The Depression in the Countryside and Peasant Women

I THE DEPRESSION IN THE COUNTRYSIDE AND PEASANT WOMEN by Chen Biyun[1] (Translated by Susan Mann) If someone were to ask me who leads the most oppressed, bitter, and pitiful life on earth, I would reply without hesitation: the woman who lives in China's villages. Naturally, I would not be referring to the genteel ladies in the families of landlords and powerful gentry, nor would I be talking about the wives and daughters of rich peasants. No, I would be speaking of the poor peasant women who make up the vast majority. At the very least they comprise about one hundred million of our total population. But to date, no one has paid any special attention to them, much less tried to help them. Their plight can be summed up this way: village women receive the brunt of the oppression and suffer the lowest standard of living because it is in the countryside that material conditions are poorest; and it is in the countryside that our familistic society's traditional ideas and customs constraining women are most deeply rooted. So in both the spiritual realm and the material realm, women in the countryside live in a perpetual state of slavery. As long as the rural economy managed to hold up--or to put it another way, before the agricultural economy had been hit by an economic crisis--even in thei.r enslavement rural women retained some of their vitality. But the present circumstances have completely altered, to the point where they cannot even continue their slavelike existence. This is because of the economic crisis. The signs of the crisis are everywhere around us, to the point where even those people who used to avert their eyes and avoid the truth have• been forced to recognize the truth--and even be a little shocked by it. For they already can see the evidence: 1) the peasants whom they used to be able to tax at will by adding miscellaneous surcharges and extra levies have now been drained of all their resources. In some areas, the peasants cannot even pay the rent on their land. For example, in Changshu county, the county government has received 14,000 petitions from landlords asking for help in collecting their rents. 2) in many areas, peasants have been leaving the land because they have no more strength to farm it. For example, in Shaanxi peasants from many areas have left their land deeds at the entrance to the county yamen, in token of the fact that they will not be paying any more land tax, and fled. 62 3) rioting and plundering of grain stores in rural areas. According to a survey conducted last July and August by the Commission on Economic Conditions in China, there wer~ twenty-two incidents of the latter alone in the four provinces of Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. 4) the unusually low cost of labor in the countryside. 5) the bands of displaced people roaming about everywhere. In fact all of these signs are only so many dewdrops rising to the surface of a deeper problem. The actual conditions of the rural crisis, and the pathos and bitterness of peasants' lives, defy the power of our pens to describe them. I do not intend in this article to present every aspect of present conditions in the Gountryside, but merely to sketch briefly the tragic position of peasant women. The impact of the widespread emigration of males from the countryside. Clearly, in the present economic crisis, peasants cannot be expected simply to remain in their villages and die. They must flee the countryside and go elsewhere to seek an escape. They have four choices: they can go to the cities to find work; they can go abroad to find a new occupation; they can join the army; or they can resort to banditry. There cannot be less than several tens of millions of men who are leaving their villages or their families in one of these ways. But over 99 percent of them leave their wives and children (if they have them) behind. This has two severe consequences for the women who remain at home. The first is that...