Country Driving [119]
The Chinese government operates under similar logic. All tobacco companies are state-owned, and the industry provides significant revenue; it also directly employs more than half a million people. From the government’s perspective, smoking is important to stability, both economic and social. Some cigarettes are even subsidized—the cheapest brands cost as little as thirty cents a pack, because officials fear that farmers will become unhappy if they can’t afford to smoke. And the issue of health is essentially separate. In 2000, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention commissioned a study that showed that the health-related costs of smoking outweigh the revenue benefits. But that’s not the key calculus: all that matters is who pays what. Until now, there has been no nationwide health insurance, so the government has collected its cigarette profits without paying for the damage. Each year, over one million Chinese people die from smoking-related illness, and that figure is expected to double by the year 2025. Now that the government is trying to establish some form of universal health coverage, perhaps their attitude toward the tobacco industry will change, but for the time being it remains a source of revenue.
Wei Ziqi put away more than a pack a day. He knew it was bad for him, and on several occasions he tried to quit. But the status was far more addictive than the nicotine. Once he told a story about a recent trip to the city. “I had dinner with a number of people I know in Huairou,” he said. “Some of them were government officials, and some were Party members from other villages. I had a pack of Chunghwa cigarettes that had been given to me by a customer. That made me feel good, to have cigarettes like that. There was one man at the table who had Red Pagoda Mountain, and another had State Express 555. But I was the one with the most expensive brand.
“They were all important people,” he continued, smiling at the memory. “You could say that each one had some possible use to me. I’m thinking about installing a solar water heater for the guesthouse, and there’s a government program that pays for things like that in the countryside. One of the men at the dinner deals with that program. So it might be possible for me to install it for free.”
AT HARVEST TIME THE old routines always return. The Party doesn’t hold rural meetings during that season, and farmers like Wei Ziqi put aside their Huairou trips; everything is aimed at bringing in the crops. By far the most important task is gathering walnuts, which ripen so quickly that villagers have to work in groups. That’s the only local harvest whose labor is still communal—a band of eight or nine will work together, starting with one person’s trees and then moving on to the next. The profits stay with each individual owner, but the labor is shared and so are the meals. Each evening, the group eats in the home of the owner of that day’s trees. Over the course of two weeks, they move steadily through the village, by day and by night—orchard to orchard, home to home.
In September of 2005, I joined Wei Ziqi’s crew on the first day they harvested his trees. There were nine other people, mostly close relatives; they had already been working together for a week. We started at seven-thirty in the morning, and by nine o’clock it was already hot. The mid-September sunshine was still strong, filtering through the leaves of the orchard, covering the ground with a quilt of mottled shadows. The trees grew on terraced tracts, bordered by walls of stone, and already a scattering of fresh walnuts had fallen to the forest floor.
There is only one tool for this kind of work: a thin lilac stick, ten feet long and tapered at the end. For smaller trees, a person can stand on the ground and use the pole to reach most branches. The harvest always begins this way: the crew circles a tree, eyes trained upward, beating the branches like children at