In April 2025, as another trade war kicked off between the U.S. and China, Vice President J.D. Vance, in a now infamous remark, referred to Chinese citizens as “peasants.”
As a son of Chinese immigrants, I found Vance’s remark more profoundly ignorant than malicious. After all, the notion that China is a nation of peasants is shared by many. I too once believed it.
A month earlier, I’d returned to China for spring break, having been unable to visit my relatives there for nearly seven years. I had grown up listening to my mother’s classic immigrant story, and so, I knew that my family had started out as “peasants.” As my journey took me from bustling airports to metropolitan highways and then to town boulevards, I realized that this trip might be my last, best chance to understand my family’s past.
My grandparents hail from Yiyang, in Hunan Province, a calm 40 minute drive from Mao Zedong’s ancestral home. Walking inside their home, I was intrigued by the framed pictures of them standing at Mao’s home in the 1960s. Amid the slow pace of my grandparents’ hometown, I seized the chance to ask my grandfather about the pivotal, often misunderstood decades he had lived through.
He speaks in the traditional Hunan dialect, so my mother translated. Often, during our conversations, he paused and gazed off, as if reliving moments from his past.
Born in the early 1940s, my grandfather came of age during the Great Leap Forward. He witnessed the entirety of the Cultural Revolution, then watched his children benefit from the decades of reform and prosperity following the Deng Era.
He described the late 50s and early 60s as a bleak era in China, one of survival and desperation. He worked as a teacher for much of his life. His poor rural background saved him from government scrutiny, but he witnessed his friends and colleagues get subjected to public displays of humiliation called “struggle sessions.” He watched people wait in line for hours to eat the grains at the bottom of rice wine bottles. Reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s critically acclaimed film, To Live, my grandfather called it a time when ideological fervor and political thought penetrated every aspect of life in China.
As the 1960s wore on, he told of great unrest, chaos, and a feverish atmosphere among the population. He migrated to the city to teach. There, he witnessed the rapid changes brought by the Great Leap Forward and the burgeoning Cultural Revolution.
“People starved, people died, and people survived,” he told me simply. “It was just how things were.”
The government’s meagre rice-only diet was far from adequate. “You know what rice liquor (BaiJiu) is right?” my grandfather asked me.
He explained that back in the day, bars served rice spirits out of bottles containing a handful of rice grains that floated around at the bottom, left unfiltered and marinating in the alcohol to sweeten the flavor. People regularly lined-up outside of bars to eat the leftover grains of rice in emptied bottles, he said. “Lines as long as the food ration lines”, he said twice, spreading his arms wide to show the length.
He came to see people’s lives as random and utterly out of their own control. He talked about one friend who became a professor at the CCP’s Central Party School in Beijing, while another friend, just as capable, was denounced and excommunicated from the educational world, due to his somewhat-wealthy background before the Revolution.
During the 70s, my grandfather said, there was gradually less ideological penetration of daily life. My mother and uncle were born, and the chaos of the late 60s gave way to a destitute calm. For years, my grandparents worked separately, each taking one child and living hundreds of kilometers apart. During this time of strife, he spent much of his time alone. Forced by government labor-planning to live far from his wife and daughter, my uncle had to travel to a different city for work. Despite these hardships, my grandfather felt he was one of the lucky men in China, given that he was able to work and eat. For others, work at the time was brutal and living conditions were squalid, especially compared to the glittering cities of modern China.
The end of the Cultural Revolution was a saving grace, according to my grandfather, bringing more stability and opportunity. The reform period of the 1980s and 1990s injected new life into a struggling population, he said. The bold reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping had immediate effects on my family. Having been fortunate enough to work and save (despite there being little to buy), my grandfather was one of the fortunate few who could afford a consumer television. The purchase made my mom feel “as if she were a rich westerner,” according to my grandfather. In general, throughout the period, he witnessed the population finally emerging from poverty and forming a modern middle-class.
Known in my family as an indefatigable optimist, my grandfather said that he and many around him carried a hope for themselves, and for their communities. It helped carry him through decades of strife and austerity, and finally paid off when in adulthood, he achieved some prosperity for himself and his children.
China, as I came to learn from my grandfather’s journey, has had a complex and checkered history. And yet, through the resilience of its people, it has risen to become a geopolitical superpower. Vice President Vance’s remark, though intended to mock the CCP and challenge its influence, bears a kernel of truth. China was indeed, not long ago, a nation of peasants. However, over decades of strife and parallel economic growth, culminating in today’s geopolitical rivalry, the Chinese people have displayed a grit that Vance, and many American voters, fail to appreciate.
Having endured and survived the trials of the past, many in China feel pride and confidence in what their nation has achieved and can achieve. Many Americans fail to understand that Chinese nationalism doesn’t stem from an imagined and glorious past, but from a present that people like my grandfather see as the result of their own labor and sacrifice.
