When Environmental Protection Becomes an Exhibition: An Eco-Village’s Green Illusion
I. The Influencer Village as Exhibition
Just ten years ago, this was still a typical small mountain village suffering from progressive “hollowing out.” Now, to borrow the standard phrasing, Lüshui Village has “blazed a sustainable development path from green mountains and clear waters to ecological industry, Strengthening villages and enriching the people, which in turn feeds back into ecological restoration.” In the name of nature conservation, the village has attracted industries in design, tourism, cultural creativity and traditional crafts, earning its reputation as a model village for rural revitalisation. Study visits, tours and inspections never cease—delegations from government departments at every level, university faculty and students, study-tour organisations, and companies arranging team-building events, to name but a few.
In this sense, Lüshui Village is not merely a place to live but a large-scale exhibition with the village itself as its unit. Houses, roads, shops and fields are all carefully designed and laid out for guided tours, fulfilling outsiders’ dual imagination of an eco-pastoral idyll and rural revitalisation.
For visiting groups, the village’s rural operations company offers a basic guided tour service for a fee of 1,000 yuan. Visitors first listen to a fifteen-minute presentation at the visitor centre, during which the story of how Lüshui Village rewrote its own fate is recounted time and again. The guide then leads the group on a site visit, narrating as they go. The route typically links the village council, the Lüshui Nature School, the handicraft museum, the artisan workshop, the trailhead and the youth centre, before ending at a reservoir cradled in the mountains—the “sacred site” of nature conservation. Nearly every day, I see coaches following this same route, carrying all manner of groups, with visitors stopping at each point to listen to a different guide delivering virtually the same script.
Much like exhibits in a gallery carry plaques, the village has a designer-produced Wayfinding signage system. Starting from the village name sign at the entrance, it directs visitors’ attention to the key sites that define this model village for rural revitalisation, accompanied by a brief text panel. Most waymarks, however, point to the growing number of restaurants, B&Bs and other commercial premises. The language it uses to label places serves the outsider. For instance, the village’s traditional cluster of street vendors and shops is labelled “CBD,” even though locals still call it by its original name, the “Under-the-Bridge Market.”
Because the information that needs to be conveyed to tourists keeps multiplying, these signs are becoming ever larger and taller, a sight to behold. The original Wayfinding signage system featured clean, low-saturation colours, with smaller panels and typefaces that blended seamlessly into the rural landscape, neither jarring nor imposing. However, these road signs—legible only to those on foot—cannot satisfy businesses’ need to draw in passing traffic; they require larger panels and bigger type to catch the eye of drivers.
II. Manufacturing a Green Illusion
From “polluted mountain village” to “future village,” Lüshui Village’s story of green metamorphosis is often recounted with admiration. Yet a friend of mine, Yugang, who returned to farm, raised a question in my ear: is Lüshui Village truly an “eco-village”?
The story of how Lüshui Village became an “eco-village” goes like this: before 2015, for a long period, villagers had relied primarily on operating Moso bamboo forests upstream of the village reservoir, selling bamboo timber and shoots. To maximise yields, they overused fertiliser and herbicide, ultimately causing non-point source pollution such as nitrogen and phosphorus levels in the reservoir exceeding safe thresholds.
At the time, an environmental NGO partnered with the government to lease several hundred mu of Moso bamboo forest upstream of the drinking-water reservoir from the farmers, halting the use of fertiliser and pesticide within the groves, thereby improving water quality. The project raised charitable donations from an internet giant and a financial firm to cover the bamboo forest rent. The internet giant, in turn, could leverage the project to build its own “environmental” public image—despite the mountain of plastic waste generated by its e-commerce operations every year.
After that, with external funding and personnel flowing in, the conservation project incubated the Lüshui Nature School and guided villagers to operate B&Bs and farmhouse restaurants to cater to the growing numbers of visitors needing food and lodging. Meanwhile, the project and a design company met over the planning of an exhibition, which ultimately led the company to relocate its entire studio to Lüshui Village, bringing in dozens of staff and converting a disused socialist-style auditorium into a non-profit handicraft museum.
A few years ago, the village collective established a rural operations company and recruited a Village CEO to attract more merchants and designer studios to set up shop. The operations company also organises events large and small—art festivals, music festivals, sporting events—and on holidays installs attractions such as the “Egg Castle Party” and “Cat in the Sky” art and play installations throughout the village.
These new ventures have undoubtedly injected vitality into the village, yet they rarely touch upon the most fundamental link to nature here: agriculture.
Setting aside its identity as an influencer village, Lüshui Village is also a bamboo-producing and rice-growing area. The low hills are blanketed with Moso bamboo forests of dual purpose—yielding both shoots and timber—while small groves of early bamboo and Phyllostachys vivax are scattered behind houses and along field edges. In the flat river valleys among the hills lie a thousand mu of farmland. In earlier years, thanks to subsidies and profits, much of the cropland was converted to tree nurseries. In recent years, under the Permanent basic farmland protection policy, most of the flatland has been returned from forestry to cultivation.
Yet, like many villages across China, Lüshui Village is rapidly shedding the dependence on and stewardship of the land that once defined rural life. Nowadays, most of the young people work away from home; villagers born in the 1980s and younger tend to lack farming experience. As a result, these croplands have been consolidated and transferred to a handful of external large-scale farmers who employ modern chemical agriculture methods, relying on chemical fertiliser and pesticides for large-scale cultivation.
Therefore, on this land, when you see green or golden rice paddies, you might think them a soul-healing landscape. But strip away the filter, and you discover patches of scorched paddy bunds hidden beneath the rice ears—scorched because herbicide was applied too heavily or at too high a concentration. The fertiliser bags and pesticide bottles scattered across the field edges reveal a growing disconnection between people and the land.
Lüshui Village, which brands itself on environmental protection, has still not escaped the shadow of chemical agriculture. Whether in China or across the globe, intensive use of fertiliser and pesticide triggers soil acidification and compaction, an increase in pests and diseases, declining organic-matter content, and ultimately a vicious cycle of dependence on chemical agriculture—all of which also result in pesticide residues and heavy metals exceeding safe thresholds in the food consumed by urban populations. Today, when we speak of ecology, these are the harsh realities we must confront first.
When a village no longer loves its land, no longer tends the health of its soil and water at the root, the title of “eco-village” begins to feel like a castle built in the air.
Beyond agriculture, Lüshui Village’s way of life increasingly mirrors the high-energy, high-consumption patterns of urban living, without any alternative, sustainable plan taking shape: public transport here is scarce and cars are the primary means of getting around; many people commute long distances between town and village. The ubiquity of e-commerce means delivery depots are buried under mountains of parcels every day, generating vast amounts of packaging waste. In some areas, native vegetation has been cleared to create cherry blossom viewing groves and rows of identical green belts… Apart from still being able to buy vegetables grown by elderly locals in the self-produced, self-sold section of the market, it feels almost like an American suburb—a way of life built on high per-capita energy consumption.
Therefore, when guides tell visitors that ‘Lüshui Village has excellent ecology; in summer you can even see fireflies, and the Lüshui Nature School offers “nighttime firefly-watching” classes’, they overlook the fact that light pollution, ground sealing, renovation and development, and pesticide-induced water pollution in the village are all increasing—factors that threaten the breeding and survival of fireflies. Visitors marvel at the “pristine” rural landscape, yet the adverse effects of human activity on wild flora and fauna receive no genuine attention or discussion.
The starting point of Lüshui Village’s success story was improving water quality at a drinking-water source—a genuine achievement worth recognising. But the subsequent development path, built on a logic centred on “display”, has strayed from the original intent of environmental protection and even obscured more pressing, systemic ecological problems in the countryside. And in the eager relay of Lüshui Village’s success narrative, government, media, rural operations companies and tourists collectively manufacture a green illusion in the sense of tourism consumption.
III. A Model for the Rural Future?
Lüshui Village’s self-presentation and commercial operations have undoubtedly helped attract capital, online traffic, foundation funding and official support, bringing economic growth and an improved overall appearance. But can the development experience here truly be replicated by other villages? Does drawing on this experience genuinely point towards a more ecological, more endogenous exploration of the rural future?
The transition from nature conservation to rural tourism that Lüshui Village promotes externally sounds straightforward, but it is not something every place can replicate. When the water-source protection project stepped in, the stars were aligned: the Moso bamboo forests on the hills had already begun facing a situation where “the old can no longer manage them, and the young do not know how”; with the bamboo-timber market shrinking and profits plummeting, the conservation project could easily lease bamboo groves from villagers at a low price and carry out protection; relying on the convenient location and beautiful surroundings, villagers smoothly shifted from operating bamboo forests to tourism and services, losing little and sometimes earning more.
I once lived in a village where fruit cultivation was the main livelihood. The heavy use of chemical products severely polluted the well water locals relied on daily. Many villagers, it is said, developed kidney stones; some even chose to buy bottled water to drink. And yet, fruit as a high-value cash crop allowed the locals to stay in their hometowns rather than travel elsewhere for work. And there are even more places where people’s main income comes from activities that severely pollute the environment—and it is precisely these places that supply the metals, minerals, food and materials modern life cannot do without… Faced with these numerous, more complex realities, balancing community livelihoods with the overall ecological health of the countryside often means longer timescales and repeated adjustments—one cannot simply replicate Lüshui Village’s path to success.
Another key topic raised whenever the Lüshui Village case is mentioned: unlike the hollow villages where only the elderly and children remain, young people are arriving in or returning to Lüshui Village. The arrival of new residents, the homecoming of the second generation born to village families, and the incubation of new industries all attest to the self-sustaining vitality of this development path: starting from water-source protection a decade ago, Lüshui Village has naturally become a place where people stay and settle, rather than being shaped by government planning or capital enclosure into a contrived tourist attraction. The image the rural operations company tries to project is that of an organically developed community with a slower pace of rural life, rather than an “influencer village” for people to photograph and check in.
However, the work of many ‘new residents’ and returning young people is directly tied to tourism and has no close connection to the land. They open restaurants and cafés, work for tourism-oriented bodies such as the rural operations company, or offer all manner of intangible cultural heritage craft workshops and study-tour courses. Many ‘old residents’ have also begun depending on tourism for their income: they renovate the villas on their homestead plots to run B&Bs, and set up stalls in places where tourists gather on weekends and holidays. Many young people simply reside in Lüshui Village; they are digital nomads, or they lead an urban–rural dual existence—working in town and returning to the village in the evenings or on weekends and holidays.
Whether it is rural tourism or a town-and-village migratory lifestyle, the countryside is merely an extension of the urban work-and-consumption system—the city’s back garden. Under this development model, even though Lüshui Village has achieved strengthening villages and enriching the people, it raises concerns about whether it can truly fulfil the promise of “sustainability” in the future.
An organic village should of course not be limited to agriculture; it ought to have richer diversity in enterprises and division of labour. But neglecting the very agriculture that ties people more closely to the land beneath their feet—and the other endogenous rural industries—in order to cater to the external demands and gaze of urban artists, designers, consumers and media often results in the village’s display effect driving it further towards “real-estate-ification”, gradually diverging from the “ecological” ideal Lüshui Village proclaimed at the start of its story.
For now, Lüshui Village can still sustain its bond with the land through the local knowledge of older generations, striving to maintain a balance against the village’s commercial operations. But after another two generations—once most villagers no longer farm or settle in the city—where will this village’s culture and traditions lead? And where will its natural ecology go?
Life in Lüshui Village continues, still full of vitality. Only time will give us the answer.
All photographs in this article were taken by the author
Edited by: Zheng Yuyang