Love the changes in my hometown (Guangxi) (about 600 words)

In 2009, China started from the countryside; in 2009, we started from our hometown.

This is a report by four of our reporters from their hometowns in Zhejiang, Anhui, Guangxi, and Inner Mongolia. The changes in these hometowns partly represent the changes in rural China. Journalists focus on the places where we are born and raised, completely true to our ears and eyes. This is also rural China in the process of social transformation. They may not be perfect yet, but they have more room for growth. This kind of growth highlights the tenacity of vitality in another original ecological aspect. It is precisely because we understand the value of this real life force that we can be more determined to start from the starting point. "Growing Pains" of Rural Household Industry

□ Reporter Yuan Guonv from Shaoxing, Zhejiang

The Choice of Smart Farmers

February 2, 2009 On the early morning of the eighth day of the Lunar New Year, the sound of fireworks and firecrackers echoed through the country roads of Huangshanfan Village, Lizhu Town, Shaoxing County, Zhejiang Province. Villagers told reporters that this is a common practice in the area. The eighth day of the lunar calendar is a good day, and dozens of small family factories in the village choose this day to open their markets. What they set off at this time is the opening firecracker. The more fireworks and firecrackers they set off, the louder they are, which means the better the business will be in the coming year.

In the 1980s, the spring breeze of reform and opening up awakened the rural economy in Zhejiang. Initially, local farmers turned to neighboring Shanghai to make money. On construction sites in Shanghai, rural construction contracting teams from Zhejiang could be seen everywhere. But slowly, with some capital in the pocket and broadened horizons, a rush for supply and sales appeared in the countryside. Smart farmers in Zhejiang suddenly discovered that the price difference between the price of goods in the place of origin and the market price was astonishing, and they could often make considerable profits when they resold the goods. As a result, farmers started to "go shopping" one after another. From selling flowers and local specialties at the beginning, to plastic small commodities, clothing and shoes. Today, Zhejiang’s “peasant businessmen” are spread all over the country. Some of them were not satisfied with the small profits they made from reselling, and gradually moved the machines into the countryside. Large-scale ones have now developed into listed companies, and the largest number are family factories set up by villagers using their spare houses or courtyards.

The villagers smiled and said to the reporter, "Even though our family factories are small in scale and have few employees, many of our machines are imported from abroad, and our products are sold all over the world." It is understood that Shaoxing's household industry has spread across many industries such as machine knitting, warp knitting embroidery, hardware accessories, building materials and other industries. In 2007 alone, the total industrial output value reached 73.7 billion yuan, and sales revenue reached 63.1 billion yuan. Picking up the legacy of large-scale industry and making up for the shortage of market supply are important reasons why these family factories can still have their own place in the modern society where many enterprises are established. Hard-to-understand business experience With ready-made manpower, complete factories, a certain amount of capital and a small amount of machinery, the foundation for the development of household industry seems to be very simple. However, the head of the relevant local department reminded reporters that the local household industry has gradually developed after years of accumulation and is based on the special local economic conditions. Take the relatively mature textile industry as an example. It is centered on Keqiao Textile City in Shaoxing County and connects textile manufacturers, dealers, printing and dyeing manufacturers, dye merchants, styling manufacturers and various middlemen. A complete market is indispensable in all aspects of production, supply and sales. Because of this, local family factories can have relatively stable sources of raw materials and sales channels, which is why this production model is difficult to copy in a short period of time.

In such a market environment, farmers gradually learned to care about national economic policies, understood terms such as "document, code sample, white match, quality sample", and also groped for many things in it. Less business experience, such as when is the cheapest time to purchase raw materials, which months of the year are the off-season for sales, what kind of products can sell for a good price on the market... But these business experiences are more based on experience after all. Accumulation is sometimes unreliable. In 2008, the financial crisis hit suddenly, causing these family factories to suffer a huge loss. Ruan Tiejun, a villager in Taoyuan Village, Lanting Town, was still sighing when he talked to reporters about this incident. The Ruan family operates three textile machineries. According to previous experience, July and August are the off-season of the year, but they are the best time to buy raw materials. At that time, he bought about 100,000 yuan of raw silk as early as in previous years. As a result, when the financial crisis broke out, the price of raw silk dropped from 13,000 yuan per ton to about 7,000 yuan, a total loss of about 40,000 yuan. This year he plans to expand The production plan had to be cancelled. Because they are at the lowest end of the market chain, and farmers themselves do not grasp market information accurately enough, family factory production often shows more blindness and lag. Bottlenecks in Development The growing pains of the cottage industry do not end there. The lagging development of equipment and technology is undoubtedly an important bottleneck restricting its development. The production equipment used in household industries in many towns and villages in Shaoxing County is still relatively backward, and the processing equipment is basically manual or semi-automatic. For example, most of the flat knitting machines used for woolen sweater processing are manual knitting machines; lathes, drill presses, punches, etc. used for mechanical processing are still from the 1960s and 1970s; many looms are also semi-automatic rapier machines.

The backwardness of production equipment will inevitably lead to increased human labor intensity, low production efficiency, and limited quality. The scarcity of skilled mechanics is a major worry for cottage industry owners. In Huangshanfan Village, Lizhu Town, there are dozens of textile machinery factories in the park, but there is only one mechanic, and there is often a situation where various companies compete for it. Housing is also a factory, and villagers' lives are accompanied by a lot of noise, exhaust gas, waste residue, waste water and smoke. This has undoubtedly seriously affected the living environment of the villagers.

The cottage industry on the village lane does have a lot of troubles. But troubles are troubles, and enterprises still need to develop. At present, a knitting union has been established in Lizhu Town, which will soon become an important pillar in promoting the construction of new rural areas. Invisible population loss

□Our reporter Zhang Mengwei came from Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia

Different from the surplus labor force in other areas who go out to work, the new generation of immigrants choose to rely on education, "rural areas surround cities ”, “go far away” to realize their dreams. As for my hometown, I have already "forgotten each other in the world" with them. "Meng's Mother Relocation" in the New Era The Spring Festival is the busiest time for the Wang family. Four of the five children in the family work in other places. During the Spring Festival, they come back from all over the country to celebrate the New Year. This situation happens almost every year, like this situation for the Wang family. Not uncommon locally. When walking on the street, you see men and women dressed in clothes that are incompatible with the local ice and snow. Needless to say, they must be people coming back from other places to celebrate the New Year.

Benduhe, a border town close to Russia, is vast and sparsely populated. It mainly engages in animal husbandry and agriculture. You can’t find its name on the old version of the map. Local people either stay at home and make a living off the land, or they leave here and seek development elsewhere. To realize their dream of going global, most people take the college entrance examination. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine how important status education will be given. Whether you can get into college and what kind of university you can get into not only satisfies parents' conversation but also means what kind of "urban" lifestyle to choose.

There are two junior high schools in the town, but no high school. In recent years, in order to provide their children with the same educational environment as those in the city and to allow them to enter a good university in the future, parents have been seeking better educational resources and have chosen to send their children to cities 20 kilometers away. Go to junior high school, and some even go to the city to study since elementary school. Since the students are young, parents start to "accompany them to study", so it is natural to rent an apartment. For those families who are financially wealthy, they simply buy a house locally and eventually move there with their family. Therefore, the short-term behavior of "accompanying students to study" often eventually evolves into long-term or permanent population migration. Population migration due to education has become the "Mengmu relocation" in the new era.

If "accompanying students" bring only a small part of the population migration, then the college entrance examination brings about a mass migration of the population. Someone has done some calculation: There are three high schools in this county-level city. With the expansion of college entrance examination, nearly 600 people can be admitted to college every year. Going to college means the beginning of leaving the countryside. Every year, college entrance examination, only people leave. , it’s hard to see anyone coming back. The better the school you go to, the less likely you are to come back. After graduation, these people dispersed and moved again to major and medium-sized cities across the country, leaving only a few days in their hometowns to count during the Spring Festival. The four children of the Wang family are an example. High labor and low housing prices. Areas that were originally "sparsely populated" became increasingly deserted after the Spring Festival. Moreover, since the exodus is mainly young adults, the population migration caused by this education system has caused the population in cities and towns to seriously age, while the population in counties has surged. Of course, as college graduates do not return, the increase in the county's population is only a superficial "prosperity." If this situation continues, the county will soon follow in the footsteps of the aging urban population.

The elderly people left behind are generally over 55 years old. For this small town that is mainly based on agriculture, although the population loss phenomenon will not lead to a shortage of coffin bearers like in some areas in the south, it does mean an increase in labor costs. The average market price for strong laborers doing temporary work in this area is 80 yuan/day. Especially in the autumn when farming is busy, only the "women's army" can be hired. A woman harvesting potatoes has to pay wages ranging from 80 to 100 yuan a day. But even so, it is difficult to hire strong labor force. Therefore, before the autumn harvest, local people spend a lot of money to "reserve" workers in advance from further away.

Labor costs are high, but housing prices are extremely low. Although global real estate prices continued to decline under the influence of the financial crisis in 2008, the decline in housing prices in this region had already occurred a few years ago. As the accumulated out-migration of the population increases, the vacancy rate of houses is gradually increasing, and housing prices have "fallen below the cost price." The housing here is not calculated by square meters, but calculated as a whole. For example, three large tile-roofed houses, covering more than 100 square meters, plus a yard covering an area of ??nearly an acre, are priced at 30,000 yuan. The price can be further negotiated, and still No one cares about it, and the cost of building a house like this is about 50,000 yuan. The situation in several areas with severe population migration is even more horrifying. No one can buy a house of the same size for 3,000 yuan.

What’s more serious is that talents trained using local resources are often unable to serve and be utilized by the local area. Although the area has realized mechanized farming, due to poor information and channels, Extensive management is often adopted. According to a farmer who has been farming for nearly 20 years, the nearly 30,000 acres of land he rented has slowly turned brown due to continuous cultivation. When it gets up, it can even float to Japan. As for how to govern, he himself did not know and had never thought about it. What he cares about is the fluctuations in grain prices during the autumn harvest. He hopes to know the information on grain prices in a timely manner, but how to open up channels and grasp the law of changes in market grain prices to solve the problem of difficulty in selling grains. For a junior high school graduate, it seems a bit difficult. Embarrassing Selective Student System The phenomenon of high labor and low housing prices caused by population migration also exists to a greater or lesser extent in neighboring towns and villages. The local government has also seen this trend. Therefore, the government has been implementing the selective student system for several years. , that is, those who pass the exam among college students who are about to graduate in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region will be selected to enter the public institution system of various cities and towns, with the same welfare benefits as civil servants. However, the metabolism of public institutions is relatively slow and it is impossible to accommodate too many selective students. In addition, as a service system, public institutions cannot produce direct economic benefits. The selective student system often "looks beautiful." In addition, there are not many local industrial enterprises. Even if college students are willing to return to their hometown after graduation, it is difficult to find suitable jobs for them in the local area. In other words, from the day they moved forward and chose to "run away" through the college entrance examination, the way back was already cut off.

Before the tenth day of the first lunar month, the local atmosphere of farewell began to heat up.

"Only where there are many people are there rivers and lakes." The Wang family's son left these meaningful words before leaving. He missed the beautiful scenery of his hometown and the family ties in times of adversity; he also yearned for the feasting, feasting, and crowds of people in the city. His hometown is his roots when fallen leaves return, and a crowded city is a holy place for him to practice "martial arts".

"I stayed in the city because I didn't want my children to start in the countryside like me." My daughter Xiaoqing said that for this reason, she stayed in Beijing, which she believed was a high starting point. 's capital.