“Becoming Global”: Yantian Village in Context

Abstract

In 1976, one of the authors walked across the Luohu (Lowu) Bridge that linked Hong Kong to Shenzhen to board a train to Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China.¹ At the time this was the only way for a Westerner to enter China, and the walk revealed a countryside covered in rice paddies with water buffaloes as the main beasts of burden. The rhythm of rural life seemed to have changed little over the centuries, despite the tumultuous upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historically, with its ample rainfall and abundant sunshine, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) was one of the major grain baskets of southern China. On the surface, the PRD looked like a rural idyll but beneath the surface was repression of farmers’ desires and potential. The Maoist polices of economic isolation and suspicion of foreign trade cut the PRD off from the potential that investment and trade from over the border with Hong Kong could bring. Returning in the late nineties, the paddy has been replaced by highways, the water buffaloes by lorries carrying products to the global market, and the land has disappeared under high-rises and factories that are part of a booming export-led economy. You will be lucky to find much more than a sliver of agricultural land!