By Xu Weiming (许伟明)
Nation, page 12
Issue No. 555, Feb 6, 2012
Translated by Zhu Na
Original Article: [Chinese]
This is one of a series of stories from the EO's Feb 6 edition that focused on changes to the regional way of life.
QUANZHOU, FUJIAN PROVINCE - Anxi (安溪) County is one of China's historic tea-growing areas, but these days it’s hard to spot tea-picking girls there.
Take Longtong village (龙通村) as an example; 18-year-old Xu Meizhi (许美枝), started picking leaves when she dropped out of secondary school, but not long afterwards her father Xu Dongfeng (许东风) sent her to find work in Beijing.
Xu Meizhi only earned 1,500 yuan a month in the capital, but her father was glad to save the money that the family had been spending on her food.
Xu Jinding (许进丁), the local Communist Party boss said that more and more girls are leaving the city. The tea pickers have been moving south to places like Quanzhou, Jinjiang and Xiamen where they get jobs in factories and shops.
For the last couple of years, Xu Meizhi’s parents have been moving out of the village between tea harvests in order to get extra work. That rhythm is now common for their generation.
“Only the elderly and children stay at home,” said the party boss Xu Juding.
But former tea-picking girls like Xu Meizhi aren’t part of the village’s seasonal workforce – the only reason they come home is to mark important occasions with their families, such as Spring Festival.
During harvest seasons, tea plantations in Anxi used to take on large number of girls from neighboring areas, but now it’s hard to find workers there.
One local farmer, Xu Chuancheng (许传诚), who owns a 2 hectare plantation, this year hired 26 women with an average age of over 45, a big change from a few years ago when most were around 20 years old.
“Who wants to pick tea now?” asks Xu Chuancheng’s wife, adding that the work is more tiring that city jobs that pay similar wages.
The last 20 years have been a golden period for tea farmers in Anxi, with rising prices for Tieguanyin (铁观音) tea，a local variety of oolong tea that originated in Anxi. That rise boosted living standards in the area, but now this golden age seems to have passed – prices fell in 2010, with a kilogram of tea selling for only 80 yuan that autumn, compared to 200 yuan in 2009.
Rising costs have also reduced profit margins at tea plantations. These days, tea pickers get paid between 200 and 300 yuan a day, compared to 65 yuan two years ago. Fertilizer has also become more expensive.
“Costs have increased 20 percent,” said local party boss Xu Jinding.
The tea pickers who migrated to factories in southern Fujian were filling a labor shortage there, but their departure created the same problem in the villages that they left.
Xu Jinding puts the difficulty of recruiting tea pickers down to the shortness of the harvest season – only ten days a year – and the lure of rising wages in the city.
The situation in Anxi is typical of tea producers across the country – state news agency Xinhua last spring reported that there were 100,000 unfilled tea picking vacancies in Guizhou Province and that there were similar shortages in Guangxi and Zhejiang.
This translation was edited by Will Bland.
