In Spring Grass, when the protagonist migrates to the city and starts working at the department store selling her wares, her incomparable enthusiasm and work ethic breathes a new life into the store. When the time comes for the election of an “Outstanding Worker” however, her rural background prompts the employees to rethink nominating her for the award. This hesitancy, because of and prejudice against her rural origins, is merely a small projection of a greater wound of the Chinese society: the systematic discrimination between the rural and urban citizens. The divide between the urban and rural population is not unique to Chinese society either. In Turkish society, there also exists a historic divide, albeit significantly milder. This division may be classified as an inevitable side effect of the rapid modernization of the nations. However, this brings a question into mind: Is the rural/urban divide in a modernizing society inevitable?
One striking similarity between the Turkish and Chinese societies is the presence and the role the rural population and culture played in the formation of the nation-state. In both cases, the main force of the movement came from the masses of the rural regions. In the Chinese Communist Revolution, after the communist party’s retreat, they decided to embrace and lead the peasant movement that was already brewing in the countryside (Wikipedia). Mao Zedong in one of his reports mentions that the peasants are a mighty storm that’s rising and “every revolutionary party and revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide” as an emphasis to the power the peasants would wield (Mao 1927).
In the Turkish Independence War, it was also the rural people that were galvanized to fight for the nation. They were the foundation of the independence efforts and it draws some parallel to Mao’s incorporation of the rising revolutionary sentiments of the peasants. However, the similarities end at that point. After the revolution succeeded, Mao’s policies took a turn to significantly favour the city dwellers over the farmers. It was not the general public who discriminated against the rural people, but the state and the legal institutions (Gong 2009, 32). The embracement of the Soviet socialist model can be seen as the root of this change. As the Marxist ideology hopes to achieve the ultimate welfare society to transcend exploitation, the rural life was seen as a remnant of the old primitive and feudal societal ages. It was not something to be strengthened but to be eventually gotten rid of (Kurt 2014). And the Soviet socialist structure embodied this ideal. So, by implementing the Soviet model in China, Mao turned his back on the peasants. Thus, the urbanites, in the eyes of the state laws and policies, were “favoured […] as the ‘superior’ breed” (Gong 2009, 51). In a way, he became a class traitor to the farmers, the majority of the nation’s populace.
On the other hand, in the wake of the Turkish Independence War, the country was in need of a national identity to embrace the people after centuries under the highly heterogeneous, multicultural, and segregated Ottoman rule. The culture in the cities was highly influenced by many foreign factors and did not represent the majority of the population that was made up of villagers. So, the search for the Turkish national identity was directed towards the rural life where the cultures were unaffected by outside influences and were thought to represent the core of the Turkish identity. This search for a national identity influenced many writers and artists in the early years of the Republic. A new movement of rural romanticism took hold in the literary circles. Papers, novels, articles were being published, praising and exemplifying the rural life and the peasant as the hero of the Turkish national epic. To a certain degree, it was true. However, for the most part, penned by people who have never experienced rural life, the romanticisation was far from the reality. The Turkish example glorified the rural life and praised its culture, whereas the Chinese culture put them down as something inferior to the life of the city and discriminates against them. Even though the reactions were different, both cultures end up ignoring the realities of the rural life
One of the primary reasons for the divide as mentioned in the Turkish case was the difference in the levels of education and economic power between the urban and rural populations, a difference reflected likewise in the Chinese society. In China, the educational and economic divide was a direct result of the state investment policy. Investment in the heavy industry was thought to be the best way forward for a strong national economy as influenced by the Soviet model. 88 per cent of the investment went towards the heavy industry whereas only 7.1 was invested in agriculture (Gong 2009, 39). Since the industry was being developed in the cities, this led to a major gap in the money flowing into the urban and rural regions. The poor rural regions were not getting the funding and resources they needed to get out of poverty and catch up with the cities. Moreover, not only were they not receiving any investment, but they were also getting squeezed dry of what they had to propel urban development. From this, the trickle-down approach to public funding becomes evident as the urban projects were heavily prioritised against the rural development (Brock 2009). And with how trickle-down economics does not work in reality, the funding scheme followed by the government only led to increasing the divide between the urban and the rural regions.
The Turkish example followed the opposite approach to the Chinese by making the rural regions its priority in investment. Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, says, “Peasants are the masters of the people,” emphasising their importance on the national scale. Aware of the exaggerated divide between the rural and urban regions, the modernisation and mechanisation of agriculture took precedence over the establishment of heavy industry. Through the investments into agriculture, in a few decades time, there was a rich farmer population forming and the nation was becoming self-sustaining on its own produce. Some of the current major cities in Turkey sprouted at this time around the rural regions where these newly financially elevated farmers lived.
Having a wealthier farmer population was seen as the foundations of a stable and prosperous nation. But even more important than agriculture was the education of the people. Historically education in the Ottoman era was limited to state officials and people from the high society of the capital region. This created a stark difference not only in the educational and intellectual levels but also in the language in a way that was one step more extreme than the misunderstandings between Rivers and Spring Grass in the novel. Getting rid of the illiteracy of the population and this barrier between the people could only be achieved by investing in the education of the rural regions.
Towards the mid-20th century, educational complexes called Köy Enstitüleri (Village Institutes) were being opened across rural Turkey. A Village Institute was a school specifically for the rural children with the goal of raising and educating teachers who in turn would go back to their hometowns to teach, educating the rural populace. Rural children would go to these boarding schools and learn modern agriculture practices, maths, sciences, literature, music, and many modern skills practical for the village life— very much like a liberal arts education focused on raising rural teachers. This was the epitome of the rural education that was changing and modernising the very fabric of the Turkish society out of the dark, illiterate, and bigoted past. However, with the onset of multi-party democracy, the schools were accused of being “communist nests” in a politically charged climate and were shut down. With the closing of their doors, the dream of a modern educated rural population was also shut down. Later governments choose to mainly invest in the cities and the rural population was left further and further behind in terms of resources and education.
Unlike the Turkish example where rural education became a political tool in a clash of democracy and was lost, the Chinese policies of rural education were more stable albeit much more discriminatory. Even though great progress has been made to combat illiteracy in China, further education practices remained highly segregated. The rural children were not allowed to join even the compulsory education program of the urban schools even if they lived in the city with their parents (Jiang 25). They were barred of their most basic right to education on the basis of their origin. However, it can be seen that education was of paramount importance for urban and rural people from how much Spring Grass constantly bases her self-worth and insecurities on her lack of education. Even beyond the urban sphere, the funding of the rural schools has been inadequate at best. Since the 1980s the public education was designated as a provincial responsibility rather than a national one (Brock 2009), meaning the local tax revenues would be used to invest in local institutions, disenfranchising the rural children from a good education. For higher education only 5% of rural graduates get accepted to universities compared to 70% of urban students, further widening the gap. The odds being stacked against the rural people’s education formed a vicious cycle where only under 60% of the rural parents wish for their children to pursue higher education compared to 95% among urban parents (Yang 2019). This difference in educational attainments fuelled by state policies is the driving force behind the cultural divisions at large, and most of the rural stereotypes seem to be based on a question of character and education. In prioritising and even defining the Chinese national identity through the urban people and discriminating in their favour, the rural population has lost what little footing they had before. It becomes apparent that both the Chinese and Turkish rural population have played sacrificial roles in an ideological clash of their nation’s politics.
Ultimately, even though the urban/rural divide in both nations at first glance seems to be a side effect of their rapid modernisation and industrialisation, when looked deeper it clearly stems from the policy choices of the states. If the initial sentiments of the Turkish model towards economic and educational investment towards the rural regions were to be preserved, a more stable and equitable society could have been achieved alongside the urbanisation of the nation. And the initial and continued discrimination against the rural people by the Chinese state simply leaves no room for bridging the divide, and the longer it remains unaddressed the harder it will be to patch up in the future. So, the answer to the question remains that the inevitability of the urban/rural divide exists so far as the state wills it into existence through its policies.
Works Cited
Brock, Andy. Moving mountains stone by stone: Reforming rural education in China, International Journal of Educational Development, Volume 29, Issue 5, 2009, Pages 454-462, ISSN 0738-0593, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2009.04.015. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738059309000443)
Gong, Renren. “The historical causes of China’s dual social structure.” Confronting Discrimination and Inequality in China, edited by Erroi P. Mendes and Sakunthala Srighanthan, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009, pp. 30-69. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ckpdk1.8
Jiang, Wenran. “Prosperity at the Expense of Equality: Migrant Workers Are Falling Behind in Urban China’s Rise.” Confronting Discrimination and Inequality in China: Chinese and Canadian Perspectives, edited by Erroi P. Mendes and Sakunthala Srighanthan, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009, pp. 16–29. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ckpdk1.7
Kurt, H . “Türkiye’de Kent-Köy Ve Kentli-Köylü Algısı Üzerine Bir Araştırma” . Mustafa Kemal Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 3 (2014 ): https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/mkusbed/issue/19568/208591
Zedong, Mao. “Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan.” Mar. 1927, http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/china/mao_peasant.pdf
Yang, Wensupu. “China’s Rural Education Challenge.” Chinafocus, UCSD, 4 Feb. 2019, chinafocus.ucsd.edu/2019/02/04/chinas-rural-education-challenge/.
Wikipedia. “Chinese Communist Revolution”, Wikipedia Foundation, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution