Don’t Let Straw Become the Last Straw That Breaks Village Cadres

I. The Strictest No-Burn Season

Everyone could sense that the ban on burning straw had suddenly become serious.

This is Village A in 2025, nestled in the heart of the Dongting Lake area in Hunan Province. The terrain is flat and the village sits in a major rice-producing region. With several thousand mu of farmland, it grows mainly single-cropping rice, planted in spring and harvested in autumn. In winter, farmers raise crayfish and sow oilseed rape. About a third of the farmland lies winter fallow, with a small portion devoted to double-cropping rice.

‘The landowners all rang me up: “Don’t burn, whatever you do, don’t burn!”‘ Zhao Hai, who helps local farmers tend several hundred mu of land in Village A, remembers it vividly. In years past, he would see officials come to the fields each year to campaign and mobilise, but when it came to burning, people burned regardless.

Sun Weimin, the village’s longtime secretary, understood too that this year was different. Although the national ban on burning straw had been in place for more than a decade, enforcement varied widely from place to place. Village A had always been on the more lenient side. In previous years, the county would issue notices to the village committee, and each township would carry out controlled burning at scheduled times. For years, this was simply how things had been done.

However, from 2022 to 2024, Hunan’s air quality indicators failed to meet assessment requirements for three consecutive years, causing the province to slide down the rankings in the Central Assessment of Progress in the War against Pollution and to lose points in the province-wide Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of High-Quality Development. By the end of 2025, Hunan’s heavily polluted days had already exceeded the national assessment threshold, and ‘the air pollution prevention and control situation is extremely severe.’

In June 2025, Hunan Province published a plan, for the first time drawing a line at provincial level between no-burn and restricted-burning zones for straw. Changsha City and cities and counties in the Dongting Lake area, including Yueyang, Yiyang and Changde, were all designated Class I control zones, with the proportion of farmland subject to the no-burn rule being ‘in principle, no less than 90%.’

Village A happened to fall within a Class I control zone. At the end of August, the county in which it is located issued a notice, tightening the rules further: a blanket no-burn order across all farmland in the county, with no burning permitted ‘at any time, under any weather conditions or air quality conditions.’ The notice is valid for five years, with joint inspections to be organised by the Office of the County Ecological and Environmental Protection Committee.

The pressure was passed down level by level. The township government also published a special work plan. The township’s Comprehensive Law Enforcement Brigade set up a dedicated no-burn patrol team, authorised to “immediately stop” and “penalise on the spot” any burning. Village A compiled a dedicated straw management register and formed a patrol team of five or six people to record each household’s planting area and go door to door to have farmers sign no-burn pledges.

Still Patrolling Into the Night

In September, as the autumn harvest began, the patrol teams took to the fields. Zhao Hai still remembers it clearly: the village service team, the township agricultural office, urban management officers and police all turned up, and the village was a hive of activity. The old secretary’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker, again and again:

“For the next couple of days, patrols are coming — absolutely no burning — do you hear me, absolutely no burning, not even tonight between eight and nine!”

Liu Xiao, a member of the village service team and a village committee official, was assigned the task. He began patrolling outdoors every single day, and the moment he spotted a fire he would run to put it out. By the end of a day, his electric scooter’s battery would be completely drained.

He would snap photos of himself working outdoors at eight or nine in the evening and post them in the work group chat, with time and location stamps. Sometimes the photos showed nothing but a road: it was too dark to make out the fields, but he needed proof that he was still on patrol.

As the policy required, the township was subject to two sets of inspectors: one team from county-level departments assigned to oversee the township, and another from the Blue Sky Office’s dedicated inspection group. Both were required to visit the villages daily for oversight. On top of that, municipal- and provincial-level covert inspection teams would occasionally make surprise visits.

At the grassroots level, satellite remote sensing and tower-based video surveillance have long been mature technologies for monitoring changes in farmland use, and they happen to be perfectly suited to monitoring straw burning. The former captures images as it passes overhead, detecting thermal anomalies within a range of around a hundred kilometres; the latter uses 24-hour high-definition cameras to scan plots within several kilometres, triggering an alarm at any suspected fire. Between them, they have all but become the township enforcement brigade’s most important tools for real-time fire surveillance.

A typical real-time monitoring and response went something like this: at around six in the evening, the township duty officer posted a photo in the work group chat, @a village official: ‘There’s a fire to the northeast of Tower No. [X] at Village [Y] — please deal with it.’ The officer also posted another photo with the note “cameras have all been turned away” — presumably so that no fire detection record would be left. Within a mere ten minutes, two village officials both replied: ‘Handled.’

The moment even a small fire appeared in a village, officials at every level faced the risk of disciplinary action. From 2023 to 2025, feedback from Hunan’s ecological and environmental protection inspections showed that several cities and counties had been formally criticised and summoned for talks over inadequate fire response. Near Changsha, it was said that one township had three recorded fires while others had only two; the municipal inspection team, needing to make an example, dismissed an official from the agriculture department. In the county where Village A is located, two section-level officials had already been removed from their posts.

But, as Sun Weimin put it: ‘You can punish the township, you can punish the village, but there’s no way to restrain ordinary people — there are no real consequences for them.’

All the pressure ultimately bore down on the village committee. Even while sleeping at home, Sun Weimin clutched his phone with notifications switched on — whenever a new message appeared in the group chat, he would glance at the tower in the photo to see if it was in his own village.

Although the policy clearly stipulates a fine of ‘500 to 2,000 yuan’, Sun Weimin said that in the end each village could only catch one or two people as a token gesture. There was even the farce of an 80-year-old being detained while his son was slow to come and collect him. After endless efforts, and with the village committee itself being called in at one point, not a single fine was ever actually collected.

The old secretary’s repeated insistence on the loudspeaker — ‘not even between eight and nine!’ — was for good reason. By that hour, the day’s sun had dried the straw until it was loose and ready, and the patrol teams had gone home for their evening meal. Sometimes the cameras had already quietly turned their heads. And so, as eight o’clock struck, flames would flicker up in the fields once more.

“Can I be honest? In the end, it all got burned.” One villager said. Liu Xiao, who was responsible for patrols, also admitted that his own family’s few mu of land had, in the end, been burned too.

Yet this exhausting and futile patrolling lasted a full three months. Hiring someone to patrol the village for a day cost at least 100 yuan in wages. A village team leader explained that as long as a patrol team was put in place, when government inspectors came looking, the village could say they had genuinely assigned personnel and carried out their duties properly. ‘They’re the ones determined to burn — I can’t stop them.’

Zhao Hai felt further that whether it was the village or the township, sending people out to patrol was merely a formality. ‘If there’s not even anyone patrolling, then they really will get a telling-off. It’s not easy for them either — you have to be understanding.’

What About the Straw?

The village and township cadres were simultaneously racking their brains to find a way out for the straw. During the autumn harvest of 2025, the biggest job in Village A was contacting buyers and farm machinery operators to get the straw dealt with.

One approach was to bale it and cart it away; the other was to chop it and work it into the soil, or leave it as surface mulching. In professional terminology, these are known respectively as “off-field removal” and “straw incorporation”.

What Village A tried first was baling and off-field removal. In September, a baler was brought into the village, but in the end only two or three hundred mu were processed.

In promotional videos online, a large baler sweeps into a field and gets everything tidied up in a flash — some even have integrated models that bale as they harvest. But in Zhao Hai’s view, the machine that came to their village was “far from that sophisticated”. It was constantly breaking down mid-job, and someone had to clear the straw out of the machine by hand.

Smallholders were on a different harvesting rhythm too. Everyone grew a single-cropping rice cycle — planted in April, harvested in September — but by the time some families had finished harvesting, drying, and were waiting to flood their fields and stock crayfish (about a third of the village’s farmland was devoted to crayfish farming, the villagers’ single most important source of income), the neighbouring plot might have only just started its harvest. And when the baler rushed over only for rain to fall, the straw became unsalvageable and the trip was wasted.

Moreover, while the machine operators who came to bale received a subsidy, they were not responsible for transporting or selling the straw. Great rolls of straw piled up in front of and behind houses and along farm access tracks. The village committee approached an agricultural company building a straw collection and storage centre locally; the two sides agreed the straw would be chopped into feed and sold to farms.

But the company then told Sun Weimin their machine was broken and couldn’t chop — they needed a transformer installed first. Once that mechanical problem was sorted, the company said there was no market. They had no choice but to haul the straw gathered from over a hundred mu of fields to the factory premises. By then, the yard was already heaped with bundles of straw of every size from several neighbouring villages. That straw still hadn’t found a buyer come the following summer. Sun Weimin said the straw sitting at several such collection and storage centres had been unable to find a market either.

The farming calendar waits for no one. In early October, oilseed rape planting machinery arrived at the field edges. The company pitched in again, hauling the remaining straw bales from some 150 mu of headlands and field margins onto the village road. Over the National Day holiday, the village spent around a thousand yuan to hire tractors and drag the straw to the open space behind the village committee office. Day in, day out, the village committee was racing against the clock.

The hardship of the process is beyond description for anyone who has not lived through it. One farmer recalled that it was still sweltering hot; with just three or five mu, it had taken him a full three days just to cart his straw home by vehicle.

But heaven was not on their side. Before long, the rain came in relentless days; straw not yet baled rotted in the fields, everything was loose, watery mud, and vehicles simply couldn’t get in. Sun Weimin remembered that crayfish farmers whose straw hadn’t been cleared away came to the village committee every day, demanding a reckoning. And piled in front of the committee building, in the offices and the stores, lice and insects crawled everywhere.

Finally the skies cleared. Terrified of delaying the next season’s sowing, villagers couldn’t resist — they started burning again. The village committee rushed the straw chopper dispatched from the township out into the fields to get the land prepared before it was too late. Complaints came thick and fast: the straw was too thick to chop; it was too late in the year, delaying oilseed rape sowing and hurting yields; the large baler, weighed down by bundles of over 100 jin, had pressed the soil so hard nothing could grow in it anymore…

By then the straw heap in front of the village committee had rotted and sprouted weeds. One day it suddenly burst into flames — a neighbouring township had once seen a giant straw pile, set deliberately alight by someone or perhaps ignited by accident, burn for a full week.

But this time, only black smoke rose. The straw, rain-soaked and densely packed inside its bales, simply refused to catch. With no other option, people scrambled to douse it with water and hired someone to flatten it out.

‘When they were going about it, watching all that unfold, I just wanted to laugh — but what can you do?’ Zhao Hai mused.

By now, of the village’s several thousand mu of farmland, apart from the two or three hundred mu taken off-field, only just over a thousand mu had been chopped and incorporated. A great deal of straw still sat in the fields, but October was already half over. Unable to wait any longer, villagers took to burning again every few days.

“The Window”

An opportunity came out of nowhere.

As mentioned earlier, the high-definition cameras mounted on the telecom towers can sometimes have their heads turned away. Though no written rule stipulates when, or by whom, this might happen, the villagers all knew there were occasional gaps.

A rumour, said to have leaked from within the government system, began circulating. “There’s a window of a few hours today!” The village committee immediately notified the team leaders of every villagers’ group, who passed the word on to individual households anxious about where to store their straw, waiting to sow oilseed rape, and eager to flood their paddies for crayfish: from this hour to that, the cameras aren’t watching — get burning!

The rain had stopped for days, and the unbaled straw had long since dried out in the sun. The dry straw, neatly stacked in a line along the field — someone sets fire to one end, and the flames race the whole length.

A village ten kilometres away lit the first fires; Village A followed suit, then another village to the south. “It all took off at once!” “You could see the blaze from dozens of kilometres away in the county town. Lots of police came — but what good did that do? The law cannot punish a crowd!” a villager sighed.

How much land the other villages burned was unknown, but this time Village A had at least 1,000-odd mu alight, burning for three to four hours. Villagers described the sky turning crimson from the fires.

Hearing someone say “the common folk are grateful to you,” Sun Weimin felt a bitter pang. He had spent decades on village committee work — lived through the agricultural tax era, weathered flood-fighting campaigns, and grown used to spending the day in the branch office, dozing upright in his chair, interrupted at any moment by villagers coming for him to handle or mediate all manner of matters. But when it came to the straw burn ban, he had nothing more to say. He felt only a headache.

Sure enough, inspectors came down from above. The next evening, the southern village had been burning for only two hours before they were shut down. Luckily, Village A had finished theirs by then. It was then they learned that the province would be sending an inspection team the very next day.

This time they couldn’t just fob off a tower camera. The province’s verification relied on satellite imagery burn patches; swathes of charred black earth would not escape detection under the satellite’s “sky eye”. The government above hurriedly consulted with Village A and organised sixteen large rotary tillers overnight to plough the scorched topsoil into the ground. The outlay that night came to 60,000 yuan, reportedly footed by the township government. The matter was finally closed.

But Sun Weimin’s work was far from over.

By late October it was raining in the township, and someone in the straw burn ban working group quipped sarcastically: finally, a good night’s sleep! If anyone’s that industrious — burning in the rain — they should get a hefty commendation.

By December, the oilseed rape was sown and the juvenile crayfish were growing, but villagers on winter fallow still wanted to burn the grass in their fields and around their houses to cut next year’s pest problems, or set light to rubbish, dead branches and fallen leaves, or set off firecrackers. All of it was forbidden: under the data criteria used by the tower company and the environmental authorities, any ignition at all counted as a fire point.

The group chat kept posting messages:

“On X December, the province notified our city of X fire points. Today, the Meteorological Bureau has issued a yellow haze warning signal, forecasting severe haze within the next 24 hours. The current situation is extremely serious.”

“The municipal bureau deployed a supervision team last evening; as late as ten o’clock they were spot-checking duty rosters at both township and village level. Township and village patrol teams and duty officers are asked to intensify patrols during key periods…”

“Please all overcome difficulties and maintain duty rosters, step up patrols and oversight, and put an end to the open-air burning of straw. The city will be sending a covert inspection team, so no one should relax their vigilance. Hold the last five days — protect the gains of over three months’ effort.”

“Only three days left of this year’s burn ban!”

Who Pays the Bill?

Sun Weimin worked out that Village A had spent 400,000 yuan that year on straw work alone — on baling, hiring patrols to watch the fields, transporting straw, chopping it, and calling in sixteen rotary tillers overnight to rotavate the scorched ground. It also included the 80,000 yuan spent in late October on a new small baler for the village, one that was never used. Most of the money had come from higher-level governments, but “that’s taxpayer money all the same,” he said, pained. Why couldn’t it have gone towards building roads, erecting bridges, or improving basic infrastructure?

Factoring in the straw yield per mu of land, and having seen firsthand what it costs to ship straw off-site, he reckoned that transport alone would have run the agricultural company operating the straw collection and storage centre to at least 4 million yuan.

But over more than a decade of the straw burn ban, the many provinces that have experimented with off-field straw removal have found that because straw has a low calorific value and low nutritional density yet occupies enormous bulk, power plants, livestock farms and other enterprises are unwilling to buy it, let alone pay the steep transport costs.

Chen Jing, an associate professor at Northwest A&F University, carried out field research on off-field straw removal in Anhui. He found that most collection and storage centres could not even recycle thirty per cent of the straw within their catchment areas, and that government subsidy incentives invariably failed to take root — at root, the profit margin was simply too thin.

When companies were unable to achieve “full collection”, Sun Weimin heard that two villages in the township had tried to find their own outlets. But merely hauling the straw from the field to the buyer’s waiting lorry left them tens of thousands of yuan out of pocket.

Moreover, off-field straw removal still depended heavily on subsidies, and with many local governments’ finances stretched thin, scholars judged the arrangement unsustainable in the long term — a finding consistent with what our own fieldwork revealed. Two interviewees confirmed to us that a local straw collection and storage company had yet to receive its full subsidies. And for the farmers in Village A and another village near Changsha who had taken part in off-field removal and soil-incorporation operations, the subsidies they had applied for the previous year had still not been approved by the city or county as of early June.

In fact, in January 2025 the Standing Committee of the Hunan Provincial People’s Congress passed the Several Provisions on the Comprehensive Utilisation of Crop Straw in Hunan Province, the first provincial-level regulation in the country to govern the comprehensive utilisation of straw, exploring “controlled burning”. In particular, addressing the pest outbreaks that years of straw incorporation had brought on in Hunan, it proposed a targeted measure: “In burn-ban zones, straw carrying pests or diseases that quarantine inspection has confirmed to require burning may be burnt in the open, provided the agriculture and rural affairs and ecological environment departments of the county-level people’s government have first put safe and controllable measures in place.” Some commentators saw this as a positive step away from an outright “ban” towards “restriction” — a measured easing of the burn ban.

But a township official in the agricultural sector revealed that the new regulations, barely in force, had already been shelved within the government system under pressure from environmental inspections. Hunan had entered the “strictest” burn-ban phase in its history.

In April 2026, the oilseed rape was harvested. Village A’s straw burn ban, patrols and mobilisation work began all over again. The village committee had a fresh ledger bound and placed on the office desk, ready for inspection by higher authorities.

– This is Foodthink’s 819th original article –

Zhao Hai, Sun Weimin and Liu Xiao are pseudonyms used in this article

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs were taken by the author

Editor: Ling Yu

Layout: Ming Lin

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