Chongming Island grows in Yangtze’s torrent

Press, 26 July 1984, Page 17

Chongming Island grows in Yangtze’s torrent

By

TODD CARREL,

, National Geographic News

Service

The old peasant squinted into the wind as he trudged across the field with another armful of reeds. His grandson toddled behind him. In another field, lined green by sprigs of winter wheat, a youth transported from the city kicked at the blocky earth with his scuffed brown shoes. The gesture was the last step in a cycle of kneeling, hacking, pacing, and cursing. Zhang Wei, the youth, said he had been digging irrigation ruts into the flat expanse all day. The peasant and Zhang Wei live on a finger-shaped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River called Chongming. The island is a rural county administered as part of China’s largest metropolis, Shanghai. It lies about 32 miles north of the city’s core, a 40-minute bus ride followed by a two-hour ferry trip across the pitching brown waters of the Yangtze. Formed by mud and silt, Chongming’s ' 418 square miles make it China’s largest alluvial island. It also is the country’s third largest island after Taiwan, the lone bastion where Chinese Nationalists hold sway, and Hainan, the sultry island of rubber trees, rice paddies, and rain forests in the South China Sea. On windswept Chongming, old women in ankle-length blue wraparound aprons bend to cut grass. Farmers plant wheat between rows of cotton and grow broad beans on elevated footpaths. Water buffalo graze on marshy tracts along the river and brush by men who climb down levees to gather reeds. Lines of barges bump over Yangtze River whitecaps just off the coast Records show that generations of farmers for at least 1300 years have struggled with Chongming’s

hard clay and made it a land of cotton, wheat, rape, and rice crisscrossed by canals and riverlets. During a drive past cedar trees and cabbage patches, Yan Yan Zhong, a spokesman for the Foreign Office, said crops can sprout on land in the same year that it has been reclaimed. “The earth is rich because of the alluvium,” he said. "Farmers start by planting reeds for two reasons: to hold the soil together, then to fertilise it” Locals claim that since “Liberation” in 1949, the year the Communists established their rule over China, sturdy peasants and labourers from the cities have transformed hundreds of square miles of shoals into productive land. The island has increased in area by one-third in the last decade. Chongming has long taken in earth stolen from inland provinces along the 3906-mile sweep of the powerful Yangtze. Now it absorbs surplus workers. Farmers from Jiangsu province to the north have been invited in to cultivate its land. Reluctant youths from the cities — where there are two few jobs for too many people — have been sent over by the Government to hoe ’its fields and help in its factories. In recent years, 130,000 of these “educated youth” have joined Chongming’s 630,000 natives, Yan said. Most of them live in dormitories on eight state farms that bend around the northern coast, farms with names such as “Red Star,”

“New Ocean,” and “Leap Forward” that may have had a glorious ring in bygone days. But for some impatient city youths, the idea of being transplanted to toil in this isolated hinterland never took root. Zhang Wei was plucked from Shanghai 11 years ago. Local peasants routinely wear patched work clothes to the fields. Zhang claws at the earth dressed in city clothes: loafers, grey cotton pants, blue shirt, light brown wool sweater, and blue cap. He earns about $3O a month and sees no prospects for much change in his life. “I’m afraid I may never be able to move back to the city,” he said as he surveyed a parched field. “And now things are too expensive to consider marriage.” Some young workers have trickled back to Shanghai under a programme known as “dingti” that allows children to fill jobs of retiring parents. Others have been shifted from Chongming’s fields to its factories. When China’s leaders called for another leap in the nation’s farm economy, urging workers to maintain a solid agricultural base but push for profits by developing sideline industries, Chongming’s peasants responded. Some now work in small factories that turn out locks, watches, electronic components, face creams, sewing machines, cotton handkerchiefs, and other products. Ju Liming, a quality control inspector from Shanghai who makes regular visits to 13 textile

factories here, said they have been a boon to the local economy. “You see, on the island’s communes, people can make money because the investment costs for factories are low, the land-use costs are kept down, and salaries are low, too, Ju said. Workers like the factories, he said, because they can combine the pay they earn in them during the slack season with their income from the crops. Still, Ju conceded, their prowess at making towels, sheets, and blankets is “a bit lower” than that of city workers because they have been at it for only three or four years and “these people are all farmers." For the young accustomed to sophisticated Shanghai, life on Chongming remains too backward — a world apart. For islanders like Shen Lisheng who recall the poverty of the past and the days when men crossed the Yangtze waters aboard junks, not steamers and motor-powered barge trains, the worlds of island and city are converging. "Chongming is about the same as Shanghai, except there’s more space and the air is cleaner,” Shen said. “Things are cheaper here, the food’s fresher, and we get better fish.” Shen, aged 59, is called “shifu,” or master, by the young workers he teaches to mould plastic fittings for washing machines. He talks about retiring to a farmhouse heresoon, and ponders the past. “My father, his father, my great grandfather were all on the island,” he said. “And I can remember the old days when we had no electricity, there were no factories, and we had few people."