Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria by Thomas R. Gottschang & Diana Lary

Author:Thomas R. Gottschang & Diana Lary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Migration and Morality

Popular antipathy to migration meant that migrants had to cope with a widely held view that they were doing something unnatural by going away. One critique of migration had this to say about people who left home:

Among people given to migrating, their morality, customs, faith, habits, moral outlook and behaviour are all unstable and change frequently. Migration destroys morality and fosters crime and evil.12

Behind this kind of statement was the assumption that people “adhere” (nianzhuo) to their native place naturally, that they belong to a specific patch of land as much as the land belongs to them. It is a visceral, physical connection, expressed in self-congratulatory sayings about people who have never left home, such as laosi bu quxiang (to grow old and die without leaving home), or antu zhongqian (attached to the soil, one hates to leave it).

Mallory pointed to another fact of life that made it easier for people to remain devoted to their native place —they did not expect much from it. A culture of poverty and hardship had inured people to the harshness of the natural surroundings of north China:

... a cause of the lack of initiative which might induce the residents of the over-crowded, famine-threatened northern provinces to seek better opportunities may be traceable to the effects on the race of former oftrepeated starvation conditions. . . . These northern families . . . have developed habits of thrift and economy until the acquisitive instinct has become second nature, for the wasteful and extravagant have long since been eliminated during the many years of want. These characteristics are the natural counter-part of conservatism, a desire to keep at all costs what has been acquired, and they tend to make abhorrent the thought of leaving home and giving up a plot of land, however meager and inadequate to support a family.13

Mallory’s views may be generalized, but they at least provide cultural background—not for the specific social and economic climates in which the migrants lived, but for the patient endurance of hardship so characteristic of people in North China. Such behavior was not stupid or apathetic, but a willing and dignified acceptance of a heavy burden. To stay home and endure hardship was admirable, to leave was not. Although migration was a routine part of life in much of Shandong, it could not be recognized as proper or admirable.

With these kinds of deep-seated cultural proclivities, migrants could admit to themselves, their families, and their laoxiang only that they were migrating to earn money and that they planned to return as soon as possible, if not in life then in death:

Grim evidence of this very consequential attachment to the ancestral soil may be seen in the slow-moving stream of wooden carts, drawn by horses, mules and oxen in tandem and abreast, southward bound through the Great Wall at Shanhaikwan [Shanhaiguan] from Manchuria, each cart piled high with plain wooden coffins lashed together. These are the remains of the pioneers who have died in the “foreign land” of Manchuria.

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