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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