自 1997 年 6 月开始，我对四川省、重庆市和江苏省部分贫困山区进行了为期十年的完全自费摄影采访。地点包括通江、达川、阆中、内江、资中、资阳、简阳、新津、大邑、崇庆、雅安、武陵、酉阳、涪陵、彭水、合川、新沂等县市。我克服巨大艰险，直接深入农户家中，和最底层农民交谈、沟通，拍摄了 1000 多个胶卷，录制了 60 多个小时的原始录音采访记录，第一次站在记录历史的立场，有计划地从事这一工作。
我用我的心，记录下一个顽强生存的人群：人类最大的劳动者群体，中国农民。我的拍摄对象，是我的同胞、我的亲人们。他们太弱，他们太小，虽然人数最多，却仍像“一盘散沙”。那些被病痛压迫、只能在家等死的老人；没有钱上学又严重营养不良的孩子；在城市卖苦力却拿不到工钱的小伙；还有一人耕作 6 亩土地、被沉重劳动压得抬不起头的 84 岁老母亲，都是我无法放下的人。
拍摄时，眼泪经常遮挡我的视线。最让我放不下的是农村的孩子们，他们太无助。有的地方，孩子一天的生活费只有 7 分钱；有的农村学校上体育课时，就有学生因为贫血昏倒。我看到一个 12 岁的小女孩，星期天从中心学校出来，在我面前把 13 个很大的辣椒面拌土豆吃了下去。中心学校的食堂承包给校长亲戚以后，孩子们的生活费被严重克扣，吃得非常差，平时也很少能出来。
有一天，我坐重庆青泉镇到龚滩镇的船。船上有很多回龚滩镇中学上学的初中学生。我先看到一个小女孩，她身体很小，看起来只有十一二岁，却背着很多柴。我问她柴做什么用，她说用来做饭。我问她一个月生活费是多少，她说十几元。我问她几岁，她说十五岁。我知道她们营养不良，没有发育好，长不高。我问她喝不喝牛奶，她用很吃惊的眼睛看着我，使劲摇头，仿佛没有听说过这个名词。
农村孩子真苦。她们严重营养不良，学习压力又极端大。因为如果考不上大学，不能走上这条唯一可能改变命运的独木桥，她们就只能继续面朝黄土背朝天。
2003 年圣诞节下午，我在四川省崇庆市怀远镇福寿村 1 组遇到一个农民。她被国土局的人打得流鼻血，看到我在地里拍摄，就来找我。她是残疾人，在我面前说不清楚话，我只能听到她的哭声，那是一种从心底发出的悲痛声音。天快黑了，我本来已经准备回去，但还是决定去她家看一看。
她家只有 40 平方米，很黑；一个房间里有猪圈，旁边一张小床，是她女儿住的地方。我没有带闪光灯，无法拍摄。回到住处后，我还是放不下，拿了灯又去。这时她女儿已经回来了，是四川省崇庆市怀远镇中学初二学生王沙，14 岁。她看到我就哭。她上学一年要 700 元，家里一年收入约 1000 元，是父亲在河道里挖沙卖的钱。家里想多喂几个猪，好卖点钱，就在路边修了一个小猪圈。母亲因此被打得流鼻血，猪圈也被推倒。我问猪圈值多少钱，母亲说 50 元，哭个不停。我给了她们 100 元，让她们换一个地方修猪圈。我真希望能给这个小女孩上学的钱，但是我身上没有。
元代文学家张养浩在散曲《山坡羊·潼关怀古》中写道：“兴，百姓苦；亡，百姓苦。”九亿中国农民是全球数量最大的劳动者人群。他们的生存状态在四千年历史的最底层一成不变，承载旱涝洪蝗、社会动荡、官僚压榨、兵匪盗贼等各种天灾人祸，始终在生存与死亡的交界线上挣扎。中国当代社会以大起大落、波荡云诡的变化引起全世界关注，剧变下的农民命运更应成为人类关怀的焦点。
上海 F1 赛车风光落幕，时尚 LV 名牌发布会纷纷登场，中国经济发展指数信心满满，奥运前景被热烈期待。在一片“中国即将崛起”的口号声中，希望人们不要忘记：中国其实是一个农业大国，三分之二以上人口为农民。城市发展的繁荣光环下，农民疾苦容易被蒸发于无形，许多人忽略了中国并不等于上海、北京。
中国百分之九十的文盲集中在农村。农村因贫困产生文盲，又因文盲导致贫困，农民落入无法脱贫的恶性循环。自 1989 年开始，中国政府号召为失学儿童募捐的“希望工程”总共募得 19 亿元人民币；与一年 1400 亿元公款吃喝费相比，这个数字本身已经说明问题。
春种一粒粟，秋收万颗子。四海无闲田，农夫犹饿死。
Beginning in June 1997, I conducted a ten-year, entirely self-funded photographic investigation in poor mountainous areas of Sichuan Province, Chongqing Municipality, and Jiangsu Province, including counties and cities such as Tongjiang, Dachuan, Langzhong, Neijiang, Zizhong, Ziyang, Jianyang, Xinjin, Dayi, Chongqing, Ya'an, Wuling, Youyang, Fuling, Pengshui, Hechuan, and Xinyi. I overcame enormous hardship and risk, entered peasant homes directly, spoke and communicated with people at the lowest level of rural society, exposed more than one thousand rolls of film, and recorded more than sixty hours of original audio interviews. For the first time, I undertook this work deliberately from the position of recording history.
With my heart, I recorded a tenaciously surviving human group: Chinese peasants, the largest laboring group in humanity. My subjects are my compatriots and my relatives in spirit. They are too weak and too small; although they are the greatest in number, they remain scattered and powerless. The elderly pressed down by illness, waiting at home for death; children too poor to attend school and severely malnourished; young men doing hard labor in cities yet unable to receive their wages; and an eighty-four-year-old mother farming six mu of land alone, bent under heavy labor, are all people I cannot put aside.
While photographing, tears often blurred my sight. What I could least let go of were the rural children. They were too helpless. In some places, a child's daily living allowance was only seven fen; in some rural schools, students fainted from anemia during physical education classes. I saw a twelve-year-old girl come out from a central school on a Sunday and eat thirteen large potatoes mixed with chili powder in front of me. After the school canteen was contracted to the principal's relatives, the children's living expenses were severely deducted. They ate terribly and were rarely allowed out.
One day I took a boat from Qingquan Town to Gongtan Town in Chongqing. Many middle-school students on board were returning to Gongtan Middle School. I first noticed a little girl whose body was very small, as if she were only eleven or twelve, yet she was carrying a heavy load of firewood. I asked what the wood was for; she said it was for cooking. I asked how much she had for living expenses each month; she said a little more than ten yuan. I asked her age; she said she was fifteen. I knew that malnutrition had kept them from developing normally and growing tall. When I asked whether she drank milk, she looked at me in astonishment and shook her head hard, as if she had never heard the word.
Rural children suffer deeply. They are seriously malnourished, and the pressure of study is extreme. If they cannot pass the college entrance examination and cross the only narrow bridge that might change their fate, they can only return to a life of farming, facing the earth.
On Christmas afternoon in 2003, in Group 1 of Fushou Village, Huaiyuan Town, Chongqing City in Sichuan, I met a peasant woman. She had been beaten by people from the land bureau until her nose bled. Seeing me photographing in the fields, she came to find me. She was disabled and could not speak clearly in front of me. I could only hear her crying, a sound of grief rising from the bottom of her heart. It was getting dark and I had been ready to leave, but I decided to go to her home and see what had happened.
Her family home was only about forty square meters and very dark. One room contained a pigsty; beside it was a small bed where her daughter slept. I had no flash and could not photograph. After returning to my lodging, I still could not let it go, so I took a light and went back. By then her daughter had returned. She was Wang Sha, a fourteen-year-old second-year student at Huaiyuan Town Middle School. When she saw me, she cried. Her schooling cost RMB 700 a year, while the family's annual income was about RMB 1,000, earned by her father digging sand from the riverbed. The family wanted to raise a few more pigs to sell, so they built a small pigsty by the road. For this, the mother was beaten until her nose bled, and the pigsty was pushed down. I asked how much the pigsty was worth. The mother said RMB 50 and kept crying. I gave them RMB 100 so they could build the pigsty somewhere else. I truly wished I could give the girl the money she needed for school, but I did not have it with me.
The Yuan-dynasty writer Zhang Yanghao wrote in Goats on the Hillside: Remembering Tongguan: "When states rise, the people suffer; when states fall, the people suffer." The nine hundred million Chinese peasants are the largest laboring population in the world. At the lowest level of four thousand years of history, their living condition has remained fundamentally unchanged. They have borne drought, flood, locusts, social turbulence, bureaucratic exploitation, soldiers, bandits, and thieves, struggling on the line between survival and death. Contemporary China has drawn global attention for its dramatic and unpredictable transformations, but the fate of peasants under such upheaval should be an even greater focus of human concern.
Shanghai's Formula One race ended in splendor; fashionable LV brand events appeared one after another; China's economic-development figures were full of confidence; and the Olympic future was eagerly anticipated. Amid slogans that China was about to rise, I hoped people would not forget: China is in fact an agricultural country, with more than two thirds of its population made up of peasants. Beneath the bright aura of urban development, peasants' suffering can easily evaporate from view. Many people forget that China is not only Shanghai and Beijing.
Ninety percent of China's illiterate population is concentrated in the countryside. Poverty produces illiteracy in rural areas, and illiteracy in turn produces poverty, trapping peasants in a vicious cycle from which they cannot escape. Since 1989, the government-supported Project Hope had raised RMB 1.9 billion for children who had lost access to school; compared with RMB 140 billion a year in public funds spent on eating and drinking, the number itself says something.
One grain is planted in spring; ten thousand seeds are harvested in autumn. No field lies idle under heaven, yet the farmer still starves.
