Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [2]
The man is named Xu Qin Quan, and he is searching for a cure. He walks down the ancient stone pathway alongside terraced fields toward the small glade on the valley floor, as members of his family have done for 10 generations. Here he finds the remedies he has known since childhood: the slender stalks of ma huang, for sweating away a cold; the leafy branches of gou qi zi, for mending the liver. He slices the stalks with his pocket knife, stacks them in his bag, and walks back to the crest. There, he stands for a while, looking at the eruptions of dust rising to the north, where a construction crew is turning the narrow, bumpy road into a broad, paved boulevard. A journey north to Chongqing and back, once an all-day affair, will soon take no more than two hours. Mr. Xu watches the dust plumes turn the distant trees ochre. He considers the larger suffering, the pain that has racked their lives and killed their children and held them in decades of food panic followed by years of paralyzing tedium. That night, at a village meeting, he proffers the larger cure. After tonight, he says, we shall stop being a village.
It is 1995, and the village is called Liu Gong Li. Very little about its appearance, its families, or its thoroughly unmechanized cultivation of wheat and corn has changed in centuries. It got its name, which means “Six Kilometers,” during the building of the Burma Road, when the great inland city of Chongqing was the eastern terminus. That name, for decades after the Second World War, was a fantasy, for the original bridge to the big city had been bombed, and the nearest replacement, many kilometers away, was impassable enough to make the journey economically pointless, even if the Communist Party had allowed it. The little village had no connection to any city or any market. It farmed for itself. The soil, and the rudimentary farming methods, never provided quite enough food for everyone. Every few years, the vicissitudes of weather and politics would produce a famine, and people would die, children would starve. In the terrible years of 1959 through 1961, the village lost a large portion of its population. Starvation ended two decades later, replaced by a scraping, passionless dependency on government subsidies. In Liu Gong Li, as in peasant villages around the world, nobody sees rural life as tranquil, or natural, or as anything but a monotonous, frightening gamble. In the final decade of the twentieth century, when China embraced a form of capitalism, the villages here were suddenly permitted to develop non-arable land for market purposes. So when Mr. Xu suggested his remedy, there was no dissension: All the land would be declared non-arable. From that moment, it stopped being a village and became a destination for villagers.
Fifteen years later, Liu Gong Li reveals itself as a specter at the side of a traffic-clotted four-lane boulevard a kilometer into the city: Amid a forest of apartment towers there unfolds a glimmering mirage of gray and brown cubes cascading across hillsides as far as the eye can see, an utterly random crystal formation that has obliterated the landscape. Closer, the crystals materialize into houses and shops, jagged brick and concrete dwellings of two or three stories assembled by their occupants without plan or permission, cantilevered over one another, jutting at unlikely angles. Within 10 years of Mr. Xu’s prescription, his village of 70 had gained more than 10,000 residents; within a dozen years, it had fused with neighboring ex-villages into a solid agglomeration of 120,000 people, few of whom officially reside here. It is no longer a distant village, or even a place on the far outskirts; it is a key and integral part of Chongqing, a city of some