Watermelons, Guaranteed Sweet; Growing Them, Guaranteed Bitter

The growers’ homes are outwardly indistinguishable from the watermelon polytunnels – steel-pipe frames and plastic-film walls – yet they house the entire life of a family. And yet by early October, as watermelon sales draw to a close, the growers dismantle both their homes and their polytunnels entirely. After heading back to their hometowns in Zhejiang for a month or more of rest, they return to Yannan Village and rebuild the polytunnels from scratch. Ever since twenty years ago, when the first grower family came from Zhejiang and settled in this village in southern Jiangsu, the cycle of dismantling and rebuilding has played out every single year.

No nation eats more watermelons than China. Over the past decade, the country has grown more than 60 million tonnes of watermelons each year – roughly 60 per cent of the global total – and still imports large quantities from abroad. With market demand so vast and profit margins so generous, many “large-scale operators” have entered the field, cultivating hundreds or even thousands of mu at a time. By comparison, the growers of Yannan Village seem rather particular: most of them run their operations as husband-and-wife partnerships.

“Living on the Land”: Labour and Life Beneath the Polytunnels

When I first arrived at Yannan Village, I was astonished by its beauty. A clear stream stretched east to west, its banks lined with neat rows of Jiangnan-style homes. Marble walls and metal fencing enclosed spacious courtyards in which stood two- or three-storey detached houses in a palette of red, white and grey. Some villagers tended trees and flowers in their own courtyards; others had installed sculptures. Everything looked elegant and grand. It formed a stark contrast with the unbroken sweeps of white plastic polytunnels just a short distance away

“The growers watched me grow up.” Zhou Pan was nineteen years old and a daughter born and raised in Yannan Village. As far back as she could remember, the people from Zhejiang had been there. Hardworking and capable, they were also warm and hospitable – they would greet her with a beaming smile whenever they saw her. And yet, in her recollection, the growers did not often cross paths with local villagers, because they were “living on the land”.

This notion of “living on the land” marked these watermelon growers apart from grain farmers, vegetable growers and most fruit growers alike: they made the polytunnels their home.

From the outside, the home looked no different from the polytunnels used for growing watermelons – steel-pipe frames rising into a rounded arch overhead, tightly wrapped in thick plastic film. Inside, though, it was small but fully self-contained, serving as living room, bedroom, dining area, kitchen and store all at once. A dozen steps carried you from the front entrance of the polytunnel to the back, yet this limited space held everything a family needed for its daily life.

Why did the growers live inside polytunnels rather than renting or buying a house in the area?

It had to do, first of all, with the nature of the watermelon. The crop does not suit continuous cropping – growing it repeatedly on the same plot – as this tends to cause a build-up of pathogens and outbreaks of pests and disease that are difficult to eradicate. On top of that, watermelons are thirst-crops requiring enormous quantities of irrigation, and the sugars they accumulate come at the expense of nutrients drawn from the soil. After years of continuous planting, soil fertility drops rapidly, sometimes leading to desertification or soil compaction.

On top of these agronomic constraints, policy pressures – “upholding the 1.8 billion mu arable land red line”, curbing the conversion of cropland to non-agricultural use, and preventing cropland being diverted from grain production – cascaded from the top down to front-line officials at the grassroots level. Many areas introduced rules banning the cultivation of watermelons in polytunnels, or required crop rotation to ensure every plot yielded at least one grain crop each year. T City, under whose jurisdiction Yannan Village falls, was no exception. Brother Li, a melon dealer with over a decade in the trade, told me that T City used to have “polytunnels as far as the eye could see”, but after “the state no longer permitted it”, the practice was gradually confined to the township in which Yannan Village is located.

Facing this dual constraint – natural and regulatory – growers typically resorted to one of two strategies. One was grafting. The watermelons grown in fixed locations at commercial scale often used this technique: in some watermelon farms in Panggezhuang, Daxing, Beijing, for example, watermelon seedlings are grafted onto pumpkin seedlings, harnessing the latter’s vigorous root system for nutrient uptake while gaining resistance to Fusarium wilt.

The growers of Yannan Village, however, saw things differently. They believed that “grafted melons don’t taste good”, and so they opted for the other approach: growing from seed. This method demands crop rotation – a plot can grow watermelons for only one year, after which it must be switched to a grain crop, and only after five to seven years can watermelons return. This practice preserves soil health and melon quality, but it also locks the growers into “living on the land”, shuttling from one plot to another year after year.

Living in the polytunnels was also a matter of efficiency and saving costs. Step outside the “front door” and you were in the melon field, giving the growers’ lives and labour a seamless continuity. Take one day in late July in Wan Fang’s household. Four thirty in the morning: the dim sky was just showing the first hint of dawn. Wan Fang woke and, careful not to disturb his sleeping younger son, stepped out of the door of the metal-sheet bedroom into the room built inside the polytunnel. His mother had already prepared a simple breakfast in the kitchen; his wife, Zhang Jing, was washing up in the bathing area curtained off behind a screen. His father and elder son had already set off on the electric tricycle for the town farmers’ market, seven kilometres away, to retail-sell at the morning market the baskets of melons picked the previous evening.

Before five, Wan Fang, Zhang Jing and his mother entered the watermelon polytunnel and the day’s work began. Picking was often done in silence. All three moved in wordless coordination, bent at the waist. Wan Fang led the way with scissors in hand, parting the leaves, spotting ripe melons, snipping the vine, and placing the fruit along the narrow central path of the polytunnel. Zhang Jing and his mother followed behind, gathering the melons into baskets.

Melons that were too small, sun-scorched, or overripe and split were set aside; those of similar size were gathered into the same basket to suit the needs of different middlemen. Four evenly spaced holes had been drilled in the basket rim. Two ropes were threaded through in a cross pattern, knotted and fastened, and a carrying pole – a length of Moso bamboo split down the middle – was passed beneath them. Two people, one at either end, hoisted the pole onto their shoulders and together carried the baskets to the roadside. A full basket weighed between eighty and one hundred kilograms. Within two hours, ten baskets – over a thousand kilograms – were lined up along the road.

For small-scale individual growers, large supermarket chains are not partners they even consider. Some of the melons were taken away by middlemen – the growers called them “melon dealers” – who supplied them downstream; others went directly to nearby small retailers. Wan Fang and Zhang Jing together hoisted five baskets onto the melon dealer’s vehicle, then loaded the remaining five onto their own electric tricycle, bound for the town farmers’ market. There, a few supermarket owners and fruit-stall holders were long-standing customers of Wan Fang’s, and the previous evening they had already sent their orders to him via WeChat.

At the market, Wan Fang unloaded the melons, baskets and all, exchanged a few familiar words with the stallholders, and moved on to the next stop. Not a word was said about price or weight. Once he was home, he would send the invoice and the payment would arrive just like that. “Over ten years now – only with us Zhejiang people can you have this kind of trust. It wouldn’t work anywhere else,” he said. By the time he finished his deliveries and came home to rest, the rest of the village was only just stirring from sleep and slowly growing noisy again.

That day, several places across the Yangtze Delta had issued yellow heat warnings, with peak temperatures approaching forty degrees Celsius – and inside the polytunnels the thermometer ran another five degrees or so higher. Walking along the ridgeway between the fields, I felt the polytunnels on either side of me like great beasts gaping wide and breathing out waves of hot air. That was why Wan Fang’s family had to finish picking before seven; any later and the polytunnels would turn into ovens. The hotter it got, the earlier they rose. In the busiest stretch they were up at two in the morning, groping their way through the field by headlamp. In the evening, once the heat began to ease, they would start another round of picking.

A Community That Crosses Boundaries: Taizhou Watermelon Growers’ Entrepreneurial History

Twenty years ago, Wan Fang and his wife Zhang Jing were both working back home in their native Taizhou, Zhejiang. Wan Fang was a maintenance technician for injection moulding machines at a home-appliance factory, while Zhang Jing knitted wool sweaters on a hand-cranked flat knitting machine in a garment factory. His monthly pay of two or three thousand yuan was already a handsome wage at the time – the price being twelve-hour shifts on a two-shift rotation every day, along with the boss’s endless pettiness.

After Zhang Jing became pregnant with their first child, the family’s financial pressure mounted sharply. At that very time, Wan Fang’s younger sister’s family had been among the first to follow their fellow villagers to Jiangsu to grow watermelons. When she visited home, she told Wan Fang that you could never save money working in a factory, but if you were diligent and hardworking on the land, you could put away thirty to fifty thousand yuan a year – and the whole family could live together, looking after one another.

Wan Fang was moved. He thought: try growing melons for three or five years; if it doesn’t work out, head home and go back to factory work. Once their son reached his one-month celebration, Wan Fang quit his job and came to Yannan Village with his father. An experienced grower first set aside a polytunnel for them and taught them melon-farming from scratch, hands-on. Once they had learned the ropes, they would “set up on their own” – contracting their own land and running their own little business. Later, Zhang Jing brought their baby and moved to Yannan Village with her mother-in-law, and the family of five was reunited.

Wan Fang’s story was no exception. The growers’ entrepreneurial history can be traced back to the 1980s. Reform and opening-up loosened the farmers’ age-old attachment to the land, and ever more people left their homes in search of livelihoods elsewhere. According to the research of the scholar Feng Ting, in 1983, five farmers from Maoshe Township in Huangyan District, Taizhou – all experienced melon growers – went to a military farm in Shanghai to grow open-field watermelons and achieved good economic returns. This set a precedent for Taizhou people renting land elsewhere to grow melons. Today, Huangyan District alone sends 43,000 migrant melon growers out, let alone the entire Taizhou city.

“Yunnan, Hainan, Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangxi, Henan… all across the country – wherever there is land, there you will find us Taizhou people growing watermelons.” Speaking of the Taizhou entrepreneurial story, the grower Jiang Fu spoke with considerable pride. Approaching sixty, he and his wife had grown watermelons in Shanghai, Wuxi, Zhoushan and other places. It was not until they came to Yannan Village in 2005 that they bid farewell to constant relocation – and they have stayed ever since, twenty years on.

Today, the Taizhou watermelon growers in Yannan Village have settled at around twenty households. They are neither hired labourers working for large-scale agribusinesses nor migrant workers who have moved into secondary and tertiary industries; rather, they resemble the entrepreneurial “little bosses” of the “Zhejiang Village” described by the anthropologist Xiang Biao – people who actively venture outward in search of a better livelihood. A body of distinctive business wisdom has also been passed down year after year through networks of fellow townspeople.

As outsiders who must practise crop rotation every year, “finding land” is a critical challenge for the growers. But finding land individually is costly and fraught with uncertainty, so experienced leaders gradually emerged among them. These leaders approach the village committee on everyone’s behalf to negotiate land-lease prices, scale and locations, then allocate plots household by household. They also coordinate water, electricity and accommodation arrangements, enabling growers to settle comfortably into their polytunnel homes.

Yet while the growers help one another, they also tacitly respect each other’s boundaries and run their businesses independently. Stealing someone’s clients is a grave taboo. Once, a grower intercepted a passing melon dealer and tried to sell his own watermelons at a lower price, yet that dealer was already a long-standing customer of another grower. When word spread, the offending grower was strongly condemned by his fellow townspeople.

It is not only people who travel; resources from home travel too. For instance, I noticed that the baskets used to hold the melons all looked much the same – their bodies made of synthetic leather, reinforced outside with thick wire crossed in an X pattern, and their rims trimmed in coloured edging. Wan Fang told me these baskets all came from back home, and if treated with care, “there is no problem at all using them for ten years.”

The Moso bamboo abundant in Zhejiang has also crossed geographical boundaries, travelling alongside its people. Split down the middle, it becomes a carrying pole for the baskets – elastic yet tough. Placed round-side against the shoulder with the hollow facing upward, it can bear a hundred kilograms of watermelons.

Each grower family leases between fourteen or fifteen mu and twenty or thirty mu of land. Far smaller than the hundreds or thousands of mu contracted by the large-scale operators, yet for growers who are mostly husband-and-wife partnerships in their fifties and sixties, the workload is already considerable. They therefore often push their time and energy to the very limit.

For example, in early May, when the first-harvest melons come to market and demand surges in a very short space of time, they work fourteen hours or more from dawn to dusk, with barely a moment’s rest between hurried meals. In a single day, they can pick seven or eight thousand jin of watermelons – enough to fill two truck beds.

Since both their work and their daily life revolve “around the watermelons”, their connection to the city is almost exclusively with the land. Getting together with fellow townspeople for a game of mahjong, or occasionally strolling through the neighbouring town for a meal, represents their scant leisure. Even during the Spring Festival each year, they “spend it in the fields”.

From early October to mid-November falls the growers’ brief holiday. By early October, watermelon sales are drawing to a close, and they dismantle their watermelon polytunnels one by one – the last to come down is their home. Silver steel pipes and black irrigation hoses are bundled in stacks and piled by the roadside; valuable electrical appliances are stored in the homes of trusted villagers; other household items are taken apart where possible, set on vacant plots and covered with waterproof plastic sheeting. The whole process is done at breakneck speed, clearing the land so Yannan Village can sow its winter wheat. By mid-November, the growers return one by one, driving steel pipes into fields where the late-season rice has been harvested, and another cycle begins.

An Uneasy Summer: Typhoon, Extreme Heat and Volatile Prices

In the cycle of year after year, some changes are quietly taking place.

“There have been an extraordinary number of strange things this year.” At the end of September 2024, Wan Fang felt as though something was missing. In his twenty years in Yannan Village, the scent of osmanthus had filled the air everywhere once the eighth month of the lunar calendar arrived – yet this year the blossoms were late to open.

The watermelon market was equally peculiar. Through May and June the growers had been gripped by anxiety. The variety they grew most – the 8424 (watermelon cultivar) – had once been the hottest product on the market, but the first-harvest melons, brought to market just before the May Day holiday, saw wholesale prices plunge from four yuan per jin at the start to a staggering sixty fen per jin.

“First thing in the morning it was still three yuan eighty a jin, then that afternoon the wholesalers said three fifty. I wasn’t happy to sell, and in two or three days it crashed to two yuan – sell or no sell, you had to let it go.” Wan Fang spoke with resignation. Jiang Fu, meanwhile, was beginning to wonder whether to carry on with the business next year. Every time he opened Douyin, he would come across short videos of growers who had taken out loans to lease a thousand mu of land, unable to bear the price collapse, who had drunk pesticide and taken their own lives.

Under normal circumstances, melons from different regions come to market at different times, creating a diverse and staggered pattern of supply: in February, melons from the low-latitude provinces of Hainan and Yunnan are the first to ripen and reach the market; this is followed in March and April by early-maturing varieties from polytunnels across North China; around the May Day holiday, the first-harvest polytunnel melons from the Yangtze Delta arrive; in May and June, open-field melons from across the country join the market; and from June onwards, melons from northwestern regions such as Gansu, Ningxia and Xinjiang begin to appear in succession.

Last February, however, an abnormal cold spell delayed the flowering and fruit-set period of early-maturing melons, pushing their market arrival to late April or even May. By May, an unusually early heatwave across North China brought summer on ahead of schedule, causing open-field melons to ripen early and flood the market alongside the Yangtze Delta’s polytunnel crop. All at once supply far outstripped demand, triggering dramatic price crashes in many regions; in Shandong, Henan and northern Jiangsu, wholesale prices even dipped to as low as two or three mao per jin.

What Wan Fang had not anticipated was a sharp turnaround in the market during July and August, with prices soaring to twice the level of the same period in previous years. He surmised that in recent years many newcomers had rushed into melon growing, but the price collapse in May and June had driven a batch of them away – they would rather rip up their melon vines and cut their losses. At the same time, the unrelenting heat had made people crave the coolness a watermelon could bring. The small but stable scale of Yannan Village’s growers meant they happened to fill the gap in the market perfectly.

The extreme heat brought the growers both joy and worry. While the melons sold more easily, working inside the polytunnels grew ever more punishing. Excessive sun exposure can scorch the fruit, so some growers apply extra fertiliser to encourage lush, dense vines – letting the leaves serve as a natural sunshade for the melons – at the cost of a paler rind colour and compromised sweetness. Facing nature’s capriciousness, they can only tread carefully, seeking a balance that is never quite perfect.

The “strange things” also included a devastating typhoon unlike anything seen in seventy years. After making landfall in Shanghai on the morning before the Mid-Autumn Festival, Bebinca swept toward southern Jiangsu. The growers huddled at home, listening to the howling wind and driving rain rage on outside for seven or eight hours, only gradually easing by early evening. Many polytunnel films had been torn away, steel pipes bent, and the melons lay scattered in ruin.

No one could have foreseen that they would face the strongest typhoon to make landfall in Shanghai since 1949. Taizhou, with its many mountains and little flat land, is no stranger to typhoons, and one of the reasons the growers had chosen Yannan Village was precisely its stable climate and flat terrain. So when, a few months earlier, the village committee approached them about purchasing commercial insurance – even with government subsidies covering up to ninety per cent – some growers still felt it was not worth the cost. Those who had taken out the insurance breathed a sigh of relief; depending on the extent of damage, they would ultimately receive compensation ranging from a few hundred to two thousand yuan per mu.

How great were the typhoon’s losses for the growers? Wan Fang helped me work it out: each mu requires approximately ninety pairs of steel pipes, at twenty yuan a pair, plus about a thousand yuan for plastic film and connectors, clasps and other fittings – bringing the total polytunnel cost to three thousand yuan per mu. Calculating on an average of twenty mu, a single grower household could lose as much as sixty thousand yuan on the polytunnels alone, and with melon prices and yields fluctuating so wildly, the damage to the crop itself was beyond reckoning.

Some wisdom, handed down from an age no one can recall, endured. A length of hollow steel pipe, secured to the rail of an electric tricycle’s rear bed with wire – slightly wider than the polytunnel’s own pipes, just wide enough for them to slide through – held at one end by Wan Fang’s hand, allowed him to lever a typhoon-bent pipe back to something approaching normal. He laughed: “If you don’t do it this way, it’s just seven mao a jin as scrap metal. Every little bit saved is a little bit saved.”

What Lies Ahead: After the Growers Grow Old

“I have three homes,” Zhang Jing said to me, seated at the small window of the bedroom.

“Which home do you prefer?”

She thought for a moment. “The village house is spacious, the flat in town is comfortable. This one – this one lets the whole family be together.”

The bedroom we sat in was in fact a container-style metal-sheet structure, fitted with flat-pack wooden beds and cabinets, a fan and an air conditioner, and a single small window. Normally it was Wan Fang’s bedroom; during school holidays, Zhang Jing would move in with the two children too.

The home was divided into two parts. The bedroom stood separately from the main polytunnel that served as the house, housing the more private side of life. The polytunnel itself was the more public space, partitioned into different zones: step in through the front door and you were in the living room, where watermelons, farming tools and chemical fertiliser were stacked, and where transactions and entertaining visitors often took place; further in, on the left, was the bedroom of Wan Fang’s parents, with its own door, a bed, a cabinet and a small television; beyond that came the dining area and kitchen, where a gas hob and an induction hob sat on a stove platform raised on bricks.

Zhang Jing longed for a life of higher quality. The curtained-off bathing area she had set up in the right-hand corner of the living room was her idea; if she could not bear the grimy plastic film on the polytunnel roof, she simply laid a fresh sheet over it. But a home that was dismantled and rebuilt every year made everything feel temporary. “If I bought nice things online and made it all cosy, we’d have to move again in a year – what’s the point? If we could stay five or six years, then yes, I’d make it nice. But moving once a year, and another year is just gone.”

Wan Fang still remembered the snowstorm in 2008 – three days and three nights of snow that collapsed every single polytunnel. Even in that depth of despair the family gritted its teeth and held on, but in recent years a growing uncertainty had crept in. After each season’s work was done, he no longer knew whether he would carry on the next year.

One pre-dawn morning five years ago, he woke suddenly and found he could not move any part of his body except his hands and his head. After being taken to hospital, the doctor told him to do less physical labour. He thought it funny. “If ordinary people don’t work, what are they supposed to do?” Years of working in a bent, half-crouching posture meant that “no watermelon grower has a sound back”.

So they had invented a few ways to ease the strain on their backs and legs. These small stools that could be “worn” around the legs, for instance, were filled with polystyrene foam, making them extremely lightweight – you could sit down wherever you were, at any point during fieldwork.

Since their social insurance was registered back home, they toughed out minor aches and pains, and for anything serious they would drive back to a hospital in Taizhou. Wan Fang’s father coughed badly every winter; years working in the mines when he was young had left him with pneumoconiosis. Zhang Jing would buy his medicine from the hospital back home and have it posted to Yannan Village. This was not just Wan Fang’s family’s situation. Compared with the migrant-worker population who leave both the land and the hometown, the healthcare and pension difficulties faced by these migrant agriculturalists – whom scholars call “substitute farmers” or “farmer-farmers” – are even more invisible.

Even after twenty years in Yannan Village, neither Wan Fang nor Zhang Jing had any thought of settling and becoming “new Jiangsu residents”. To get the children into a better school, they had bought a flat in the county town of Taizhou, which meant Zhang Jing was shuttling between three homes: the village house, the flat in town, and Yannan Village.

Wan Fang always talked about his parents growing old, their health worsening, perhaps after just two more years of growing they would head home for good. But he could not say what he would do in the future if he stopped growing melons. The skills Wan Fang had once taken pride in had long been superseded by new technology, and the hand-cranked flat knitting machine Zhang Jing could operate so deftly was no longer used by any garment factory.

Would they want their children to take over the melon business? At this question, both Wan Fang and Zhang Jing shook their heads firmly. Growing melons was too hard, too exhausting. They saved desperately, not just for the present but to prepare for their children’s future: betrothal gifts back home had soared to 250,000 yuan each – for two sons that meant 500,000, on top of a car and a house. They hoped their elder son would find a job after graduating from vocational college. Growing melons was the last resort, only when there was truly no other way.

In early October, I visited Wan Fang and Zhang Jing’s family home in the countryside of Taizhou city. The village was ringed by hills. Looking out from the south-facing window of Zhang Jing’s family house, a narrow stream ran east to west through the village; in the grass on the far bank, flecks of white were scattered – goats belonging to a neighbour. Zhang Jing led me up the hill behind the village to the north. Some citrus trees grew there, but most of the slope was covered in tall weeds.

Zhang Jing told me the village had very little arable land – barely one or two mu per person – enough only to grow a small crop of rice and maize. Terraced fields had once been carved into the hillside, some planted with vegetables, some with tea, step upon step, neat and beautiful to look at, but in time they had all been left to go fallow. Nowadays very few villagers remained to farm locally; they either went to work in factories or ran small businesses, or, like them, went out to find land elsewhere to cultivate.

Over the years of growing melons, every bit of money saved went into renovating the house. What had once been a two-storey old building had been rebuilt into a spacious, light-filled four-storey home. And yet the time they spent in this house amounted to barely a month and a half each year, starting from early October. Whether it was Lunar New Year’s Eve, the Lantern Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival or the Mid-Autumn Festival – all festivals that carry extraordinary meaning for the Chinese – they could spend them only on a foreign land, far from home.

On the evening before the National Day holiday, Yannan Village listened to a radio news broadcast echoing through the polytunnels: “National Day is almost upon us. The Five-Star Red Flag flutters in the breeze along the streets. Everywhere, lanterns and colourful decorations have been hung up, and all manner of celebrations are being held…” Holiday travel was none of their concern – it was precisely when they were busy moving their belongings. Accompanied by the broadcast, in the dim yellow light, Wan Fang’s mother was cooking. Strips of pork rind went sizzling into the wok of hot oil, and the acrid smoke spread quickly through the polytunnel. His father sat before the stove, feeding sticks of wood into the flames, waiting for the water to boil. The firelight from the stove glowed on the door, turning the fu – the character for “blessing” – a deep, radiant red.

References

Feng Ting, “‘Social Market’ + Digitalisation: A Path to Common Prosperity – An Examination of Huangyan’s ‘Melon Growers’ World’ Practice,” Zhejiang Social Sciences, Issue 5, 2022.

Huang Zhihui, Invisible Domination: Substitute Farmers and Their Underclass World, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2013.