As a long-time China observer, I have always been impressed by the Chinese willingness to scrutinize one's own shortcomings as a first and key step toward self-improvement.

China has developed tremendously in the two decades since my first visit and this development is in large part due to societal introspection combined with a strong curiosity about how other nations have developed quickly.

China is a different country from the one I first visited in 1987. Now, more than ever, introspection and honest self-analysis are needed.

It is no secret that China's development has come at a cost, but the cost may be bigger than many Chinese realize. It affects agriculture, the farmers and the values that have helped spur the country's recent success. Visiting villages in Central China last summer, I found an absence of working-age adults, most of whom had migrated to coastal factories and construction sites.

Officials told me this is just part of the normal process of development: China is becoming more urban and less agricultural. I heard "urbanization" discussed approvingly in many official circles.

The farmers told a different story, however, a story of migration driven by a desire to escape the prejudice against rural life. Older farmers told me they worried about the effects of migration on agricultural production in years to come, since they believe their own adult-age children will never return to farm the land of their parents.

"Couldn't your children learn to farm?" I asked. They could learn, the older farmers said, but they do not want to learn, because being a farmer is considered too shameful. Even students whose own parents are farmers told me that manual laborers, such as farmers, are "stupid" (this is the word they actually used) and that mental work in cities is the only worthy goal for their own lives.

I have long known of the Chinese prejudice against rural life and against the farmers, but I was shocked at how intense this stigma still is - so intense that rural youth are willing to talk with great disrespect toward the hard work done by their own parents and grandparents.

And this stigma imperils China's ongoing development. A country as large as China cannot afford to leave large tracts in its center unfarmed, due to the unwillingness of people to live as farmers.

Mechanization is not a realistic substitute for much human labor since the land is simply too hilly and mountainous in much of the country. A reliance on hiring paid agricultural workers from the most destitute parts of the country, something several officials proposed to me, strikes me as highly undesirable.

The start of a better solution would be to condemn the view that hard rural work is somehow contemptible and that a lazy, indulgent urban lifestyle is somehow glorious and civilized.

One countryside student, when asked about Chinese views of work, told me the Chinese only want to work hard so they can secure a position that lets them relax, forego work, and live the life of urban luxury, with good food and drink.

I hope this student's perception of Chinese values toward work is incorrect. But there is some truth to her feeling that work is too often viewed only as a means to an end - a means to get to a big city, where relaxation and indulgence are the rule (or are, at least, thought to be the rule).

This view not only endangers China's agricultural production by draining people from the countryside in pursuit of imagined urban wonders; more generally, it poses problems for all Chinese production.

Challenging the rural stigma might stem the tide of people flocking to cities, a tide which has vexed nations around the world and which would surely challenge the most populous nation on earth if it goes unchecked. And confronting the often extreme instrumentalism of Chinese notions of work would prevent the next generation from viewing work as a means to land a position where one can escape hard work.

If Chinese newspapers, politicians and teachers more fully validated rural life and the farmers, then the hard work they represent might no longer be stigmatized.

As a result, the current instrumental view of work - that it is only a means to earn money to escape a dreary life of drudgery - could be replaced by a view that work can be, and should be, enjoyable and personally fulfilling.

I might add, having spent years studying Chinese education, that Chinese schooling could likewise be improved by affirmation of the pleasures learning can bring, in place of the all-too-common view that learning, like work, is only a burdensome means to a more glorious end.

I know many Chinese may see my views here - the emphasis on personal pleasure in learning and work - as deriving from American individualism. Some Chinese might even see my views as anti-collective and selfish. Such an analysis, however, is wrong.

Instrumental views of study and work put too much emphasis on money and success as the supreme measure of well-being. I firmly believe that the worship of money, recognized by many Chinese and foreign friends alike as a problem in contemporary China, stems from an over-emphasis on the external rewards of money and success and a failure to accord work and study intrinsic worth.

Recognizing that study and work can be a means for pleasure, joy and service to others - along with a concomitant recognition of the value of agricultural labor - could lead to new, needed changes in Chinese society. The result would be less selfishness rather than more, less emphasis on money and consumption, and a return to those older Chinese values that encouraged work because of its intrinsic value to oneself and to one's nation.

The author chairs the anthropology department at Dowling College in New York and is a visiting scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC

(China Daily 05/30/2007 page11)