"There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants."

-  Mao Zedong, The Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside, Volume 1 (1955)

YUEQI, Chongqing – Driving around the farming villages surrounding Chongqing municipality during China’s Lunar New Year holiday this weekend, we noticed plenty of evidence to support Mao's thesis.  

The most popular was the abundance of Guangdong license plates. Guangdong province, a few hundred miles southeast of Chongqing, is considered ground zero for China's economic reform experiment, the heartland of the nation's export manufacturing economy.   

"These cars all belong to people who went south and made it big," explained Li Youfu, the village elder of Yueqi. In this rural hamlet of 5,000 people, half are migrant workers, and their remittances make-up about 80 percent of the town’s income. "They became little bosses down there and bought cars to bring back here." 

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Hopes for a better life run high for China's new generation of so-called peasantry.

"[The table] cost only 2,000 renminbi ($290)," said Li Jingshan, the village elder's 22-year-old son. That's more than what used to be his monthly salary. The younger Li came back home early in December for the holiday – a little earlier than usual – after the Guangdong food product factory that employed him suspended its operations temporarily because of the slowdown. He's worked in the south for four years, where he earned 1,800 renminbi a month ($264), plus free meals and housing. 

But the global economic crisis has reverberated around China's once-thriving coastal areas in the south and east. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said up to 10 million out of an estimated 150 million migrants lost their jobs last year due to the crisis. Since business has slowed at Li's factory, it's unclear whether he will have a job to go back to once the weeks-long New Year holiday comes to an end. 

"We were finishing work at two, three o'clock in the afternoon," said Li when I asked him whether there had been enough orders at the factory to keep him fully employed. Then he grinned. "More time to play!" 

VIDEO: Millions of migrant workers are returning home after losing their jobs

‘These young people can't farm’
Li doesn't appear to have inherited his carefree spirit from his father.  As the older Li led us behind his two-story house to the fields and paddies which he and his fellow villagers have been farming for decades, he expressed a concern that was echoed across the countryside. 

"These young people can't farm," he said, shaking his head at the thought of his son staying home to work the land if there was no job waiting for him back in Guangdong. "They just aren't used to it." 

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Despite steadily rising incomes, parts of China's countryside still look as they did 50 years ago.

Nor is the father keen to have his son till the soil. "Peasant incomes are very low. If they can't find work, just to live off the farm is not enough. Even with government subsidies, it's not enough," said the older Li, who earns roughly 20,000 renminbi a year (about $3,000), but those earnings come all from his little corner shop. "What I farm here is just for me and my family to eat. You can't earn enough from that." 

"This is definitely a trend we're seeing," said Zhou Litai, a high-profile labor lawyer based in central Chongqing. "It's the balinghou generation of migrant workers," he said referring to those born after the 1980s. 

Most of these migrant workers left their homes years ago and have become urban dwellers.  

"I am more used to Guangdong than I am to this place now," said Mr. Zhang, a 30-year-old from Gaosun village. Zhang, who was too shy to give his full name, began working at a garment factory in Foshan, Guangdong, back in 1997. A few years later, he left to open his own restaurant. "After coming out to work after finishing school, for ten years, I have been away all this time. I know Guangdong really well. This place – not so much." 

Pondering the options 
Zhang is taking a wait-and-see approach for now.  "If there is a chance the economy [in the south] will improve, then I will definitely go back right away." But if the downturn persists, farming isn't an option for Zhang. 

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

NBC News' David Lom films an elderly farmer cleaning rice for the new year feast.

"It doesn't bring much income," he shook his head. "You still have to go away to work. You still have to rely on work in other areas. Maybe you don't have to go too far, but you have to get out to the big cities or more developed areas, do some construction or something menial to earn better money. But to expect that we can live off our pigs or ducks, there is no way you can prosper that way." 

Concerns about maintaining social stability have propelled local governments to act. In fact, everyone we met talked about government-funded training programs for unemployed returnees. 

Wen Chen-bing, 42, quit a manager's job at a toy factory in Dongguan, Guangdong. The factory, which had supplied big companies like Mattel, had reduced its workforce from 13,000 to 3,000 in 2008. 

Wen decided to leave when he heard about a local training program designed for managers at his level. "This will give me better opportunities in the future," he said. "And the skills will be very valuable." 

Uncertainty about the economy hasn’t yet muted the villagers' holiday celebrations. Folks like Zhang said they're spending the same amount of money to ring in the New Year as they usually would.