The day of my arrival in New Village, I ate lunch with many other construction workers in a private house marked with a sign saying paidang, a term referring to a low-budget restaurant for workers. The restaurant proprietor used his first-floor living room and garage for this purpose, setting up three square-shaped “eight sages” tables—each of which could accommodate eight customers. This type of table is a common piece of household furniture among farmers living in the lower Yangzi rice-growing region. I encountered several small restaurants in the New Village. Townhouse space was used for other informal businesses as well, including general stores, two majiang parlors, a computer IT repair store, and even a clothing factory. It was in one of the majiang parlors, run by an older couple in their two-story townhouse, that I first made the acquaintance of my host Mrs. Tang. During my stay, I accompanied her to this majiang parlor nearly every afternoon. The couple could make as much as USD $15 per day if all four majiang tables were in continual use. The computer repair shop, run by a young man in his 20s, was more difficult to find. Although situated in the house just behind the Tang’s, I did not notice it at first. The clothing factory, also a family-run business taking advantage of family household space, was comparatively more conspicuous. Although the majiang parlor and computer repair shop did not have signs, the name of the factory— “Jinhu Clothing Factory”—was mounted on a side wall along with an advertisement announcing that the factory was hiring experienced workers to operate the sewing machines. Even with all the above-mentioned survival strategies, many residents still cannot balance their family budgets. Thus, many young able-bodied men from Jinhu continue to migrate to distant urban centers for work. To be sure,maceta plastico cuadrada rural-to-urban migration is not a new strategy; it has been practiced by rural populations across China since the late 1980s.
As most rural young adults began to migrate to large cities for work, a great divide emerged between the productive space of cities, where able-bodied adults work in factories and in the service sectors, and the social reproduction space of villages, where grandparents take care of grandchildren, whose own parents in the factories do not have time to tend to their upbringing. In the villages, one generally encounters mostly women, children, and the elderly, often referred to as “left-behind elderly, children, and women” . The Jinhu development project was supposed to change this. Residents of the New Village were supposed to find employment at the nearby theme park. In fact, less than 100 people are employed there, with more than half of them hired from outside of the New Village. Moreover, one middle-aged woman complained to me that the developer hires his own relatives and friends for all of the higher paid positions. Residents of Jinhu are only hired as day laborers when seasonal jobs are needed, such as to cut weeds or plant trees and vegetables. As a result, to support themselves, residents have continued to find jobs far away. Mrs. Tang and her husband had both migrated to a large city in Zhejiang when I revisited Jinhu New Village in summer 2013. In all appearances, the “New Countryside” implemented at Jinhu merely reproduces the great divide between production space and social reproduction space that first emerged in the 1980s. In any case, Jinhu New Village is now, in many respects, merely a by-product of the major local development project, the Jinhu Rural World theme park. One of the most curious, even bizarre, aspects of the Jinhu site is the construction of a theme park. Not far from the New Village, a set of three bridges cross the artificial canal that separates the national highway from the theme park compound. Two of these bridges are restricted to automobile traffic, one serving as an entrance to the compound and one as an exit. Across the bridges one encounters the rectangular “Culture Plaza,” a vast space somewhat reminiscent of Tiananmen Square in appearance . Beyond the plaza is a large parking lot. Only after crossing this parking lot does one finally reach the ticket office, as well as the adjacent multi-story headquarters of the real estate development company responsible for the entire project—the Guoqiang Conglomerate.
All the elements of this entryway—not to mention the drive-in movie theater on the north side of the park—are tailored to car-owning clients, presumably arriving from large urban centers. Needless to say, the monumental entryway is also meant to impress. In order to obtain government funds and bank loans earmarked for agricultural development, the Rural World theme park is in principle designed to educate urbanites about agriculture in China. One particular focus is “natural disasters”—on the premise that agriculture is reliant on the conditions of the weather, the soil, and the natural environment. Thus, the rural theme park includes a small museum showing photographs and videos about floods, droughts, earthquakes, tornados, locust plagues, and tsunamis—all representing the various natural disasters afflicting the peasantry throughout China’s history. Associated with this theme of natural disaster—and billed as one of the highlights of visiting the park—is the“tsunami experience dome” . In contrast to the museum, which displays merely images and photographs of natural disasters, the water dome purportedly provides visitors with the “real” experience of a tsunami. Inside, visitors can surf six-meter high artificial waves generated by a wave machine. The Guoqiang Conglomerate is very proud of its innovative approach at combining entertainment with an educational experience. Indeed, Jinhu Rural World has been publicly acclaimed by both central government officials and the national media.Perhaps as part of its educational mission, the park is also a celebration of scientific management and high technology. As such, many of the park’s attractions provide insight into how agricultural development and modernization are imagined in contemporary China. By depicting natural disasters through historical photographs and videos contained within a museum, natural disasters are relegated to the realm of the historical past. By transforming tsunamis into entertainment, they become in essence domesticated by modern science. The theme of the human conquest of nature is ever present.
On either side of the vast empty plaza and parking lot is situated a large one-story green building, with signs identifying one as a “modern seedling center” and the other as an “agricultural high-tech center”. As one example of agricultural modernization, the agricultural high-tech center contains a section demonstrating hydroponic techniques for growing green vegetables, including lettuce and tomatoes. Water-drip irrigation and greenhouse farming are commonplace throughout the park. For example, the grape garden is covered with plastic,macetero de 7 litros producing a greenhouse-like environment that shelters the plants from uncontrollable nature. The grape vines are watered with a drip system and kept at constant temperature using a temperature control system. Elsewhere, delicate butterfly-shaped orchids are grown in glassware within laboratories in which staff members wear white medical coats and face masks . The park also features desert and tropical botanical gardens—containing plants like giant cacti and many exotic tropical plants—both housed within glass-roofed concrete buildings. Modern agriculture, as portrayed in the Rural World theme park, is not unlike urban modernity. Hygiene and cleanliness—represented by the face masks, lab coats, and hydroponics—are stressed. And modern agriculture is placed in a built environment almost entirely protected from the vagaries of the natural world. This modern, scientific, hygienic agriculture exists in curious contrast to another dominant theme of the park—the romanticization of the peasantry and rural life. The rural fantasy is evident in a variety of different “rural” activities in which tourists are invited to participate. It is this element of the park that is most evident when one searches for information on the internet. Numerous travel agencies based in Nanjing and Shanghai—two of the largest urban centers in Eastern China—describe nearly identical itineraries. Their websites highlight tsunami- and tornado-based water sports, as well as rural activities such as fruit and vegetable picking, watching “folk animal performances” , and growing crops in a four-by-four-meter rented vegetable plot in one of the greenhouses. Thus, during grape season, tourists can pick grapes from grape vines in the covered greenhouses, and then purchase what they have picked at a relatively high price— USD $5 to $6 per pound. The vegetable plots are rented for USD $215 per year; moreover, clients who do not wish to get their hands dirty can entrust the planting and maintenance of the crops to the theme park for an additional fee. Clients can also enjoy a variety of shows including cock fighting, goat fighting, and piglet racing. Also at an additional cost, one can go horseback riding around the park grounds. All of these fees are on top of the entry ticket of USD $25 per person. It is clear enough that what Jinhu Rural World represents is not a nostalgic recreation of traditional agricultural society; rather it is a playground for adventurous urbanites, featuring a clean, new, “modern” countryside. One key difference distinguishing Jinhu Rural World from traditional rural society is the apparent absence of peasants. In fact, at Jinhu, it is not the case that mechanization has replaced intensive farm work. Jinhu Rural World does hire local peasants to weed, prune grape vines, and grow vegetables for urbanites who rent the four-by-four plots. Yet peasants are absent from all publicity for the theme park. In the case of the vegetable plots, Jinhu’s innovative approach is to allow urbanites to monitor their plots over the internet—a form of e-commerce that Jinhu planners call “e-family farms” . Though there are peasants minding the plots, they rarely appear on the monitors; they become faceless and nearly invisible.
Peasants are not part of the new rural world. Instead, fabricated “folk animal performance,” agricultural machines, and new technologies are the key emphasis. It is as if the rural population itself is too backward to have a place in the modern new countryside. To build Jinhu Rural World theme park with no rural population in it, the Guoqiang Conglomerate embarked on a radical reorganization of village space. In 2007 and 2008, peasants had to move out of their original villages, which once dotted the landscape around the large lake now at the center of the theme park. Although the development company demolished most of the peasants’ houses immediately so that they could not be reoccupied, as of 2012, most of the fields were left fallow while awaiting the construction of the new theme park attractions. Village restructuring also involved a much more highly compartmentalized organization of space. To avoid confrontations with peasants seeking to exploit unused land, the company fenced off a large area, preventing access by all but authorized personnel. Formerly, villagers could walk anywhere, even across their neighbors’ fields. Their physical freedom of movement within villages was a longstanding part of peasant culture. Now things were different. When Mrs. Tang and her husband took me on a Honda motorcycle to see their old village, we were prevented by a guard from entering the compound, despite the husband’s angry insistence. The development of the Jinhu site involved a compartmentalizing of public and private space that led to previously unknown constraints on the free movement of villagers. Besides compartmentalization, development also entailed the labeling of space. All of the attractions in the Jinhu Rural World theme park were identified with signs. Jinhu New Village was also identified by means of the majestic gate placed at the entrance. Needless to say, local residents living in their natural villages had no need for such signs and labels. Labeling the landscape is done by outsiders and for outsiders. It is a tool used by the state to increase the legibility of the built environment. Living villagers were not the only ones to be moved. The village dead were also relocated—from graves once scattered throughout the peasants’ fields into a single cemetery just east of the new village. The Jinhu cemetery is graced with a brand-new gate just like the one for Jinhu New Village, albeit with characters written in white on black instead of in red .