Jiangzhuang, SHANDONG: Always with an idea to improve farming efficiency through collective action, villager Ma Yichang worries about the recent policy document that so many in the cities view as an emancipatory move for the countryside. The document, released last Sunday, allowed peasants to lease their contracted farmland or transfer their land-use rights.

But Yichang is worried. He worries about it so much in the fields, on the road and back home, it’s like a rain that never stops floating in his mind.

“The peasants’ land isn’t worth much to begin with. It (our land) is like a group of small animals; a few tigers would eat us all,” the 49-year-old told China Daily last Monday upon learning news of the document. “I’m as much worried as I’m delighted (by it). I’m just afraid it will take on a wrong path.”

Yichang, 49, isn’t the only one with such concerns in this ordinary village in southwestern Shandong province. But the dark-skinned chief of the Jiangzhuang Cooperative has all the more incentive to keep justice in order.

“The starting point of it all should be serving socially vulnerable groups, not making the rich richer,” he said.

Twists and turns in a Chinese village

China has vowed to carry out “the most stringent farmland protection system” and urged local authorities to firmly safeguard the 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) minimum farmland set line.

But there are reasons Yichang and his fellow villagers sound much less certain than policymakers in Beijing. Very few are still actually farming. The ones who do are cautious of the people who may benefit and operate their land once land transfers become the next big trend. And most of all, the peasants worry about policies that may eventually lead to land purchases and sell-outs, which they see as an “eviler return of the devil” of feudal landlords.

Who’s gonna grow it?

Like many other rural communities around China, the working-age men and women in Jiangzhuang are part of the service sector somewhere in the cities. As a result, people between the ages of 12 and 40 are rarely, if at all, seen in this village of some 300 households, or 1,350 registered residents.

Only those who are left behind, essentially women and senior men, work the land, where traditional methods of farming have long become and are increasingly more ineffective.

On average, a local villager draws 700 – 800 yuan (US$102 to $117) from each mu of land per year. The annual cost for fertilizers, though, totals about 300 yuan. Pesticides are another 100 yuan, not to mention the seed and labor costs. That means the some 100 yuan of annual state subsidy on each mu of land is, in villager Ma Peicheng’s words, “good money, but hardly sufficient”. 

Add that to all the different varieties of crops grown by local families across these connected but independent flatlands, thanks to the household responsibility system introduced 30 years ago. Hailed as a major breakthrough in land reforms, the system meted collectively owned farmland to peasants in small plots in leasing contracts.

But in an era when farming is no financial match for physical labor positions in the city, growing whatever one pleases on their own limited share of land seems a less than judicious option.

“Even when the peasants unite, we are but a massive socially vulnerable group,” said Yichang. “Imagine what would happen if we go on trying to keep the bits and pieces of our own share as the tigers come get us one by one.”

Machinery doesn’t help much, either. “Each person has very few farmland to work with. I have only two mu myself. You can’t use larger equipments for it, and the smaller ones aren’t available. So in the end, it’s still manual labor at work,” said Jiang, a senior local villager.

“We’re an epitome of Chinese villages,” he said.

Who’s gonna manage it?

The Jiangzhuang people barely know of the financial crisis that is sweeping the world. A few curious ones ask, with interest only, why it’s happening at all. But land is the one thing that can get everybody talking. A local family planning office banner gives insight into the seriousness of the matter: “Whose family will the land come from if one more child is born?”

Land, the backbone for all Chinese peasants alike, is extremely limited here. Each villager on average owns about one mu (0.16 acre) of not even arable, but marshy land. And still, these peasants, who have no social safety network to fall back on, treat the land shares as their greatest asset.

But as land transfers become a choice, they fear a lack of supervision and collective action will drive the village back to its worst days a decade ago, when a few powerful men controlled all of Jiangzhuang’s collective farmland.

Yichang, who not only felt it was wrong to turn collective land into private hands at anyone’s will, but also thought collective action must be organized, led local residents in a decade-long struggle with corrupt village chiefs over misused land.

One petition after the next eventually led to the local public’s impeachment of the village Party chief in 2004. But the 500 mu (82.4 acres) of collective land he sold off to a private firm years ago have still not been turned to the villagers to this day.

Worse, the impeached village Party chief later became deputy head of the county to which Jiangzhuang belongs through money and kinship. Before one of Yichang’s last petitions, he warned the villager to cool off, because “even if you take it to the world’s ends, it’s still going to be me taking care of business around here.”

Who’s gonna sell, and who’s gonna buy it?

Selling the land “is not an option” for Yichang. Many among his generation, who are the producers of these lands, agree. But everybody sees that with the heavy debts all villagers carry, some may have to do so sooner or later.

“Without a rural cooperative, and with policy approval, many peasants would be inclined to sell their land to pay off debts. That will create brand-new landlords and laborers,” said Yichang.

“Despite our poverty, there’re so many rich people in China today. When land policies are further relaxed, they can afford to come buy our town and make everybody their tenants, and that… let’s say that the Revolution had a reason.”

The peasants’ offspring, a younger generation of migrant workers, may not share that view. Yichang and his deputy Zhou Dong’an say the youngsters don’t have an incentive to return to the villages to settle down.

And when they, “the last generation of peasants who attach themselves so much to land”, die out, the duo believes their children will be more than happy to sell the land “and become a rural city folk… and then nobody’s going to work the land at all”.

All of Zhou’s children are working in the cities. Yichang’s 23-year-old son works in Shanghai and returns home once a year. His daughter, a 21-year-old, was sent by him to work with the James Yen Rural Construction Institute in Hebei “to explore possible alternatives”.

A co-op experiment

The villagers tried their best to turn things around. Even Peicheng knew something must be done. “We got to do things together, as a cooperative. If we didn’t have it, the government grants will always be absorbed by each layer of the lower administration. We can’t afford to have them do that with land forever,” he said.

A 52-year-old single man with deformity and just one mu of land, Peicheng has every lived experience of an isolated, disempowered individual at society’s bottom line. At the same time, he has had every urge for a rural cooperative.

“Bogus pesticides and fertilizers are sold to individual peasants from time to time. But no one would risk doing the same to a cooperative,” he said.

Several villagers, headed by Yichang, shared the vision and sought action. But at first, they needed theoretical assistance. In April 2004, Yichang approached the James Yen Institute and became a member of its first-ever training course.

With help of the institute and 20 college students from Beijing and Shandong’s capital city Jinan, who came to the village for research and assistance, the Jiangzhuang Cooperative was set up on June 30, 2004. Yichang became its Director-General, and Peicheng its keeper. Villagers could become a shareholder with a one-off 200-yuan, and annual membership fees are 30 yuan per person.

With passion at a high tide, 100 households joined the co-op. “The best years were 2005 and 2006,” Peicheng recalled. “You can easily gather seven or eight people when something’s up. They’d get in a truck and head wherever needed. There really was that momentum.”

The cost for fertilizers went down significantly, while the selling price for rice rose by sharp percentages for co-op members. Success, it seemed, was only within an arm’s grasp.

The tough road to a brighter future

But luck began to fade. To start off, the co-op was not allowed to be set up as such. The national law on professional rural cooperatives was not promulgated until last year. In 2004, Jiangzhuang villagers were only permitted to establish a professional association.

The villagers agreed that breeding, which seemed promising in the market then, would pioneer their co-op effort. Hence gave birth to the Jiangzhuang Breeding Association, the cooperative’s official name until this March.

Co-op members raised and sell pigs, and soon later, rabbits and ducks together. Training seminars were held on a weekly basis. As a collective, the peasants had much more bargain power with business partners and village committees. But soon, that advantage became a problem.

“The village committees don’t want any cooperatives, because then they couldn’t absorb the grants so much,” Peicheng said. “I’d say 90 percent of them in rural China oppose the idea, because having a village co-op would place them in a very embarrassing situation,” argued Yichang.

With little starting capital and no policy support, the villagers found themselves vulnerable to risks of both administrative disruption and market declines. “You ought to have protective layers for veggies in a greenhouse. Even without it, we’d survive and flourish with a little water. But it’s been so difficult to get that water,” Yichang said.

“There is so much water for others that it can literally drown them. But for us, there is none at all,” he said.

“There are policies. But most of their beneficiaries down here do so through guanxi and under-table deals. We can’t benefit like them. We’re too transparent... doing good things is harder than doing bad things here.”

The co-op relied on the market. But the market crashed. In 2006, the cost of pig feed soared up to 3 yuan per half kg, while pork prices dropped to 2.5 yuan. The cooperative had gathered 2,000 yuan from each pig breeder. Most of the money were lost, and so was confidence.

“It’s back to pre-Liberation now, everybody for their own interests. Members have stopped paying annual fees, and market situations are worse than ever,” Peicheng said. “The retail price for each bag of grain ears have fallen from 130 yuan in July to 93 yuan now.”

Students from more than a dozen universities throughout China have come to the village to research and offer help. But the financial and policy assistance the peasants so desperately seek are beyond these youngsters. In May, the last batch of students pulled out from Jiangzhuang.

“Time and again, people have come to me with the same question Chairman Mao was asked when the first Chinese Red Army base area was set up 80 years ago: ‘How much longer can the red flag hold?’” Yichang said.

“I tell them that we’re different from the mass of committee/company-turned ‘co-ops’ out there. We were here long before co-ops became fashionable. We’re a spontaneous cooperative, and all we have now results from insistence.”

“It’s the correct path, but an arduous one,” agreed Jiang. “You can already see brightness, but you just can’t walk it up there.”

“We shall overcome…”

The Jiangzhuang Cooperative, like many others among China’s nearly 60,000 professional rural cooperatives, is at a bottleneck. The richer villagers don’t want in, and the poorer ones expect immediate returns. The average age of co-op members is above 40, and hardly any young blood is available in the village.

But with some support, they believe they will overcome it all.

Yichang asserts that the government should take whatever measures necessary to reduce the number of peasants, and permit joint development of rural farmland.

“It’s a lot easier to manage things that way,” he explained. “Each peasant only has so much land. It’s as much a pity to sell the land as it is a waste leaving it undeveloped or underdeveloped.”

“So if we study together and decide to grow a particular crop on a joint land, we can make it into a brand. Each local resident would become a shareholder, and those working in the cities could rent their share,” he said. “And we can buy harvesting machines to improve efficiency.”

“I know it’s hard, but we can do it. I’ve been to Nanjie Cun for a prolonged personal investigation, and the place fascinated me. I figure if they can do well, so can we,” he said.

As one of the largest bases for the production of instant noodles and rice chips in the country, Nanjie Cun in the central Henan province is arguably China’s best-known collective village. Around 7,000 – 10,000 villages like Nanjie Cun, according to scholar Dale Wen, “have continued with the co-op commune model by resisting the top-down pressures to break up”.

Next week’s issue: Nanjie Cun in the new land reform

I am planning to visit Nanjie Cun and replicate the Jiangzhuang research/investigation in the coming days. And if all's well (which we know things hardly ever are), the stories will be published as part of a larger series. Not to mention that the name Nanjie Cun came up numerous times during my days in Jiangzhuang. Hence the crossover in the story below.

Indeed, some of the research's content and conclusions do contradict with the Central Government policies. But this is China. There is no black and white, and history can attest to the fact that the peasants aren't stupid.

Jiangzhuang, SHANDONG: It was way beyond dark when Ma Yichang arrived home from Hebei for a business trip on Sunday. Farming is tough enough; business isn’t any better. But it’s no time to rest for the peasant – any peasant – in this ordinary village in southwestern Shandong province.

The downpour that began around midnight had many senior local residents awake. Nobody in the village had yet learnt of the landmark policy document that was issued hours earlier in Beijing, which allowed peasants to lease their contracted farmland or transfer their land-use rights. Here, rain and only rain was the immediate concern.

Always an early bird, Yichang, 49, was among the first to have their harvested wheat taken home from the fields, packed and relocated in the storage. By 8 am, he was already taking breakfast in the living room, unsurprised by news of the historic document. “A policy at last, eh?” Yichang said, smiling.

Not that he doesn’t care. Like many others here, but perhaps more than anyone, the dark-skinned chief of the Jiangzhuang Cooperative has plenty of legitimate worries. Doubts. Suspicions. And most of all, he has concerns.

“The peasants’ land isn’t worth much to begin with. It (our land) is like a group of small animals; a few tigers would eat us all,” Yichang told China Daily. “I’m as much worried as I’m delighted (by the policy). I’m just afraid it will take on a wrong path.”

“The starting point of it all should be serving socially vulnerable groups, not making the rich richer,” he said.

An epitome of the Chinese countryside

The Communist Party of China Central Committee has said the country would carry out “the most stringent farmland protection system” and urged local authorities to firmly safeguard the 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) minimum farmland set line.

But there is a reason Yichang and his fellow villagers sound much less certain than policymakers in Beijing. A glimpse of his electric motorbike suffices to explain how life is like here. One rear window is stroked out, the other barely hanging in there, and no one knows when the battery will run out.

Like many other villages around this country, the working-age men and women in Jiangzhuang are part of the service sector somewhere in the cities. As a result, people between the ages of 12 and 40 are rarely, if at all, seen in this village of some 300 households, or 1,350 registered residents.

Only those who are left behind, essentially women and senior men, work the land. The weeklong harvest season that just ended on Monday saw practically every active villager busy in their fields before dawn. Very few stay home, so much so that in this birthplace of the legendary war-era “railway guerillas”, one couldn’t help but wonder if the entire labor force is outside fighting the Japanese invaders.

But even amidst the romantic mixture of land smells from grass, crops, fallen leaves and fertilizers, it is difficult not to realize the inefficiency of farming.

On average, a local villager draws 700 – 800 yuan (US$102 to $117) from each mu of land per year. The annual cost for fertilizers, though, totals about 300 yuan. Pesticides are another 100 yuan, not to mention the seed and labor costs. That means the some 100 yuan of annual state subsidy on each mu of land is, in villager Ma Peicheng’s words, “good money, but hardly sufficient”. 

Add that to all the different varieties of crops grown by local families across these connected but independent flatlands, thanks to the household responsibility system introduced 30 years ago. Hailed as a major breakthrough in land reforms, the system meted collectively owned farmland to peasants in small plots in leasing contracts.

And yet, in an era when traditional methods of farming are no financial match for physical labor positions in the city, growing whatever one pleases on their own limited share of land seems a less than judicious option.

“Even when the peasants unite, we are but a massive socially vulnerable group,” said Yichang. “Imagine what would happen if we go on trying to keep the bits and pieces of our own share as the tigers come get us one by one.”

Machinery doesn’t help much, either. “Each person has very few farmland to work with. I have only two mu myself. You can’t use larger equipments for it, and the smaller ones aren’t available. So in the end, it’s still manual labor at work,” said Jiang, a senior local villager.

“We’re an epitome of Chinese villages,” he said.

Precious land

The Jiangzhuang people barely know of the financial crisis that is sweeping the world. A few curious ones ask, with interest only, why it’s happening at all. But land is the one thing that can get everybody talking. A local family planning office banner gives insight into the seriousness of the matter: “Whose family will the land come from if one more child is born?”

Misused land was the very cause of a decade-long struggle between corrupt village chiefs and local peasants led by Yichang, who not only felt it was simply wrong to turn collective land into private hands at anyone’s will, but also thought legal measures must be taken.

The subsequent years saw Yichang and his village’s name repeatedly featured in the provincial media, as one petition after the next eventually led to the local public’s impeachment of the village Party chief in 2004.

That was but the start of Jiangzhuang’s story. Land, the backbone for all Chinese peasants alike, is extremely limited here. Each villager on average owns about one mu (0.16 acre) of not even arable, but marshy land. Moreover, the 500 mu (82.4 acres) of collective land the impeached Party chief sold off to a private firm years ago have still not been turned to the villagers to this day.

“This implies one thing: we got to do things together, as a cooperative. If we didn’t have it, the government grants will always be absorbed by each layer of the lower administration. We can’t afford to have them do that with land forever,” Peicheng said.

A cooperative experiment

A 52-year-old single man with deformity and just one mu of land, Peicheng has every lived experience of an isolated, disempowered individual at society’s bottom line. At the same time, he has had every urge for a rural cooperative.

“Bogus pesticides and fertilizers are sold to individual peasants from time to time. But no one would risk doing the same to a cooperative,” he said.

Several villagers, headed by Yichang, shared the vision and sought action. But at first, they needed theoretical assistance. In April 2004, Yichang approached the Hebei-based James Yen Rural Construction Institute and became a member of its first-ever training course.

The institute’s aim is, according to its website, “to improve the condition of people’s livelihood and their rights and to enhance the ability to mobilize villagers to collectively work on issues of concern to them”.

Yichang was deeply inspired by the courses, to the extent that after they ended, he returned with four other fellow villagers to join the institute’s second training course in May.

That month, Wen Tiejun, Dean of Renmin University’s School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development and director of the Yan Yangchu Institute, arranged 20 college students from Beijing and Shandong’s capital city Jinan to Jiangzhuang for research and assistance.

With their help, the Jiangzhuang Cooperative was set up on June 30, 2004. Yichang became its Director-General, and Peicheng its keeper. Interested villagers could become a shareholder of the co-op with a one-off 200-yuan, and annual membership fees are 30 yuan per person.

With passion of collaboration at a high tide, 100 households joined the co-op. “The best years were 2005 and 2006,” Peicheng recalled. “You can easily gather seven or eight people when something’s up. They’d get in a truck and head wherever needed. There really was that momentum.”

The cost for fertilizers went down significantly, while the selling price for rice rose by sharp percentages for co-op members. Success, it seemed, was only within an arm’s grasp.

The tough road to a brighter future

But luck soon faded, smashing villagers back to the real world. To start off, the co-op was not allowed to be set up as such. The national law on professional rural cooperatives was not promulgated until last year. In 2004, Jiangzhuang villagers were only permitted to establish a professional association.

The villagers agreed that breeding, which seemed promising in the market then, would pioneer their co-op effort. Hence gave birth to the Jiangzhuang Breeding Association, the cooperative’s official name until this March.

The service-based co-op had members raise and sell pigs, and soon later, rabbits and ducks together. Training seminars were held on a weekly basis. As a collective, the peasants had much more bargain power with business partners and village committees. But soon, that advantage became a problem.

“The village committees don’t want any cooperatives, because then they couldn’t absorb the government grants so much,” Peicheng said. “I’d say 90 percent of them in rural China oppose the idea, because having a village co-op would place them in a very embarrassing situation,” argued Yichang.

With little starting capital and no policy support, the villagers found themselves vulnerable to risks of both administrative disruption and market declines. “You ought to have protective layers for veggies in a greenhouse. Even without it, we’d survive and flourish with a little water. But it’s been so difficult to get that water,” Yichang said.

“There is so much water for others that it can literally drown them. But for us, there isn’t any to spare,” he said.

“There are policies. But most of their beneficiaries down here do so through guanxi and under-table deals. We can’t benefit like them. We’re too transparent... doing good things is harder than doing bad things here.”

The co-op relied on the market. But the market crashed. In 2006, pig feed cost soared up to 3 yuan per half kg, while pork prices dropped to 2.5 yuan per half kg. The cooperative had gathered 2,000 yuan from each pig breeder. Most of the money were lost, and so was confidence.

“It’s back to pre-Liberation again now, everybody for their own interests. Members have stopped paying annual fees, and market situations are worse than ever,” Peicheng said. “The retail price for each bag of grain ears have fallen from 130 yuan in July to 93 yuan now.”

Students from more than a dozen universities throughout China have come to the village to research and offer help. But the financial and policy assistance the peasants so desperately seek are beyond these youngsters’ capabilities. In May, the last batch of students pulled out from Jiangzhuang.

“Time and again, people have come to me with the same question Chairman Mao was asked by Lin Biao when the first Chinese Red Army base area was set up 80 years ago: ‘How much longer can the red flag hold?’” Yichang said.

“I tell them that we’re different from the mass of committee/company-turned ‘co-ops’ out there. We were here long before co-ops became fashionable. We’re a spontaneous cooperative, and all we have now results from insistence.”

“It’s the correct path, but an arduous one,” agreed Jiang. “You can already see brightness, but you just can’t walk it up there.”

“We shall overcome…”

The Jiangzhuang Cooperative is at a bottleneck. The richer villagers don’t want in, and the poorer ones expect immediate returns. The average age of co-op members is above 40 years old, and their offspring, the young, vibrant migrant workers, don’t have an incentive to return to the villages.

That’s why despite deep worries, most co-op members applaud the new land reform policy as “thoughtful”, as it addresses the issue of land after they, “the last generation of peasants who attach themselves so much to land”, die out.

And cooperatives, they believe, are a good solution to the issue. According to Yichang: “Without it, and with policy approval, many peasants would be inclined to sell their land to pay off debts. That will create brand-new landlords and laborers.”

“Despite our poverty, there’re so many rich people in China today. When land policies are further relaxed, they can afford to come buy our town and make everybody their tenants, and that… let’s say that the Revolution had a reason.”

At the same time, Yichang is unconvinced that stringent controls over peasants’ land would work, either. Instead, he asserts that the government should take whatever measures necessary to reduce the number of peasants, and permit joint development of rural farmland.

“It’s a lot easier to manage things that way,” Yichang explained. “Each peasant only has so much land. It’s as much a pity to sell the land as it is a waste leaving it undeveloped or underdeveloped.”

“So if we study together and decide to grow a particular crop on a joint land, we can make it into a brand. Each local resident would become a shareholder of the joint undertaking, and those working in the cities could rent their share,” he said. “And we can buy harvesting machines to improve efficiency.”

“Selling the land is not an option. At least not for our generation,” he said. Yichang’s 22-year-old son, who works in Shanghai and returns home once a year, may have other views. That’s partly why he sent his 21-year-old daughter to work with the James Yen Institute.

“I know it’s hard, but we can overcome all the difficulties. I’ve been to Nanjie Cun for a prolonged personal investigation, and I figure if they can do well, so can we,” he said.

As one of the largest bases for the production of instant noodles and rice chips in the country, Nanjie Cun in the central Henan province is arguably China’s best-known collective village. Around 7,000 – 10,000 villages like Nanjie Cun, according to scholar Dale Wen, “have continued with the co-op commune model by resisting the top-down pressures to break up”.

At last, I'm back from Shandong. Notes and writeups to be uploaded soon.

It’s one thing to just walk along these flatlands, even for hours, and be fascinated by their stunning beauty as a temporary getaway from urban consumerism and the deeply troubled melting pot of globalization.

But it’s quite another to put oneself in the shoes of the peasants, the owners and producers of these lands, and actually walk the same walk in their shoes.

今天下午偶然从总编室同事童猛的桌前走过，一眼看见他屏幕上PDF版报纸的文章标题：Reuters' David Chipp dies at 81。而我的第一感觉竟然是，他去世地真不是时候。

I am sorry.

我只见过David一面，是去年新华社与路透社友好关系不知几十周年的一个人民大会堂活动上。这个英国老头的中文名叫漆大卫，是总理起的，这很让他自豪。作为第一名在新中国参与报道的西方记者，大卫驻华日久，对此间人事感情深厚。虽然那次活动上的发言不过是照本宣科地朗读，但在他慢慢道来，却饱含沧桑，颇具神韵。大卫总喜欢说他当年不小心站立不稳，向后踩到一个中国人的脚，窘然转身道歉，却发现眼前人是宽容笑着的毛主席的故事。这情景旁人殊难体会。他还说他最爱喝茅台。说着说着就拍起我的肩膀，说小伙子有你的，自我介绍说是reporter而不是journalist，这么年轻就老于世故，懂得自抬身价，哈哈哈哈，什么时候到伦敦我家里来喝两盅啊？

过了几个月，我托同事张琦转人带了一瓶家存的茅台酒到伦敦给了他。又过了几个月，在奥运火炬境外传递前不久，又托另一位同事王卓琼去看他。大卫请她喝了咖啡，给了她一本书，也托她给我带了一本小说，是E.M. Forster的A Passage to India。我请大卫介绍了一些他关于1948年伦敦奥运的记忆，并说好火炬传递到伦敦时，要去看他，当面答谢。

我带着Forster的小说开始万里行程，经阿拉木图、伊斯坦布尔、圣彼得堡，终于抵达雪夜下的伦敦。后来的故事，知道的人都知道了。不知道的，慢慢总会知道。总而言之六个字：一切嘎然而止。

“大卫身体很好，”王卓琼笑嘻嘻地说。我想没错，机会总是有的。下次到伦敦，再去拜访他。不然在邮件里，又能说清楚什么事情呢？

现在，这个机会是永远地没有了。这位坚定而老到的记者，终于走完了他的路。对于他的死，我是很悲痛的。王卓琼也很悲痛，几乎一下子就掉下泪来，足见他精神感人之深。我只能宽慰自己说，我们都是向往光明、追求进步的记者，心自相通，岂分阴阳远近。一个人能力有大小，但只要有这点精神，就是一个高尚的人，一个纯粹的人，一个有道德的人，一个脱离了低级趣味的人，一个有益于人民的人。大卫就是这样的人，即使死了，也象一盏火炬一样，照亮着前方的路。

Thank you, David. So long.