Example essays · China

China

Two example essays on the novel, each modelled on one kind of final-year task set in China.

About these essays. They are example essays written for this site, in the voices of imagined students; they are not the work of real pupils. They discuss the whole novel, including the ending, so each one stays hidden until you say you have finished the book. Every quotation is checked against the paperback, and page numbers refer to it.

The first essay imitates an extended critical essay of the kind written for Cambridge International A Level Literature in English (9695) at international schools in mainland China: a single argued response to a teacher-set question, usually of 2,000 to 3,000 words, in continuous prose with page-referenced quotation and a short bibliography. The second imitates a research-based learning report (yanjiuxing xuexi, 研究性学习), the inquiry project that forms part of the integrated practical activities course in Chinese senior high schools; it follows the usual report headings (background, question, method, findings, analysis, reflections, references) and is written here in English, as some schools allow for an English-language extension project. Both students and both schools are fictional.

Example essay 1

“I am old, not a ledger”: Proverb and Number in Songs of Dust and Water

Written as: An imagined student aged 17, an international school in Pudong, Shanghai
Format: Cambridge International A Level Literature in English (9695), extended critical essay (coursework-style, school-assessed)
Task: “‘I am old, not a ledger’: how does the novel set proverbial wisdom against numerical evidence?”
Length: 2,996 words, not counting headings and references

Hidden until you have read the whole book, including the vote and the ending.

My grandfather kept the accounts of a textile factory in Wuxi for thirty-one years, and he could hardly finish a sentence without either a number or a chengyu. When I complained about maths homework he said shu neng sheng qiao (熟能生巧), practice makes skill. When I asked what our flat had cost, he told me to the last yuan. For a long time I thought these were two separate parts of him, an old-fashioned part and a practical part. I thought of him often while reading M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water, because the novel is full of people who speak mainly in one of these two languages and who seem, at first, to stand on opposite sides. In Part Two the young technician Hassan brings a quarrel about money to Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper of Nafawol, and she answers him with a saying about a baobab. He protests: “That is a proverb, Grandma. I need a number” (p. 178). Her reply gives this essay its title: “I am old, not a ledger. Go and ask Fatou” (p. 178).

It would be easy to read the novel as a contest in which the old, local proverb defeats the cold, foreign number, since Part One ends with the engineer’s figures in ashes. I will argue that the novel is more careful than that. Proverbs and numbers are both forms of authority, and either can be captured by whoever holds it. What the novel really tests is whether a saying or a figure can be checked and challenged in public by the people it concerns. In Madina the numbers cannot be challenged and the proverbs cannot change anything. In Nafawol the two languages learn to correct each other, and Kadiatou’s “not a ledger” turns out to be a modest and accurate statement of what a proverb can do, and what it cannot.

Adam Sterling’s first words of authority are figures. Presenting his plant to the Ministry in Bakoro he tells the officials that “The metrics are on page four” (p. 7), and when Minister Khresay asks what his plan is for the people of Madina, he answers, “The numbers speak for themselves” (p. 8). The phrase gives him away, because in this novel numbers never speak for themselves; someone always speaks for them. Khresay replies in the other language. He warns that “glass breaks” (p. 6) and that “a man who does not help build the granary will never fight to defend it” (p. 8). Both sayings come true. Yet it is worth noticing how little they achieve. Khresay signs the letter of intent anyway, and four chapters later, when Aisha telephones him for help, he can only say, “I have no hand on it now” (p. 44). His wisdom is correct and powerless. Minister Dunia sees this and uses it. “Minister Khresay is a man of tradition. He likes proverbs,” she tells Adam, and then, “I deal in outcomes” (p. 39). Dunia claims the language of results while her brother’s bank drains the plant’s money. From Part One, then, the reader cannot line up the proverb with honesty and the number with deceit, or the other way round.

The clearest example is the pre-filter trial. When Aisha proves with a dish of grey paste that the dust will choke his filters, Adam proposes a fair test: her box of sisal and charcoal on one intake, nothing on another, a week side by side. “Let the numbers settle it” (p. 26). And the numbers do settle it: the protected intake runs cooler and its pressure line is “as flat as a ruler” (p. 31). Adam nevertheless tells Talib that the result was “inconclusive” (p. 31), and the box goes into the scrap store. The pattern repeats when Talib brings him the portal records that link the fake parts to Yusuf Dunia’s bank. Talib has learned Adam’s own creed and turns it back on him: “This is the data.” Adam answers, “This is noise” (p. 51). What the novel distrusts is a man who owns the screen on which the data appears.

It is Khresay who names this most precisely, after the fire, when Adam arrives at his house with a flash drive of proof: “Evidence is a goat. It goes where the man holding the rope leads it” (p. 66). When I read this I thought immediately of zhi lu wei ma (指鹿为马), “pointing at a deer and calling it a horse”. In the story recorded by Sima Qian, the minister Zhao Gao presents a deer to the young Qin emperor and calls it a horse, then watches which officials agree with him and which dare to say “deer”. Everyone in the room knew what the animal was. What mattered was who could punish them. The Madina inquiry is a quieter version of the same scene. Adam realises that “none of the facts they read out were false. They had simply started the story where it suited them” (p. 63). A fact, like a goat, has no will of its own. What interests me is that the best analysis of numbers in Part One is a proverb. Khresay’s goat explains the inquiry better than any of Adam’s charts. Proverbs in Part One are good at describing power and bad at resisting it.

The griot Balla offers a way between the two languages. Of the fall of Wagadu he says that the histories blame drought and the grandmothers blame a broken promise, and that “Both are the same sentence, told by different people” (p. 66). Drought is something a scientist could measure; a broken promise is something a grandmother remembers. Balla does not choose between them, and his sentence prepares the reader for Part Two, where the two languages begin to work together.

The first surprise of Part Two is that the keeper of proverbs demands evidence. When Adam and Dr Arramata describe their water harvester under the baobab and the alkalo asks for her counsel, Kadiatou answers, “Words are wind, Tubab,” and then, “Show us what it does now” (p. 91). Her proverb is an argument for testing. It reminded me of the line in the Analects that we copied out in junior school, qiao yan ling se, xian yi ren (巧言令色，鲜矣仁): clever words and a pleasing face are seldom found with true goodness. Confucius and Kadiatou share a suspicion of fine speech, and Kadiatou goes further, because she asks for a demonstration, which Dr Arramata agrees to run in the heat of the day, when the air gives least. The test ends with two kinds of proof together. Dr Arramata’s testing pen gives a reading, “No salt” (p. 98), and Kadiatou raises the glass, says Bismillah and tastes it. Neither proof replaces the other. After the ñan-kale over the salt ground, the farmer Ousman uses a sentence shaped like a proverb to fix a boundary no measurement could: “The water is yours. The soil is ours. Do not confuse them” (p. 107).

Mamadou, the senior elder, is the character in whom the two languages are hardest to separate. His sayings almost all concern cattle, and when I listed them I found that every one was a calculation. When Fatou reads out the clause that keeps a second key in Proxima’s hands for a decade, he says, “In ten years a heifer is a grandmother” (p. 101). This is a measurement of time in generations of cows, and it makes exactly the point Adam himself had made at his review desk: “Ten years is also long enough for a village to forget it was ever meant to own the thing” (p. 83). The engineer and the herder reach the same conclusion in different languages. When Dr Arramata explains that carbon buyers will pay only for new growth, Mamadou replies, “So the cow in my yard is worth nothing to them,” and then, “Only the calf she has not dropped” (p. 127). My economics teacher spent a whole lesson on additionality and did not explain it so well. Of a commercial loan he says, “And while the mill pays, the debt has calves” (p. 141), which is interest, and of his father, “My father kept his wealth on four legs, where he could see it” (p. 144), which is a principle about visibility that the whole Coffer Fund is built on. He checks his grandson’s motorbike sums on his fingers, “as he had once counted cattle past a gatepost” (p. 130). Mamadou’s proverbs are numbers counted in cattle, which is why they are easy to remember.

This makes his most important decision more moving. When the lawyer drafts the rule that no large sum may leave the fund without three signatures from three households, Mamadou insists that it must bind him “Especially” (p. 129), and explains why: “I want the rule to say no to him, so that I do not have to” (p. 129). The man who speaks most in proverbs asks for the strictest number. He knows that sayings can be bent by love and a sad face, and that a fixed figure cannot. The test comes when his grandson Lamin splits stolen payments into nine sums, each just under the limit, and it is a schoolgirl, Mariam, chalking the figures on a foundation stone, who sees the pattern. Mamadou argues for the boy at first, and then gives way: “Write it. His name, and the sum, and what it bought. Then write mine under it, as the one who asked for the rule” (p. 169). The proverb gives the reason for the rule; the number holds the rule when the old man himself cannot.

What makes numbers trustworthy in Nafawol when they were not in Madina? The answer is the ledger on the wall. The portal in Madina was a closed system that belonged to the Ministry, and its records reached Adam only because Talib went looking in its back rooms. Fatou’s ledger is posted in the square every Friday, and anyone may read it, argue with it or add to it. The women’s leader Isatou uses it to make unpaid labour visible. She reads out the millet, oil and hours the women have spent feeding the road crews and says, “Write it in your ledger” (p. 113), and when Fatou does the sum, “the sum was not small” (p. 113). The bank inspector who examines the Fund finds two errors and gives a rule that could be a proverb in its own right: “If you let it be two when it is convenient, it will be two when it is not” (p. 138). Here a number is spoken in the shape of a saying. And when Hassan’s honest entry of two disagreeing invoices forces Fatou to confront a supplier who had been at her daughter’s wedding, she tells Kadiatou afterwards, “The ledger doesn’t care who your friends are,” and then, more quietly, “I didn’t think it would be me who needed it” (p. 143). The ledger is the opposite of Khresay’s goat. Whoever holds the rope, the figure is already on the wall.

The chapter “Six and Four” is where the novel stages the question most directly. The Union has a surplus, and two villages want it for opposite purposes: Kumbawol for water channels and a seed store, Talawol for training its own mechanics. Hassan, the academy’s best student, produces “phased splits and allocation formulas,” and “Nobody took up any of them” (p. 176). Fatou settles it at her scales before dawn: six parts to the fields, four to the workshops. When Hassan asks why six, she says, “At five, Yaya walks out. At seven, Aminatu does. At six they both shout and they both stay.” He objects, “That isn’t a formula,” and she answers, “What did you think a council was?” (p. 178).

This exchange reminded me of the chengyu zhao san mu si (朝三暮四), “three in the morning, four in the evening”, from the Zhuangzi. A keeper of monkeys tells them they will have three nuts in the morning and four in the evening, and they are furious; he offers four in the morning and three in the evening, and they are delighted. The total is seven either way. Today the phrase means fickleness, but it began as a story about a number used to manage those who cannot see the whole sum. Fatou’s six and four looks at first like the same trick, a number chosen for its effect on feelings. The difference is that she says so openly. She does not pretend her number is science. Hassan, lying awake after the first day of argument, had seen the real danger of the expert’s number: “And when I am wrong, I am wrong in the same voice as when I am right” (p. 177). That was Adam’s voice in Madina. Fatou’s number admits that it is a bargain, and so it can be argued with. She is equally honest about what it does not solve. When Hassan points out that a mill fitter still earns three times what a farmer earns, she says only, “That’s another price” (p. 179).

The novel does not let the number become a hero, however. Before the council rises, Isatou asks “where, in six and four, the cooking fires fell” (p. 179), and her question is put off twice until the women stop cooking and the delegates of twelve villages sit hungry. A figure can leave people out as easily as a proverb. The Analects has a phrase I think fits this chapter well: junzi he er bu tong (君子和而不同), which I would translate roughly as “the gentleman seeks harmony, not sameness”. Six and four is a harmony in which Yaya and Aminatu still disagree. As the narrator says, “No one got everything they had asked for. Yaya said so, loudly, and voted for it anyway” (p. 179). The number gives the argument a place to continue.

Now Kadiatou’s answer to Hassan can be read properly. Her proverb, “A baobab does not ask whether roots matter more than branches” (p. 178), states a principle, that the fields and the workshops feed each other, but it cannot say how much each should have. She knows this, and says so. “I am old, not a ledger” is a statement of the limits of her own language, and it sends Hassan to the person whose language can finish the job. Kadiatou also changes her proverbs when they prove wrong. When Alkalo Musa of Sirawol asks for a written charter between the villages, she refuses: “Neighbours do not need paper” (p. 156). After the inspector seals Sirawol’s mill, she admits her mistake with a new saying, “A rope of four strands is not four ropes” (p. 165), and the narrator adds, “Fatou was already writing” (p. 165). Here the proverb argues for paper. In the last chapter, when the Union has thirty-one villages and its council sits in a lecture theatre, we are told, “She had not yet found the proverb for thirty-one” (p. 226). Proverbs, it seems, have a natural size. They belong to a circle where people know each other’s faces.

The last pair I want to consider is the tape and the rope. During the years when the harvester gives only seventy per cent of its design yield, “every Friday Dr Arramata lowered a tape into the borehole and wrote the depth beside the curve” (p. 125), and in the bad year after the vote, “Every Friday the figure was lower” (p. 205). Kadiatou has her own instrument. On the first day of the demonstration she thinks, “The rope knows me” (p. 96), and after the channel fills in Year 10 she notices that “the rope was a little heavier in her hands” (p. 211). She tastes the water, finds it “still bitter” (p. 211), and keeps the knowledge to herself. The two measurements belong to different worlds: the tape’s figure goes on the public wall and decides how long the taps run, while the rope’s knowledge stays private: for five years she has “told nobody” (p. 232). Yet they measure the same water and arrive at the same answer. When the bucket finally comes up “heavy, cold and clear”, the novel gives a judgement in one short sentence: “It was right” (p. 232). A scientist or a grandmother could say it. It matters, too, that Dr Arramata, before the vote, writes her figures out twice and keeps the second copy for the Water-Keeper; that page is “Kadiatou’s” (p. 192). Fatou, reading her own copy, “did not like the number, and she could find nothing wrong with it” (p. 192). That is what a public number is for: people who dislike it still have to accept it, because they can check it.

The coda returns to Wagadu and ends: “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (p. 233). This sentence is a proverb, but it is also a piece of arithmetic. One pair of hands is a single signature like Mustapha’s in Madina, a single screen like Adam’s, a single key. Against it the novel sets the rule of three names, the twenty-four stones counted in front of everyone, and the ledger that anyone may read. In the end, then, the line the novel draws runs between the private and the public, and a proverb or a number can fall on either side of it. Khresay’s goat and Adam’s dashboard both fail because only one man holds the rope, and Mamadou’s cattle and Fatou’s six succeed because everyone can see the herd.

When I told my grandfather about this essay he said yin shui si yuan (饮水思源), “when you drink water, think of its source”, and then, without stopping, asked how many words it had to be. I now think his chengyu and his columns of figures were one habit of mind, two ways of remembering what is owed and to whom. Kadiatou says she is not a ledger, but she spends the whole of Part Two making sure there is one, and making sure it is on the wall.

Bibliography

Confucius. The Analects (Lunyu). Passages quoted from the Chinese text (1.3 and 13.23); translations are my own.

Hydara, M.J. Songs of Dust and Water. 2026. Paperback, ISBN 9798162251088.

Sima Qian. Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), “Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin” (source of the story of Zhao Gao and the deer).

Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi, chapter 2, “Qiwulun” (source of the story of the monkey keeper, zhao san mu si).

Example essay 2

Stone Lines and Sealed Wells: What the Loess Plateau, Minqin and Nafawol Can Learn from Each Other

Written as: An imagined student aged 17, a public senior high school, Lanzhou, Gansu
Format: Research-based learning (yanjiuxing xuexi, 研究性学习), Senior Two, integrated practical activities course; English-language report
Task: “What can the Loess Plateau and Minqin learn from Nafawol, and what can Nafawol learn from them?”
Length: 2,953 words, not counting headings and references

Hidden until you have read the whole book, including the vote and the ending.

1. Background

I live in Lanzhou, where the Yellow River runs through the middle of the city. In summer the river is the colour of milky tea, and our geography teacher told us in Senior One that this colour is the Loess Plateau, washed downstream. My grandparents come from Minqin county, about three hundred and fifty kilometres north of here, between the Badain Jaran and Tengger deserts. They moved to Lanzhou when I was a baby, and my grandmother still says that in her village you could tell how bad a year was by how many metres more pipe a family needed for its well.

This term our English teacher allowed one research-based learning project to be written in English on a novel. I chose Songs of Dust and Water by M.J. Hydara (2026), because its second part, “The Water-Keeper”, is about a village called Nafawol on a dry floodplain in a fictional West African country, the Republic of Tekuru. The village’s only well is turning bitter, and over fifteen years the people rebuild their water, soil and trees. While reading it I kept thinking of Minqin and the Loess Plateau, except that here a village was doing the work instead of a government. That thought became my question.

2. Research question

What can China’s two famous dryland stories, the Loess Plateau rehabilitation and the struggle over groundwater in Minqin, learn from the fictional village of Nafawol, and what could Nafawol learn from them?

I also set myself a second, smaller question, because my supervising teacher asked it at the proposal stage: in each case, who actually did the work, the state or the village? I wanted to answer this honestly.

3. Method

I read the novel twice and made a table of every action taken on water, soil and trees in Part Two, noting who decided it, who paid for it and who did the labour. Page numbers refer to the paperback.
I read publicly available sources on the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project (World Bank, 2007), the Grain for Green programme (tuigeng huanlin, 退耕还林) (Uchida, Xu and Rozelle, 2005; Bennett, 2008) and Minqin (Yuan, 2019).
I read the chapter on the “differential mode of association” in Fei Xiaotong’s From the Soil (Xiangtu Zhongguo, 1947), in the Chinese original with the English translation by Hamilton and Wang beside it for a way to think about village relationships.
I talked to my grandmother about Minqin. This is one person’s memory and I treat it only as background.

A limitation must be stated at the beginning: Nafawol is fiction and cannot prove that anything works. I use it as a thought experiment for asking questions about real places.

4. Findings

4.1 Nafawol in the novel

Nafawol’s problem is that the old river has left the floodplain and the well has become salty. The engineer Dr Arramata, who was born in the village, brings a machine that takes water from the air, and a borehole to the deep water. From the start she treats the machine as a way of saving groundwater: “Every litre this makes is one we leave in the deep water” (p. 103). If the land does not recover, she warns, “we’ll have built a very expensive way to lose slowly” (p. 103). She refuses to remove the salt by desalination, partly because the deep water it would use “is the water your grandchildren should drink” (p. 90).

The machine only ever reaches about seventy per cent of its design yield, so the borehole makes up the rest. This is measured openly: “every Friday Dr Arramata lowered a tape into the borehole and wrote the depth beside the curve” (p. 125), on a public wall. In a bad year they ration water: “They opened the taps for two hours after dawn and two before dark” (p. 205), and Isatou, the head of the women’s association, sits between the taps with an exercise book, checking each household’s buckets.

The long-term work is on the land. Every dry season, crews build “low stone lines across the dead beds, knee-high, curved against the slope” (p. 126) and dig half-moon pits filled with manure. Dr Arramata says the channels may run again in ten years “if they were lucky, and fifteen if they were not” (p. 126). The old men say their grandfathers built the same lines and never lived to see them pay, and when a boy asks why they built them, one answers, “For us” (p. 126). This is our saying qianren zai shu, houren cheng liang (前人栽树，后人乘凉): one generation plants trees so the next can sit in the shade. Before the first stones go in, the elder Mamadou takes kola to the herders, because “Their cattle had walked those dead beds since before the river left, and nobody had asked them about stones” (p. 126). He goes three times before they agree.

Trees are planted around the village, and the “old stumps, no longer cut back for firewood, had sprouted again” (p. 126). Families plant fruit trees between the rows, “claiming pieces of the green belt for their children to inherit” (p. 126). Later the village sells carbon credits, but only for new growth: “Only what grows from here is paid for” (p. 127).

In Year 10 the rains fill an old channel, and the water stays long enough to sink in: “It stood for twelve” days (p. 211). Five years later “the borehole’s line on the wall had stopped going down” (p. 225), and the Water-Keeper’s bucket strikes “water, clean and deep” (p. 232).

The money comes partly from a foreign fund, Proxima, for ten years, and partly from the village’s own cotton and mill, through a common fund with public rules. The state appears mostly at the edges. A clerk stamped the water permit (p. 134). The Minister of Rural Development tries to take control of the fund and is blocked by the banking regulator. Later the Republic authorises the carbon credits and “asked for nothing but the tax” (p. 175), and it reopens a railway, charging a levy that the trader Fatou pays each month and “called the rent” (p. 226).

4.2 The Loess Plateau

The Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project was supported by the World Bank in two phases, the first from 1994 and the second from 1999, in parts of Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu and Inner Mongolia. According to the World Bank’s own summary (2007), the main methods were terracing slopes, banning grazing on the steep land so that grass and shrubs could return, replanting, building small dams to hold water and silt, and training farmers. The World Bank reports that more than 2.5 million people were lifted out of poverty, that perennial vegetation cover roughly doubled, from 17 to 34 per cent, and that the sediment flowing into the Yellow River fell by more than 100 million tonnes a year. The same summary names the consultation and participation of local people as one of the reasons for success.

4.3 Grain for Green

Grain for Green began as a pilot in 1999 in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu and was extended nationally from 2002. Farmers were paid in grain and cash to stop cultivating steep slopes, generally those over 25 degrees, and to plant trees or grass instead. The payments lasted for a fixed number of years. Researchers have asked what happens when the payments stop, and whether farmers will return to cropping if they do not earn enough from the new land (Uchida, Xu and Rozelle, 2005). Bennett (2008) asks whether the programme was really a new kind of institution or mostly the old way of governing through local officials. One case study I read (Watershed Markets, n.d.) notes that participation was officially voluntary, but in practice local governments often enrolled whole villages at once.

4.4 Minqin

Minqin depends almost entirely on the Shiyang River. Rainfall is only about 110 millimetres a year, while evaporation is more than 2,300 millimetres (Yuan, 2019). As less water came down the river, farmers drilled deeper wells, and by 2005 the water table had fallen below 20 metres. Qingtu Lake, at the end of the river, had dried up completely in 1959. In the 2000s officials used the slogan that Minqin must not become another Lop Nur, the lake in Xinjiang that disappeared. The government closed thousands of private wells in 2006, limited farm sizes, set water quotas per mu, and from 2007 sent more water from the upper Shiyang River and from the Yellow River basin. Qingtu Lake reappeared in 2010, and the water table stopped falling in 2011 (Yuan, 2019). The same article reports that wells in one village were sealed when a production team did not pay its groundwater fees, and that the county lost more than ten per cent of its population between 2000 and 2010. My grandparents are part of that figure.

5. Analysis

5.1 What the Loess Plateau and Minqin can learn from Nafawol

Measure in public. In Minqin the groundwater is measured carefully by scientists and the water bureau, but ordinary farmers mostly learn the results as a quota or a fee. My grandmother says the villagers knew the water was going down from their own pipes before anyone told them. In Nafawol the depth goes on the wall every Friday, so when the taps are rationed nobody has to be persuaded that the water is short. I think a village that sees the number itself is more likely to accept a hard rule.

Ask the herders first. The Loess Plateau projects banned grazing on the slopes, and this was one of the reasons the grass came back. Nafawol does something slower: Mamadou goes three times with kola before the herders agree. The novel suggests that a rule the herders helped to draw is less likely to be broken at night.

Give people a reason to keep the trees after the payments stop. This is my strongest point. The worry about Grain for Green is that when the fixed years of payment end, the reason to keep the trees may end too. In Nafawol, families plant fruit trees “for their children to inherit”, and the carbon buyers pay only for new growth, into the common fund. The trees belong to someone, and the reward continues as long as they grow. Of course a novel cannot show whether this would work at the scale of a province.

Watch the money as closely as the water. Nafawol’s common fund needs three signatures from “three different households” (p. 129) for any large payment, and its accounts hang in the square. Mistakes are corrected on the wall with a name beside them. Nafawol’s method is cheap. Fatou says that writing such rules is free and keeping them is not.

5.2 What Nafawol can learn from the Loess Plateau and Minqin

Scale. Nafawol has two hundred households. The Loess Plateau projects changed the land of millions of people, and Minqin’s recovery needed water brought from another river basin, which no union of villages could do. The novel itself admits that its methods have limits as they grow. When the union reaches thirty-one villages, Kadiatou “had not yet found the proverb for thirty-one” (p. 226).

A hard rule on groundwater. Minqin shows what happens when everyone pumps and nobody stops: the lake vanished, and the water table fell below twenty metres. Nafawol is lucky that water returned to its channel in Year 10, three years sooner than Dr Arramata had said. If it had not, the village would have needed something like Minqin’s well closures and quotas, and I am not sure a village committee could close its own neighbours’ wells. The problem never arises in the novel because Nafawol’s borehole is shared, while Minqin’s wells were private.

The state is not only an obstacle. Most of the time Nafawol’s government is an enemy: the Minister wants the fund, an inspector seals a boiler for ten months, and when the villages register their union, the Minister replies that “the Republic knew of no place called Senebia” (p. 173). The most interesting argument for the state comes in Part One, set in another country. Minister Dunia remembers the charity projects of her childhood and says that when they had all broken, “The only thing still there, when everything else had gone, was the state” (p. 61). She is corrupt, and her brother’s bank takes its share, but when I read her line I thought of the Loess Plateau, where the state stayed for more than twenty years. Nafawol’s own success also depends on the state: an honest inspector from the banking regulator, carbon credits the Republic authorises, and a reopened railway.

5.3 The state’s role and the village’s role, honestly

In the Chinese cases the state planned, paid and enforced. On the Loess Plateau the farmers built the terraces with their own hands, and the World Bank says local participation mattered, but the decision to ban grazing or to convert slopes came from above. In Minqin the turning point was the government’s decision to close wells and transfer water, enforced by sealing wells. It brought hardship as well as recovery, and some families, like mine, could not stay.

In the novel almost everything is the reverse. The village decides, pays most of the cost from its own trade and enforces its own rules; Isatou with her exercise book is the water bureau. The novel is honest about the costs too. Soon after the village refuses a foreign company’s offer, crop prices fall and there is a year without surplus. One family leaves for the coast, Mariam loses a year of study, and an old man in a neighbouring village dies waiting for a hospital that was never built. Both systems make people pay; what differs is who decides.

5.4 Fei Xiaotong and the ledger on the wall

In From the Soil, Fei Xiaotong describes rural Chinese society with the image of ripples spreading from a stone thrown into water. Each person stands at the centre of their own circles of relationships, which grow weaker as they spread out. He contrasts this “differential mode of association” (chaxu geju, 差序格局) with an “organisational mode”, like bundles of straw tied together, in which everyone belongs to a group on the same terms. He begins the chapter with the problem of selfishness: people look after their own households first and neglect what belongs to everyone.

Nafawol is obviously a ripple society. People are greeted by their father’s names, apologies are made with goats and kola, and there are joking cousins who insult each other at every meeting. What interested me is that the village deliberately builds one “bundle” inside the ripples: the common fund. When Fatou catches a supplier who had cheated the mill, the novel points out that “He had been at her daughter’s wedding” (p. 143). In a pure ripple society that friendship would have protected him. Instead she tells him the figure will go on the wall, and later she says, “The ledger doesn’t care who your friends are” (p. 143). Even the women’s savings pot follows the bundle rule. When Isatou’s own daughter-in-law asks to take a neighbour’s turn because the wind has torn a sheet off her roof, Isatou says, “Then she can wait for her own turn” (p. 132), although it means the rain comes into her son’s house.

The novel also shows where the ripples still win. When a foreign company offers fifty thousand dollars to every household, Isatou asks, “Into whose hand?” (p. 190), because the household is signed for by its head, usually a man. Earlier she says, “I know whose names the households go by” (p. 145). The three-household rule is fairer than one signature, but the households themselves are still Fei’s inner circles, and the women stand inside them. China and Nafawol share this. In Minqin too, water quotas were set by the mu and paid by the household, and my grandmother never once signed for our family’s water.

6. Reflections

At the beginning I expected to write that China’s approach was top-down and Nafawol’s bottom-up, and that the lesson was to listen to villagers more. The research made it more complicated. The Loess Plateau projects did listen to farmers, according to the World Bank, and Nafawol needed its government too. I now think the more useful question is whether the people who live with the result can see the numbers and argue with them. In the novel, the foreign fund changes its own rules after an earlier disaster, so that money goes only where the people who would live with the result “owned it, and could stop it” (p. 82). Could the farmers of Minqin have stopped anything? I do not know, and the answer is not simple, because without the well closures there might be no Minqin to live in.

My biggest limitation is obvious: I compared real programmes affecting millions of people with a fictional village of eighteen hundred people. I also relied on a few English-language sources and could not check every figure against Chinese government documents. If I continued this project, I would like to interview farmers in Minqin about the quotas, and visit one of the terraced counties near Dingxi, which is less than two hours from Lanzhou.

When I told my grandmother about the old man who says “For us” while setting a stone, she said that in her village nobody planted for the grandchildren in the bad years, because nobody believed the grandchildren would stay. Then she said that Qingtu Lake had water again, and she would like to see it before she dies. I have promised to take her in the summer holiday.

7. References

Bennett, M.T. (2008). “China’s sloping land conversion program: Institutional innovation or business as usual?” Ecological Economics, 65(4), 699–711.

Fei Xiaotong (1947). Xiangtu Zhongguo (乡土中国). Translated by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng as From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Hydara, M.J. (2026). Songs of Dust and Water. Paperback, ISBN 9798162251088.

Uchida, E., Xu, J. and Rozelle, S. (2005). “Grain for Green: Cost-effectiveness and sustainability of China’s conservation set-aside program.” Land Economics, 81(2), 247–264.

Watershed Markets (n.d.). “Sloping Land Conversion Programme (Grain for Green), China.” Case study, watershedmarkets.org.

World Bank (2007). “Restoring China’s Loess Plateau.” Feature story, 15 March 2007. worldbank.org.

Yuan Ye (2019). “Island in the Sand.” Sixth Tone, 17 December 2019.

All example essays