirmation that I've chosen a fruitful social study project location.

This entry is mostly just a hold-over until my treatise on Food, which has taken nearly a lifetime to write because of the workload but is finally almost finished. Until then...

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