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By Root 3952 0

agricultural population was still over eight hundred million, and the average rural household consisted of 4.55 people who tended less than an acre of land. This plot, tiny in Western eyes, is adequate to feed a Chinese family and even provide a surplus to sell. With all the migration, land should be consolidated, but migrants have a tendency to cling to farming rights after they’ve left the village. There isn’t any alternative—after all, they can’t sell. They usually lend the plots to relatives or neighbors, who farm with less enthusiasm than if they actually owned the fields. When I moved to Sancha, my house still belonged to the young couple who were now in Huairou. They couldn’t legally sell the building; the best we could do was a long-term lease, and this agreement had no legal status. It came down to guanxi—as long as I had good relations with the Weis, I could trust the contract, but it would never hold up in court. From my perspective, it seemed unfair, but it was even worse for the village. I wasn’t inclined to improve the property, and the young couple would never get the capital from a sale.

In a place like Sancha, real local power is held by the members of the Communist Party. When I came to the village, there were seventeen members, and these cadres made all important decisions. They settled land disputes, handled public funds, and selected the Party Secretary, the highest local official. They controlled Party membership: nobody else could join without their approval. They held meetings on all sorts of subjects—after Mimi and I first moved to Sancha, the local Party members gathered to discuss our presence. I learned about this afterward, when I was told that they were divided on the question of whether we should be allowed to stay. I knew who led the opposition: one of the Party members was the Shitkicker.

But the person with the most clout was the Party Secretary, who was named Liu Xiuying. She was one of the few women who grew up in the village and eventually settled there, instead of marrying out. In the 1970s, after finishing middle school, she left Sancha to continue her education, a rare opportunity at that time; eventually she was trained as a “barefoot doctor.” During the Cultural Revolution, rural health care depended heavily on such people, who served in places too poor and remote to receive regular medical services. Liu Xiuying was assigned back to Sancha, where she married and also farmed. In 1998, she was elected Party Secretary, and three years later she won a second term. There were fewer than a half dozen female Party secretaries in the whole county, and she was the only one in the twenty-three villages that are under the jurisdiction of Bohai Township.

In the abstract, Liu Xiuying’s status was highly unusual, but it was far less surprising in person. She was powerfully built, with broad shoulders and thick callused hands, and she moved with a distinct physical confidence. Chinese women rarely have such a presence—in the city it would be unimaginable. Young urban women are called xiaojie, or “miss,” and nowadays most xiaojie cultivate a distinct physical helplessness. They are great arm-flailers and foot-stampers; they wear impractical clothes and they stagger around on stiletto heels. Everything is designed to attract attention, and in the entire animal kingdom there’s no more striking vision than a xiaojie running to catch a cab. It’s like the mating dance of a peacock: plumage everywhere, a stunning profligacy of flash and color, so much movement combined with so little obvious purpose.

But the Sancha Party Secretary belongs to a completely different world. When she moves, things get done, and they get done fast. She performs the same farm labor as local men, and she works with them on village road construction crews. During breaks, if they drink baijiu and play cards, she does the same. She is in her late forties, with black hair cropped short; her handsome face ends abruptly in a square jaw. She is not a tall woman but she holds her head high. She has a gruff, booming voice—from my