Conclusion

Abstract

In the winter of 1983, I went to Wuxi county in southern Jiangsu to participate in a conference on the economic history of Jiangnan during the Ming and Qing times. While there, I also took the opportunity to visit some outlying villages. Then, in the winter of 1994, I returned to this county to attend a conference on Chinese agricultural history and again visited some villages. The changes I saw were so stunning that I could scarcely believe my eyes. On my first visit, the villages had been rather poor. Many families still lived in old dirt and thatch houses, small and uncomfortable. Few families owned a television set. No one had heard of private phones or running water. Bicycles were the principal means of transport, but even so, many families still could not afford to buy one, because the price was too expensive to them. But on my second visit, virtually everyone had moved into two- or three-storey houses, newly built with brick and concrete and well decorated. Moreover, many of the homes, at least from outside, were not very different from an American middle-class home, and inside that was the case with some of them as well. In fact, they had been built to blueprint specifications of American middle-class family homes, though their knowledge of the American middle-class family home was quite superficial. Colour televisions, running water, and washing machines became available in almost every house. Telephones, video machines, gas, motorcycles and stereos were widespread. Even a luxury good most Chinese urban dwellers could only dream of owning — a private car — was for some a reality in these villages.¹