Dacaiyuan or "Big Vegetable Garden" no longer lives up to its name.

Once a village of open farmland in Linxian County, Henan Province, it has, like many parts of rural China, been transformed in the past three decades into a modern suburb with factories and multi-story housing. Only a few acres of wheat and vegetables at the entrance to the village sit as a reminder of the village's past.

Nancy Jervis has been tracking these momentous changes in Linxian County for more than three decades. A New York anthropologist and one of the first American academics to study social and rural life in China, Jervis first visited the village in 1972, and has been coming back since.

According to Jervis, the relative prosperity of the village today is a result of two things - the accumulation of private wealth brought by the temporary migration of villagers to the cities and the village leadership's ability to adapt to change.

Village doctor Shi Cunji, 64, was one of the earliest migrant workers in central China. In 1980, he left Dacaiyuan and went to the neighboring city of Hanzhong to work in construction.

"We were too poor. I earned only a few work points at the clinic," Shi recalled. In communal days the daily labor of peasants was calculated by work points which became the basis for their cash income at the end of the year, after their ration of grain was deducted.

The richest villages might be able to pay more than 1 yuan for each work point, while poor villages could only pay 10 fen (1.4 US cents). Often the work points a peasant earned was not enough to pay for grain rations.

"My family of eight people had only one mu (667 sq m) of land and raised one pig. We earned about 100 yuan (US$14.2) a year. There were no other options."

Shi worked in Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province, the first year, mailing home about 1,000 yuan (US$143).

The majority of his fellow Dacaiyuan villagers also became migrant workers, building skyscrapers or working in assembly lines at factories. There are about 200 million migrant workers in the cities nationwide today.

"The massive migration was possible because of the reform policies after 1978, especially the household responsibility system that took the place of the people's communes and also the relaxation of the hukou or residency system - both freed farmers from their lands," Jervis explained.

Under the household responsibility system, the farming of publicly owned land was entrusted to individual households through long-term contracts.

The introduction of this system in 1978 was enthusiastically welcomed by Chinese farmers who believed that the harder they worked, the more income they could earn.

In the past, the same job earned the same number of work points regardless of how hard they worked.

Jervis recalled the striking contrast between now and when she first came to the village during her visit in 1972.

"There was no tap water. Electricity only ran for an hour a day. People put a portrait of Chairman Mao in the living room," she said. Today the village is a picture of modern development, with a television and a new refrigerator in living rooms.

Nationwide, 44.9 percent of the population had been urbanized by 2007; an increase of 30 percent over 1978, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Dacaiyuan is no exception. Over the last three decades, the village has gone through major changes, some of which threaten its very existence. Rapid urbanization and industrialization have reduced the size of the village and its arable land.

In 1994, Linxian County was upgraded into Linzhou City, in accordance with the local government shifting its focus from agriculture to rural-urban integration and industrialization.

It also marked a step towards modernization. The urban area expanded from 3 sq km to 24 sq km. Most farmers have entered the service industry or run privately owned rural enterprises, according to Linzhou City Party Secretary Wang Chun'an.

With a population of 1 million now, the economy of Linzhou City has grown from 140 million yuan (US$20 million) in 1978 to 17.4 billion yuan (US$2.5 billion) in 2007, according to Wang.

"People in Linzhou have a long history of leaving their villages to find work elsewhere and are known for their construction skills," Jervis said.

"The 1978 agricultural reforms gave them more than land. It also gave them the freedom to go out and find construction jobs."

"Basically, there was no specific policy on leaving the rural areas, but all restrictions were relaxed," the anthropologist explained. "There were specific policies to end food rationing and government subsidized food prices. This made it easier to live in cities."

Until the early 1990s, the supply of grain and other foods in urban centers was rationed for permanent urban residents.

As production of grain, meat and other foods increased dramatically as a result of the rural household-responsibility system, food rationing ended. This, coupled with rising demand of labors in the city, became the biggest push to allow farmers, who previously had no way of sustaining their life in cities without ration coupons, to migrate into cities.

"The government also encouraged creativity and flexibility; taxes were lower, allowing people to accumulate capital," Jervis added.

"They've found life is a lot better, but not because of farming," Jervis said. "It is because they've found ways of getting out of the village and are sending money back to the village."

According to Jervis' survey of 61 households in 1981, more than 25 per cent of the men spent the year working on construction projects in big cities. Jervis said the number increased each year.

Today Linzhou has 3,100 construction teams of about 210,000 migrant workers working on projects in 300 cities nationwide and overseas, bringing in a net income of 1.56 billion yuan, according to city head Wang.

Part of the incentive for people from Linxian County to go out and find jobs much earlier than those in other rural counties is due to the region's history.

"When people read about China, they think one policy applies to the entire country. But in this vast nation, even two villages in the same region can have different sub-cultures; they may speak different dialects and their architecture may vary," Jervis said.

"In development, it is important to look at your own history and resources - natural and human - in planning for the future," she added

That is what the leadership in Linxian did. From the collective commune to the household responsibility system, the leadership in Linxian combined the merits of two very different systems.

Then Party Secretary Ma Dongshen helped negotiate urban construction contracts and later became a labor contractor for the village.

He went as far as Tianjin, Sichuan Province and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to seek contracts.

He made sure that if a project required five skilled workers, three apprentices would also be hired, so that younger workers could also learn the skills, Jervis said.

"They came to understand that collective action could get them some benefits. I believe this was due to the village's own history - experiencing combat during the anti-Japanese war and the cooperative movement in building the Red Flag Canal," she said.

The county made its name through the Red Flag Canal - an enormous irrigation project, the construction of which began in 1958, the year of the Great Leap Forward, and continued during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

Local farmers like Shi expected the canal to alleviate water shortage problems by bringing water from the other side of the rocky Taihang Mountain to local villages for irrigation.

"Almost every member of a family in our county has worked on the canal," said Ma Yufeng, a deputy head of the local tourism bureau.

"They could take advantage of the new freedoms without completely abandoning their collective ways of doing things, which had proven so successful in the past," said Jervis.

Another example of creative leadership in Linxian was in trying to boost the local economy by encouraging women, who were left behind in the villages, to start businesses.

The county hired a retired tailor from Tianjin to teach women how to cut and sew Western-style suits. The plan did not work because the suits they made were not selling well in the county.

"They were learning by doing things," Jervis said.

"They were not afraid of making mistakes."

Shi Cunji's journey is also an example of adapting to change.

After returning to Dacaiyuan, Shi opened his own private clinic with his wife in 1985. Their son later joined the clinic.

Shi now makes about 20,000 yuan a year. The rural-urban transformation has allowed the Shis to receive some of the same benefits as urban residents.

But Shi is feeling a bit lost in the transition from farmer to urban resident. "One could say I am in the city but not of the city," said Shi. "We do not have many services the city people have, such as health insurance coverage or social security."

Now without land, the villagers in Dacaiyuan either work in the local service industry or go out and find jobs in the cities as migrant workers, returning once a year.

"Our lives have become a lot better in the past 30 years," Shi said, "but prices have gone up too. We have to make money. We are on our own now."

(China Daily October 15, 2008)