I. “You Have Been Penalised and Demoted to Clerk” “You have been penalised and demoted to a clerk.” A few months ago, Ms L, a store manager at a Bianlifeng branch in Beijing, suddenly received a message to this effect on her handheld terminal. As part of her daily routine,…
Foodthink Notes This year’s rainfall across southern China has been deeply concerning. Beyond the news reports of widespread damage, we have also begun receiving troubling updates from our farming partners regarding diminished yields. Kouzi, a long-standing friend of Foodthink based in Fujian, has seen his onion and wheat crops nearly…
6 July marks International Cooperative Day, with this year’s theme being “Cooperatives are building a better future for all.” Cooperatives form a global social movement. Since the founding of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, the movement has spanned 180 years, taking root and flourishing across the globe.…
This episode of Food Talk features Huang Guoliang, an experienced rural development practitioner. As is common among his peers, we usually refer to him simply as ‘Lao Liu’. Lao Liu has been working in rural communities for nearly two decades, having first embarked on this path in 2005. He shared…
Editor’s Note In Chengdu’s Yulin community, a surprise vegetable parcel from farming friend Hu Xuemei brought a little shock—and an unexpected shift—to Xia Lili, the cook at the Little Dining Table. This is the fourth piece in the “One Pot Shitai’s Little Dining Table” series. It will explore Xia Lili’s…
Shelling and grinding buckwheat groats into flour, mixing it with wheat flour to form a dough, and then slicing it into fine, slender noodles yields one of Japan’s most everyday staples. In Japanese, *soba* (buckwheat) is a homophone for “beside”. Consequently, asking for “buckwheat noodles” sounds identical to saying “please…
I once wrote How Much Land Does a Person Need?, and experience has shown that a modest plot of roughly an acre is entirely sufficient to meet all my life’s needs. So, for someone living on that smallholding, just how much living space is actually required? I want to respect…
I. Setting out with questions in mind Late in March, I embarked on a three-month internship at Guixinyuan Farm. Partly, this was to test whether I was suited to life as an agricultural worker; partly, I was searching for an ideal model of farming: What kind of relationship ought agriculture…
Taking a break from a conference in Nanning, we caught up with our old friend Huang Yajun. As a seasoned rural development practitioner, Yajun, born in the 1980s, has witnessed over a decade of shifts in the countryside. From grassroots, community-led explorations to government-driven poverty alleviation and rural revitalisation initiatives,…
I. My Story with Fireflies As someone from the north, I had never seen a firefly before the age of fifty; my limited understanding of them stopped at the classical idiom ‘studying by the light of snow and a pouch of fireflies’. It was only when I travelled to Taiwan…
