Volunteers at James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute

By staff reporter LU RUCAI

Pan Jia'en talks of future plans for the institute.

Before going to the James Yen Institute, I met Qiu Jiansheng, one of the founders of the institute and currently director of the school office. He is a man of few words, and the only information he volunteered was that he was trying his best to do something for farmers. When I asked him what he had actually done, he told me, “You’ll see when you get there.”

The institute is on the site of a defunct middle school in Zhaicheng Village. A statue of Yan Yangchu, erected by the villagers in 2003, stands at its entrance. On the walls flanking the entrance are eight characters, which mean “Develop People’s Power for Rural Reconstruction.” In the courtyard are a few gray-brick school buildings built in the 1950s, most of whose windows are smashed and doors broken. Qiu Jiansheng’s home is in one of the old classrooms, simply furnished with a desk, telephone and three single beds.

Qiu Jiansheng still remembers the admiration shining in the eyes of his fellow mountain villagers in his native Fujian Province when they learned that he had passed the university entrance examination and would soon leave home for the city. Ten years after graduating, however, Qiu married a woman from rural Hebei Province whom he had met at a training session, and settled in Hebei. It was winter when I went there. There was no on-going training session, so the school was empty except for six volunteers from various universities, and a few villagers hired to tend the school’s farmland.

Pan Jia’en is a new graduate from the China Agricultural University in Beijing. He works as deputy director of the Institute Office and has moved all his worldly goods – books and a laptop – to the institute. As he was hired by the Action Aid International China Office, he gets a monthly salary of RMB 2,000. The other five staff members get a monthly allowance of RMB500. Pan is also from rural Fujian Province and understands farmers and rural China. While in university, he organized rural investigation trips for student societies. “I haven’t told my parents that I’ve resigned from my government job to work in rural Hebei,” he says. “They will find it hard to accept that I left Beijing to return to the countryside, when the chance for young country folk to leave rural life is so rare. They objected to my entering an agricultural university, but agreed on condition that after graduating I would find a job in the city and become an urban dweller. I lied and told them that I am Beijing-based, but that I often go on business trips to other places.” Though it will be difficult when he eventually tells his parents what he has done, Pan has no regrets. Most of his colleagues are from the countryside, and, like him, have not told their parents that they work in rural Hebei.

These young volunteers have rapidly adapted to life at the institute, and are actively involved in its management. Xiao Zhou is a volunteer recently returned from studies in England. The first thing he did was to arrange and catalogue books in the school library to make it easier for local farmers to select and borrow them. Although most volunteers come from the countryside, none had done much farm work before coming to the institute. They have cultivated a section of the school’s three-hectare farmland using manure, but their yield is one-third less that of local farmers. Yet they refuse to use chemical fertilizer or pesticide, and will continue trying to improve the output of the entire three hectares according to results of soil studies. Their aim is to put their currently experimental plot on show as a model organic farm.

According to Pan Jia’en, funding for the school comes from Hong Kong and a few international non-governmental organizations whose specific purpose is to train farmers. The school lacks the funds necessary to update the equipment in its computer room, lab and library, most of which was donated from various parts of China. Staff members must also find their own daily life costs. This winter, Chinese cabbage was the only vegetable they ate for two months because, having grown in their own fields, they were free. But none considers their life hard. They print a school newspaper and the Zhaicheng News, and have reactivated the village cultural and art performance team. “We live a realistic life, at least,” says Pan Jia’en. “We are dealing with real issues, so life for me and my comrades, who share the same aspiration to change China’s countryside, is real.”