6/17/2023 0 Comments Cavorite mars utopia basin![]() ![]() (Realizing the futility of trying to hold back modernity, Han allows smartphones.) The day’s further entertainment included a workshop or two and further talks - everyone is encouraged to keep a journal - before the 80 or so students found their way to single-sex dormitories and shared beds. Such diversions are usually in short supply on the farm: No television is allowed. ![]() Its head was low before - now it’s time to raise it.” The lunchtime festivities, which begin with a dragon dance before seguing into speeches, draw an odd crowd of perhaps 250 students, onlookers and locals, some of whom spent their morning watching a performance of Peking Opera, a popular form of singing from Beijing. Han adds his own flourish: “China is the dragon. My visit in late March coincides with Dragon Head Raising Day on the farm, a lunar festival marking imminent rains and, it’s hoped, a bountiful harvest. But none do so with quite the ideological bent of Righteous Path, which cheerfully fuses Maoist precepts (education through labor!) and study of Confucius with Mao Zedong-thought characteristics, with up-to-date concerns about industrial farming, complete with signs abjuring the use of pesticides. ![]() Others, such as the Phoenix Hills Commune, an organic farm in northwest Beijing, focus on preserving “ancient culture,” something that Han also repeatedly stresses. Parents sued another farm in Hunan after realizing their children were simply being exploited as unpaid labor. In fact, many simply offer a form of indentured servitude, like the “Happy Farm” in Shanghai exposed for selling its pupils’ produce to retirement homes. Some have sought to exploit this, with boot camps purporting to offer errant youths a cure of their appetite for addictive games like World of Warcraft through discipline and hard work. The countryside is still trusted to offer a traditional remedy for modern Chinese woes, from food safety and pollution to crime, overcrowding, and Internet addiction. Similar anxieties concern the direction of China’s youth, who have grown up in relative comfort, not “eating bitterness” like their forebears. (While the shop is still open, Utopia’s website remains blocked.) Although neo-Maoists such as Zhang Honglian have hailed a “golden period” for China’s leftists, there is still much anger among their ranks, and intense infighting as to how exactly they should grasp the nettle. In early 2012, government officials marched into the small bookshop Utopia runs in west Beijing and rebuked its owners for defending Bo Xilai, the revivalist party secretary of the metropolis of Chongqing, now serving a life sentence for corruption, bribery, and abuse of power. Now, full-time volunteers and student dropouts often stay for a year, getting bed, board, and a monthly stipend of just under $100 to spend on what few goods there are to buy in these remote fields.Īmong intellectual circles, Han is infamous as co-founder, with the activist Fan Jinggang, of the now-shuttered Utopia, a hard-left-leaning website whose notoriety came from sailing as far against the political winds as possible without sinking. When Han opened the farm in April 2013, the students were initially from Beihang, but word soon spread to other nearby schools. The experiment is currently sponsored by an initial investment from Maoist sympathizers of roughly $150,000, and staffed by students. Pressed on whether the farm is more of a modern commune - areas where Mao Zedong collectivized Chinese peasants, with disastrous results - Han pauses. On some 30 acres of farmland, lined with plastic greenhouses adjoining a large dormitory-cum-schoolhouse, students learn “not to focus on fame and wealth, not to care about life or death,” says the academy’s soft-spoken, 48-year-old founder Han Deqiang, an economics professor at Beihang University, an aeronautics school in Beijing. The Zhengdao (“Righteous Path”) Farm Academy in Hebei province is only about a half-hour’s bullet ride from Beijing, but feels a world away from the desperately ambitious hype of the capital. Dried husks litter the cornfields, ditches are awash with human garbage, and the nearest town in Dinxing county is an unpaved strip, mostly corrugated storefronts selling agricultural and food supplies.īut amid this unprepossessing rural landscape may be the fertile soil for a different kind of development - a spiritual movement that eschews the materialism many believe is rotting China from within, and celebrates simplicity, hard work, and communal living. The nearest train station, a vast brick that rises alone from the flat and arid land, is almost empty of commuters. BEIJING – It’s not easy finding the Righteous Path.
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