South floods, north droughts, back-to-back typhoons – smallholder farmers bear the brunt. From stress-tolerant varieties to crop rotation and intercropping, agroecology digging deep alongside farmers is agriculture’s fundamental path through the climate crisis.
Men leave for work; the women of Stone City stay to farm, tend old and young, and run guesthouses. He Xiuqin’s plot grows twenty to thirty crops across the seasons; Zhang Xiuyun keeps over a dozen heirloom maize varieties. This uncelebrated labour connects field to table.
In the Jinsha River valley at Stone City, Lijiang, villagers whistle to call the wind for winnowing wheat, wait for rain to plant maize. Old varieties like Tunmai and chicken bean live on the hillside from generation to generation, sustained by household seed saving and exchanges among neighbours.
Qin Xianrong, a 1990s-born returnee, has farmed 60 mu of sloping land in Dadu’gang, Xishuangbanna, for four years—growing pineapples, passion fruit and macadamia nuts almost wild, no chemical fertiliser, pesticide or watering. Amid rubber plantations and tea gardens, he explores a way of reconnecting with the land.
Four eco-farms—Lexiangu, Yuefengdao, Wuyuetian and Fukang Shengliang—span the region from Shanghai to Jiaxing; their losses ranged from minor damage to nearly a whole year’s work down the drain, with scale, infrastructure and farming methods the decisive variables.
The eating disorders art exhibition at Gallery No. 600, Shanghai Mental Health Centre, unites patient-created and professional works. Curator Zhang Qinwen, a six-year survivor, founded the ED Healer mutual-support community, using science communication and exhibitions to build public awareness of this illness.
Once young teachers who had both worked in nature education, Antian and Sanqi spent six months interning at Yinlin Village’s ecological farm in Guangdong – planting, organising events, running the café. Now they are determined to return to the countryside and build their own farm.
In 2006, on the banks of the Jinsha River, six ethnicities in Chezhu village celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival together. Their mooncakes had no filling; the wheat, rapeseed oil, eggs and maltose were all homegrown—”Everything but the iron pot is homegrown.”
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.
Director Liu Taifeng of Another Day Full of Hope says riders’ “zero-cost onboarding” is really just debt for equipment and rent upfront; engineers under KPIs dare not question the system; restaurant owners must pad reviews — all strata are bound by the same algorithmic logic.
