A Cash Crop, a Better Life

Farmers Find Profit Niche In China's Industrial Boom

A latex collection tank makes its morning rounds in Xiaomansan village in southern China, where rubber is now a primary crop. (Photos Peter S. Goodman -- The Washington Post)

XIAOMANSAN VILLAGE, China

Roosters break into a dissonant chorus at dawn as fog clings to the bamboo grove encircling a cluster of wooden houses. Villagers apply fresh logs to fires, boiling water for green tea to summon energy for another day in the fields of southwestern China.

From the pigs occupying pungent earth below the floorboards of a cluster of village homes to the surrounding rice paddies and pineapple fields, this mountainous area in southern Yunnan province is defined by agriculture. Yet one crop now dominates farming and ties this settlement of 216 people to China's industrial boom: Seemingly every family grows rubber trees, feeding China's voracious appetite for factory-made goods. The country's embrace of the automobile has given particular impetus to demand for fresh latex to be processed into tires.

A bucketful at a time, the crop is adding up to big money and beginning to transform villages like this one. It was only this year that the village was linked to the rest of the world by road. The crude dirt track is now used twice a day by modified motorcycles pulling tanks of raw rubber off to be processed. Once a place of subsistence farmers, it is now home to families earning as much as $4,000 a year from rubber, plowing the cash into consumer goods and improvements such as indoor plumbing.

The rubber trade has also spawned a new crop of entrepreneurs in what remains one of China's poorest regions, turning uneducated ethnic minority farmers into capitalists -- a class shunned and persecuted in the name of peasant revolution only a quarter-century ago. People who survived famine now risk planting rubber trees instead of rice in hope of greater reward.

Li Ziqie, 25, remembers the debate inside his household in 1987 as provincial government officials arrived offering a bargain aimed at developing this ethnically Jinuo region: The government would supply roughly two-thirds of the capital needed to buy young rubber trees if the villagers would come up with one-third. The government would deploy experts to show them how to coax latex from the trees and how to turn it into cash.

The area already held nearly a dozen large, state-owned rubber plantations. During the days of the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao forced urbanites to engage in farm labor, Shanghai residents had been sent here to tend to rubber trees.

Like the rest of the country, the ethnic Jinuo clans that dominate this part of Yunnan had already had their lives remade twice by the evolution of Chinese communism. Farming was collectivized in the years following the victory of communist forces in 1949. Market reforms in the 1980s carved the land into household plots, and villagers were allowed to sell their produce in town for cash.

But the advent of rubber farming presented a whole new magnitude of change. Li's family had 44 Chinese "mu" of land, about 6.5 acres. They were accustomed to living on as little as $100 a year, yet they always had enough to eat. Surrendering their land to cash crops amounted to an enormous gamble.

"In our tradition, we rely on our land to feed us," said Li, who was a boy when the first meeting about the rubber project was held here. "We were really suspicious at first. My father wanted us to use just a small portion of our land for a pilot project. Some people said, 'Why plant rubber? You cannot eat these trees.' But eventually, he agreed to devote 30 mu. We were really nervous. If we couldn't grow enough food, what then?"