Following a two-year investigation, a team headed by Professor Ye Jingzhong from China Agricultural University concluded in December 2008 that nationally there are 47 million left-behind wives.

Another official survey finds that two-thirds of Chinese peasant wives live apart from their husbands. Many of these women - virtual single mothers - have to juggle the tasks of farming and rearing their children, single-handedly.

Long separation from their spouses take a toll on their psychological well-being. Some feel abandoned and overwhelmed. Some are understandably angry. This study found that 42 percent of the women surveyed often wept in distress.

These figures translate into gruesome real-life pictures of the rural landscape.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University, during a trip to rural Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in August 2006, reportedly saw desolation usually associated with wartime: whole villages peopled by the elderly, women, and children, and such were their economic circumstances that some families had lost contact with the men working outside.

Zhu Dongmei, a left-behind woman in Henan Province, wrote a folk rhyme depicting the plight of left-behind wives; it won a competition sponsored by local Beijing media in 2010.

"Of 10 bridal homes, nine are deserted," she wrote. "And when bridegrooms go to cities, brides must fend for themselves."

Zhu married when she was 22, and one month later her husband left home to find work in Beijing.

A recent article by Lai Guoqing on caixin.com portrays similar physical and emotional decrepitude in his hometown in rural Hubei Province.

"When night falls, there descends a deadly tranquility in the village, broken only by a few dog barks," he writes.

A lot of uncultivated land lies fallow and becomes overgrown. Old irrigation facilities and water sources (canals, rivers, ponds and wells) are not maintained and dredged, so silt builds up, weeds flourish and they become unusable.

Rejuvenation

What is happening in rural China to some extent provides an interesting footnote to the "vicious circle" Olivier De Schutter mentions in his article "Rethinking global pacts to provide food for the needy" (February 7, Shanghai Daily).

A vicious circle unbeknownst to Schutter is that in the decades of hectic growth, local officials have been tacitly encouraged to fuel economic growth at the expense of farm land, which is virtually expropriated without fair compensation.

Peasants thus dispossessed are more willing to offer themselves to the labor market.

The influx of migrants has already strained transport, housing and education facilities in cities, but nearly all officials choose to ignore the simple truth that there is a limit to the size to which a city can reasonably expand.

Ironically, when local officials flirt with the idea of "building a new countryside," something that is actually supposed to improve rural life, their emphasis is invariably on "building."

To many people, urban amenities (read: consumption) are the only things commensurable with "development."

At the annual central conference on rural work held in Beijing late December, Premier Wen Jiabao said, "We can no longer sacrifice farmers' land property rights to reduce costs of urbanization and industrialization."

He also said that retaining educated, prime-age youths is key to long-term agricultural development.

To make that happen, we need to reinvest traditional rural life with a sense of dignity and talk less about economic growth.

The countryside cannot expect and should not aspire to the headlong growth that characterizes manufacturing and finance.

The reinvigoration of rural life cannot be achieved without a reappreciation of the balance, contentment, self-sufficiency, and slow rhythm that is inherent in rural life.