Twelve Years Back Home: The Spirit of the Land

I. I.

About ten years ago, two successive waves of university-educated young people returned to the countryside, earning themselves the public label of “those bucking the trend”.

The first wave returned with a critical outlook and deep reflections on over-urbanisation and the expansion of capital, hoping to rebuild their lives—and indeed their values. They viewed farming as a lifestyle distinct from urban living, emphasising its ecological character and the cultural fabric of rural life. They maintained a wary distance from the push to fully commercialise agriculture and the countryside. Rather than catering to or simply echoing government directives, they championed their independence, at times adopting an outright “uncompromising” stance.

The second wave, by contrast, focused on the commercialisation of agriculture, specialising in marketing and the cultural and creative industries. A decade later, many have become local agricultural ‘livestream sellers’, highly sought after by e-commerce platforms and local authorities.

Ten years on, most of that first wave are battered and bruised, while others have vanished without a trace.

A writer who has long followed the trend of young people returning to the countryside asked me whether conditions have improved. She gets the sense that more and more young people are making the journey back.

I was at a loss for an answer. Reflecting on my twenty-five-year-old self, choosing to return home, I’m still struck by a chilling sense of retrospective dread—as if I had been courting complete ruin.

Naturally, this is a look back a decade on. Over those ten years, these two waves of young returnees had almost nothing in common. The first wave, collaborating with NGOs and self-organised community groups, explored new paths while operating on society’s “fringes”; the later wave, by contrast, marched confidently down the mainstream commercial road. Even if their paths happened to cross, they would likely have failed to grasp each other’s perspectives and shown little mutual regard.

I first “spotted” this shift in Hainan. Towards the end of 2019, just before the pandemic struck, the Wotu Sustainable Agriculture Development Centre organised a study tour. One stop was a pomelo orchard. The owner was roughly our age, yet he already presided over a base spanning several thousand mu and was actively developing hotel and cultural tourism ventures.

She also mentioned two other associates: one who paired several thousand mu of apple orchards with a hotel, and another who combined a maize estate of the same scale with a processing facility.

This marked my first experience of the “convergence” between these two waves of young returnees.

II.

Of course, the impact was felt. We began to worry that if we could not share our reflections on rural life and agriculture to attract wider support, the ‘first wave of returnees’ model we believed in would prove unsustainable.

By then, we had been learning composting from Hideo Iketuka at the Wotu Sustainable Agriculture Development Centre for several years. Mr Iketuka, now in his eighties, had come to China after retiring to voluntarily promote ecological agriculture. Shortly before his departure, he introduced the ‘Dedicated Farmer’ spirit. In Japan, ‘Dedicated Farmer’ is an honourific term for agricultural practitioners who actively engage and are deeply passionate about research.

We proposed establishing a collective brand centred on the ‘spirit of the dedicated farmer’, uniting to conduct joint field visits, carry out shared trials, and engage with the wider world together.

‘Reaching the mainstream’ became something of a defining theme for our explorations in 2020 and 2021. We surveyed major agricultural wholesale markets at 4 a.m.; visited a sprawling 2,000-mu orchard in Weihai; and called on a veteran strawberry grower in Laiyang, Shandong, who had shipped his fruit as far as Tokyo, while also providing cultivation guidance and selling agricultural supplies in Shaanxi and Gansu.

After walking the grounds, I remained torn. Flipping through my notes from the time, I found them filled with the same uncertainties.

At a fruit tree pruning workshop organised by Lijun, I even tried to talk a friend out of pursuing the ‘first model of returning home’.

She was an admirer of Anastasia—a ‘Xia You’. Thirty-five years old, married with children, she had resigned from a research institute to return to the countryside and take up farming. She asked Lijun for wild apple seeds, reasoning that “wild apples don’t need pruning; they can simply grow as they are meant to. Why does agriculture have to be so exhausting?”

“Wild apples aren’t exactly a treat, are they?” I asked, wanting to remind her that fruit lacking commercial appeal would probably be hard to sell.

“But they are nutritious. Just because something tastes good, does that mean it’s better?”

I didn’t press further. I held back the urge to sound like a seasoned veteran and warn her not to be so naive.

I wrote another entry in my notes:

Cherish every person you meet whose passion seems to run a touch too hot. Do not get drawn into debates over strategy, pathways, reality, or experience. Embrace this rare courage, so seldom found in the world: the willingness to cut straight through the banal self.

III.

Most of the later returnees chose the second path.

IV.

If returning home simply means transplanting the city and its logic into the countryside, then what is the point of going back at all?

In October, once the autumn silkworms had spun their cocoons, I travelled to Shanghai to discuss returning home with a group of young people working in ‘social innovation’. As questions mounted in my mind, I was eager to find answers.

The organisers categorised those returning to the countryside into five groups based on their ‘degree of rural connection’: urban ruralists, city-rural commuters, digital nomads, seasonal rural residents, and long-term rural settlers.

For instance, the organisers described the ‘urban ruralist’ category—those with the lowest degree of rural connection—as follows:

“Bagzi is a sustainable living enthusiast active on Bilibili. She previously paid little attention to agricultural and food issues, but now she believes regenerative agriculture is a powerful way to turn the tide on the climate crisis. She also feels that purchasing responsibly produced food can bring peace and wellness to our bodies, minds, and spirits. Bagzi currently lives in Shanghai and subscribes to organic vegetable deliveries from farms in Pudong. In addition to eating seasonally and locally, she opts for a subscription box model, embracing the simple philosophy of ‘eating whatever the land produces’.”

As for me, I belong to the final category—the ‘long-term rural settlers’, who have the highest degree of rural connection.

I used to be rather reluctant to attend events like this. I’d grow “wary” – how could city dwellers with little rural experience possibly understand the countryside?

Yet, contrary to my expectations, even though I likely represent the highest “degree of rural connection” among the five types of countryside dwellers, I still found inspiration in someone with the lowest. I learned from Daidzi how to roast ginkgo nuts, and upon returning to the village, I gathered a bagful from the roadside and roasted a tray in the oven.

When it comes to returning to the countryside, there are no natural mentors or undisputed experts. Nor should rural life be the exclusive preserve of farmers.

Of course, through this exchange I did realise that, despite rural affairs featuring in China’s annual Document No. 1 for years, they still garner little attention in cities like Shanghai. Many remain entirely unaware of issues such as the policy of relocating farmers into high-rise housing. Greater dialogue between town and country is clearly necessary.

V. V.

In November, I spent a solid fortnight harvesting Hangbaiju chrysanthemums. Since the work requires keeping your back bent for hours, I would usually give in to exhaustion after just half a day. This year, however, I kept at it from dawn till dusk.

I thought of how my father tended each seedling with such exacting care: taking cuttings, fertilising, weeding, layering, pinching back the tips, and staking every single plant. I simply could not let his careful labour go unavailing, and with that thought, a quiet steadiness settled within me.

A few friends from Qingpu, Shanghai dropped by and took me to a nearby rural project site where she had once worked. The village has been entirely cleared. At the entrance stands a vast tourism reception centre, converted from an old factory building. I eyed it with envy, thinking how splendid it would be if we could turn it into a silk workshop. Further in, there are several newly built white holiday villas in a Mediterranean style, complete with swimming pools. It grew dark before we could make it over to the camping ground.

My friend had strong reservations about their former employer. In their view, these rural development projects routinely run into the hundreds of millions of yuan yet bear no connection to the original village culture, amounting to little more than leisure destinations built to cater to city visitors. All the local villagers had been moved out and relocated to a designated resettlement estate.

It left me feeling thoroughly conflicted.

I had heard of this rural development company before; it was highly controversial. I never cared for it either. What I hadn’t anticipated was that its former staff would be the first to voice their dissent, airing their grievances as they picked chrysanthemums.

On the other hand, the project did, objectively, create local employment opportunities for the village’s younger generation. Though few in number, they meant that a handful of young people could stay put rather than having to leave home to seek their fortune in the city.

For most of the local villagers, being “demolished” was something they actively welcomed. Farming never brought in much money, and the younger generation had long since abandoned the trade. Rather than cling to a hollowed-out village shell, it made more sense to drop the pretence of keeping it intact. Secure a compensation payout, build a proper new home in the estate, and perhaps even pick up occasional odd jobs in the newly branded “scenic village”.

Our complaints and anxieties, then, are likely little more than bookish idealism.

VI.

Perhaps the old farmers are not as fragile as scholars imagine—that their spirit would crumble the moment their village is demolished. The world allows them no such luxury. If it were truly so, how many more times would this land be drowned in tears? He simply raises his hoe, stands, and presses forward. Yet, with nothing certain—not the land, nor the houses, nor the villages—how is the farmer to find his place?

In 2022, an anthropological work titled Pseudodisease was also published. The author describes the ancient beliefs and local knowledge of a village on the Hang-Jia-Hu Plain, bearing a striking resemblance to my own village of Zhenghebeng.

‘Every time I return home, I find myself troubled by each newly built factory, because as my hometown is surrounded and slowly encroached upon by these towering grey structures, it feels increasingly alien to me,’ wrote Shen Yan, a fellow villager and author who left the area over a decade ago to pursue postdoctoral research at a university.

Yet, through extensive observation and research, she discovered that despite the pervasive uncertainty, villagers continue to sustain an inner sense of stability through the practice of local beliefs. The issue is that our generation is drifting ever further from the village’s ‘invisible world’, leaving us unsure of how to articulate or practise such traditions.

VII.

In certain respects, I am a “countryside purist”. The rural world occupies the softest, most guarded corner of my heart; it is a sanctuary that admits of no compromise.

Unlike most, my return to the countryside was not driven by entrepreneurship, nor sought as a remedy for food safety anxieties, a pastoral retreat for retirement, or a chance to ride the updraft of the Rural Revitalisation policy.

I see the countryside as integral to my sense of self, a means of answering the question “Who am I?”.

Thus, although “Mei He Yu” only formally began in 2013, my involvement actually started in 2011. There was no meticulous planning as to what exactly to do—whether commercial or non-commercial, agricultural or craft-based. What mattered was acting upon the core motivation of treating the countryside as a cornerstone of identity.

Initially, I conducted academic research under the auspices of Little Donkey Farm and ActionAid, carrying out sociological fieldwork in rural communities. This was followed by a brief stint working the land at Yufu Farm, run by Lao Shen in Zhejiang. Between 2012 and 2016, I shuttled between Shanghai and the countryside, experimenting with a “half-farming, half-X” lifestyle. The work that continues to this day—and which is now best known to most—revolves around the craft of silk quilts and the preservation of traditional sericulture culture.

In essence, I draw a sharp divide between the countryside and the wider world.

It mirrored the beginning, when I left advertising to enter rural community building. The ethos instilled within the rural development team centred on resisting consumerism and over-urbanisation. It was hard to conceive how advertising could ever be combined with rural work, given that they were fundamentally at odds. Let alone “integration”—back then, I wouldn’t even broach the subject within the rural development team, regarding advertising as something akin to an original sin.

Later, whilst navigating that semi-agricultural, semi-X life between city and country, brand consulting felt much the same. I harboured a genuine resistance to it and simply could not picture myself offering brand consulting to projects in the rural sector. It was difficult to step back from my deep identification with rural life and adopt a stance of “objectivity”, “calm detachment”, or “professionalism”, even if only to lightly brush against it.

Let commerce be commerce, and the countryside the countryside. I simply did not want to compromise the purity of the rural endeavour.

VIII.

Yet, the world does not bow to my will.

As I sought to shut the rural world away, “strangers” kept breaking through.

I recently attended the 14th CSA Conference, held online. Although testing positive for COVID meant I missed much of the proceedings, I still took note of the growing number of new faces: representatives from listed companies, foundations, and capital firms.

In 2011, while we were still based at Little Donkey Farm, we co-organised the third CSA Conference. I recall it took place at Renmin University, with the attendees largely comprising students, teachers, and charities. In 2013, after returning to the countryside, I was invited to the fifth Conference, hosted by Tongji University. We also visited Chongming Island to see farmhouses and greenhouses renovated by “Design Harvest”. The experience left a deep impression on me; I was struck by how agriculture could be reimagined.

In the years that followed, I attended CSA conferences in Chengdu, Guangdong and elsewhere. My overall impression was that their scale and influence were steadily growing, with organisers and funders shifting from non-profit organisations and universities to local governments and private enterprises. As the forums expanded and attracted larger crowds, I found myself feeling increasingly isolated and marginalised, and in-depth discussion seemed to grow ever more elusive.

This year’s CSA conference carried the theme “New Era, New Farmers: Social Ecological Agriculture Advancing Chinese-style Modernisation”.

One session focused on bio-pesticides. Representatives from various companies described the difficulties they faced in a market saturated with cheap, counterfeit biological pesticides, noting how inferior products were driving out the good. Their struggles certainly sounded genuine. However, in our earlier discussions on agroecology at the Worth Land Sustainable Agriculture Centre, we had explicitly rejected this very mindset of simple substitution: swapping chemical fertilisers for organic ones, or chemical pesticides for biological alternatives. Such an approach remains mechanistic reductionism, not genuine ecological thinking.

Yet now that social ecological agriculture has stepped into the mainstream, the reality is that reductionist thinking dominates. It seems as though only by adopting this approach will businesses, investors and technology providers be willing to engage, and only then can viable business models take shape? I am left wondering whether our earlier expectations for ecological agriculture were perhaps too rigid, to the point of stifling any meaningful progress?

One investor involved in CSA wrote the following: “Investment is simply a tool—a means to an end rather than the end in itself. The purpose of a business extends far beyond merely maximising profit within the bounds of the law (author’s note: should such entities exist, we respect and understand their position, though they are not the focus of this piece). We believe that, just as people work for a living to secure a better quality of life rather than being born as mere labouring machines, a company or investment firm seeks returns so that it may operate sustainably and, through its work, generate value for society or the natural world.”

Yueli suggested that we should also invite these large corporations and capital to chat on our “Collective Power Structure” podcast. Even if both sides do not necessarily see eye to eye, opening a dialogue is essential.

IX.

Unexpectedly, it turns out that we ourselves are the “greedy” ones: we want to preserve the purity of the “first type of return”, whilst also attempting to harness commercial forces to make that purity sustainable and break into the mainstream.

X. X.

On one occasion, at a popular café in the village, Sandy, a researcher who has returned to rural life, remarked: “I feel you’re genuinely different. You put your own hands to the work, using your body as the method.”

Another friend, Cher, wrote in an interview outline she sent me: “While plenty of people today are retreating to the countryside to escape the crushing pressures of city life, your experience is worlds apart from the rural, petite-bourgeois idylls I come across on Bilibili. You’ve genuinely returned to farming—tilling the fields, rearing silkworms, living as a proper farmer again, and putting your livelihood in the hands of the elements.”

Neither Sandy nor Cher has much experience of rural life; they are quite typical city dwellers. Yet, amid today’s wave of people treating “returning to the countryside” as a fashionable pursuit, I find it deeply encouraging that they could recognise what sets our path apart.

What is most profound and what is most simple are, at times, one and the same.

Since 2022, Yueli from Wotu Farming School has relocated from the countryside to the city, tending a rooftop farm amidst the towering skyscrapers of Shenzhen. Every week, a steady stream of urban residents head up to the roof to till the soil, sow seeds, and gather harvests. In some ways, the city perhaps needs the nourishment of nature even more. Is this not, in its own way, another kind of “returning home”?

I am reminded of something Lee, a young Thai returnee who grows coffee beans, once told me: “In the end, all we truly long for is simply to go home.”

XI.

Attending a Future Village tea talk hosted by the Club of Futurists, I found myself blurting out: “The future countryside needs to offer the world a rural logic that currently remains largely invisible.”

What, exactly, is this “rural logic”? And why does it remain so obscured?

From poverty alleviation to boosting rural consumption, mainstream rural development has consistently been viewed through an economic lens. Moreover, it is often approached from a top-down, urban perspective. The primary aim is to bridge the urban–rural economic divide. This is undeniably crucial, particularly for communities in central and western China, where those returning home can secure stable employment in their home villages, towns, or counties—whether in the primary, secondary, or tertiary sector.

It is precisely through the lens of cultural identity that we recognise possibilities extending beyond—and outlasting—the mere narrowing of that gap.

This rural logic may be found in how traditional smallholder farming effectively addresses environmental challenges such as biodiversity, climate change, and regenerative agriculture; in how local knowledge systems provide a profound foundation for cultural confidence and collective identity; or in how community beliefs offer grounding and stability to a society in transition.

In short, it is about bringing rural culture to the city.

XII.

Twelve years back in the countryside, and there are still no answers. Puzzlement persists, and so does the need to keep exploring.

This year’s greatest realisation arrived during the spring silkworm season, with the sudden understanding that raising silkworms is the end in itself.

To labour authentically on the land, and through the body, to rebuild a tangible connection to reality, nature, and the world. It is a necessity, a conviction, and a blessing.

Thus, far from a fate of marginalisation, if we liken the first wave of young returnees to pioneer species, then after taking root in this ecosystem and conditioning the environment, we have finally begun our own authentic growth.

Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are provided by the author.

Editor: Tianle