ABSTRACT
Liu Min Ying is a small village of some 898 people in 240 households in the suburbs of Beijing, in Daxing County. Standing on the North China Plain, it lies 30 miles to the south-east of China’s capital close to the recently opened highway linking Beijing with Tianjin. Despite its relative proximity to two centres of large urban populations, Liu Min Ying has an entirely rural location, surrounded by other villages similar in size. Access is not easy except by car, although with the rapidly increasing prosperity of the region, many more cars make journeys to Liu Min Ying now than a few years ago and travelling to Beijing for villagers is becoming more routine than it was, even very recently. But drivers must know where they are going - road signs to the village are at a premium and few people can give accurate directions to the village even within a few kilometres of it. Buses from Huancun, the county town of Daxing, are infrequent making life difficult not merely for the earless visitor to get to the village but also for the local people, young as well as old, to venture too far from their homes. The village owns 80-odd motorised vehicles (including tractors, lorries and taxis) which are used intensively in various forms of local economic activity; for most people, however, bicycles and bicycle carts remain the most popular, indeed the only methods of getting around. In that regard, Liu Min Ying is a very typical Chinese village. It remains untypical in many other respects.
