During the Golden Holiday period I had, as visitors, several relatives from my native town in rural northern Jiangsu Province. As I hadn't been to my native place for some time, the information they provided familiarized me with the plight of Chinese peasants.

One of my aunts lives in a "model village" that for years had been well-known in Jiangsu Province for its glamour. It was one of the first villages in the county to have tap water and a telephone installed in every household.

Since then its fame has been growing steadily.

This June, the Party secretary in the village, Song Shimin, made national news when he was elected deputy county magistrate, reputedly becoming the first peasant to hold this position in China.

Head of a village enterprise specialized in the breeding of aquatic products which reportedly contributes to a combined profits of 6 billion yuan, Song has been received by State and provincial leaders. He has also been selected as one of Ten Excellent Peasant Talents in China.

I thought those living in such a village would be spared much of the deprivations common to Chinese peasants.

One of my aunts (my mother's sister) who lives in the village used to be one of the most wealthy of my relatives. During the late 1980s they had built two large fishing boats that cost half a million yuan. Four sons of hers, excepting one who works as a village cadre, had engaged in the fishing business since then.

But I learnt that both the fishing vessels had recently been sold for less then a third of their cost to appease persistent creditors.

Except for the cadre son, all her sons are virtually unemployed (this word is rather too dignified, because technically no Chinese peasant can dream of formal employment).

Several of them, like many others, became self-employed in raising shrimps and crabs, but excessive rain this year made this totally profitless.

Working farm fields had long been delegated to the females and the elderly, for it has long ceased to be a source of profit (various subsidies for farming cost the State hundreds of billions annually). The most energetic males seek their fortunes in economically prosperous eastern coastal areas, mainly as cheap labourers at construction sites.

In recent years more and more young girls choose to work at production lines in developed areas. In suburban Shanghai alone I had two cousins and one nephew working at factories (one cousin's monthly 1,000-yuan remittance home became the major source of income for her family of five in the model village).

I have to make it clear that by all accounts many of my townfolks (even those not in the model village) are among the "get-rich-firsts" (in the words of Deng Xiaoping) when reform was first tested in rural China in the early 1980s. But their advantage soon vaporized when reforms were extended to urban areas.

As the poverty of rural China deepens the government apparatus is becoming more tolerant of this peasant exodus (formerly known as "blind flow"). But this by no means exculpates China's policy-makers.

For one thing, the sheer size of the Chinese peasantry (80 per cent of the total population) means it could never be fully assimilated by this "urbanization" process.

Continued, mass subsistence in poverty and indignity is not only deplorable. It is dangerous.

starcomment@yahoo.com