"Without Tan Dongfu, Hongbin couldn't have finished school," Zhang says. "Almost every time Tan Hongbin wrote to ask for money, I would cry. There was just no money."

She was too poor to see her father before he died in 1997.

"I really wanted to go, but I couldn't afford it. In 1989 when I returned to Chongqing for the first time since marriage, my younger brother sent money," she recalls.

Zhang says she felt hurt and guilty as she had also been unable to see her mother before she died in the winter of 1970. When she knew that her mother was seriously ill, she immediately left for Chongqing. She arrived home after traveling for three days to find her mother was already dead and buried. She was heart-broken.

Widening gap

Zhang and her husband still cultivate one mu (0.07 hectare) of rice paddies and half a mu of maize.

"We have electricity, tap water and telephone connections. Most families in Lishui can watch TV. Some people also have mobile phones," she says.

But life is still hard. "We are both old and rheumatism has plagued my leg for years. We can no longer do hard labor," Zhang says.

She worries about serious illness. "Medical treatment is too expensive although we have joined the cooperative medical care system," she says.

The rural medical care system, initiated by the government in 2003, aims to help uninsured farmers. It can cover up to 60 percent of medical costs for serious illness.

But Zhang, like other farmers, fears the system will never cover a serious illness that could cost thousands in hospital bills.

Her four trips back to downtown Chongqing since 1969 have convinced her that the rural-urban wealth gap is widening. "The countryside is walking, but the cities are running," she says.

She estimates the per-capita disposable income of Lishui at about 3,000 yuan for the year in 2008, less than 20 percent of the net income of urban dwellers in Chongqing, which stood at 15,709 yuan. Nationally, per-capita disposable income of urban residents was 15,781 yuan last year.

National statistics show the urban-rural income ratio, a gauge of balanced social development, was 3.36:1 last year. It was 2.57:1 in 1978 when city dwellers' average incomes stood at 343 yuan and those of farmers at 134 yuan.

The gap also includes education, medical care and social security.

Zhang says Mao's order in 1968 was a cruel mistake as she and other zhiqing were too young to adjust to the harsh life in the countryside.

Mao's campaign failed for at least two reasons - the widening urban-rural gap and the return of almost all zhiqing to cities, she says.

But she counts herself a rare success of this failed campaign as she built a family, brought up a university student and understood the hardship of a farmer's life.

"I don't regret the decision to stay here and marry Tan since regret doesn't work. I am not used to thinking too much," she says. "Life in the countryside is too hard, too bitter."

(Shanghai Daily September 22, 2009)