Visitors at the Red Flag Canal in Linzhou. The canal, still in operation, has also become a tourist attraction.(Source: China Daily)

    BEIJING, Oct. 14 — Dacaiyuan or “Big Vegetable Garden” no longer lives up to its name.

    Once a village of open farmland in Linxian county, Henan province, it has, like many parts of rural China, been transformed in the past three decades into a modern suburb with factories and multi-story housing. Only a few acres of wheat and vegetables at the entrance to the village sit as a reminder of the village’s past.

    Nancy Jervis has been tracking these momentous changes in Linxian county for more than three decades. A New York anthropologist and one of the first American academics to study social and rural life in China, Jervis first visited the village in 1972, and has been coming back since.

    According to Jervis, the relative prosperity of the village today is a result of two things - the accumulation of private wealth brought by the temporary migration of villagers to the cities and the village leadership’s ability to adapt to change.

    Village doctor Shi Cunji, 64, was one of the earliest migrant workers in Central China. In 1980, he left Dacaiyuan and went to the neighboring city of Hanzhong to work in construction.

    ”We were too poor. I earned only a few work points at the clinic,” Shi recalled. In communal days the daily labor of peasants was calculated by work points which became the basis for their cash income at the end of the year, after their ration of grain was deducted.

    The richest villages might be able to pay more than 1 yuan for each work point, while poor villages could only pay 10 fen (1.4 cents). Often the work points a peasant earned was not enough to pay for grain rations.

    ”My family of eight people had only one mu (667 sq m) of land and raised one pig. We earned about 100 yuan ($14.2) a year. There were no other options.”

    Shi worked in Hanzhong, Shaanxi province, the first year, mailing home about 1,000 yuan (143 U.S.dollars).

    The majority of his fellow Dacaiyuan villagers also became migrant workers, building skyscrapers or working in assembly lines at factories. There are about 200 million migrant workers in the cities nationwide today.

    ”The massive migration was possible because of the reform policies after 1978, especially the household responsibility system that took the place of the people’s communes and also the relaxation of the hukou or residency system - both freed farmers from their lands,” Jervis explained.

    Under the household responsibility system, the farming of publicly owned land was entrusted to individual households through long-term contracts.

    Chinese farmers who believed that the harder they worked, the more income they could earn welcomed The introduction of this system in 1978 enthusiastically.

    In the past, the same job earned the same number of work points regardless of how hard they worked.

    Jervis recalled the striking contrast between now and when she first came to the village during her visit in 1972.

    ”There was no tap water. Electricity only ran for an hour a day. People put a portrait of Chairman Mao in the living room,” she said. Today the village is a picture of modern development, with a television and a new refrigerator in living rooms.

    Nationwide, 44.9 percent of the population had been urbanized by 2007; an increase of 30 percent over 1978, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.