Despite huge leaps in recent decades, rural living standards remain an issue of widespread popular concern in China. A heating crisis in Hebei last winter, for example, became the focus of intense online discussion and subsequent censorship as the withdrawal of natural gas subsidies and a ban on traditional coal heating left many rural pensioners shivering. These concerns are not confined to the countryside: recently deplatformed influencer Hu Chenfeng first came to prominence in 2023 by highlighting the meager pension of a 78-year-old woman in Nanchong, Sichuan’s second most populous city. But many city-dwellers, encouraged by rose-tinted official media coverage and idyllic clips from "New Farmer" influencers, hold romanticized views of rural life and its supposed perks that are at odds with the daily reality for millions of the one-third of Chinese citizens still living in the countryside. Because prosperous urbanites are the most common points of contact for most foreigners, these misconceptions can easily spread beyond China’s own borders.
5. Do elderly rural residents not spend much because they’re frugal?
This is another of urbanites’ common arguments still sometimes used by “Three Rural Issues” experts to argue against the necessity of increasing pensions: elderly rural folk are used to frugality and don’t like to spend money, having escaped infection by the “virus of consumerism.” If you give them money, they’ll just hoard it, so it won’t meaningfully stimulate domestic demand.
Uncle Zhou’s answer to this argument hits the nail on the head: “They have no disposable income, they can’t even stay afloat, how can you expect them to spend on consumption?”
He went on to lay out an extremely simple argument: If you give an elderly villager 200 yuan [about $30 U.S.], of course he’ll save it … because he might need 500 yuan saved to cover a single stay at the county hospital. Give him 2000 yuan, then he’ll dare to spend a bit. It’s not that rural folk aren’t consumers by nature: it’s that they’re given too little, only enough to save for emergencies, nowhere near enough to spend freely.
Elderly rural people aren’t at all averse to spending or improving their own lives. Uncle Zhou asked many older people how often they eat meat. The answer was that they usually don’t: eating meat is reserved for weddings and funerals, when they can grab a couple of extra bites at the banquet. This isn’t a matter of simple living; it’s about suppressing desires in response to absolute poverty.
On the issue of daily expenses, Uncle Zhou says much the same as Zhao Yushun. First are medical insurance premiums, which now amount to 400-500 yuan [about $60-75] per year, and are mandatory. Second comes daily medication for chronic health conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes. These require long-term treatment but, depending on the household’s financial situation, those who can’t afford it may have no choice but to go without. Third are social obligations such as weddings and funerals. These are “basic operating costs” in village society, and for many elderly rural folks they’re also rare chances to experience something better.
These expenses combined far exceed the basic [monthly] pension allowance of 163 yuan [about $24].
6. "It’s fine, they’ve got dibao." But there are catches.
City-dwellers have yet another argument in reserve: they have dibao in the countryside—if they can’t make ends meet, they can apply for that.
Uncle Zhou says this is a huge misconception. Many urbanites hear that dibao in Beijing is over a thousand yuan, and in Shanghai it’s 1500 [about $220], and assume that the same level applies nationwide. In fact, in most regions dibao is capped at 500 or 600 yuan [about $75-90], and the criteria for eligibility are completely absurd.
First, your savings cannot exceed a certain amount. In some regions that limit is as low as 5,000 yuan [about $735], and if you have more than that you don’t qualify. Next, children’s earnings and property can be assessed as the parents’ “income”: if they have a son living in the city who bought a car to drive for [Uber-equivalent] Didi, the parents can’t get dibao, because "the household owns a car."
Here we have a logical paradox with Chinese characteristics: when the children pay taxes, they can deduct a certain amount, up to a cap, per person for the support of elderly parents, but when the parents receive benefits, their children’s total assets are factored in. You’re an individual until it’s time to share the financial burden: then you’re part of a family.
More importantly, we all know that city-based children aren’t necessarily able to support rural parents. How much of a monthly 10,000-yuan paycheck [about $1,470] will be left after urban mortgage payments and childcare? But the system doesn’t care: it just converts this straight into a couple of thousand yuan a month of "invisible income" for the elders, and excludes them from dibao as a result.
Many countries don’t run the numbers this way. Take America: even if Elon Musk earns ten billion dollars a year, his mom could get American "dibao" as long as her income was low and she didn’t live with him.
And none of that even takes into account the problem of favoritism in the dibao screening process.
7. Why don’t city-dwellers understand the countryside?
I’ve long wondered why it is that city-dwellers misunderstand the countryside like this. Is it just ignorance, or are they thinking with their backsides instead of their heads—basing their conclusions on where they happen to be sitting?
I think it’s a bit of both, but Uncle Zhou’s response is very direct: "Vested interests. There’s no other way to put it. They don’t know because they don’t want to know. They exist on a more privileged plane, and don’t want to look down."
He cites an example: Every time the topic of educational equity comes up, as soon as there’s talk of dropping Beijing and Shanghai’s special treatment in the college entrance exams, all the Beijing-based experts and scholars calling for educational equity immediately fall silent, because if the walls come down, their own kids might not make the cut. Everyone’s a paragon of justice and ethics until their own interests are at stake.
But, as Uncle Zhou points out, there’s another level to this beneath that of self-interest: the more fundamental problem is the lack of channels for accurate information. The poorer you are, the fewer ways you have to speak out. Elderly villagers lack formal education; they can’t write or make speeches. Their stories don’t make it into the media or broader public consciousness. It’s as if they don’t exist.
What’s even worse is that in today’s “short video” era, the countryside is more "consumed" than "portrayed." What the camera focuses on is the vlogger himself, helping an old person with a gifted bag of rice. It’s the inspirational story of "kind-hearted person changes someone’s life," a staged performance that appeals to urban viewers by making them feel virtuous. Meanwhile, that elderly person still has another 360 days of the year to get through after the camera has stopped rolling.
8. What is public-benefit work? Helping people see one another.
Uncle Zhou’s been doing public-benefit work for a decade, but not in the same way as the vast majority of public-benefit organizations I know.
His organization will install street lamps, but require the local villagers to raise 20% of the funds; they’ll help a village school buy curtains, but insist that the school handle negotiations itself, instead of taking care of everything for them. A lot of people don’t get it: if the recipients are that poor, why make them chip in?
Uncle Zhou explained what I think is a very important point: the fundamental basis of public-benefit work is respect for people. As soon as you involve the local people, they gain ownership of the matter, instead of remaining recipients of charity. That village you pushed to raise 20% may, in the course of that fundraising, reconnect with people who left it many years ago. That elementary school on the Yunnan border got back in touch with former sent-down youth in Shanghai who are now providing them with assistance, letting Uncle Zhou step back.
Sociologist Fei Xiaotong talked about village, school, and clan ties as the three energy meridians of Chinese social relations. Uncle Zhou’s public benefit work essentially follows these three channels to restore lapsed connections, helping people who have left the countryside rediscover the villages that nurtured them—not to pressure them into returning or feeling guilty, just to get them to extend a helping hand to those back home.
"What does our public-benefit work do? It inspires people, and rebuilds them—rebuilds them and their social relationships with others. If no one else is willing to help, why don’t we just band together and support each other?”
9. Atomization is the product of other people’s deliberate intent
Toward the end of the livestream, Uncle Zhou said something that I think was the core of the whole conversation:
"Rural people’s invisibility isn’t because no one else is looking, it’s because people who are suffering are not allowed to be seen—because that would disrupt ‘harmony.’"
In our society today, extremely intractable forces are at work to isolate us from one another. Elderly villagers are on one island, their children working in the cities on another, and every young person who had no choice but to buy at the top of the property market and shoulder a 996 workload to cover the mortgage on another. This atomization didn’t happen by chance, but to a certain extent, by design. Isolated people are powerless to do anything but internalize their suffering.
Uncle Zhou’s work, and my own writing on farmers’ pensions, have essentially the same goal: to make people realize they’re not alone. To make children in the cities realize that they and their parents who stayed in the countryside are one family, the two hardest-pressed generations of our times; to make people who left the countryside realize that they are never truly cut off from their roots, nor should they be. To rebuild a community, however small, from these isolated individuals.
Uncle Zhou does this in the public-benefit field. I do it at my keyboard. Zhao Yushun and Yuan Zhenzhen do it out among the fields. We need more people doing this work.
I’ve always said that those of us children who came from the countryside must speak up for ourselves. Now I want to add a corollary: we must first recognize one another. [Chinese]
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