Feed Me

摘要

Li yongfu is a survivor. Working a farm in China's fertile northeast, he escaped the mass starvation in the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, then the violence that wreaked havoc and killed many more in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the late 1970s the Chinese autocrats belatedly got the idea that markets work, and farmers like Li were allowed to sell food grown on what had been communal plots. Did this bring prosperity and efficiency to the countryside? Not much. Whereas many urbanites purr along highways in snazzy foreign-designed sedans, Li, 60, lives along a narrow dirt road dotted by potholes. It's traveled by cart-tugging mules and three-wheel put-puts that look like downsized Volkswagen Beetles. Wearing a faded blue Mao-era jacket and seated in a house of clay and straw, Li can cite one difference in his village from the heyday of the Great Helmsman. Over the cacophony of geese and other animals nearby, he says there's much more food for the people, even though his own harvest of soybeans and corn is about the same as it was 20 years ago. What's ahead? No breakthrough seeds, no additional land to plow, not even an upgrade to machine harvesting, he predicts.