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The wisdom of tea lady Sister Zheng
By Wang Yong |
June 3, 2010, Thursday
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Print Edition
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THE two Xinhua stories in today's opinion page show how far China has fled from Mother Nature in an urbanization drive urged by some officials and economists.
In the lead story about relocating farmers from quiet mountains to crowded towns, Xinhua mentions some old peasants whose "tranquil life" in harmony with nature would be gone forever.
For other peasants, Xinhua says, losing farmland means losing the source of life, however big and new the apartments they may get as "compensation" in a "modern" town.
Certainly, in this case, farmers are being shifted and shoved from their farmland to make way for a river project, not urban development. Still, many local officials believe that cities are better than villages and that farmers should be satisfied and thankful for relocation near cities with "bigger homes" and "brighter prospects."
Since when have our policy makers come to worship urban life despite their rhetoric to go greener? Urban life, after all, is Manhattanized and vehicular one way or another. It's fundamentally a nature guzzler, a perpetrator of parched land.
If Chinese farmers saw eye-to-eye with those policy makers on what a better life means, Xinhua would not have said that "signs of discontent are leaking through the cracks of a massive social program to relocate them."
Even if it is feasible to channel water from southern China to quench the thirst of the dry north, farmers should have been given a choice between moving to cities or other rural areas, instead of being "persuaded" into virtually abandoning farm life.
Those relocation officials are far from alone in a national or even international farce that belittles farming life.
In another story, Xinhua quoted British economist Danny Quah as saying that there's no real estate bubble in China, a country "still engaging in the task of moving hundreds of millions of people from rural areas to urban China to continue to power its manufacturing and industrial progress."
One can infer from the context of his quoted remarks that the "manufacturing and industrial progress" on the back of cheap rural labor kicked off the farmland is one of the "strong fundamentals" of China's economy. He ignored bureaucratic corruption that's one of the key factors behind the exorbitant housing prices in urban China.
People's Daily said on May 20 that cracking down on official corruption (in land-for-money schemes) would have a direct and positive effect on curbing "wildly surging" housing prices.
Qiushi magazine ("seeking Truth"), a theoretical research publication of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, published an article on May 12 in its online edition, arguing that a large population was not the root cause of high housing prices.
"Germany has a population density of 236 persons per square kilometer and an average per capita living space of 40 square meters," said Liu Zhongliang, author of the article. "China has a population density of 137 persons per square kilometer and would need only 5,200 square kilometers to house all its people in cities (in 10-story buildings with a per capita living space similar to that of Germany)."
The urge to get gray income from selling land to bribe-giving real estate developers is a key factor behind China's red-hot housing market, he said.
A few officials and developers have got rich in the urbanization drive, but what about hundreds of millions of uprooted farmers who sell their labor in urban sweatshops? Not all farmers are worse off in cities, for sure, but farmers could have been better off on their farmland if only modern day policy makers were more down to the earth.
Last week I attended a tea lecture where I tasted tea picked in April from a primordial forest in Yunnan Province. Sister Zheng, a 48-year-old tea expert, told us how she gladly struggles, sometimes dangerously so, to reach the deepest part of the forest for the freshest tea leaves from ancient trees untouched by fertilizer. She dries those tea leaves without any artificial processing.
She is a Buddhist and leads a frugal life. She vows to introduce the most natural tea to people, not to make exorbitant profits, but to spread a lifestyle that is simple and close to nature. "I am very 'rich' because my feet are solid on the ground and what I drink, eat and breathe is all natural," she said.
Sister Zheng teaches tea culture. Some of her students once said that money can buy everything. "But what if I don't sell my tea to you?" she asked. Indeed, few urbanites can by themselves get the pristine tea leaves, many flourishing on the edges of cliffs. Sister Zheng once nearly fell off as she reached too far over a cliff.
Thanks to Sister Zheng, I learned for the first time that tea can be brewed in cold water, just like tea trees nurtured by cool spring water.
In the lead story about relocating farmers from quiet mountains to crowded towns, Xinhua mentions some old peasants whose "tranquil life" in harmony with nature would be gone forever.
For other peasants, Xinhua says, losing farmland means losing the source of life, however big and new the apartments they may get as "compensation" in a "modern" town.
Certainly, in this case, farmers are being shifted and shoved from their farmland to make way for a river project, not urban development. Still, many local officials believe that cities are better than villages and that farmers should be satisfied and thankful for relocation near cities with "bigger homes" and "brighter prospects."
Since when have our policy makers come to worship urban life despite their rhetoric to go greener? Urban life, after all, is Manhattanized and vehicular one way or another. It's fundamentally a nature guzzler, a perpetrator of parched land.
If Chinese farmers saw eye-to-eye with those policy makers on what a better life means, Xinhua would not have said that "signs of discontent are leaking through the cracks of a massive social program to relocate them."
Even if it is feasible to channel water from southern China to quench the thirst of the dry north, farmers should have been given a choice between moving to cities or other rural areas, instead of being "persuaded" into virtually abandoning farm life.
Those relocation officials are far from alone in a national or even international farce that belittles farming life.
In another story, Xinhua quoted British economist Danny Quah as saying that there's no real estate bubble in China, a country "still engaging in the task of moving hundreds of millions of people from rural areas to urban China to continue to power its manufacturing and industrial progress."
One can infer from the context of his quoted remarks that the "manufacturing and industrial progress" on the back of cheap rural labor kicked off the farmland is one of the "strong fundamentals" of China's economy. He ignored bureaucratic corruption that's one of the key factors behind the exorbitant housing prices in urban China.
People's Daily said on May 20 that cracking down on official corruption (in land-for-money schemes) would have a direct and positive effect on curbing "wildly surging" housing prices.
Qiushi magazine ("seeking Truth"), a theoretical research publication of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, published an article on May 12 in its online edition, arguing that a large population was not the root cause of high housing prices.
"Germany has a population density of 236 persons per square kilometer and an average per capita living space of 40 square meters," said Liu Zhongliang, author of the article. "China has a population density of 137 persons per square kilometer and would need only 5,200 square kilometers to house all its people in cities (in 10-story buildings with a per capita living space similar to that of Germany)."
The urge to get gray income from selling land to bribe-giving real estate developers is a key factor behind China's red-hot housing market, he said.
A few officials and developers have got rich in the urbanization drive, but what about hundreds of millions of uprooted farmers who sell their labor in urban sweatshops? Not all farmers are worse off in cities, for sure, but farmers could have been better off on their farmland if only modern day policy makers were more down to the earth.
Last week I attended a tea lecture where I tasted tea picked in April from a primordial forest in Yunnan Province. Sister Zheng, a 48-year-old tea expert, told us how she gladly struggles, sometimes dangerously so, to reach the deepest part of the forest for the freshest tea leaves from ancient trees untouched by fertilizer. She dries those tea leaves without any artificial processing.
She is a Buddhist and leads a frugal life. She vows to introduce the most natural tea to people, not to make exorbitant profits, but to spread a lifestyle that is simple and close to nature. "I am very 'rich' because my feet are solid on the ground and what I drink, eat and breathe is all natural," she said.
Sister Zheng teaches tea culture. Some of her students once said that money can buy everything. "But what if I don't sell my tea to you?" she asked. Indeed, few urbanites can by themselves get the pristine tea leaves, many flourishing on the edges of cliffs. Sister Zheng once nearly fell off as she reached too far over a cliff.
Thanks to Sister Zheng, I learned for the first time that tea can be brewed in cold water, just like tea trees nurtured by cool spring water.
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