In 1967, when he was 17 years old, Funing Zhong was given a graduation gift by the Chinese government.
He was sent to the countryside to dig irrigation ditches and work as an unskilled farm labourer for a decade.
“It was pretty hard, pretty hard,” said Zhong in an interview during the Canadian Wheat Board’s Grain World market outlook conference.
“Very hard work.”
It was a common fate for urban high school graduates during the Cultural Revolution, which was Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung’s attempt to stamp out social classes from society. Educated people were thought by Mao to consider themselves better than farm workers or factory workers, so he forced them to live the workers’ lives.
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In 1977, after Mao died, the Cultural Revolution was ended and Zhong was allowed to return to his city and attend university. After he graduated he received a scholarship to attend the University of Manitoba, where he received a PhD in agricultural economics in 1989.
He is now dean of the college of economics and trade at Nanjing Agricultural University in China.
He admits being a faculty dean at a large university is much better than digging irrigation ditches with a shovel, but he isn’t bitter about his years on the collective farm. In fact, those years have turned out to be relevant.
“My experience of working on farms is very beneficial to my career as an agricultural economist,” said Zhong. “But if I had any other career now, it would have been 10 years of lost time.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese farmers lived on huge collective farms, often working with only the crudest of implements.
Since then, the government has steadily opened up the agricultural economy, which still supports more than half of China’s population of 1.2 billion people, to market economy reforms and innovation.
Farmers in some areas are now using cutting edge technology, such as modern farm equipment and biotech crops including BT cotton.
But the development has been uneven, leaving many farmers even poorer than they were during the years of strict economic communism, Zhong said. Many farmers are still using their hands to plant and harvest crops, while others are using machinery and expensive inputs.
China’s grain industry has also evolved in an unusual manner, with the government relinquishing direct control of most grain procurement.
The task, which is handled by grain companies in most of the world, is done in China by quasi-commercial trading companies. These agencies are still owned and controlled by the government, but allowed to act at arm’s length, as if they were private companies.
Zhong spoke at Grain World about China’s agricultural evolution, explaining the confusion over China’s potential, agricultural policy and grain stocks.
But Zhong’s personal experience on Chinese collective farms has also given him a concrete sense of other developments, such as on-farm storage.
Now, analyses of Chinese grain stocks have to include a much higher proportion of farmer-saved grain than they used to, because there is much less grain wasted on individual farmers’ farms than there was on the collective farms.
Zhong knows this because he was on the collective farms and saw huge amounts wasted after harvest. Now that Chinese farmers are allowed to sell their surplus grain and keep the money, waste has radically declined.
Zhong is advising his government on how to link China’s rapid economic and agricultural revolution with the needs of its hundreds of millions of farmers who could be left behind. To him, it seems like coming full circle.
“It has been in interesting career,” he said with a smile.
