Qipan

““I have met old people who held my hands and told me tearfully that they preferred to die early,” wrote a township Party secretary, Li Changping, “and I have seen the sad sight of children kneeling before me saying they want to attend school.” In Li’s Qipan, also in Jianli County, society is failing because of the decline of agriculture. Li wrote a direct plea to Zhu Rongji about conditions in his area. That was futile because the well-intentioned Zhu has little power in Qipan and most other places in the countryside.”

“In his letter, Mr Li revealed the bleak situation in Qipan township. Almost all the young people in the township had left to find work in cities and 65 per cent of the farmland had been left idle. A family of five paid at least 350 yuan (HK$329) a year for each mu (0.07 of a hectare) of farmland they looked after, and 85 per cent of farmers were losing money.”

“I come from a peasant family in Hubei, where I was born in Jianli County, by the Honghu Lake in the mid-Yangtze tributary area.[…] When I was fifteen I got the top score in the entrance examinations for the provincial key-point high school in our township Qipan (‘Chessboard’).”