I wrote a paper entitled " The Way Out of China’s Surplus Rural Workers Straitjacketed by the Hukou System: ‘Gearing to Big Markets’ or ‘Shifting from the Soil without Leaving Home-villages’?" a couple of years ago. Would like to share here with you the last paragraph of the conclusion:
“What’s wrong with millions of Tao Yuan Mins (陶淵明), Kants or Picassos living in a self-supported ecosystem, using more than enough resources than needed for sustaining an intellectual life within cyber world for life-world – “life-world” as a notion in Habermas’ theory, which costs nothing in particular but an Internet accessible PC plus minimum energy consumption. We are circumventing the western model of modernization by leading a modern life that obtains support mainly from the primary and tertiary production, while bypassing the secondary. In other words, we are seeking for a quality life without perfume or junk food with fancy packing, leaving behind exceeding automobiles, trendy fashions, debris from demolished concrete jungles… We can imagine how strong a nation can be with millions of healthy scholars and artists working in the rural area, electronically linked to their counterparts in the urban areas. Birth control is no longer an issue then.”
