Nankun Village No. 8: The Construction of the Nankun Railway and Socio-Cultural Changes in the Villages Along the Line (Yunnan Volume, Guangxi Volume, Guizhou Volume)

Author: Weng Naqun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-09-01
Features: As an important part of the Southwest's maritime access channel, the Nankun Railway appears distant to the villagers along the line. From the eight villages surveyed, after the railway's operation, villagers did not transform it into a transportation tool that could be utilized in their economic production. The rural areas along the line still operate on the household as the basic unit of social production, with villagers relying on small-scale agricultural economic production methods. Each household possesses only a small plot of land, and the agricultural products they produce are primarily for self-consumption within the village. In addition, they can sell very limited surplus agricultural products to the market. Such a small amount of surplus agricultural products only needs to be taken to the nearby village market to complete the exchange. Under these circumstances, for the economic lives of the villagers along the line, the significance of the railway as a modern transportation infrastructure is very limited, and in other words, almost non-existent.