Rural revitalization, rural infrastructure, social change, and public services.
Nearly twenty years into rural work, Lao Liu (Huang Guoliang) and his partner, Agricultural Technician Luo Lishuang, have nurtured fellow ecological farmers in Guangxi. He discusses the gap between textbook science and rural experience — and asks whether new-generation farmers’ minds have followed their bodies back to the village.
Foodthink, supported by Oxfam Hong Kong’s Beijing Office, has launched a survey soliciting practical experience and needs in climate adaptation from rural social organisations. The survey closes on 31 December 2024.
In the Jino Mountain rainforest, Jinuo guide Saoqie forages greens, scoops fish and roasts food wrapped in banana leaves — a meal once the Jinuo people’s daily livelihood. This rainforest is no “untouched paradise”: since 24 trekking companies arrived, Jinuo lives keep shifting between rubber and tourists.
Meicuntou, with fewer than four hundred permanent residents, faces “village extinction.” Fan Hanquan offers his own land and housing free for three years to attract ecological farmers, while the village collective’s 2023 trial planting lost 70,000 yuan and the land was left fallow in 2024.
An Anhui family travelled far into the Hunan countryside to open a mooncake factory. The child grew up beside the conveyor belt through summer holidays, until the factory shut, the fields all became sheds, and the bicycle on the river embankment rode ever further away.
Wang Xiaoyi, Chinese translator of Seeing Like a State and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, traces the three stages of Scott’s reception in China, the historical “loosen–tighten–loosen–tighten” cycle between state planning and grassroots spontaneity, and the confidence grassroots adaptive change brings after project failure.
From the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, cooperatives have connected members at both consumption and production ends for 180 years. Foodthink gathers cooperative practices in food and agriculture worldwide, tracing this movement’s paths to health, fairness and sustainability in the ‘food empire’s’ gaps.
From volunteer teaching in Shaanxi to promoting ecological agriculture training in Guangxi, Huang Guoliang (Lao Liu) co-founded the Y.C. James Yen Rural Reconstruction Academy and the Little Donkey Community Farm, advocating coexistence and mutual learning between ecological and conventional agriculture rather than irreconcilability.
With over a decade in the villages – growing rice, raising chickens, brewing green plum wine, running rural tourism – Huang Yajun of Conghua’s Deep Cultivation centre offers, after multiple setbacks, a practitioner’s response to the academic judgement that rural work runs counter to modernisation.
In Zhaizi Village, Jianyang, Sichuan, Senior Agronomist Yuan Yong teaches smallholders the no-till cover method for growing rice hands-on. A few aunties and uncles sit round discussing whether it suits their plots; Grandpa Jiang decides on the spot to set aside two fen of land to try it.
