Friday, January 11, 2019

Chinese rural life on You Tube/Carlos Pueblo


Chinese rural life on You Tube/Carlos Pueblo

Recently, I have been hooked by several brief You Tube programs about
Chinese rural life. These programs have been provided by an anchoring
girl living with her family and describing her everyday life. I believe that
the Chinese National CCTV is sponsoring the programs. It reminds me an
epic Utopia, the Peach Colony by Yuan Ming Tao 372-427 A.D. during  the
Eastern Jin Dynasty. Almost all of the families are located in the mountain
area with a small acreage to grow crops, vegetables, fruits, hogs, and
chicken, etc. She also introduces how she prepares meals for a special
dinner. I estimate that it has been for thousands of year rural Chinese  
live this way.

They grow rice in the south and wheat in the north as the major crop for
their own consumption and the excess for income. During the winter break,
they grow vegetables. They still practice exchange of goods in lieu of cash, i.e.
2 pounds of wheat can trade for 3 pounds of watermelon in Santung Province.
They also grow fishes in the pond and the most popular one is the grass carp.
They use a lot of green onion, young ginger root, garlic, and red peppers for
flavor. They still use mostly drying stuff such as branches, leaves, peanut shells,
and even save corn stems to burn. I learn how to prepare the spicy pepper pasta
and pickle cucumbers.

I saw one program about making the brown sugar in Yunnan Province touched me
very much. There is an apparatus to squeeze the cane juice semi manually. After
boiling and thickening the cane juice, the maker pour the unfiltered pulp into a
cubicle and wait for one day of brown sugar cube to be solidified. I was brought up
in a neighborhood of sugar cane factories in rural Taiwan. I had witness the modern
cane sugar making from growing cane on the field, gathering dry leaves, cut the cane
and move the raw cane to the sugar factory to process. I have visited twice in my life
time to the factory where my Dad worked as an engineer. Almost 125 years ago,
Japanese built such process to Taiwan and brought up Taiwanese rural area.

During the US-China trade war, the US insists to open up crops imports in China such
the old 301 Provisions, etc. I watch these You Tube documentaries and I understand that
will change the traditional Chinese rural life. How do Chinese face the mass production
of crops from the US? Would Beijing regime know how to learn from Japan and Germany
to protect their farmers? Or do they know how to help their rural farmers to improve their
life?





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