Westward Ho: Chasing Rural China across Time and Space

My entree to fieldwork in rural China began with a seven month stay in Taiwan in 1985. I accompanied researchers from the Agricultural Bureau surveying households who were recently taught to grow a variety of crops such as strawberries, vegetables, and a crop I had never seen before called lingjiao ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], water caltrop) in an effort to reduce the majestic piles of surplus rice that filled every cupboard and cranny of the island at that time. Since I could not even identify the edible parts of the plant I was supposed to economically evaluate, it is quite safe to say that on that thrilling virgin voyage and many of those that followed, I knew a lot less about local conditions than I should have prior to going into the field. However, with the great kindness and patience typically shown to strangers anywhere in China coupled with a willingness to repeatedly ask stupid questions, eventually I learned enough to get by. Since 1986 when I conducted my dissertation research in nine counties in Jiangsu Province during an 18-month stay, I have conducted rural survey-based projects in twelve additional provinces and have visited six more. To summarize my research in a sentence, I would say I study agricultural systems, investigating the roles that agriculture plays across China's rural economic landscapes and how these agricultural activities, in turn, impact rural people and their environments. I have conducted most of my research in China's poorer (and drier) rural areas (pinkun dichu), with my projects shifting westward over time as millions of farm families have been lifted from poverty in the eastern provinces on the back of rural industrialization and specialized commodity production. I have never worked alone; rather my projects are always conducted in conjunction with Chinese scholars and extension officials who identify current problems and issues that could or should be analyzed. Typically, I meet with a "team" a year before a project starts to discuss possible topics, approaches, and potential sources of funding. This is both good and bad: good in the sense that I feel our projects generate useful information and draw attention to contemporary issues challenging rural China because the topics come from local agents and agencies, but bad because my projects are almost exclusively driven by issues, seldom by theory--a sort of intellectual ambulance chasing. Theories do emerge from the work, but they do so during the research process, not in anticipation of it. This is NOT exactly the way it is supposed to be done--at least according to the textbooks, but I do not think this is uncommon, especially in applied work. Apologies aside, these projects have allowed me to visit family farms in countless villages throughout China and conduct surveys and/or in-depth interviews for a quarter of a century (Figure 1). Learning new methods from friends and articles, I try to join these household-scale data with published statistical data and remotely-sensed environmental data derived from a variety of sources to generate synthetic multiscale ecological economic studies. Still, when all is said and done, I most like being with the farm families, killing time in villages talking to farmers about agriculture and rural issues but often digressing into stimulating topics such as how much I paid for my shoes or current crop prices in the US. Since 1985, I have gone to China almost every year with stays ranging from a typical summer season of 1 to 2 months to several opportunities of a year or more. For a foreigner bumbling about in rural China, it has been a pretty good run--enjoyable, sometimes exciting, often funny, and always interesting. Last year during July in Gansu Province, accompanied by four young Chinese graduate students and my friend and colleague Jay Emerson, I crossed the Yellow River during flood stage on a six-foot long raft woven of bamboo and buoyed by six inflated sheep skin bladders (Yangpi fa). …