The changing Chinese attitude towards the rural

I was born in Shanghai at the turn of the century in Zhongshan Park, rooted in the heart of Shanghai. In the 1930s, my grandfather watched as the roots of the first international port in China shot off into a burgeoning international hub. Following WW2, my father watched factories churn out concrete and asphalt onto the packed dirt and cobblestone streets of the city as the rapid industrialization of China choked out any surviving remnants of Imperial China.

 

    Old Shanghai Circa 1960s

By the time I was born, modern Shanghai had been presented to the world, a true “global” city by the metrics of international research impact and the size of its economy, China’s New York and London wrapped into one neon package. In the twenty years since, it has only grown, the bright skylines on both sides of the Huangpu River, Puxi and Pudong, divided in appearance only by the living memory and history of Pudong’s more humble origins.

View landing into Shanghai Pudong International Airport, Oct 2025

  The Bund, Shanghai, Oct 2025

In the day of my father, the city was the desired end goal, the only location where the rapidly industrializing China could be experienced by the formerly agrarian subsistence farmers that had always comprised the bulk of China. The city was where any enterprising person could get rich, the gateway to the unimaginable international world. A hukou (a little more about that from Professor Pruitt and the Economist) in the city was the most desirable to be able to get the exclusive social services only allowed for the residents of the city.

And yet, core to the Maoist uplifting of the “pure” agrarian proletariat was the belief that the city cultivated pro-bourgeois sentiments, and from the 1950s to the 1970s, the urban youths were all sent to countryside (a collection of photos detailing the Back to the Countryside Movement collected by Dartmouth here) in the belief that the hard living of rural life would leave them firm believers of social equality, as well as build the toughness that only farming and ranching builds (A little more on that from Professor Pruitt).

At the time, the idea to stay in the communes was unthinkable, the whole experience an experience in the same type of biting poverty that they had lived through during the revolution. In many respects, the rural people were the same people as the impoverished peasantry that had long suffered. In some parts of China today, any reference to the mountains still carries the old reference to the impoverished villages that remain in those areas (a la hillbillies). The food of such areas remains directly translated as “dirt food” or peasant food.

Today, however, there is a growing counterculture, two generations after the boom. Rising costs in the city make finding a job, buying an apartment, starting a family prohibitively expensive for graduates of even the most elite universities. Rising youth employment (near 20%)  reveals the worst job market China has ever seen (A slight improvement in this new 2026 quarter by South China Morning Post). Even given the opportunities of the urban environment, the struggle and competition itself can be overwhelming even for those that grew up with it.

Growing numbers of Chinese youths seek to escape to the rural, rather than continue in the struggle of urban life. This trend continues even with the loosening restrictions among the obtaining of a hukou, and the courting of these new exurban residents to new cities.

As The Economist points out:

It had taken just two generations for a Chinese family to pass from pre-industrial agrarianism to post-material urban malaise

In this the Chinese and the Americans are now more similar than different. As China’s growth slows down as America's did in the 1980s, and the glow of the urban lights stings more than it inspires, with it will come the nostalgia for what is gone. When the struggles of poverty are removed, only the admittedly beautiful view remains.

  My Mom's hometown, now a highway, circa 2010s