Twelve Years Back on the Land: Spirits in the Soil

I. I.

Almost ten years ago, one after the other, two waves of university-educated young people returned to the countryside, becoming, in the public’s eyes, “those who go against the current.”

The first wave returned to the countryside armed with a critical spirit and reflections on excessive urbanisation and the expansion of capital, hoping to rebuild their lives — or even their values. They regarded farming as a way of life set apart from the city, emphasising agriculture’s ecological character and the cultural attributes of rural life; towards the tide of wholesale commercialisation of agriculture and the countryside, they kept a wary distance; nor did they actively cater to or second government plans, pursuing independence; sometimes, even “uncompromising.”

The second wave, on the other hand, focused on the commercialisation of agriculture, specialising in marketing and creative industries. Ten years on, many have become local agricultural “product promoters”, warmly embraced by e-commerce platforms and local governments alike.

Ten years on, the first wave of young people are, for the most part, battered and scarred; some have vanished without a trace.

A writer who has long followed the theme of returning to the countryside asked me whether conditions had improved. She felt that more and more young people were heading back to the countryside.

I found myself at a loss for words. Thinking of myself at twenty-five, returning to the countryside, I was gripped by a hindsight dread — that of “dying with no ground to bury you in”.

Of course, this is a “looking back” ten years on. Over those ten years, the two waves of young people barely crossed paths at all. The first wave, through the collaboration of public-interest organisations and self-organised communities, walked along society’s “margins”, exploring and experimenting; the second wave strode boldly along the mainstream path of commercialisation. Even where they did physically overlap, I suspect they could not make sense of one another, each holding the other in disdain.

It was in Hainan that I “discovered” this. At the end of 2019 (before the outbreak), the Wotu Sustainable Agriculture Development Centre organised a study tour. One stop was a pomelo farm; the owner was around our age, yet already sitting on thousands of mu of farmland and pushing ahead with hotel and cultural tourism developments.

She also mentioned two other peers — one had thousands of mu of apples + a hotel, and another had thousands of mu of corn + a factory.

This was the first time I had experienced an “encounter” between these two waves of young returnees to the countryside.

II.

The shock, of course, was real. We began to worry that if we could not communicate our reflective views on the countryside and agriculture and attract a wider base of supporters, then the “first kind of return” model we identified with would simply become unsustainable.

By then, everyone had already been learning composting from Ikeda Hideo at the Wotu Sustainable Agriculture Centre for several years. Ikeda was in his eighties; after retirement, he had come to China to promote ecological agriculture on a voluntary basis, and just as he was preparing to leave the country, he put forward the “Tokunōka spirit”. In Japan, “Tokunōka” is a term of respect for “agricultural practitioners who actively participate and are passionate about research”.

Everyone proposed establishing a shared brand centred on the “Tokunōka spirit” — to unite, to explore together, to experiment together, and to face the outside world together.

Breaking out of one’s circle became, more or less, the theme of our exploration in 2020–2021. We surveyed mainstream agricultural wholesale markets at four in the morning; visited a 2,000-mu mega-orchard in Weihai; and called on a veteran strawberry grower in Laiyang, Shandong, who sold his strawberries in Tokyo and also provided strawberry-growing technical guidance in Shaanxi and Gansu, as well as selling agricultural supplies.

After the tour, my heart was still torn back and forth, conflicted over and over. I opened my notes from that time, and they were full of such bewilderment.

At Lijun’s fruit tree pruning workshop, I even tried to talk a friend out of her plan, one that followed the “first kind of return” model.

She was an Anastasia devotee, a Xiayou — a ‘summer friend’. Thirty-five, married with children, she had resigned from a research institute and was planning to head back to the countryside for farming. She asked Lijun for wild apple seeds, because ‘wild apple trees don’t need pruning — they can grow just as they were meant to. Why does farming have to be so exhausting?’

‘Wild apples aren’t exactly tasty, are they?’ I asked, wanting to remind her that apples with no commercial appeal would probably be hard to sell.

‘But they’re nutritious! And is tasty always the same as good?’

I let the questioning drop. I held myself back from slipping into the voice of someone who had been there before, telling her not to be so naive.

And I wrote again in my notes:

Cherish every person you meet who seems to burn a little too brightly. Do not debate strategy, paths, reality, or experience — embrace this courage, so rare in this mortal world, to cut open one’s own mediocrity!

III.

Most of the later returnees chose the second path.

IV.

If returning to the countryside is merely hauling the city and its logic over here, then why return at all?

In October, after the autumn silkworms had spun their cocoons, I travelled to Shanghai to discuss the topic of returning to the countryside with a group of young people working in “social innovation”. Faced with doubts that had been growing ever larger in my mind, I was desperate to find answers.

The organisers classified those returning to the countryside into five types based on their “rural-content ratio”: Urban-Ruralism, Urban-Rural Neighbours, Digital Nomadism, Rural Migratory Bird, and Rural Rooting.

For example, for the Urban-Ruralism type with the lowest “rural-content ratio”, the event organisers described it thus:

“Dazi is a sustainable-living enthusiast active on Bilibili. She hadn’t previously cared about agriculture or food issues; now she believes regenerative agriculture is a powerful action to reverse the climate crisis, and that buying responsibly produced agricultural products can help our body, mind and spirit find peace and health. Dazi currently lives in Shanghai and orders organic vegetables from a farm in Pudong. In addition to eating seasonally and eating locally, she also opts for a blind-box subscription — ‘whatever the field produces, that’s what I eat.'”

And I belonged to the last type — the Rural Rooting type, with the highest “rural-content ratio”.

Before, I would rarely have been willing to attend an event like this. I would grow “vigilant”: how could city dwellers with little experience of rural life ever understand the countryside?

But to my surprise, though among the five different types of rural dwellers I was probably the one with the highest “rural-content ratio”, I still drew inspiration even from the type with the lowest. Dazi taught me how to prepare ginkgo nuts — once back in the village, I picked up a bagful from the roadside and baked a trayful in the oven.

In the realm of returning to the countryside, no one is a natural mentor or expert. Nor should the countryside belong only to farmers.

Of course, through this exchange I did also realise that, even though rural issues have been the theme of China’s No. 1 Central Document year after year, in a metropolis like Shanghai, few still pay attention. Many people are unaware of concerns such as “making farmers go upstairs” — the policy of relocating villagers into apartment blocks. More dialogue between urban and rural areas is necessary.

V. V.

In November, I set about picking Hangzhou white chrysanthemums for a solid half-month. The work demands you stay bent at the waist the whole time, and in previous years half a day’s picking would have left me beaten. This year, though, I held on from dawn to dusk.

I thought of how Father had tended each chrysanthemum seedling with such earnestness and care — taking cuttings, fertilising, weeding, layering, pinching, staking — every single one. I could not be false to that. My heart settled.

A few friends from Qingpu, Shanghai came to visit, and one of them took me to a rural project site nearby where she had once worked. The village had been demolished and relocated wholesale; at its entrance stood a vast tourism reception centre converted from an old factory. I gazed with envy and could not help but wish — how wonderful it would be to have a silk workshop there! Inside there were also several newly built Mediterranean-style white holiday villas, complete with swimming pools. Darkness had fallen before we could see the camping base.

My friend had strong grievances against her former employer. She felt that these rural development projects, which routinely ran to hundreds of millions, bore no relationship whatsoever to the village’s original culture — they were nothing more than a consumption-oriented scenic area built to serve city folk. The villagers had all been moved out to a concentrated resettlement estate.

Mixed feelings.

I had heard of this rural development company before; it was rather controversial. I did not much like it either. But I had not expected a former employee to be the first to voice objections, griping away while picking chrysanthemums.

On the other hand, the project had objectively provided work opportunities close to home for the village’s young people. Not many, but enough to spare a few of them from having to leave home and seek a living in the city.

Most of the local villagers, meanwhile, looked forward eagerly to “being relocated”. Agriculture itself earns little, and the younger generation had long since given up farming. Rather than preserving a village shell that exists in name only, better to burst the last paper window. Take a lump-sum compensation payment, then build a new house in the resettlement estate. Sometimes you could even pick up odd jobs in the new “tourist village”.

My friend’s and my dissatisfaction and worry were, I feared, nothing but a “bookworm’s view”.

VI.

Perhaps the old farmer is not as fragile as the bookworm imagines — the village torn down, and he simply never rises again. This world does not afford them the luxury of fragility. If it were truly so, how many more rounds of tears would this land be drowned in? He merely lifts his hoe, stands, and presses quietly forward. And yet — land, home, village — nothing is certain. How, then, is a farming man to settle his own soul?

In 2022 another anthropological work also came out — False Illness — in which the author describes the ancient beliefs and local knowledge of a village on the Hangjiahu Plain, much the same as Zhenghebang, the village where I now live.

“Every time I go home, a newly built factory causes me anguish, because as my hometown is surrounded and encroached upon by these tall grey buildings, the sense of strangeness it brings me grows ever greater,” writes Shen Yan, a fellow villager who left over a decade ago and is now a postdoctoral researcher at a university.

Yet through extensive observation and research she found that, even amid all this uncertainty, the villagers still sustain an inner steadiness through the practice of local faith. It is only that our generation has grown ever further from the village’s “invisible world”, and no longer knows how to give it voice or enact it.

VII.

In some ways, I am a “rural fundamentalist”. The village is set apart in the softest corner of my heart — a pure land that cannot admit so much as a grain of sand.

Unlike most, my return to the village was not a start-up venture, not a remedy for food safety, not a pastoral retirement, and not a “trend” brought about by rural revitalisation policy.

I see the village as my own identity — as my answer to “who am I”.

And so, although Mei he Yu did not take off until 2013, the practice had already begun in 2011. What exactly to do — commercial or non-commercial, farming or handicraft — was never precisely calculated. What mattered was carrying out the work under the fundamental motivation of “treating the village as one’s identity”.

At first, I did academic research under the framework of Little Donkey Farm and ActionAid, conducting rural fieldwork in the sociological sense; then came a brief spell farming at Yufu Farm, run by Old Shen in Zhejiang; then, from 2012 to 2016, a lifestyle experiment of half-farming, half-X, lived between Shanghai and the village; and continuing to this day — and what most people know me for — is the craft of making silk quilts and the culture of traditional farming and sericulture.

In short, I keep the village and the outside world entirely apart.

It is very much like when, at the very start, I left the advertising industry and entered rural reconstruction. What I absorbed in the rural reconstruction team was a rejection of consumerism and over-urbanisation. How advertising and rural reconstruction might be combined was almost impossible to imagine, since the two diverge at their very roots. “Integration” — not even the rural reconstruction team I was with at the time would speak of it; we felt advertising was, of all things, a kind of original sin.

Later, living half-farming, half-X between city and village, brand consulting proved much the same. In truth, I resisted — and simply could not imagine — doing brand consulting for rural projects. It was hard to loosen my identity-based attachment to the village, to even so much as brush against an “objective”, “dispassionate”, “professional” stance.

Let business be business, and the village be the village. I do not want this matter of the village to lose its purity.

VIII.

But the world is not mine to govern.

When I try to shut the village’s doors, “strangers” keep breaking through.

Recently, I attended the 14th Social Ecological Agriculture CSA Conference, held online. As I had tested positive, I missed most of the sessions, but I still noticed a growing number of new faces — listed companies, foundations, representatives of capital, and the like.

In 2011, when we were still at Little Donkey Farm, we co-organised the 3rd CSA Conference. It was held at Renmin University, if I recall, and most participants were students, lecturers, and non-profit organisations. In 2013, after returning to the village, I was invited to the 5th conference, hosted by Tongji University. We also visited Chongming Island to see the farmhouse and greenhouse renovated by Design Harvest — it left a deep impression. I thought: so this is how farming can be played.

In the years that followed, I attended CSA Conferences in Chengdu, Guangdong and elsewhere. The overall impression was one of steadily expanding scale and influence, while the hosts and funders had shifted from non-profit organisations and universities to local governments and enterprises. The forums grow ever larger, the crowds ever thicker, yet I feel ever lonelier and more marginalised, and genuine, in-depth discussions ever harder to find.

This year, the CSA Conference theme was “New Era, New Farmers — Social Ecological Agriculture Supporting Chinese-Style Modernisation”.

One forum session focused on biopesticides. Companies spoke of their struggle: the market was flooded with cheap, counterfeit biopesticides — bad money drives out good — and it sounded genuinely difficult. But earlier, at the Wotu Sustainable Agriculture Centre, when we discussed ecological agriculture, what we opposed was precisely this logic of simple substitution: replacing chemical fertiliser with organic fertiliser, replacing chemical pesticide with biopesticide. That is still mechanical reductionism, not truly ecological thinking.

And yet the reality, after social ecological agriculture broke out of its niche, is that reductionism reigns supreme. It seems that only by simplifying things this way can enterprises, capital and technology all come in — and only then is there a viable business model? One cannot help but wonder: were our earlier demands of ecological agriculture simply nitpicking, so exacting that nothing could move forward?

One investor participating in CSA wrote: “Investment is merely a tool; it is a path to the destination, not the destination itself. The value of a company is not simply to maximise profits within the bounds the law allows (author’s note: if such a stance exists, we respect and understand it, but will not discuss it in this piece for the time being). We believe that, just as humans earn wages through work for the sake of a better life rather than being born as machines of labour, so too a company or investment firm earns returns in order to sustain its operations and, through its business, to realise value for society and the natural world.”

Yue Li said we should also invite these big enterprises and representatives of capital onto our “Tuanli Structure” podcast for a conversation. We won’t necessarily see eye to eye, but opening a dialogue is essential.

IX.

Little did we imagine that it would turn out to be ourselves who were “greedy”: wanting both to preserve the purity of the “first kind of return” and to harness commercial forces, so that this purity might be sustainable and able to break beyond its niche.

X. X.

On one occasion, in the village’s trendy café, Sandy, a researcher of return-to-the-land migration, said: “I think you really are different. You insist on labouring with your own hands — on making the body your method.”

Another friend, Cher, wrote in the interview questions she sent me: “Although today many people flee the crushing pressure of the city to live in the countryside, your experience is nothing like the petit-bourgeois Peach Blossom Spring fantasies I see on Bilibili. You actually went back and farmed — tilling the soil, raising silkworms, becoming a farmer again, earning your living at heaven’s pleasure.”

In truth, Sandy and Cher have very little rural experience themselves; they are quintessential city dwellers. In this surging tide of a time when returning to the village has become a fashionable obsession, it gives me great pleasure that they can see how different our return has been.

The deepest and the simplest, it turns out, are sometimes one and the same.

Yue Li of the Wotu Farming School has been moving in the opposite direction since 2022 — from village to city. In Shenzhen, among the towering high-rises, she tends a rooftop farm. Every week, throngs of urban residents come up to till the soil, sow seeds, and reap the harvest. In a sense, the city is the one that most needs nature’s nourishment. And is this not another kind of “returning home”?

I am reminded of what Lee, a young Thai returnee who grows coffee beans, once said to me: “In the end, all we hope for is simply to come home.”

XI.

I attended a Future Village Tea Talk organised by the Futurologists’ Club. A sentence suddenly sprang to my lips: “The future village must offer the world a logic of the village that is presently hidden from sight.”

What exactly is this “logic of the village”? And why is it “hidden from sight”?

From poverty alleviation to consumption, mainstream rural work has consistently taken an economic perspective. And often, the city looks down from above. Its aim is to close the (economic) gap between town and country. This is, of course, crucial too — particularly for villages in the central and western regions, where returnees need to be able to go back to their own village, town, or county and secure a stable job, in whichever of the three sectors of the economy.

Simply because, from our cultural-identity perspective, we see possibilities beyond the mere levelling of that gap — and beyond what comes after.

The logic of the village can be the effective response of traditional smallholder agriculture to environmental concerns such as biodiversity, climate change, and regenerative agriculture; it can be the deep sustenance that indigenous knowledge systems provide to cultural confidence and national identity; it can be the steadying role of local faith in a society in transition.

Simply put: sending culture into the city.

XII.

Twelve years since I returned to the land, and still no answers. The confusion never abates; the need to explore never ceases.

This year’s greatest gain came during the spring silkworm season, when it suddenly dawned on me — raising silkworms is the purpose in itself.

To labour truly upon the land, in a bodily sense, to re-establish one’s feeling for reality, nature, and the world — it is a need, a faith, and a fortune.

And so, precisely the opposite of a destiny of marginalisation: if the first wave of young returnees are likened to pioneer species, then after being the first to take root in the ecosystem and improve its receptivity, we have at last begun our own, truly authentic growth.

Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the author

Editor: Tianle