The Heartland

Wang Huning is a member of the Chinese politburo. He is widely considered on of the most powerful theoreticians in China, and works as head of the Chinese Policy Research Office and chairman of the Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization.

In this chapter of America Against America, Wang Huning describes his impressions of the American Heartlands and the tensions which exist between the heartland areas and the richer coastal states.

The Heartland

In your average trip around America, one gets the impression of flourishing cities, rows upon rows of skyscrapers, fast cars, glitzy shopping centers, and diverse crowds. America’s prosperity is mainly embodied in its cities and metropolises, and it would be easy to equate these impressions with all of America. However, the United States is not just its coastal cities. They play an influential role, but they are not the entire country.

The situation in rural towns is far from being comparable to that of urban cities. You can’t get to know the real America without visiting the heartland, or at least you can’t get a holistic view. The backward conditions in the countryside have driven a large number of people to the cities, and the rural population is shrinking. Today, the rural population of the United States accounts for only a few percent of the total population, and more than 90% of the people live in the cities. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that agriculture is mechanized and does not require as much actual labor. At the same time, the influx of people into the cities has made the industrialization of agriculture a necessity. In fact the United States is the world’s largest importer of food.

The heartland comprises the Midwest, the Great Plains, and some Western states. If one takes a plane from the East Coast to the West Coast, it is hard to understand exactly the differences between these vast plains and the coastal metropolitan areas. It is only by living in these places, or at least driving on the highways through their vast plains, that one can feel the difference. They call it having your feet on the ground. I’m afraid it’s hard to understand the American heartland when your head is in the clouds.

In some parts of the East and West coasts, it’s not rare to see large fields with farmhouses dotting the landscape, nor to see cattle and hogs leisurely grazing alongside dusty roads, but this is uncommon. I took the train from New Haven to Philadelphia and saw very little farmland. Whereas I took a car from Iowa City to Illinois and Missouri, as well as a car ride within Ohio, and passed large tracts of farmland.

What is the American heartland? Some depictions can be made here:

• Heartland states generally have vast and boundless farmland, a natural condition that the United States is uniquely blessed with. Large areas of farmland with few hills and rivers except for some slopes. This creates excellent conditions for agricultural mechanization. With terrain like that of Jiangsu and Zhejiang in China, mechanization would be extremely difficult to achieve.1 The farmland looks very fertile with dark mud. A friend told me that he had planted tomatoes behind the house where he lived and that there were too many to eat. The land has only been developed and used for less than two hundred years, so the soil is still    fertile. China’s land has been developed for over two thousand years and most of it has become poor.
  
• The heartland is sparsely populated and its rare to see people driving around, while the houses that can be seen are separated from each other. These houses are very far apart. Usually, the farms are run by single families. The condition of the houses is not bad, but they are not comparable to the cities. The rural areas are very quiet, so many wild animals have made homes there, it’s common for roads to have signs saying “Beware of deer”. Once, on my way to Chicago, I saw three or four deer playing beside the highway.
  
• Heartland states are less economically and culturally developed, and their main centers are small towns and small cities. We passed through about dozens of these small towns, which are generally more run-down. In fact, some of them are just a street with some stores on both sides. Despite this, there was no shortage of major commodities, and everything was available. Such is the power of the commodity economy. Small towns are generally two or three stories tall, old buildings, without the benefit of modern architecture. There are not many houses and the population is sparse. People in these towns are relatively conservative, both culturally and psychologically, and not as enlightened as those in big cities. Rural roads are also not comparable to interstate highways. Most of the rural roads are two lanes in one direction, and the surface is not as smooth as some of the better long-distance roads in China. However, these roads are clearly marked with traffic signs and have clearly defined lines. The roads that branch off from these highways, such as those leading to farmland or farmhouses, are paved with gravel, not tar, making them a dusty place to drive.
  
• There are many dilapidated houses in the heartland, some of which have collapsed and are unmanaged and probably unoccupied. Of many of the houses that are occupied, they do not look very elegant. As people keep moving to the city, many houses in rural areas are in disrepair or abandoned. The young generation usually goes to college in the city, then finds a job in the city after college. When the previous generation passes away, they do not return to their hometowns, but either sell them at a discount or leave them to the elements. The heartland looks shabby, in contrast to the bright lights of the coastal cities. Some places have been completely abandoned, and they have become “ghost towns”.
  
• The countryside offers some sights that are similar to developing countries, such as herds of cattle, horses and pigs in the grasslands. Naturally these herds cannot be compared to the herds on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia.2 Farming in the United States is generally a one-family operation that does not raise much livestock. Farmers use two methods to raise livestock, one is called factory farming, which is usually invisible. The other is called free-range, putting cattle, pigs, sheep and horses in a large enclosure. Sometimes you can feel the stench of manure hitting your nose. This is a very rare experience in the United States.

The standard of living in small towns is not as good as in cities, and the people there often suffer from financial problems. Most of them are not well educated and have difficulty finding good jobs, they also often lack the resources to move to a city. Many farmers can only do  menial work. I went to a fisherman’s house on the Mississippi River in Missouri. He survives by catching fish and selling them from his home for a modest price. The place where he lived was rather shabby, and although there were larger buildings, they had fallen into disrepair for many years. Mr. Y told me he had been to one of the poorest places in America. The people there live in crumbling sheds with little furniture, only a few broken tables and chairs, and there is an unpleasant smell when you entered the house. The people there are depressed and listless. Although I can’t say that such people are the norm in the heartland, they are numerous.

The condition of the heartland is relative to that of the highly prosperous coastal cities, and compared to some developing and underdeveloped countries, rural America is still quite developed. What this comparison tells us is that the urban-rural divide will inevitably exist in any society, but that the divide has different implications for different societies. For American society, where more than 90% of the population is in cities, the countryside hardly constitutes a tension. Although no solution has been found to this problem, which will persist and tend to worsen, the rural problem will not, for the time being and lacking certain conditions, be the cause of any significant disruptions. But for Chinese society, the political and social significance of having more than 80% of the population in the countryside is very different.3

The actual solution in the United States is to draw people out of relatively backward areas and bring them into cities. This process is integrated with the development of productive forces, so as to relieve the tension in rural areas. Really, the problems existing in the countryside have not been resolved. Are there limits to this process? Obviously there are limits. If agricultural production is seriously threatened, then it will become a serious problem. Under the current system, it is difficult to imagine any force or strategy capable of reversing the flow of the population.

The existence of urban-rural differences is inevitable and is something that any society should be aware of. Differences in living standards are bound to create tensions between different populations. This tension may appear sooner or later, but in the process of modernization, this challenge is always encountered. The question is not how much rural areas are developed, but how these conflicts are resolved, and whether the method of resolving these conflicts will produce new conflicts.

1 Jiangsu and Zhejiang are both highly populated, highly developed coastal provinces in eastern China. Zhejiang is known for its hills and mountains, which account for 70% of the topology of the province. Jiangsu is comprised mainly of flat planes, but most of the province is barely above sea level, and subject to flooding and monsoons. Containing perhaps the most developed irrigation system in the world, Jiangsu’s many canals have earned it the nickname shuǐxiāng , or “land of water”.

2 To this day Mongolians are largely nomadic pastoralists, and “Herding Families” collectively own and tend to several hundred heads of livestock at a time. During the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy both the number of pastoralists and the size of their herds have increased substantially

3 The rapid urbanization of China has been a major component of its economic transformation, but it still had a long way to go by 1990. According to their National Bureau of Statistics, only some 26.4% of the population lived in cities by 1990. This meant that out of a population of 1.135 billion, some 295 million lived in cities, while almost 840 million lived in rural areas. Historically, the comparably poorer rural interior of China has presented a constant foil to the highly developed coastal regions, and has provided the tension and manpower necessary for many civil wars throughout Chinese history. One notable example being the Long March undertaken by Mao Tse-tung, the now infamous retreat to China’s isolated northern interior where the Red Army was able to enlist the aid of an alienated and impoverished peasant population to evade Chiang Kai-shek’s military encirclement and replenish their forces.