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OctChina’s reform and opening up began in 1978, and this year is exactly the 40th anniversary. Fortunately, I was born in 1978, the same age as reform and opening up.
Personal destiny is usually highly positively related to the fate of the country. I have changed from a cow in the remote rural areas of Jiangxi to a professor at a prestigious university. For forty years, I dare not say that the life is difficult, but the world is changing rapidly and dramatically, all sorts of feelings well up in my mind from time to time.
Looking back on the great course of reform and opening up in the past forty years, the most impressive thing for me personally is three key words: food shortage, farmers entering the city and soaring housing prices. Around these three keywords, I want to tell three stories that happened around me.
First, food shortage
At my age, most men have become fatty men, or they are becoming fat. Moreover, when people are over forty years old, they will become fat quickly. So 40 years old is a terrible turning point. What is even more frightening is that the woman's stomach is big, and she will go down with a child; the man's stomach is big, I haven't seen one become slim again.
This shows that life is getting better now, and the material is more abundant. At least ordinary food is oversupply, but it was incredible thirty years ago. Today, young people, especially after the 90s and 00s, may be hard to imagine that the most unforgettable thing in childhood is the shortage of food, even in my generation.
In 1978 I was born in a poor rural area in eastern Jiangxi. The family has a large population, except for our parents, as well as our brothers and sisters. Because there are many people and few foods, before I went to high school in 1994, I often didn't have enough vegetables at home, and the fruits were basically none. At that time, there were some kind-hearted relatives who occasionally sent vegetables.
In my childhood memories, green apples are the best fruits, because it is rare to eat one in a few years. That would be, after school, the thing I did the most was to release cattle. I believe that the little friends who have had cattle experience in the village, I am afraid they have stolen people's sugar cane, sweet potatoes and melons. First, because they are not sensible, and second, because these things were very scarce at the time, they were the "fruits" in the countryside.
At that time, the farmers mainly depended on planting rice to make a living, and the tax burden was very heavy. Therefore, almost all the crops were used to grow rice or vegetables. Only those with more crops would plant a little melon or sugar cane. Food and fruit, for the farmers at that time, were the relationship between “survival” and “development”.
My worst day is junior high school. Rural students are living in campus. I went home with rice once a week, plus one or two cans of pickles and had to eat for a week. One summer, the family lacked vegetables. I could only take a can of dried beans fried with lard from home. At noon on a hot sun, I ate a few mouthfuls of white rice and licked a few dried beans. I felt that it was difficult to swallow and I simply dumped it.
Seeing that others have meat and vegetables, I was able to experience the taste of poverty at that time, and I understood what poverty means to a person. Poverty can change a person's personality, and personality can affect a person's destiny. Generally speaking, people who have experienced poverty will be more pragmatic and hate the gap between the rich and the poor.
The greatest achievement of China's 40 years of reform and opening up has been to solve the poverty problem of countless people. No one wants to live in poverty, so poverty itself is not worth showing off. It is not a kind of wealth. If poverty is regarded as wealth, who is willing to buy poverty?
Second, the peasants enter the city
The first story is a bit tragic, and the second story is brighter. Where is the most frequent and largest migration in human history? The answer is that it happened between urban and rural areas in China in the 1990s.
In 1992, China began to build a socialist market economic system. The southern cities were first launched, and the market economy was pushed from the south to the north like a wave. Around 1995, more and more farmers in our country went to the southern cities to “make a living”.
There are three main ways for peasants to make a living in the city: one is to work in the factory, the other is renting land to grow vegetables, and the third is to start a business as a boss.
Everyone knows the story of "working girl" and the boss. I won't talk about it. Here is the story of growing vegetables. In our township, many farmers in the urban and rural areas of Guangdong and Fujian have rented local farmers' land to grow seasonal vegetables.
The income of a peasant couple who grow vegetables a year is as low as 20,000 yuan and as much as 40,000 yuan, which was a huge sum in the rural areas at that time. I clearly remember that a neighbor has been growing vegetables in the field for many years and already has a deposit of 70,000 yuan, so that one of my elders told me that even if you were admitted to college, you would not earn 70,000 yuan in your lifetime.
It’s very hard to grow vegetables. They had to squat on the ground, cut the vegetables, then sorted and packaged, for two or three hours at 10 o'clock at night. Then, they were transported to the distribution center by a tricycle or motorcycle before 4 o'clock in the morning, to the wholesaler or directly to the large farmers wholesale market to sell.
Because of the long-term squat, many farmers have a disease with prominent lumbar discs; because of running through the night, several farmers in nearby villages died because of a car accident.
The most important thing about reform and opening up to promote economic growth is that it frees up the surplus labor, not only for everyone has something to eat, but also for everyone to have the opportunity to display their talents.
As we all know, human capital is a key factor in long-term economic growth, but to become human capital, the population must have freedom of movement and freedom of choice. There are so many industrious and intelligent people in China. The key is fluidity. This is the basis for the sustainable growth of China's economy.
Therefore, the key to rural revitalization is to allow labor to flow freely and integrate into the broader market system of cities, rather than sinking into the countryside, which is a mismatch of resources.
Third, soring housing prices
The third story is rather dramatic. In 2001, China just joined the WTO, while I graduated as a student of Class 1997. At that time, it was effortless for graduates of prestigious universities to find a job. Accordingly, most of my classmates went straight into the workforce, and only a minority of them chose to pursue postgraduate study.
I could remember well that in the year of graduation two of my classmates were provided with the opportunity to work in the same state agency. One accepted it while the other one had to give it up due to his pursuit of a master’s degree. Nevertheless, when he graduated three years later, he went to work in that agency anyway. Why would that happen? Because most universities began to expand enrollment since 1999, and thus the employment situation was not as promising as before. Therefore, even postgraduates’ employment choices were limited within the units where graduates could be admitted several years ago.
Actually, this is not too bad. After all, after three years of postgraduate study, he could still work in an agency. More importantly, housing prices did not differ much from those of three years ago. In 2001, the housing price of Haidian District was about 3000 yuan per square meter, which was approximately the same as a month’s salary. By 2004, there was some increase, but not of magnitude.
If the postgraduate students were like studying for nothing for three years, then the situation was worse for the doctoral students. Housing prices started to take off since 2007, when the second-hand houses in the Century City near Renmin University of China could be sold at 10,000 yuan per square meter. It should be noted that the number was still 6,000 in 2004. Therefore, those doctoral students graduating in 2007 could by no means afford a house in the downtown area, if simply relying on their wages.
No comparison, no harm. The situation was the worst for a very few postdoctoral students among my classmates. They graduated in 2009, while housing prices were still acceptable. The fact is that many people did not consider buying a house until working for several years, but it was during these years that housing prices in Beijing soared to an unprecedented peak.
In 2011, the shabby second-hand houses were worth 30,000 yuan per square meter, which were opposite to the west gate of Renmin University of China. And the price of those second-hand houses in the Century City even reached 50,000. Nowadays, the housing price there is about 100,000 yuan per square meter. As can be seen, the price has increased by 10 times within ten years! As a result, emptying “six wallets” becomes the only magic weapon for those rural college students to count on if they hope to take root in big cities (“six wallets” refer to the savings of one’s parents, grandparents, maternal grandparents, his partner’s parents, grandparents and maternal grandparents).
It’s not hard to see when the growth rate of housing price far exceeds that of wages, it is actually a daydream to rely on the accumulation of human capital so as to live a good life in big cities.
In the past, we often repeated the words "knowledge changes fate." Of course, this statement itself is not a problem. However, we should also understand that for the personal destiny, knowledge is only one of the individual variables. Cleverness and effort are other individual variables, while the background, policies, and institutions are the national-level variables that determine the fate of individuals. In the face of national variables, individual variables are often very small.
In a fair, progressive, and open society, the importance of individual variables should be greater than the national variables. Only when an ordinary person works hard through individual efforts can he improve his destiny at a high probability, will he feel that he is dignified and confident.
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