Sam Han | Eportfolio

Reuters/Nir Elias

A farmer from the Zhuang ethnic minority works at his rice terrace near Pingan Village in Longsheng in southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang

PINGWEN VILLAGE, Guangxi province — As I walked into the living room of the farmer’s new house, I noticed that the floor was still wet from a recent mopping — and I was tracking in dirt from the village outside. I was mortified. Then I learned that the farmer had only mopped the floor because she had been warned moments earlier that a visiting delegation of American journalists might be visiting her home. Even worse — now I was embarrassed both for making her speed-clean the house and for messing it up.

Xu Huayan, a member of China’s Zhuang minority, did not appear to mind, however. She looked just as energized by the culture shock as we were. Americans do not visit Pingwen very often — if ever, a fact partially attested to by the Chinese journalist who was filming us for a local TV broadcast. Xu quickly urged us to sit and seemed to enjoy the semi-random questions we threw at her: What crops do you grow? What programs do you watch on your TV? What do you use the Internet for?

(Answers: Tomatoes, weather forecasts, and information about agricultural production.)

She grew most animated when asked if she worked in the fields herself. “Of course,” she exclaimed, pointing at her dark brown skin. “See my sun tan!?”

There is no doubting the reality of hard peasant labor in the village of Pingwen in Guangxi province. One of the new houses we inspected had been built around an older structure, a kitchen and shed where at least a dozen hoes and shovels leaned against one wall. Xu Huayan’s open air basement was piled high with sacks of seed. In the fields stretching away from the village, peasants working mostly with hand tools toiled under a mildly hot sun.

And at the same time, there is also little doubt that the standard of living for Pingwen’s farmers has risen dramatically in recent years — to the point of inspiring perhaps even more amazement than the rapid growth of China’s cities. One farmer boasted a much nicer TV than I do, and graciously invited a member of our delegation to check her e-mail on his computer. (The connection was fast, she reported.) Meanwhile, in the meeting room where we met with the village’s leader, Mr. Tang, where portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Deng Xiaoping brooded unsmilingly over us, we were told that the average per capita income of the village’s residents was only about $700 U.S. per year. Even if it is true that incomes have been growing in recent years at an annual rate of 10 percent, it was hard to see how that added up to a consumer lifestyle that would not be frowned upon in California.

More on the emergent Chinese consumer society. It’s like watching America in the 1950’s. Fascinating.