Inequality in the Business of Surrogacy

Carvings of men and women on Jagdish Temple, Udaipur. Photo credits: Adrian

Last month, Dr. Sheela Saravanan gave an excellent colloquium talk based on her research of commercial surrogacy in Gujarat. She highlighted the economic and legal inequality in these transactions. For example, Indian surrogates are not even given the copy of the contract and have little knowledge of the legal guidelines, while US surrogates have a choice over closed or open contract and choose the closeness of the ongoing relationship between her and the intended parents. The participants of the colloquium asked great questions, such as the role of doctors. Doctors have a lot of power to conduct this business and there seemed to be minimal regulation; there is still no authoritative data on the number of surrogate births in India. A Mumbai doctor in the business once even replied to Saravanan’s persistent questioning, “We are doing a favor for the mothers.” Another question asked the caste background of the surrogate mothers. One of the clinics Saravanan researched had a book of surrogate profiles for the intended parents to browse. In that book, most of the intended parents ask about religion and usually wanted mothers to be of the same religion. Furthermore, if the surrogate mother was a Brahmin, then she could receive more money. If one is better looking then one would also have higher chances of being chosen from the book. Yet this process does not occur in the reverse: the surrogate would not choose the parents or sometimes not even the number of fetuses inserted in her body.

Inequality between the global north and south pervades medical tourism. Indian film Ship of Theseus poses bioethics questions in one of the segment where an illegal organ trader poached a poor Indian man one of his kidneys. The organ trader provided it to man who needed a new kidney in Europe who knew nothing about the source. Later two Indian good Samaritans traced down the European man and questioned him about this problem. The European man coughs up more money for the man who lost a kidney, yet one of the Indians saw this act as an easy way for the European man to buy out of his guilt. The segment ends with the good Samaritans bringing the Indian man the money but still feeling ambivalent regarding the nature of the trade. Surrogates who sign up for money in the global south also are susceptible to deceit. The 10-minute documentary Mothers Anonymous shows that surrogates who give birth to twins or triplets may not always receive the promised compensation and have few legal channels of dispute. Saravanan noted in her paper on surrogacy that “Asymmetries of individual capacity (knowledge, contacts and financial capability) lead to trust amongst actors. This trusting process results in experiences that can either be positive or potentially exploitative.”

But the starkest aspect related to surrogacy among the many forms of medical tourism is the gender aspect. Many kinds of medical tourism arguably can become more transparent and legally regulated for both parties, but the gender issue of surrogacy will still remain a stickler: the social contract has been conveniently neutralizing patriarchy in legalese, and the same may happen to surrogacy. Sarvanan writes,

In her book, The Social Contract, Carole Pateman critiques the social contract theory and asserts that patriarchal control prevails in the marriage contract, the prostitution contract, and the contract for surrogate motherhood. She claims surrogacy contracts are the means by which women’s reproductive capacities are dominated and patriarchy is upheld. In Feminist Morality, Virginia Held regards the social contract theory as inadequate in representing children and women and in capturing the meaningful moral relationship between people.

Surrogates may read, understand and sign a surrogacy contract, but the contract would not signify the same amount of shame and guilt as for a person to read, understand and sign a contract for trading in his or her kidney. Cultural baggage is attached to surrogacy in the South Asian context. While some think that being a surrogate mother is fine for money in an otherwise a conservative society, with patriarchy in mind, I still found it hard to believe that women can ever pursue this chance in the open: understandably many work in collaboration with their husbands and immediate family to keep this as a secret. Another gender question: how does surrogacy threaten the social understanding and definition of motherhood? The surrogate mothers in the documentary feel emotion attachment to the babies, even though they are not genetically related. (In contrast, the popular trope regarding men is that they expect their offspring to be genetically “theirs.”) Women around the world face critiques that they are selling their wombs, which should somehow be regarded as a sanctified zone. Motherhood seems to mean legal ownership of the child, but in the case of surrogacy without the same amount of effort, which is so often labeled as “sacrifice.” The intended parent also may not experience the typical birth defining motherhood but still expects to enjoy all the experiences with “her” child thereafter.

Many surrogates rationalize their decision by citing their economic needs and contribution to family income, as seen in the documentary. This attitude poses is a stark contrast with another group of women who also earn money for their family in Pakistan. Zehran Yasmin Zaidi’s Chaddors and Pink Collars in Pakistan: Gender, Work, and the Global Economy shows in one chapter that oftentimes women can

participate in non-traditional employment outside of home, but requires women to observe cultural norms in non-work related matters. The dynamics of this process can be understood by examining how class and gender operate in Pakistan. Many women workers who were interviewed by the author came from working-class backgrounds, yet made contradictory claims about working out of choice rather than economic necessity.

But in both cases, women earn approval through bringing financial gains to the family despite the acts are against previous convention.

Unfortunately there was not a lot of anthropological data on the gender questions: who makes the decision to become surrogates in the family and what are the different opinions of the informed participants (e.g. Fathers, mothers, in-laws)? How does gender relations impact the surrogates’ economic “rationality?” The intentions are very elusive, compounded with layers of ethics and gender politics. I speculate that it is possible that both sides who are participating in this transaction would not even approve of this kind of deal when asked in a polling exercise.

Reliance on Landlords: From the Colonizers to the Congress Party

Why did India never have a class-based revolution or stark social transformation? In a letter to Engels, Marx suggested that the arrival of British free trade brought the only social revolution in India. He starts by invoking the imagery of the static village-- 

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Tehri village paddy fields, Uttarakhand

But in Reinventing India, Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss have shown that the British left many pre-existing structures, such as the zamindari system or the village caste relations, untouched or even retrenched. Some have suggested that this was their strategy of divide and rule, since it would be to the British rulers’ advantage if supra-village structures were weakened and villages were strengthened. Others have also argued that the British colonizers could have been thinking only in terms of “Western” and “Indian” terms, saw India as a divided society, and strengthened preexisting divides in the process. Anti-colonialism sought to adapt western institutions while also understanding India as distinctly different than Western societies. Spiritual values and private practices can remain “Indian” while the public sphere becomes Western, which created new identities and contradictions. Economics definitely fell under the public sphere and has been a politically contested issue in India throughout the 19th and 20th century.

The authors provided many critiques of the Congress Party-led nationalist movement. Historian Barrington Moore suggested from a Marxian view that Gandhi provided a link between landed classes and peasants through satyagraha and ahimsa movements. Gandhi and his followers advocated for class conciliation while others saw a need for class struggle. But the Congress Socialists were divided and weak and eventually established their own party--CSP.  Therefore even though Jawarhalal Nehru’s position towards socialism was sincere, as Pramit Chaudhuri has pointed out, Nehru did not push for nationalization of land seriously within his own party for the sake of unity. He also felt personal loyalty to Gandhi’s positions. As soon as Congress Party came into rule after independence, according to David Arnold, they have strengthened rulings of the Raj, such as the civil administration and refused the interference of politicians. Some would say that the Congress Party became the Raj to some extent.
Corbridge and Harriss follow Gramsci, Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj’s idea of Nehru’s “passive revolution” to explain developments in the 1950s that substituted any real social revolution. Nehru wanted to uplift the poor through development led by a centralized state. Nehru proposed that top-heavy industrialization could reduce dependence on agriculture. He resisted conservative tendencies in the Party but he did not have the power to institute industrialization as much as countries like South Korea or redistribution of land like China. Furthermore, Nehru’s Congress Party garnered support through regressive taxation, in which the state did not tax rich Indian farmers much. This contributed to Nehru’s inability to implement agrarian reform and contributed to the 1970s’ “crisis of planning.” Due to these demand-side requirements, the state could not raise resources domestically. Used to the many concessions by the state, the New Farmers’ Movement in the 1970s also championed lower input costs such as the reduction of irrigation charges and more subsidies. This arrangement impeded planning and the passive revolution.
Partha Chatterjee and Karivaj identifies Nehruvian ideals as “high modernism” that was distant from popular support. For example, secularism through education was also an alien concept to the broader public. The English-educated elements in Congress Party realized in 1947 that in addition to these ideals, they also had to struggle and compete for local control of party organizations. They gradually lost ground to networks of important individuals with bonds to business patronage.

If nationalism had certain problems, how should we assess India’s (nationalistic) claim that it is the biggest democracy? Ambedkar, social reformer and champion of lower caste rights, criticized the lack of change over the caste-class issue. He posed the contradiction that from 1950, “In politics we will have quality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, one value. In our social and economic life we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man, one value.” (p34) Nehru understood democracy from the Raj and Westminister models, which nowadays people consider overly idealistic. Yet at the time mostly everyone in the Constituent Assembly agreed with him to form a centralized Parliamentary constitution rather than something close to the ground, like a panchayati government. Barrington Moore also identified the weak bourgeois class for a functioning participatory democracy in India. Karivaj proposed that due to the weak bourgeois, India requires state bureaucracies for social justice and redistribution. These institutions have been less funded since privatization led by Indira Gandhi and the Indian economists of the 1990s, which Corbridge and Harris criticize in a later chapter.

In an international context, state planning and rule by economic experts were two hegemonic ideas among much of the Third World Nationalists, such as Egypt’s Nasser and India’s Nehru. There was a brief honeymoon period between the Communist leadership and economists in China as well before Mao Tse Tung started movements to purge many intellectuals, economist and others, and consolidate in 1952, 1956-57 and 1966-1976. In India, Congress Party could not execute social justice through land reform and redistribution. Rather, the Party continuously distributed subsidies to rich farmers throughout post-independence. For example, fertilizer subsidies only strengthened the dominating landholding farmers. This strategy was also in line with the “demand side” Keynesian economics that sought to increase spending in the economy. Yet as Beverly Silver has pointed out, the Keynesian prescription was meant for the “developed” countries. High mass consumption and full employment were deemed to be beyond the reach of “underdeveloped” economies. (Silver, Beverly. Forces of Labor, 154.) Only the upper classes in India had money to spend and and rich farmers were taxed regressively. Since the money was not flowing to the state through taxed consumption, the subsidies partly caused the crisis in state finances in the 1980s and 90s. 

Banana tree in village near Rishikesh

Since rich peasants have been one of Congress Party’s main constituents’ interest, and may continue to serve as a powerful constituent of the BJP as well. Rich peasants obtained votes often vertically by coercing their tenants or dominions to vote with the rich's interest, this tendency may continue even as Congress Party support in current elections.  Rupa Viswanath argued in class that the phenomenon in which rich do not vote as much as the poor is because nowadays the rich are confident of their control over rural power. Thus it does not matter which political power is at the center. New taxes would be protested and fended off by the rich peasantry since there was a precedent of low to no taxes. More readings need to be done on the relationship between rural interests and electoral politics.

The City's Reliance on the Village

This blogpost will explore the relationship between the city and the village by first examining the everlasting material effects of caste in India. Then it will introduce the similarities of India's city with China's city: both countries' urbanization relies on the village and even subordinates the village to the city. Finally it will introduce some attempts to address this issue in China.

Does caste exist only as a religious category? Historical studies on India show that caste is a result of material institutional arrangements as well. Castes should not just be understood as the most commonly cited four varnas in popular explanation but also exist as jatis (job categories). Orientalists have proposed that caste only exists as religious and thus static; but it also constantly adapting as some jobs appear and while other jobs disappear. But to what extent does caste change with the time? Certain proponents of liberal modernization theories think that caste will only be practiced in a “backward village” and cities have successfully become caste blind. (Similar problems can be pointed about the "post-racial" American society so many people believe, but that is for another blogpost.) To quote Prof. Rupa Viswanath, "Most factories in India have divisions of labor. Every factory in India a particular caste is limited to particular kinds of work. The most dangerous and filthy work is usually relegated to Dalits." In the similar vein, scholars have suggested that industries cannot rely on stable labor supply due to the migrant workers attachment to rural lifestyle and their traditional culture. According to these scholars, India has the lowest speed of industrialization for this reason. 

But unlike what some modernization theorists expect, industrialization has not erased caste. Caste and religious practices have taken up new forms and adapted to post-colonial institutions. The importance of labor history in understanding rural urban links is crucial. One of the readings have mentioned the historian Raj Chandavarkar. He studied Bombay textile workers in the period of 1900-1940 and is known for conducting research at the workers’ neighborhood rather than just the workplace. He noticed that the ties with the village is not just cultural, but also rooted in economic necessity. Dr. Chandavarkar linked business strategies with instability of workforce: Businesses keep wages low by outsourcing the healthcare and retirement costs to the village. Tasks of reproduction are also transferred to the village. Thus only young men become migrant workers and contribute to the household without keeping the household.

The danger with comparing also could produce ahistorical misunderstandings. One Chinese scholar, while speaking at a college in the U.S., once pointed to the lack of women joining the workforce in India as India’s disadvantage in competing with China. His perspective is common among political scientists and development organizations who like to view India and China in competing terms. He may have been unaware of that this phenomenon was implicit in the patriarchal development logic of India’s capitalist accumulation.

Once the workers in India grow sick or old, they become social burdens and would be levied to the village, while supplemented with additional income from the city. Workers who have strong village ties can sustain the strike whereas workers who cannot return to the village cannot hold out during a strike. The worker's link with the countryside is not broken for pragmatic reasons. In light of these discoveries, the cultural explanation does not suffice to explain India's low industrialization speed. 

A cow herder possibly from the Yadav caste guides the cows across a road that connects Rishikesh with Dehradun, 2014

Although Dr. Chandavarkar studied Bombay workers in the 1900-1940, this theory is extremely relevant for China's migrant workers who are not protected by the same rights as urban citizens. Compared to many factories in India that have a long tradition of casual labor force, Chinese migrant workers are more stabilized and often live in community housing. Yet the hukou system formally discriminates against migrant workers and many do not have adequate access to resources other than the bare necessities. Chinese migrant workers thus also drift between the rural and the urban for both cultural and economic reasons. Migrant workers often work as couples, and once they have children they also rely on the child's grandparents to raise their children in the village. Their children cannot become legal residents of the city and have access to the city's public education. I am not very familiar with the land policies, but similar to India, many Chinese migrant workers return to the alternative option by becoming a peasant. As the economic advantages of the city decreases, some choose to return. However, recently there have been massive buyouts of rural land in regions surrounding Chinese cities. Even though the situation is different for migrant workers from different areas, some migrant workers are distressed with the cut off of options once they sell their land. This year, the Chinese state has tried to address this by expanding unemployment benefits to lure migrants to cities--

This would help migrant workers, who lack urban hukou, and are cut off, along with their families, from access to education and social welfare outside their home villages. Lack of a local registration should no longer be used as a basis for denying unemployment benefits, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said, according to a government website. Local governments must also provide free career counseling and job-seeking services, and subsidize career development and skill-building, it added.

But the effects of these policies are yet to be observed. The outsourcing relationship between the city and the village exists in both China and India, often by subordinating the village's interests for industrial needs. But China's subordination is perhaps more severe than India's case, since China has urbanized at a much rapid pace and much larger extent than India. The Party’s danwei system allowed for mobilization of people beyond their original hometowns and contributed to the severing of rural relations.

Since the Open and Reform policies prioritized Chinese cities, much has been said about the assumed inferiority of Chinese villages and the existential crises of people with village roots. For example, Liang Hong's books on Liang Zhuang document her alienation from her ancestral village. There have been efforts that address these issues. Chinese intellectuals and activists, like Ou Ning and Chang Kun, also link both the cultural and economic needs of the countryside. By fostering book stores, public interest internet cafes, and activity centers, activists pay attention to cultural activities. At the same time, they also notice that the lack of culture is linked with the monopolization of economic resources in the city. Ou Ning has tried to think about alternative methods that are not necessarily out-right commercialization and reification of the village culture through tourism. For more about this subject, I will have to watch his new documentary first. 

Rice field in rural Rishikesh, 2014

Alternatives for the Village and Rural Revival: India and China

Rural and urban divide in China and India are increasing not only in terms of material wealth but also cultural standing. In grotesque simplifications, villages signify what is "backward" or under-developed. But one should understand that this is the result of current modes of development, which disrupt village social fabric and family structures at the expense of developing cities. Many villages in both China and India experiences drops in income from farmland and a loss of village youth to city migration. Recent efforts to help the village become self-sustainable include Barefoot College, started by husband and wife Bunker Roy and Aruna Roy. This college trains villagers to become experts in their own right and resist the fetishization of credentials. As The Hindu reports,

Rajasthan’s Ajmer and Rajsamand districts have been the sites of their work for enabling the self-respecting to become self-reliant as well, the self-abnegating to become self-assured too, and the self-denying to become inspirationally self-affirming.

Aruna and Bunker Roy

I first learned about Aruna Roy and her dedication to villages and the MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Shakhti Sangathan —the Organisation for the Empowerment of Workers and Peasants) that aims to secure the rights villagers through British journalist Edward Luce's 2006 book In Spite of the Gods--

Ms. Roy is a Gandhian to the tips of her fingers: her saris are always made of cotton; she is a vegetarian; she lives ascetically among the villagers; she uses the occasional hunger strike, and more frequently the dharna, or sit-down protest, to pressurise the authorities — both tactics Gandhi pioneered against the British. And, although she concedes that escaping your caste identity is much more difficult in the village than in the town, she sees the former as the key to India's future. 

...

Each meal was a nutritious vegetarian mix of rice,  roti (Indian bread),  dhal (lentils), and a variation of potatoes, aubergine and okra, with a glass of buttermilk.

Nikhil Dey, when interviewed by Luce, resists being labeled as Gandhian or Marxist, claiming to inherit the heritage of both schools of thought. "We can make the village work through better farming and cottage industries. If people leave the villages then they also lose the rootedness that comes with living where you are from and the strength you draw from your natural surroundings."

While Luce's account focuses on Aruna's collaboration with Nikhil Dey, I read about other inspiring efforts of the Roys again from a detailed 2013 Chinese report on the Barefoot College by Hong Kong journalist Susanna Chui-Yung Cheung. She also commented on the simple food and was amazed by the college's success in training of age-old grannies how to create solar panels. She interpreted the Barefoot College as Gandhian.

 

Solar panels and its engineers

Still, the lack of of respectable employment opportunities in the typical Rajasthani villages pose a serious problem for similar villages in developing countries. As Luce holds skepticism for Roy and Dey's efforts, he reported on the desire for migration out of the village--

(Peasants) stood up and announced their profession. It was a roll-call of agricultural failure. The first was a well-digger who travels from village to village. Another worked as a security guard for Reliance Industries, one of India's largest companies, in Delhi. The next was a cloth worker who had lost his job in the city. The fourth had been trying for years without success to join the army. The next two were both menial workers at a hotel in the city of Ahmedabad in the neighbouring state of Gujarat. And so on.  Barely any of the men remain in the village because farming is not enough to make ends meet. 

In China, many hail back to 20th century thinkers such as philosopher Liang Shuming (梁漱溟) for ideas on village reconstruction. More recently intellectuals such as Ou Ning have also tried experimenting with cultural revivals in the countryside as well. Xiong Peiyun's Seeing China Through a Village (《一个村庄里的中国》) also documents social issues in an elegiac tone as a writer who left his village for the city. PhD student Yige Dong's gender analysis (《女权视角下的碧山计划》) also sheds light on how we understand the contribution of women to the village economy. India also produced many intellectual discussions surrounding the question of village economies, which I learned from reading Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire.

During roughly the same era as Liang Shuming, economist and social thinker Radhakamal Mukerjee studied the issue of village development in the 1925. He suggested that the German model of small scale industries could be emulated by India. Radhakamal argued for the power of the Indian village economy, and "the strenuous diffusion of production factors" as an alternative to "Western, city-centered, and finance-driven capitalism." Mukherjee "praised the village and handicraft economies... as well as the benefits it would bring to Indian society." This is distinctly different than a state capital-intensive model proposed by some socialists at the time.
"Radhakamal spoke of 'rurbanization' and the 'cityward drift' that would instigate 'the improvement of the technical conditions of the village, which will satisfy the more intellectual and ambitious of the village youth,'" quotes Kris Manjapura, author of Age of Entanglement. The "co-operative credit" movements in Germany also inspired Radhakamal. He regarded the Germany's model of agricultural reconstruction through decentralized network of expertise and finances was appropriate for India.
In my opinion, Radhakamal would certainly hope to see more initiatives similar to those of Bunker Roy, Aruna Roy, and Nikhil Dey's rural revival projects. In face of globalization, some people find trouble "catching up" with rising costs and standards levels of living. Migrant laborers around the world accept their dismal and disenfranchised conditions of living despite the lack of legal protection. However, one should also reflect on alternative methods, especially when current models of development exploit migrant labor and resources in atrocious ways.

Leftist Projects and Subaltern Silence | 碧山计划

A lively and important discussion started by Harvard sociology PhD Ms. Zhou Yun critique of the Bishan Jihua (碧山计划) has come to my attention. The Bishan program's initiator Ou Ning (​欧宁) is a rather big name as an art curator and intellectual. Based on what the discussions, it is Ou Ning’s effort to revitalize the village and help them become livelier through civil society. Specific goals elude me as well as the online discussion, but Ou Ning's vision of the ideal village (Bishan) focuses more on the cultural aspect of the locality than the model CCP village development program would. As a result of the program, Bishan village now has a bookstore, a hip bar, and reoccurring cultural + crafts festivals. (The one time I met esteemed sociologist Dr. Yu Jianrong  于建嵘 at a discussion about NGOs, he talked very enthusiastically about his own version of Bishan in Guizhou’s 黔西南).

Bishan Bookstore (碧山书局)
Photo Credits: Ou Ning

Zhou Yun makes some very good points about how the liberal-elite discourse perpetuates the inequality between rural (farmers) and urban elites. She also points that while tourism seems to commodify the rural areas, many residents in rural areas like Bishan with rich cultural endowment would prefer tourism. But I also share the concern of some of the comments below that think 1) she is thinking ahead of herself--if the arrangement of capital doesn't change and farmer continue to be “at the bottom of the economic food chain,” analyzing discourse may not be the best recourse. 2) She is exaggerating the lack of consensus between the locals and Ou Ning based on some impressions. (I would presume that Ou Ning would know more about villages than a hypothetical foreign NGO, such as depicted in Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China.) Even if some Bishan residents have no opinion regarding Ou Ning's ambition, she does not acknowledge the existence of local supporters.

One of the sobering comments below (emphasis added):

"Of course, capital and power might destroy the village cultural and ecosystem. But before capital has even reached the village, if one starts to worry about whether [a project] is 'elitist' or 'nativist,' it seems to be akin to worrying about whether the sky will fall. 
Dr. Fei (Hsiao-tung)'s Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley still has much relevance today. Because even after one hundred years (since he wrote it), China still is a maiban country: foreigners print money to exploit the (Chinese) city, the city exploits the rural villages, the villages exploit the environment, and the environment cannot speak so it can only be exploited (without question). Right now the question is how to empower the two weakest in along the food chain--the village and environment. There are many ways in regards to how to empower them, and some forms are terrible indeed if viewed from certain angles."

“诚然，资本和权力可能对乡村文化生态可能会带来毁灭性的影响。但在资本没有到位之前，就开始焦虑精英主义还是自然主义，岂不杞人忧天。  费老的《江村经济》在今天依然有现实意义，正是因为一百年后的中国今天依然是买办大国，洋人印钞抢城市，城市抢乡村，乡村抢环境，环境不会说话， 只有被抢。当下如何反哺处于权力链条上最底端的乡村和环境才是重点。如何反哺当然会有各种形式，有些形式可能从某个角度来看可以说是极为糟糕。” 

The larger question presented here is--if the Chinese government does allow for more organizing from the bottom-up (here, “bottom” includes elites such as Ou Ning), are the locals and the public open to leftist / utopian projects such as the the Bishan Jihua? Ou Ning definitely sees a possibility. Then again, I would anticipate a Marxist response being that the rural areas will still have to rely to some extent on consumers from the urban areas, which clearly does not shield them from capitalism (I recall a U-Madison graduate student's point about certain Laos rubber plants’ different modes of production seem to provide good alternatives for their lives, but from a Marxist perspective they still have to function under the same global capitalist system and respond to the global rubber price).  Still, a cultural revival of the rural areas in the popular imagination will definitely benefit the image and subsequently the material conditions of some villages.

It’s also interesting how many participants in this discussion accept the de facto “nongcun” (rural) v. “chengshi” (urban) dual categorizations for people. Politically, these categories are designated by the government; culturally many discussion participants also  distinguish between the two, with the urban is "modernized," while the rural is the "backward" or "marginalized." In reality I think 1) a significant amount of people fall between the two, such as the migrant hair stylists of Fujian or college students with rural backgrounds / hukous, both types which successfully emulate urban sensibilities. 2) There are many different kinds of vested interests and cultural identity within the “urban” or “rural.” 3) The Urban v. Rural category carries both feudal and modern weights, since the hukou system extends beyond the CCP but has been reemphasized and evolved since the CCP. 4) Ethnic minorities would complicate the dualistic picture. I wonder if Zhou Yun would maintain a similar stance regarding the lack of subaltern voices if she were writing about a village in Xinjiang or Tibet. 

All in all, I am glad that this discussion is open and receiving media attention; it seems that at least some Chinese netizens are willing to imagine a more bottom-up approach and aware of leftist projects such as the Bishan Jihua.