Ten Yuan an Hour: The Fallback and “Freedom” of Yunnan’s Women Strawberry Workers

A rain shower has just passed over the June highlands. Wind rolls down from the ridge, bone-chilling, carrying the earthy smell of damp soil and the scent of strawberry leaves. Gazing into the distance, one sees stretches of white polytunnels lying between the verdant hills, like silkworms resting on mulberry leaves.

This is Mashu Town, Qiaojia County, Zhaotong City, Yunnan Province. High altitude and low temperatures, a large day–night temperature range across the mountainous area, and a flatter, more open terrain compared to the surrounding region – capitalising on these natural conditions, Mashu has become the second-largest summer strawberry cultivation base in China. In 2025, the town’s officially recorded planting area reached approximately 1,670 hectares, generating over 9,000 work placements.

Strawberry cultivation is a quintessentially labour-intensive form of agriculture. The delicate fruit hides among the leaves, easily damaged by the slightest mishap, and every stage of the process requires human hands. Walk into a polytunnel, and you will see that those bent over working between the rows are almost entirely women.

In May, two road accidents involving rural women workers made headlines across China. In Dandong, Liaoning, a minibus overloaded with blueberry pickers overturned, killing eight and injuring thirteen. In Hechi, Guangxi, a pickup truck carrying sweet-potato workers plunged into water, claiming ten lives. The women who pick fruit under large-scale plantation farming, along with the toil and risk they bear, are gradually coming into the public eye.

The women strawberry workers of Mashu Town belong to this same group. Some are fifty or sixty years old, working while they still can to earn a living and save for old age. Others are local left-behind mothers, striving to strike a balance between caring for their families and working independently. In the strawberry fields they work ten to eleven hours a day – pinning runners, weeding, picking fruit – trading hands caked in mud for wages of around 100 yuan.

For these rural women, the strawberry industry offers a chance to leave the house and earn their own money without having to travel far. Yet they remain in the most “bottom-tier” roles within the industry. Amid the transformation of the countryside – the collapse of smallholder farming, men leaving for work elsewhere – these women, lacking education or skills, or burdened with family care, were once passive left-behind dwellers on the land. The strawberry fields have given them a fallback for earning a living. But can this fallback lead, even slightly, toward freedom?

A Left-Behind Mother’s Decision

This past Chinese New Year, twenty-seven-year-old Lu Yinghong decided to join her husband’s aunt in working at the strawberry farm.

The strawberry industry in Mashu, the town where her husband’s family lives, began roughly a decade ago. Back then, those who leased land were mostly outsiders – people who had gained cultivation experience in places like Daibu Town in neighbouring Huize County and then came to Mashu, where the terrain and climate were similar. The plots closest to the town centre were the first to have their maize and potato crops cleared away and polytunnels erected.

In the years that followed, strawberry farms sprang up like wild mushrooms after rain. Caopidi Village, where Lu Yinghong’s in-laws live, sits about a thirty-minute drive from the town centre. Around 2022, villagers and outside contractors began growing strawberries there too – one plot lies right behind Lu Yinghong’s house. The middle-aged and elderly women in the village were hired to work: ten hours a day at ten or eleven yuan an hour, with roughly five or six months of work each year. The wages are low, but still better than farming at home.

Lu Yinghong watched all this and felt tempted. But at the time her elder daughter was only three and still needed looking after, and she was soon pregnant again. It was not until the start of this year, when her younger daughter turned two and was weaned, that she finally walked into the polytunnel.

“I always meant to stand at the lectern, and here I am, trapped in a few dozen mu of strawberry fields.” Lu Yinghong is young and educated, which makes her something of an outlier among the women workers on the farm. Half a year after she started in the polytunnel, she posted these words on her WeChat Moments.

She was born in a mountain village in the neighbouring town of Chongxi, where the slopes are steeper still and life is harder. As a child she was one of the left-behind children; her grandparents could provide food and clothing but paid little attention to her schooling or friendships. She says she used to do well at school and excelled in Chinese, but her grades slipped, and with no one at home stepping in to help, she began to give up on herself.

Even so, after finishing junior high Lu Yinghong passed the entrance exam for the vocational college in the county seat, enrolling in the early childhood education programme – back then, Qiaojia County’s overall senior-secondary gross enrolment rate was just 42 per cent. But like many girls from mountain villages, she met a boyfriend while she was in town. Once his militia training was over, Lu Yinghong decided to drop out and join him at a factory in Fujian. Her parents did not object; their stance was simple: “You chose not to study. Whatever life you live from now on is none of our business.”

The work in Fujian lasted only three months. After that the couple moved to the boyfriend’s hometown, married and started a family. That year, Lu Yinghong had just turned twenty.

During the seven years after her marriage, Lu Yinghong says she was a left-behind woman “eighty per cent of the time.” Her husband first worked in a factory, then moved on to scrap-metal trading in Anhui and Kunming. She lived with her parents-in-law, doing the laundry, cooking and looking after the children. Farming chores were never in short supply either: she fed the chickens and pigs, and at harvest time she helped her mother-in-law dig up potatoes, “puttering from dawn to dusk.”

In Mashu she knew no one, had no family or friends to turn to, and lived within the narrow circle of the household. Friction with her in-laws was inevitable, and living apart bred quarrels with her husband. “Some things never get resolved – every time I bring them up again, I tell him the same thing over and over, but nothing ever changes.”

But to her husband’s family, Lu Yinghong’s life was already “happy” enough. Mashu offered better natural conditions than her natal home; her father-in-law did concrete-pouring work between the townships, earning a decent wage by local standards. Her husband was quiet and mild-mannered – he never raised a hand or shouted when there was a disagreement, sent money home every month while working away, and had built the family a new house with tiled floors. In their eyes, Lu Yinghong was making a fuss for no reason.

Under such a life, negative feelings welled up. “You keep putting yourself down, thinking you cannot look after your children properly, cannot manage the housework, cannot handle the farm work.” Sometimes there was bewilderment too: “If only I had not been so wilful all those years ago and had studied hard – would things be different now?”

It is not that Lu Yinghong never tried to change things. She saw other couples going out together and considered leaving with her husband to work elsewhere – to grow closer and ease the finances. But the thought that their children would become left-behind children, repeating her own childhood, made her abandon the idea.

Before and after the birth of her younger daughter, she had to visit the hospital in the county town frequently. Tensions with her in-laws also flared, so she asked her husband to let her rent a place in town and look after the children on her own, sending the elder girl to a kindergarten there. He reluctantly agreed and sent her money each month. Though she was on her own with both daughters, going through postpartum confinement alone, nursing and cooking, she found that period “a little easier” – she only had to mind the children, without juggling all the farm work and housework. But after just eighteen months, her husband’s income became erratic, and asking him for rent and living expenses grew harder for Lu Yinghong.

Under the pressure of money, she and her daughters moved back to the village to live with her husband’s family.

The work at the strawberry farm, however, showed Lu Yinghong a way to be with her children and still leave the house. Once, in the industry-starved county seat, even hotpot restaurants and street food stalls had been reluctant to hire mothers who needed to juggle childcare as waitstaff. The strawberry farm is a ten-minute walk from home, and at last she could earn her own money.

When she first arrived at the strawberry farm that Chinese New Year, Lu Yinghong was apprehensive. Since leaving school she had done only five or six odd jobs – factory work in Fujian, paving roads around the village – none of them lasting long. She worried she would not do well and that the boss would make life difficult for her. Even with a relative showing her the ropes, she kept asking, “Is this how it should be done?” Before long, she had learned to strip out the old strawberry leaves.

The job lasted only eighteen days and brought in two thousand yuan. Once the winter maintenance of the strawberry farm wrapped up, there would be no more work until the approach of summer. But collecting her wages, Lu Yinghong managed to “affirm herself for at least a minute.” “It felt like I could stand on my own two feet. All it takes is the courage to take that first step, and there is nothing you cannot do.”

She recalls the days two years ago, when she had the children to herself in the county seat. Her younger daughter was barely four months old, and once both girls fell ill at the same time, and she had to look after them in hospital while they were on drips. “I felt completely shattered. It was as if having family or a husband no longer mattered – the only thing that could give me a sense of security was money. But money was exactly what I had least of all.”

Safety-Net Work, Left for Women

The strawberry farm where Lu Yinghong works hires around ten workers each day. Most of them are left-behind mothers and middle-aged or elderly women. The only two men are both older people with unusual circumstances – one is a lifelong bachelor, and the other injured his leg while building a house and cannot do heavy labour.

Why are most of them women? Lu Yinghong tells me that, for one thing, younger and middle-aged men can go to work in other provinces and earn more; for another, there are the constraints of gender norms. “Some men might set their sights too high, feel the pay is too low, and even think this kind of work is a bit beneath them … He feels that growing strawberries is something women ought to do, and if a man does it, people will laugh at him – he will lose face.”

Women are the backbone of strawberry cultivation, yet they are rarely the managers or leaseholders of the farms. Many of the middle-aged and elderly women locally are illiterate, and the work they take on is repetitive, back-breaking, and lacking in technical skill.

In another strawberry farm in Caopidi Village, the operator Ma Guoguang tells me he is a villager here. A few years ago, he and his wife grew polytunnel vegetables in Luliang County, Qujing. But when vegetable prices slumped and they made no profit, they returned home three years ago. Using a 15,000-yuan agricultural loan, he and a relative set about cultivating this strawberry farm. Their own land together with the leased plots comes to a little over ten mu. After deducting pesticide, fertiliser and labour costs, they earned seven or eight thousand yuan per mu in the first year.

Ma Guoguang now employs five or six workers, all middle-aged and elderly women from the village. He says the work on a strawberry farm demands a delicate touch and careful hands, and that women do it better than men.

Chen Minglian is one of them. She has two daughters: one married into the same village, with a child just over two; the other married into a neighbouring county, and the son-in-law is working somewhere she does not know. “They have their own burdens – honestly, they can barely fend for themselves,” she says. She does not expect her children to provide for her. Since last year, Chen Minglian has been working at Ma Guoguang’s strawberry farm, while her husband stays at home, tending the livestock and looking after his parents.

At fifty-six, her hair has already gone grey, and her face is deeply lined. During the interview, she is wearing an apron, and her front pocket is stuffed with small red plastic forks. She is propagating runners: bending down, she tears a hole in the plastic mulch film beside an existing plant, draws out the sprawling strawberry stem, and then pins it into the soil at the tear with a small fork. This is the most effective way to propagate strawberry seedlings. Once the new roots have taken firm hold, she cuts the connection to the mother plant. Chen Minglian repeats this same movement hundreds of times a day.

Yet the skilled tasks still fall to the “bosses.” While Chen Minglian presses a runner into the soil, Ma Guoguang is out in the field spreading fertiliser. He says this kind of work he and his partner relative carry out themselves – they would not leave it to the workers.

The Outsiders “Pushed” In

As the strawberry industry expanded, gaps began to emerge in the labour market. Many strawberry farms – especially those leased on a large scale by outsiders – started recruiting workers from neighbouring townships.

Li Chaodong hails from Huize County, Qujing, and leases roughly 50 mu of land in each of Mashu Town and neighbouring Laodian Town to grow strawberries. By his estimate, the local labour supply had already fallen short four or five years ago. Now, of the seven or eight thousand strawberry workers in the whole town, nearly half come from elsewhere.

Today, at Li Chaodong’s strawberry farm, the busiest season requires more than twenty workers, all of them women from elsewhere. “This is work for deft hands – a man does it no faster than a woman.” He had some people put up simple corrugated-metal sheds with a washing machine, and the workers live there day to day. They work eleven hours a day at ten yuan an hour, with another ten yuan deducted for food and lodging. Sometimes they do not go home for months on end.

For these migrant women workers, the wages at the strawberry farm naturally provide the pull factor drawing them here. But the withering of agriculture back home is the push that drives them from their villages.

In one of the polytunnels at Li Chaodong’s farm, four women in their fifties and sixties are clearing weeds. Perched on plastic buckets between the rows, they slide the bucket a little further forward each time they finish a patch, their hands never pausing even while they chat.

Two of them say that back home they all used to grow green Sichuan pepper trees, but in recent years pepper prices have plummeted, leaving them with barely two or three thousand yuan a year. This year, because of the weather, the yield dropped even further – “it has stopped fruiting” – so they came to a strawberry farm not far from home. “It is just about earning a little money. Besides, there is no other work to be found anywhere.” Another woman’s home sits at a higher altitude, where “not even pepper will grow there.” She leased her land to someone else and came out to work herself.

For all of them, coming to the strawberry farm is the first time they have left home to work. Most of their husbands and children are also working away, mainly in manual labour. Liu Yingcai, sixty years old, tells me that her son is “doing heavy labour – hauling earth for people, that sort of thing,” while her daughter-in-law has to take the grandchildren to school. The burdens are heavy on every side, and she can only “fend for herself.” Her husband died more than a decade ago, so she has nothing left behind when she sets out: “I pull the door shut, lock it, and come here to earn a mouthful.”

Yet some still hold hopes for their land at home. Another woman says she came here simply “to scrape together the fertiliser money.” Once the boss pays this month’s wages, she may well head back, in time for the summer harvest, to pick the pepper at home.

Once Inside the Polytunnel

Before the sky has fully lightened, Lu Yinghong is already up. She arrives at the strawberry farm at half past six and begins the day’s work. On mornings when there are strawberries to pick, she straps on a woven back-basket and paces back and forth inside the polytunnel, searching for the berries that have turned red. Lunch break begins at noon. Some workers take out food they have brought from home – rice and dishes, potatoes, or instant noodles – heat it up in the boss’s rice cooker, and eat out at the edge of the field. Lu Yinghong lives close by, so she hops on her electric scooter to go home to eat. When she is away at work, her mother-in-law prepares the midday meal.

At one in the afternoon, the work resumes. The workers sit on stools between the rows, pulling out weeds and stripping away yellowed leaves. In summer the polytunnel grows stiflingly hot, and the early afternoon is when drowsiness is hardest to resist, so Lu Yinghong puts on her Bluetooth earphones and lets the music keep her alert. She finishes at half past five. Back home, she cooks for the whole big household, then tends to the chores in her own little home. Busy until nine in the evening, she picks up her elder daughter from evening study, helps her with homework, and then gets the two children washed and tucked into bed.

Since May this year, Lu Yinghong has lived almost every single day to this schedule, with barely a moment to rest. In spring, when there was no work to be had, she went and learned to drive, thinking it would make it easier to visit her parents’ home and that one day she could drive the girls to school herself, sparing them the cold of winter. The moment she passed her driving test, strawberry season was already in full swing, so she went straight back to the farm.

As the novelty wore off, Lu Yinghong came to feel the strain of the work all the more keenly. “It is quite hard on the back, and sometimes my legs ache as well.” The fine downy hairs on the strawberry leaves drift into the lungs and trigger coughing fits; in the hot polytunnel in summer, the older workers often grow giddy. Add to that the aching back, the sore legs, the tedium – “but as long as you can earn a little money, you just put up with it.”

For the older workers, the toll the work takes on the body is even more pronounced. A day at the strawberry farm means hours of sitting or bending double, and at the end of hers Chen Minglian always feels her lower back sore and her back aching. “Crouching and stooping all day – my feet hurt in the evenings, too.” All of this means she sometimes needs to take a day off, but “without any income, what else can you do? There is no choice but to keep at it.”

For the women who have come from farther afield, there is even more to overcome. Liu Yingcai “can’t get used to the food, can’t get used to the lodgings,” yet “if you can’t adapt, what are you going to do? When you leave home to find work, you just make do.” Back home, growing pepper was hard too, but when the heat or the fatigue became too much, she could at least sit down for a while. Here, working for someone else, even when stripping leaves has left her fingers aching, she cannot stop once she is on shift.

With the work so scattered across the various strawberry farms, Liu Yingcai gradually lost all contact with the other women from her hometown who had come here to work. She has not seen a single familiar face at the town market either. After the evening shift ends, she rests in the corrugated-metal shed, waiting for dawn to break so she can start again.

What You Can Escape, What You Cannot

Beyond the money, the strawberry farm also gave Lu Yinghong an emotional outlet. She could talk to the other women about the weather, the harvest, or the daily ups and downs of family life. Sometimes she would vent about tensions with her husband and her in-laws, or share the difficulties of raising children, and the older women could always offer a few words of comfort drawn from their own experience. Before all this, alone at home, she had felt stifled. She and her old classmates had nothing left in common, and one by one, the ties had faded.

“So I feel that working with strawberries has given me more than just an income – it has given me a sense of home on top of that,” Lu Yinghong says.

But not everyone feels the same way. On the day of the interview, rain fell, and the strawberry farm where Lu Yinghong worked called off the afternoon, so the workers naturally lost their hourly wages. She mentioned an older woman she works alongside: “She said she wished it wasn’t raining, because she needs the money too – her children aren’t married yet, and the pressure on her is heavy. I suppose they don’t really want to be here either, but for the sake of making a living, there is no other way.”

Yet even working this hard, the women barely save anything. Chen Minglian says that of course she would much rather come to the strawberry farm than go back to growing maize at four or five jiao a jin. But prices are high now – a trip to the town market for a few errands means sixty yuan in bus fares, round trip – and she has no thought of saving for old age or medical bills. “At this age, being able to cover your own living costs is good enough.”

A woman worker from Laodian Town added that, compared with life back in her village, working at the farm meant extra spending on groceries and shopping – “money just evaporates.” On top of that, even working away from home, social obligations back in her hometown cannot be ignored. If a relative or friend has a wedding or a funeral, she has to take time off and travel back. The fare alone costs over a hundred yuan, and the gift – “less than a hundred yuan and you’d be too embarrassed to show your face” – makes for a hefty expense.

Most of Lu Yinghong’s earnings at the strawberry farm go on the children – clothes, groceries, snacks, and milk powder for her youngest – “I feel like I haven’t spent any real money, and I’m earning every single day, yet there’s never any money at the end of the day.” The children’s expenses have always fallen on her side: before, she relied on the living expenses her husband provided; now she earns it herself.

This year, the scrap-metal trade took a downturn, and her husband returned from Kunming to their hometown, where he is doing concrete work alongside her father-in-law. Financial pressure has surged. The family, too, encourages her to keep going.

I ask her whether her husband’s and in-laws’ attitudes toward her have changed now that she brings in an extra two or three thousand yuan a month. The question rests on an assumption taken for granted locally: that a woman who once ate and dressed at her in-laws’ expense, even while doing all the housework and raising two children, has done nothing of note.

“No.” Lu Yinghong’s answer is firm. “Maybe I feel a little more free, and I’ve gained a bit of self-assurance, but for other people nothing has probably changed. Because to others, there are far more people who are more impressive than you – you don’t count for much.”

An Unknown Road Ahead

By the third year, the strawberry farm where Lu Yinghong had originally worked was down to fewer hands – just eight or nine workers now for twenty mu of land. In July, when I got in touch with Lu Yinghong again, she told me the boss had already transferred the land, and she had moved to a different strawberry farm.

In fact, this is the general pattern of the local strawberry industry. After three to five years of growing strawberries, pathogens multiply in the soil, the fruit shrinks, and the plants gradually wither and die. A joint study by the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Beijing Academy of Agricultural Sciences explains: “The particular cultivation model in the Huize area has led to soil acidification, soil salinisation, organic matter depletion, and soil microbial community imbalance, resulting in soil degradation and reduced strawberry yields.” After that, operators either have to move to new land or switch to a different crop.

Much of Mashu’s strawberry industry was, in fact, transferred over from Huize. And once the land here is used up, the strawberry farms may well migrate somewhere else too.

The bosses are even more aware of this. Ma Guoguang says that with the soil deteriorating, the cost of pesticides and fertilisers has risen sharply this year as well. Coupled with the impact of a warm winter on yields, his income will likely fall short of last year’s. He reckons strawberries can be grown for a maximum of five years. What comes next to make money, and what the workers will do – Ma Guoguang has no answers either.

Li Chaodong is struggling too. He used to grow strawberries in Daibu Town in Huize, but eventually “the soil went bad”, and in 2021 he came to Mashu to lease land. He says he put in five or six hundred thousand yuan of his own money and borrowed another five or six hundred thousand – now it has all gone up in smoke. He can only wait for this year’s produce to hit the market and hope to break even.

“Of the million you hustle for, at most a hundred thousand is left over. Everything else goes on wages, fertiliser, and rent.” He says last year wages alone came to 780,000 yuan, accounting for sixty per cent of his costs. On top of that, leasing land requires going through a middleman, which is enormously expensive – the middleman contracts wasteland from the government at fifty yuan per mu and cultivated land at two hundred yuan per mu, but by the time it reaches the growers the price has jumped to six hundred yuan per mu. “It’s all money out of ordinary people’s pockets – we growers are the ones who take the loss.”

Soil degradation has reared its head again, too. This year he has started trying to grow small plots of sunflower and Pepino melon, but neither has brought in any returns yet.

The women workers from farther afield inside the polytunnel know nothing of all this. They are hoping their boss sells his produce quickly and pays out their wages. As they see it, across the entire county, apart from strawberries, there is nowhere else that would take in the likes of them – the old and the frail.

Lu Yinghong thinks much the same. “If the strawberry industry keeps going, I will probably stick with it. For me, right now strawberries are the best fit I’ve got.” Tomorrow morning at half past six, she will walk back into the strawberry farm once more, through the rosy dawn or the morning mist.

– This is Foodthink’s 834th original article –

Apart from Li Chaodong, all other individuals named in this article are pseudonyms.

Unless otherwise stated, all photographs were taken by the author.

Editor: Pei Dan

Layout: Xiaoshu

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