“People gone; buildings empty: this is the fact of daily life in the countryside,” lamented the author Liang Hong in her bestselling account China in One Village. It was a grim portrait of her home town – its vitality ebbing as the forces of modern life drained it of young people, polluted its water, exploited its resources and even turned the local school into a pigsty. Its quarter of a million sales reflected not just her distinctive writing, but the familiarity of the story. As urban China prospered with the Communist party’s turn to the market, 350 million villagers migrated to the cities, leaving behind increasingly desolate settlements.
Now Beijing is promoting “rural revitalisation”. State media run a steady stream of articles lauding city dwellers who have returned to their home towns to set up cafes or run home-stays. The expansion of transport and telecommunications infrastructure has allowed rural inhabitants to expand their horizons. First came the “Taobao villages”, where at least a 10th of households were using Alibaba’s e-commerce platform. More recently, farmers have taken to livestreaming – selling fruit or flowers direct to urbanites.
The push factors are equally potent. Disenchanted urbanites tired of the pressures of city life are seeking to take it easier in the countryside, just as hippies in the west rejected their parents’ materialistic dreams in the 1960s. Some just aren’t willing to work round the clock; others see increasingly scant rewards for doing so. Some are turning to rural entrepreneurship because of the high youth unemployment rate. And the bulge in working-age citizens that fuelled China’s boom years is now becoming a wave of retirees.
Migrant remittances were critical to lifting rural incomes. But the hukou or household registration system, tying rights to benefits and services to your home town, forced working parents to leave their children with grandparents – fracturing families and blighting the prospects of many in the next generation. Now it prevents them from retiring in the cities.
China announced in 2020 that it had eradicated extreme poverty, which it characterised as entirely rural. That reflected remarkable improvements in the lives of tens of millions of people through official programmes – even if the means used were often crude, such as forced relocation, and the headline target was reached because it was measured on extremely specific criteria.
But new opportunities should not be overstated. Remote areas are unlikely to benefit as those near major roads or close to affluent urban centres are doing. Many policies are focused on towns – small by Chinese standards, not so by western ones – rather than villages. And disgruntled city dwellers who seek a rural idyll may find, as many in the west have, that they cannot make a go of it or that the novelty wears off.
In fact, projections suggest that the rural labour force will continue contracting until 2035, with the urban labour force expected to grow. Increasingly, the government’s vision is of development being driven by hi-tech industries, while the countryside continues to provide cheap labour for the cities when needed and troops for the People’s Liberation Army. China needs better social protection and services – going beyond its hukou reforms to abolish the system, and investing more in education in the villages as well as the cities that house its cutting-edge enterprises. Otherwise, most will continue to see the countryside as a place to leave behind.
