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 the city. 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 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 who had always comprised the bulk of China's populace. The city was where any enterprising person could get rich, the gateway to the unimaginable international world. A hukou (a little more about that in this prior post and the Economist) in the city was the most desirable to be able to get the exclusive social services reserved for the residents of the city.

And yet, core to the Maoist goal of uplifting the “pure” agrarian proletariat was the belief that the city cultivated undesirable pro-bourgeois sentiments, and thus, from the 1950s to the 1970s, urban youths were all sent to countryside (a collection of photos detailing the Back to the Countryside Movement collected by the University of Dartmouth here). The thinking was that the hard work of rural life would leave them firm believers of social equality, while also fostering the toughness that only farming and ranching builds (Read more here).

Until the Back to the Countryside movement ended in the 1980s, the idea to stay in the rural communes was unthinkable, the whole experience a memory 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, a growing counterculture has emerged, two generations after the boom. Rising costs in the city make finding a job, buying an apartment and starting a family prohibitively expensive for graduates of even the most elite universities. Rising youth unemployment (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 in the context of urban opportunities, the struggle and competition itself can be overwhelming even for those who grew up with it.

Growing numbers of Chinese youths seek to escape to the rural, rather than continue in the race of urban life. This trend continues even with the now easier process for the obtaining of a hukou, and the friendlier sentiments inviting these new exurban residents to new cities. 

The Economist points out that:

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 as America's did in the 1980s, and the glow of the urban lights burns more than it inspires, with it will come the nostalgia for what is gone. When the struggles of rural poverty are removed, only the admittedly beautiful view remains.

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

Literary Ruralism (Part LI): Attention to "rural" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, on China's rise

Breakneck:  China's Quest to Engineer the Future by technology analyst Dan Wang was published last month by W.W. Norton.  The promotional blurb touts the book, in part, thusly:  

Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China—one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad.

I came to the book after listening to Ross Douthat's interview with Wang on the "Interesting Times" podcast.  While Wang's book primarily contrasts the differing approaches to development and infrastructure of the United States and China, it often raises the matter of rural-urban difference and how those differences play out in the two countries.  I was intrigued, for example, by Douthat's comparison of Guizhou, a backwater Chinese province that Wang uses to illustrate an underdeveloped place, to West Virginia.  The transcript from the podcast features this from Wang: 

Guizhou... is a land where a local said, “Not three feet of land is flat, not three days go by without rain and not a family has three silver coins.”  China’s fourth-poorest province, I was surprised to see, had much better levels of infrastructure than one could find in much wealthier places in the United States, like New York State or California.

We saw very tall bridges all around us. We saw a guitar-making hub. We saw a lot of fancy new roads that were a cyclist’s dream. And it was only afterward when I realized how bizarre it was that China’s fourth-poorest province — about the level of G.D.P. per capita of Botswana, much less than Shanghai or Guangdong — was able to build all of these things.

It is a province with 11 airports, 50 of the highest bridges in the world and brand-new, spiffy highways — and that’s because China was just building a lot in its equivalent of a South Dakota or West Virginia.

That's a good introduction to the book excerpts that follow.  I have highlighted the word "rural" in context.  

Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown. Controls are far worse for ethnoreligious minorities: Tibetans are totally prohibited from worshipping the Dalai Lama, and perhaps over a million Uighurs have spent time in detention camps that attempt to inculcate Chinese values into their Muslim faith. 

The engineering state can be awfully literal minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves. (pp. 5-6)

* * * 

The Guizhou locals we chatted with were prouder of their bridges than anything else. My friends and I cycled across bridges that were set above plunging ravines. State media boasts that Guizhou has become a “museum of bridges,” a few of which are trying to develop into tourism sites: The tenth-highest bridge in Guizhou (which is twenty-third globally) hosts the world’s highest bungee jump. Each time the engineers build a bridge, they inevitably announce that travel times between two towns have been cut from many hours to perhaps a few minutes. That creates real convenience and connection for rural people. Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere. 

(I am reminded of what a "bridge to nowhere" connotes in the United States; read some of my analysis of the political implications of the phenomenon here). 

Still, beneath Guizhou’s engineering marvels are counties mired in poverty. At $8,000 per capita, the province has the income of Botswana, 40 percent below China’s national average and less than a third that of rich coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai. One day, Christian remarked on how few working-age adults we saw in Guizhou: Those who don’t have a job making guitars have mostly migrated to other provinces, leaving small children in the care of grandparents. In 2010, only half of Guizhou’s children attended high school—the lowest rate in the country. News reports often featured stories of children having to rise at the crack of dawn and hike through harrowing mountain paths, some with rope ladders, to be able to attend school. 

In spite of the challenges of deep rural isolation, China’s fourth-poorest province—where household income is one-fifteenth that of New York State—has vastly superior infrastructure: three times the length of New York’s highways, as well as a functional high-speed rail network. And Guizhou isn’t exactly an exceptional Chinese province. Across the country, the engineering state has relentlessly built public works, making Guizhou an extreme case of China’s growth strategy rather than a deviation from it. 

Modern China has been on a building spree. It began in the 1990s, after economic reopening took hold, and then received another boost in 2008, when the central government approved vast public works to respond to the global financial crisis. (pp. 27-28)

* * * 

The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan outlines interstellar research and other state-directed megaprojects. There’s something for the ordinary consumer too, but it’s nowhere near as exciting. To promote consumption, the plan suggests measures like “expanding the coverage of e-commerce in rural areas,” “improving product recalls,” and “improving in-city duty-free shops.” Fine measures, but puny relative to orbiting Mars. The economic planners have obviously poured their hearts into the scientific projects, whereas the consumption measures look like a hasty afterthought. When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income. 

Under Mao, China practiced a more literal form of Marxism, with full state control of the means of production. Deng Xiaoping pivoted the country away from that failed experiment. As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.” That flexible definition allowed for greater adaptability, generated higher growth, and sustained the regime into the twenty-first century. Under Deng’s definition, the United States has also achieved plenty of socialism. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program all concentrated resources to accomplish great tasks. Maybe even Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could have been understood as socialism. When the engineering state works, it can produce beautiful cities like Shanghai. But Shanghai is exceptional: It has been China’s richest and most westernized city for the better part of a century. The engineering state also produces a lot of problems. To see them, we should return one more time to Guizhou. 

Under the gleaming new bridges lurk not only poverty but also a massive debt burden. The underlying hope of Guizhou’s construction is that infrastructure will invite lasting economic activity. Part of that has worked out: Guizhou incomes have risen by nearly 10 percent annually from 2011 to 2022, driven partially by urbanization and by the tourism facilitated by new infrastructure.  (pp. 37-38)

* * *  

But most of Guizhou’s infrastructure spending looks dubious. Its super-high bridges aren’t producing the revenue to recoup anywhere near their super-high costs. Of Guizhou’s eleven airports, five have less than a dozen flights each week—and there are three more airports still under construction. Guizhou has become one of China’s most indebted provinces, and it’s starting to feel real fiscal distress. In an unusual move, Guiyang’s finance bureau issued a public outcry in 2022 that it was at the end of its ability to deal with the debt. Quickly afterward, the government deleted its own admission. 

Guizhou’s debt has kindled Beijing’s wrath. In China, the only people scarier than debt collectors are political inspectors from the central government. The Communist Party has unleashed teams of officers from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to descend on Guizhou. They are unbound by even the modest levels of legal niceties afforded in China. Rather than investigating legal crimes, their remit is to find “violations of party discipline,” a nebulous charge that includes not only corruption but also misuse of public funds and political disloyalty to the Communist Party. That makes the commission akin to the Inquisition, enforcing doctrine and discipline on its members. (pp. 38-39) 

The worst-affected people are targeted minority groups, who have to bear Beijing’s social engineering. The state has singled out, for example, Tibetans, who are forced to relocate from high-altitude mountains, where they are able to graze their yaks and horses, to lower-altitude farms in part to monitor them more easily. What are yak herders supposed to do when they move down to apartment blocks? Rural people who know only their farming or pastoralist lives are often at loose ends when the government resettles them into rows upon rows of high-rises. Two researchers at the University of Colorado have documented China’s coercive tactics to compel locals to leave their homes. It is a process it calls “thought work,” ranging from presenting resettlement as a voluntary and happy choice to holding intensive one-on-one meetings with recalcitrant folks who do not want to leave. Officials mix inducements with threats until they wear down the farmers. Thus, the state has been able to achieve “voluntary” resettlement rates of 100 percent. 

Reckless construction has often produced rubbish quality. Builders employed cheap materials to construct even schoolhouses. The 2008 earthquake that tore through Sichuan also shattered thousands of schoolrooms, killing five thousand children (according to official figures).  (pp. 48-49)

* * * 

Though rich students in Shanghai score splendidly on international exams, education in China’s rural areas is still often abysmal. The Covid pandemic revealed that the country’s health care system is weak, with shortages of doctors and nurses and six times fewer intensive care unit beds per capita than in the United States. An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. 

The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai. The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.

I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other.  (pp. 49-50) 

* * * 

China’s overbuilding has produced deep social, financial, and environmental costs. The United States has no need to emulate it uncritically. But the Chinese experience does offer political lessons for America. China has shown that financial constraints are less binding than they are cracked up to be. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments. 

Rather than worry about bond vigilantes, the engineering state has focused on delivering material improvements for the people. Rural folks in Guizhou have seen their material conditions of life improve immeasurably over the past few decades. The mixture of permitting free enterprise while building big infrastructure is part of the reason that the Communist Party has held on to consent of the governed.  (p. 54) 

I'll write a separate post later about the rural-urban divide in relation to China's one-child policy.  

As traditional media collapse, "The Epoch Times" gains a following in rural America

The newspaper racks at the Newton County (Arkansas) Library
are full of issues of The Epoch Times, along with News China 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025.

The New York Times journalist Eli Tan reported last week from Oakdale, California (population 23,181), on the evolution of that community's media ecosystem.  The headline for Tan's story focuses on events from 2020, "It was Just a Rumor on Facebook.  Then a Militia Showed Up" but the story is about the longer-term disintegration of local media, both before and after that 2020 event.  It's a story of how the local media dried up, leaving residents reliant on local Facebook groups, eventually supplemented by The Epoch Times, a publication of Falun Gong, a group associated with right-wing views and its opposition to the Chinese government. I want to focus on that part of the story because it relates to something I observed first-hand in my home county this year.  First, I'll share a bit more background on Oakdale, which is in Stanislaus County, in California's Central Valley:   

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

By the 2024 election, when its county, Stanislaus, was among the 10 in California that President Trump flipped red, it wasn’t just trust in traditional media that had vanished from Oakdale — it was the media itself.

Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers, elevating the county’s “keyboard warriors” to roles akin to editors in chief.

Many issues of News China magazine
were also on display in the 
Newton County Library

Of the 80 Oakdale residents The New York Times spoke to for this article, not a single one subscribed to a regional news site, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

Oakdale is not alone: Between news deserts expanding in rural areas and a growing distrust of national outlets, the town’s shift toward new sources of information is becoming commonplace in small communities across the country. 

Here is more coverage of the rural news desert phenomenon. 

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. 

* * *  

The town is still able to support a weekly newspaper called The Oakdale Leader, which shares a handful of reporters with nine other local newspapers in the Central Valley, all owned by Hank Vander Veen, its publisher and a former circulation director at the Modesto Bee.

* * *

It isn’t just local news habits that are changing in Oakdale. Since the pandemic, a wider skepticism for everything including vaccines and the price of eggs has changed the way people approach information in general: The thinking is, do your own research, and trust neither side.

Newton County Library, Feb. 2025
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

Here is another post about misinformation influencing politics in rural communities.  Tan's story in the NYT continues:

Alternative news in Oakdale has even extended into print. In barber shops, clock repair stores and diners across town, copies of a peculiar newspaper appear on tables and bookshelves: The Epoch Times.

The media outlet is affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, and it is known to include right-wing misinformation with an anti-China slant. (The outlet did not respond to a request for comment.) A weekly print subscription costs less than $15 a year, but most store owners in Oakdale said they didn’t initially pay for a subscription — the editions just started showing up in the mail during the pandemic.

This brought to mind what I saw in the Newton County (Arkansas) Library (in my hometown) when I visited in February, 2025:  the newspaper rack was dominated by just two publications, The Epoch Times and the local(ish) Harrison Daily Times, from neighboring Boone County.  Oddly, there was no copy of the local weekly, The Newton County Times, on display.  (It is owned by the same company that owns the Harrison Daily Times and currently operates out of the same office in Boone County--that is, The Newton County Times has no physical presence in Newton County except when the reporter comes over from Harrison, Boone County's seat, to cover events like local government meetings).  

I was back in Newton County in early April and again popped into the library.  Nothing had changed in terms of what was on display--well, the issues of The Epoch Times and The Harrison Daily Times were more recent because it was April and no longer February.  On this latter visit, the librarian was present, and so I asked her about the prominence of The Epoch Times--and why she carried it at all.  She said that a patron had requested it.  My facial response was skeptical, perhaps even as strong as an eye roll.  Though what I was really judging was her decision to display this propaganda so prominently, especially when there was so little counter-balance of real news.  Not a copy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, let alone any national newspaper, in sight.    

Now, however, that I've read this New York Times story, I'm skeptical in a different way about what the librarian told me.  I suggest The Epoch Times is being sent to lots of local libraries, and those without much else--and those who don't see how biased it is--simply display it.  After all, they have plenty of room, and it's no tax at all on their budgets.   

It seems this is an important bit of information toward understanding the media ecosystem that has led to a right-ward shift in the rural vote. 

It also reminds me of some billboards for The Epoch Times I saw on California's I-80 in the last year.  Those billboards proclaimed The Epoch Times the most trusted news source in America, a claim that made me very skeptical.   Here's a story about those billboards and how they showed up in Tampa, Florida. from Axios. 

A flex from China's rural women

The top story on the New York Times website right now--at least for us on the Pacific coast--is about rural Chinese women. The headline is, "In Rural China, ‘Sisterhoods’ Demand Justice, and Cash."  Vivian Wang reports; here is the lede:  

The women came from different villages, converging outside the local Rural Affairs Bureau shortly after 10 a.m. One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.

The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.

“I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?” one woman asked.

That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong Province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a longstanding custom of denying them land rights — all because of whom they had married.

In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman.” To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there.

That means the village assembly — a decision-making body technically open to all adults, but usually dominated by men — can deny her village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance, as well as money that is awarded to residents when the government takes over their land. (A man remains eligible no matter whom he marries.)

Now, women are fighting back, in a rare bright spot for women’s rights and civil society. They are filing lawsuits and petitioning officials, energized by the conviction that they should be treated more fairly, and by the government’s increasing recognition of their rights.

In doing so, they are challenging centuries of tradition that have defined women as appendages to men: their fathers before marriage, their husbands after. That view has persisted even as the country has rapidly modernized, and women have gone to school and sometimes even become their families’ breadwinners.

They are also exposing a gap between the ruling Communist Party’s words and its actions. Many courts, which are controlled by the party, refuse to take on the women’s lawsuits.

This reminds me of the case of Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (U.S. Supreme Court 1979).  This excerpt from the case digest should explain the comparison based on a loss of rights for women who married outside their tribe:  

Respondents, a female member of the Santa Clara Pueblo and her daughter, brought this action for declaratory and injunctive relief against petitioners, the Pueblo and its Governor, alleging that a Pueblo ordinance that denies tribal membership to the children of female members who marry outside the tribe, but not to similarly situated children of men of that tribe, violates Title I of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA), 25 U.S.C. §§ 1301-1303, which, in relevant part, provides that "[n]o Indian tribe in exercising powers of self-government shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws." 25 U.S.C. § 1302(8). The ICRA's only express remedial provision, 25 U.S.C. § 1303, extends the writ of habeas corpus to any person, in a federal court, "to test the legality of his detention by order of an Indian tribe." The District Court held that jurisdiction was conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 1343(4) and 25 U.S.C. § 1302(8), apparently concluding that the substantive provisions of Title I impliedly authorized civil actions for declaratory and injunctive relief, and also that the tribe was not immune from such a suit. Subsequently, the court found for petitioners on the merits. The Court of Appeals, while agreeing on the jurisdictional issue, reversed on the merits.

Rural places as sacrifice zones, from California to China

I've been following this story out of California for a few months or so--the story of how a company called Flannery Associates has been buying up thousands of acres of farm and other rural land in Solano County, between Sacramento and San Francisco.   The Wall Street Journal first reported in July under a headline more focused on national security concerns than anything else, "Investors Bought Nearly $1 Billion in Land Near a California Air Force Base. Officials Want to Know Who Exactly They Are."  The speculation then was that foreign investors might be buying up the land as they are elsewhere in the United States, creating a threat to our food security.  Alternatively or additionally, any foreign threat stem from the proximity to Travis Air Force Base.  

Then, about ten days ago, the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times revealed, nearly simultaneously, that the folks behind Flannery Associates are Silicon Valley elites hoping to aquire enough land to build a new city--obviously in the orbit of the Bay Area--from scratch.  

The San Francisco Chronicle describes what the area is now:  "rural back roads that snake the dry farmland around Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills."  There's also this: 

For more than a century, the rangeland in southeast Solano County didn’t change much. Cattle and sheep grazed. Wheat and barley grew. Ranches were passed down from generation to generation in this swath of wide open territory between Vallejo and Sacramento.

This excerpt from the New York Times story about Flannery's aspiration similarly characterizes the place's starting point as rural:

Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation and dense urban life.

Elsewhere, the utopia the investors aspire to build is compared to Paris or the West Village in New York City in terms of walkability, a "bustling metropolis that ... could generate thousands of jobs."  

The Chronicle story provides this on Flannery's business practices--and an interesting legal strategy that reminds me of the old adage, "the best defense is a good offense": 

From the beginning, Flannery has been relentless in its drive to buy up parcels of land in southeast Solano County, often paying three or four or five times appraised value. But while it has willingly offered to pay well above market value, the company has also accused the ranchers of colluding to force prices even higher. In May, Flannery filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Sacramento, accusing a group of ranchers of an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy” that caused them to spend $170 million in “overpayment for properties.” The lawsuit seeks $510 million in damages.

Lisa Shipley, manager of the Solano County Farm Bureau, said the accusations of collusion have had a chilling effect on the tight-knit community, with ranchers wary of talking to each other lest they be accused of conspiring against Flannery.

Shipley is quoted:

Flannery has done some slimy, underhanded stuff to these long-term, multigenerational farmers.  Everyone is afraid to talk. They are afraid of getting sued. My members are afraid to talk to me. It’s a messy situation.

Flannery is only now starting to talk to local government officials regarding their plans.  Given that the land is zoned agricultural and there is little water available, big hurdles remain.  The story quotes Solano County Administrator Bill Emlen, who said he's been looking into Flannery for five years.  

We approached them a while back and said, ‘We’ve noticed you have been making a lot of large acquisitions and we’d like to set up a meeting to talk about zoning and the general plan and what your intentions are.'  They said they were investors in family farms and their intention was to continue with grazing and farming and that was their plan.

Emlen noted that the county's policies have long been to approve only "large scale residential development takes place in the cities," including Vacaville, Dixon, and Fairfield, and thus to preserve the rural parts of the county. 

With these California events fresh in my mind, I couldn't help think of a partial California-China parallel when the Washington Post reported here a few days ago from a rural part of Hebei province, home of Beijing.  The headline is, "Rural areas sacrificed for Xi Jinping’s new city, satellite imagery shows."  The story tells of government efforts to build a whole new metro area, Xiong'an New Area, in the orbit of Beijing.  Xiong'an New Area, which will be twice the size of New York City, has been under construction for six years.  When the new metro was recently threatened by flooding from Typhoon Doksuri, Chinese officials used rural parts of the province as a sacrifice zone to save their investment in the new city. 

Here's an excerpt from the Post's story.

[W]hile the effort diverted water away from Xiong’an and other urban areas, it directly contributed to the devastation of rural villages in Hebei, destroying homes and livelihoods. Satellite images reveal that authorities’ actions led to a dramatic increase of water across those areas, covering at least 95 square miles — almost 46,000 football fields. In one of the clearest examples, more than 20 square miles of farmland near Xiong’an’s high-speed railway station were still underwater on Aug. 5.

* * * 

The idea that rural areas are better suited to take the brunt of flooding dates to as early as the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the country’s flood zones — areas that are deliberately flooded to absorb excess water — were built. But such areas are no longer as sparsely populated as they once were. Local governments have allowed towns in designated flood zones to grow, despite regulations meant to control the number of residents living there.

We can also see instances--even recent ones--of rural places being sacrifice zones to urban ones when flooding strikes in the United States.  I wrote about it this spring from California, but it's also been a practice when flooding has threatened the Mississippi River Valley.  

Nostalgia for China's rural past, now manifest in miniature

Vivan Wang reported in the New York Times yesterday under the headline, "Recreating a Bygone China, One Miniature Home at a Time."  The young man featured in this story is Shen Peng, who had recently taken his grandmother to the site of the house where she and her husband had once lived.  The house in northern China had been demolished by the Chinese government for redevelopment.  Here was Mr. Shen's response to his mother's grief over the home she and her husband had at one time: 

For more than six months, he labored in secret after his day job as a hairdresser. Finally, Mr. Shen, now 31, presented his grandmother with a surprise — a handcrafted 1:20 scale replica of her old home.

There was the wire clothesline in the courtyard, draped with a blue blanket cut into the size of a postage stamp. There was the rickety bicycle, outside a shed constructed with foam boards and plaster. Mr. Shen had even traveled to the site of the old house to better recreate the fragment of brick wall that still remained.

The project led him into a small but growing community of artists in China filling an increasingly urgent demand: miniature replicas of homes that have been demolished, remodeled or otherwise swept away by China’s modernization.

Over the past 40 years, China has transformed from one of the world’s poorest countries into its second-largest economy. The share of city residents has tripled, and vast numbers of Chinese have seen the structures of their childhoods disappear, often through government redevelopment campaigns.

Here's a quote from Mr. Shen:

Nobody would actually want to live in these houses again. Once people have gotten used to nice things, they can’t handle these shabby one... the pace of life now is too fast. Just because you live in a high-rise doesn’t mean you’re happy.

Mr. Li is another artist who makes the miniatures: 

About half of Mr. Li’s clients are in their 30s; the rest are older. Most, like himself, were carried by China’s economic boom from the countryside to the cities, finding education and jobs that allowed them to afford nostalgia. Mr. Li’s miniatures cost between $1,400 and $7,000, in a city where the average disposable income for urban residents is about $8,000 per year. He has made about 80 in all.

Younger viewers on social media can find the urge to document these old houses confusing. Some comment disbelievingly on how run-down the houses look. Even some of Mr. Li’s assistants, many of whom are recent art school graduates, said they had little familiarity with the countryside.

Other posts about China's rural past are here and here.   

On the future of vertical farms: Conflicting trends from China and the United States

I first took notice of so-called vertical farms about the time I started this blog some decade and a half ago when I saw this story in the New York Times depicting plants growing up the sides of a skyscraper.  Bina Vinkataraman wrote there of an idea that had "captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years."  The story's lede follows: 

What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

The story included this reality check on the economics of these enterprises: 

Armando Carbonell, chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., called the idea “very provocative.” But it requires a rigorous economic analysis, he added. “Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.”

Scientific American ran a story in 2009 that also featured Despommier's vision and noted what would be saved in money and carbon in not having to transport food to city consumers:

[A] 30-story building built on one city block and engineered to maximize year-round agricultural yield—thanks largely to artificial lighting and advanced hydroponic and aeroponic growing techniques—could feed tens of thousands of people. Ideally the recipients of the bounty would live in the surrounding area, so as to avoid the transport costs and carbon emissions associated with moving food hundreds if not thousands of miles to consumers.

I was intrigued when I learned about these developments (which was about the time I started this blog), but to be honest, I was also a tiny bit disappointed because vertical farms risked making rural places obsolete.  I was starting to see that one of the things rural places provided to urban places--one of the ways rural places were seen as adding value--was food.  If, somehow, urban places came to be able to supply their own food needs, it would become one more reason for metro folks not to care about rural folks and their livelihoods. 

Thus, for the past 15 years, I've tried to track what's going on with vertical farms.  Are they still a sort of "pie in the sky" aspiration?  or are they becoming a real thing?  

Among the vertical gardens stories since that 2008 report is this 2013 NY Times piece out of Singapore.  It is focused on the island nation's Kranji neighborhood, "home to a farm resort and ever-evolving agritourism circuit where locavore thinking has taken hold," thus reclaiming some of Singapore's early kampong (farm village) spirit.  Here's an excerpt focused on green skyscrapers as tourist attractions 

The most recent [vertical gardens] addition is Sky Greens, a collection of 120 30-foot towers that opened in late 2012 using a method called “A-Go-Gro Vertical Farming,” which resembles a sort of vegetable-stuffed Ferris wheel, and is designed for leafy greens like spinach and bok choy. Sky Greens is Singapore’s first vertical farm, located in Kranji, 14 miles from Singapore’s central business district, with bus service available every 75 minutes.

The Kranji Heritage Trail, instituted in 2011, includes 34 independent farms and agriculture-related businesses. Seventeen of the trail stops are open to the public, including a poultry farm, a goat farm, frog-breeding aquaculture, a community vegetable garden, a cooking school, and the no-frills D’Kranji Farm Resort, with 19 eco-friendly villas and a spa. A day spent exploring Kranji’s farms is a great antidote to Singapore’s crush of street-food hawkers and urban attractions.

A few more recent stories suggest conflicting answers to the question whether these farms can go beyond serving as tourist attractions and make significant dents in the world's food needs--or even a city's food needs.  

First, this February New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu caught my eye.  It's about a multi-story hog factory in Ezhou, China, on the south bank of the Yangtze River, which will produce 1.2 million pigs a year once its sister facility is completed and at full capacity later in 2023:  

The first sows arrived in late September at the hulking, 26-story high-rise towering above a rural village in central China. The female pigs were whisked away dozens at a time in industrial elevators to the higher floors where the hogs would reside from insemination to maturity.

This is pig farming in China, where agricultural land is scarce, food production is lagging and pork supply is a strategic imperative.

Inside the edifice, which resembles the monolithic housing blocks seen across China and stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on high-definition cameras by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center. Each floor operates like a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life: an area for pregnant pigs, a room for farrowing piglets, spots for nursing and space for fattening the hogs.

Feed is carried on a conveyor belt to the top floor, where it’s collected in giant tanks that deliver more than one million pounds of food a day to the floors below through high-tech feeding troughs that automatically dispense the meal to the hogs based on their stage of life, weight, and health. 

* * *  

China has had a long love affair with pigs. For decades, many rural Chinese households raised backyard pigs, considered valuable livestock as a source of not only meat but also manure. Pigs also hold cultural significance as a symbol of prosperity because, historically, pork was served only on special occasions.

And here are some more interesting tidbits about the factory, which was built by a cement manufacturer just diversifying into the hog breeding business:  

The farm is next to the company’s cement factory, in a region known as the “Land of Fish and Rice” for its importance to Chinese cuisine with its fertile farmlands and surrounding bodies of water.

While the journalists refer to the location of the hog factory as a "rural village," Ezhou is a city of more than a million.  Here's more on the factory itself: 

A pig farm in name, the operation is more like a Foxconn factory for pigs with the precision required of an iPhone production line. Even pig feces are measured, collected and repurposed. Roughly one-quarter of the feed will come out as dry excrement that can be repurposed as methane to generate electricity.

A Chinese executive who designs hog farms is quoted as suggesting that "multistory farms will have an impact on the world."  Meanwhile, the U.S. perspective is more skeptical, largely because of concerns about the inability to control contamination in these facilities: 

U.S. hog farmers look at the pictures of those farms in China, and they just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare do that.’ ... It’s just too risky.

Contrast what's happening in China with this recent story out of western Pennsylvania, where a multi-story facility producing lettuces recently shut down.  Adele Peters reports for Fast Company under the headline, "The Vertical Farming Bubble is Finally Popping."  

When workers arrived at Fifth Season, an indoor farm in the former steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, on a cloudy Friday morning last October, they expected it would be a normal day.

The farm, which had opened two years earlier, seemed to be running smoothly, growing tens of thousands of pounds of lettuce per year inside a robot-filled 60,000-square-foot warehouse. The brand was selling salad kits—like a taco-themed version with the company’s baby romaine, plus guacamole, tortilla strips, and cheese—in more than 1,200 stores, including Whole Foods and Kroger. Earlier in the year, the company had said that it projected a 600% growth in sales in 2022. The branding was updated in October, and new packages were rolling out in stores. Solar panels and a new microgrid had recently been installed at the building. A larger farm was being planned for Columbus, Ohio.

But the workday never started. ... The managers announced that the company was closing immediately. After shutting down the electrical equipment and draining water lines, the plants were left to die. ... Dozens ... were left scrambling to find new jobs.

Fifth Season’s failure is only the most dramatic signal of a reckoning taking place in what’s known as the vertical farming sector. 

The story goes on to provide other examples of this trend of vertical farm failures in the United States and in Europe.  

So, is the salient distinction between what's happening in China and what's happening in the United States that the former involves meat and the latter involves fruit and veg?  That farmers--really agribusiness--in assess risk differently?  Or are there other reasons for the differing trajectories?  

Chinese spy balloon over Montana gives new meaning to "flyover states"

This afternoon as I was driving home from work, I heard NPR report the breaking story of a high-altitude balloon over Montana--at least that is where it was yesterday.  The U.S. Government says it is a Chinese surveillance balloon and is not disclosing where the balloon is now.  Given Montana's reputation as a "rural state" that is sparsely populated, I found interesting this coverage by Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton in the Washington Post:

The incident, first reported by NBC News, prompted a series of unusual events as the balloon was observed Wednesday over sparsely populated Montana, officials said. The state is home to numerous U.S. nuclear missile silos.

* * * 

Senior military officers, including Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised against [shooting down the balloon], citing concerns that falling debris could put people and property at risk, the senior official said.

The balloon’s flight path takes it over “a number of sensitive sites,” this official said.

Also of interest is this about prior Chinese surveillance of U.S. territories outside the North American continent, surveillance that spanned "several years."  

[S]imilar balloons, carrying guidance systems on board, have been detected previously over Hawaii and Guam, a U.S. territory that houses substantial American military assets.

The presence of missile silos in Montana is reminding me that many are also present in my home state, Arkansas.  This, it seems, suddenly makes sparsely populated places of interest and value--if only because strategic defense systems have been sited in them.  I assume that the sparse populations and cheap land are primary reasons for the decisions to site this sensitive--and potentially dangerous military infrastructure--in these rural places.  

The Washington Post story notes similar national security concerns in Montana's neighbor to the east, sparsely populated North Dakota: 

China’s brazen surveillance effort coincides with recent warnings from the U.S. Air Force over proposed Chinese land purchases in North Dakota about 12 miles from a military facility where drone test flights are conducted. The pending deal for a corn milling site has fueled concerns that the purchase is a cover for Chinese surveillance activities. A U.S. interagency committee decided last year it did not have jurisdiction to oppose the sale.

Air Force Assistant Secretary Andrew P. Hunter took an unambiguous view in a letter released earlier this week by North Dakota’s senators.

“The proposed project presents a significant threat to national security,” it says, “both near- and long-term risks of significant impacts to our operations in the area.” The senators called for the project to be discontinued.

Here's a somewhat humorous quote from the New York Times coverage of the surveillance balloon: 

On the ground in Montana, Jeffrey Sherlock, a retired state district court judge in Helena, agreed that the balloon was a “provocative” move. But he also expressed wonder that the Chinese would have been interested in his part of the country.

“I can’t believe they are spying on Billings, Mont.,” he said. “There’s not much there.” 

This recent post similarly speaks to the conflict between rural development and the risk of Chinese surveillance or influence.  

Youngkin nixes battery plant for rural southern Virginia, citing concerns over Chinese influence

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported a few days ago on "Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to halt plans for a $3.5 billion Ford Motor Co. battery plant over his concerns about Chinese influence, [a decision that] cost one of the poorest areas of Virginia a reported 2,500 jobs with potential for more."  

A further excerpt follows, illustrating well the tension between the need for jobs in rural southern Virginia and concerns about Chinese influence: 

If Ford finalized the project, the plant would have gone in the Southern Virginia Mega Site at Berry Hill in Pittsylvania County, [population 60,501]. More than $200 million has been spent over 15 years to make Berry Hill a premier site and the largest publicly owned site in the Southeast. The plant would have built lithium iron phosphate batteries for Ford’s electric vehicles.

The location still has no tenant, however, after Youngkin intervened in late December to stop plans for the plant in Virginia because of its partnership with Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology. Youngkin first publicly discussed his decision after giving his State of the Commonwealth address on Wednesday.

Local officials said they could not comment on the situation because of a nondisclosure agreement, which is standard in such economic development projects. But Democratic state lawmakers slammed Youngkin, saying he put national politics in front of thousands of jobs in Southside Virginia. (Youngkin is considering a run for president in 2024.)

Senator Ghazala Hashmi, D-Chesterfield, wrote in an email earlier this week:  

During his campaign, the Governor made a promise to bring economic development and manufacturing jobs to our communities that are struggling — especially in rural Virginia — to attract industries that offer competitive wages.  The Governor’s decision to pull Virginia out of the competition for the new Ford facility puts the Commonwealth at a severe disadvantage.

Here's more on Berry Hill:  

The roughly 3,500-acre megasite at Berry Hill is owned by the Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facility Authority, a joint entity involving both Danville and Pittsylvania County.

City and county officials hope to attract major industries that would bring thousands of jobs to the site. They are hoping to land a large deal that would transform the economic fabric of the area, which has lost its furniture, textiles and tobacco industries and is focused on advanced manufacturing.

Tony Pipa of Brookings writes of need for "policy renaissance for rural America"

The New York Times published the guest essay, which follows on the first episode of Brooking's "Reimagine Rural" podcast, out of Shamokin, Pennsylvania.  Here's an excerpt from Pipa's essay: 

Shamokin is a cautionary tale for what happens when we lack policy solutions that can truly help places cope and adapt to major economic and social shifts. Despite widespread acknowledgment since 2008 that rural places have generally been left behind, our nation still lacks a coherent federal rural policy.

Almost a century ago, federal policy like the Rural Electrification Act, Title V of the Housing Act and other national-scale development programs helped bring rural America into the modern era, and its contributions helped make the American economy the envy of the world. But today’s federal programs were built for a different era. We need a renaissance of rural policy to enable a renaissance of rural America.

What we have are lots of programs — over 400 available for community and economic development spread across every nook and cranny of the federal government. But navigating that maze and the peculiarities of their applications, reporting and matching requirements is a high bar for anybody, let alone the part-time volunteer elected officials and the bare-bones staffs that make up many local rural governments.

That leaves most rural communities starved for investment. Very few can get the type and level of resources necessary to reinvent their economy or unleash the full potential of their human, intellectual and natural capital as they face rapid change.

Too often policymakers mistake agricultural policy for rural policy. Farming now accounts for just 7 percent of rural employment. Service jobs, retailing, manufacturing and government employment all outweigh agriculture. And while $163 million of the relief the Trump administration distributed during the peak of the trade war with China went to high-income farmers making more than $900,000 annually, small-scale and family farmers are increasingly taking off-farm jobs just to get by.

Other posts about how rural communities struggle to compete for federal funds--and even apply for them--are plentiful on this blog, including one here.  

Rural policy is one issue where Republicans and Democrats should be able to find common ground to work together. The new Congress will present a concrete opportunity as it takes up work to pass a new Farm Bill in 2023, a major piece of legislation renewed roughly every five years that — among other things — authorizes rural development programs at the Department of Agriculture.

Yet early indications signal high-profile fights over food stamps, agricultural subsidies and conservation investments — and limited attention to rural development.

Reauthorizing the Economic Development Administration presents another opportunity. Its authorization expired in 2008, and conversations to renew it began in the current Congress but never made it to the finish line. The new Congress can reopen that process to seriously consider the federal role in promoting economic revitalization in left-behind communities.

One thing is clear: Tweaking around the edges will remain ineffective. A serious policy discussion should be dominating the airwaves. Rural America is listening for how public leadership and resources can better support the economic and social renewal of rural communities, but it hears mostly silence.

Don't miss the rest of this important essay.  

Rural China especially vulnerable to "dark COVID winter"

Emily Feng reports for NPR this afternoon.  Here are some excerpts that illustrate the problem: 

As COVID-19 spreads largely unchecked from Beijing to Shanghai, China is bracing for a second surge, jumpstarted by millions of people who are planning holiday travel from cities back to their rural villages, where the health care system is far patchier.

"I really don't think the village doctors, or even the township or county hospital, can handle the increased number of severe cases," says Huan Wang, a researcher at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. "I think the rural villagers are just left on their own in a dark COVID winter."

As the Lunar New Year approaches, health officials are concerned the celebrations could turn into superspreader events, catching rural systems off guard and driving up infections in a country where natural immunity is nearly non-existent and vaccine hesitancy has remained stubbornly high among the older population.

* * * 

However, the strain China's on countryside is already evident as medicine shortages hit rural pharmacies. On Chinese social media, rural residents have been asking for donations, posting pictures of ransacked pharmacy shelves devoid of fever and pain medication. Some of the medication has been diverted to cities, which were initially hardest-hit by the surge and where supplies first ran out.

"People from the cities have been coming over and buying all of our medicines, or they'll order online and have our pharmacies mail it over to them," says Li Qian, a recent college graduate, who lives in a village in China's southern Jiangsu province. She worries most about her asthmatic grandparents; the nearest hospital, she says, is two hours away.

* * *

Last Thursday, China's national health commission said it was accelerating the expansion of fever treatment clinics – where patients can get quick medical consultations and supplies from a pharmacy — to cover 90% of rural areas to prepare them for the anticipated increase.

The audio has some information not in the transcript, so it's worth a listen.  

Postscript:  Here's a mid-January 2023 story from the Washington Post speculating about the impact Lunar New Year travel will have on the pandemic in China, again because many will travel from urban to rural areas to mark the holiday.

U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, Tim Ryan (D) pleads with the white working class to trust Democrats, again

Here's the lede for today's Washington Post story by Michael Scherer, as candidate Tim Ryan campaigns in Ironton, Ohio, population 11, 129, in the Ohio River Valley:  

Congressman Tim Ryan has been traveling the foothills of western Appalachia with a joke about marriage he hopes will make him Ohio’s next U.S. Senator.

The voters he needs to turn his way — the forgotten, the struggling, in communities with hollow factories, Trump flags and fentanyl epidemics — don’t agree with everything he stands for as a Democrat. But then, he asks his small crowds, who does?

“If my wife and I have 10 conversations in one day and we agree on six or seven of them, we crack a bottle of wine and celebrate how great our marriage is,” he said at a recent stop here along the Ohio River, just a few blocks from an empty brownfield where furnaces once burned. “So why would you think you are going to agree with someone 100 percent of the time?”

Ryan’s bet — and the national Democratic dream — is that a few issues still just might matter more than his party label. He lists three whenever he speaks, after talking up his small-town upbringing and all of his union relatives who once worked at steel plants or auto suppliers: rebuilding the country with major public works spending, new government investing in manufacturing industries and beating China.

“They have a 10-year plan, a 50-year plan, a 100-year plan,” he said of the Asian superpower. “We are living in a 24-hour news cycle talking about really dumb stuff, like Big Bird and Dr. Seuss.”

The pitch has made Ryan one of the most consequential Democratic candidates of the 2022 cycle, a test case on whether his party has any hope of reclaiming its erstwhile White working-class voting base, as former president Donald Trump, who sped their flight, waits in the wings. The struggle is, by any measure, uphill.

* * * 

With less than 10 months to go before the general election, Ryan has already visited 72 of the state’s 88 counties in a full-press effort to try to persuade the hinterlands, a handful at a time, that Democrats like him are human beings who breathe the same air.

Love that Ryan is using the whole state approach in his campaign, leaving no county behind.  Also bemused by the journalist's use of the word "hinterlands."   

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.  

Post script:  NPR's All Things Considered is doing a story on Tim Ryan on the afternoon of February 1, 2022.  Another one ran on February 4, 2022.  

Nostalgia for the rural, farming in China

Here's the story from the New York Times,  "At this Instagram Hotspot, All the World's a Stage (the the Buffalo's a Prop).

The morning mist was still thick between the banyan trees when the farmer appeared in the clearing, an ax slung over his shoulder as he led a water buffalo on a rope leash. In the slanting sunlight, unhurried and companionable, the two picked their way through the undergrowth, a vision of the rural idyll.

Then, when the farmer reached the other end of the clearing, he turned and began his trek again. And again. And again, in a constant loop.

“Come over here a bit!” called out one photographer on the edge of the glade in southeastern China.

“That’s the way!” said another photographer, shouting out directions and encouragement.

“OK, no need to walk anymore!”

With that, the visitors called it a wrap, satisfied they had gotten the perfect photographs of the bucolic scene.

Be sure to click through to the story so you can enjoy the photos.   It seems that people--and I don't think this is limited to the Chinese--want to dream about/fantasize/fetishize/feel connected to where their food is coming from.  The story's subhead speaks volumes in this regard:  "Photographers are flocking to a rural county in southeastern China for its quaint scenes of farmers and fishermen — made to order."

Rural China garners NYT front-page story about the nation's costly investment in persistent, deep poverty

Keith Bradsher reports under the headline, "Jobs, Houses and Cows: China’s Costly Drive to Erase Extreme Poverty."  The subhead: "China has spent heavily to help its poorest citizens, an approach that few developing countries can afford and even Beijing may struggle to sustain."

Here's the lede:  

JIEYUAN VILLAGE, China — When the Chinese government offered free cows to farmers in Jieyuan, villagers in the remote mountain community were skeptical. They worried officials would ask them to return the cattle later, along with any calves they managed to raise.

But the farmers kept the cows, and the money they brought. Others received small flocks of sheep. Government workers also paved a road into the town, built new houses for the village’s poorest residents and repurposed an old school as a community center.

And here are the implications for a country where "a migrant worker in a coastal factory city can earn as much in a month as a Gansu farmer earns in a year":  

The village of Jieyuan is one of many successes of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious pledge to eradicate abject rural poverty by the end of 2020. In just five years, China says it has lifted from extreme poverty over 50 million farmers left behind by breakneck economic growth in cities.

But the village, one of six in Gansu visited by The New York Times without government oversight, is also a testament to the considerable cost of the ruling Communist Party’s approach to poverty alleviation. That approach has relied on massive, possibly unsustainable subsidies to create jobs and build better housing.

The high price and lack of sustainability are clues to why the United States government is unlikely to make a major investment of this sort, if not in cows, even in housing and jobs.  

The story quotes Martin Raiser, the World Bank's country director for China, 

We’re pretty sure China’s eradication of absolute poverty in rural areas has been successful — given the resources mobilized, we are less sure it is sustainable or cost effective.

The total cost of the program, thus far, is $700 billion in both loans and grants, over five years.  And that doesn't count "large donations by state-owned enterprises like State Grid, a power transmission giant, which put $120 billion into rural electricity upgrades and assigned more than 7,000 employees to work on poverty alleviation projects."

Here's more on what's happening in some rural reaches of China's Gansu province, with quotes from various residents: 

According to the government’s complicated criteria for determining eligibility for aid, anyone who owned a car, had more than $4,600 in assets or had a new or recently rebuilt house was excluded. People hovering just above the government’s poverty line continue to struggle to make ends meet, but are often denied help with housing or other benefits.

* * *

The party’s campaign-style approach also fails to tackle deep-seated problems that disproportionately hurt the poor, including the cost of health care and other gaping holes in China’s emerging social safety net. Villages provide limited health insurance — only 17 percent of the cost of Mr. Jia’s arthritis medicine is covered, for example. Hefty medical bills can ruin families.

* * *

Despite the challenges, the poverty relief program may have a long-term political benefit that helps to ensure some of it survives. Gratitude for the program seems to be reinforcing the political power of the party in rural areas.

In Youfang, Mr. Zhang was quick to praise not just the poverty program but also Mr. Xi, comparing him to Mao.

“It is good for the country to have Xi Jinping,” he said, “and the national policy is good.”

That's an interesting twist since neither major party in the United States seems to care much about the rural vote, though one party certainly pays more lip service than the other to rural voters.  

By the way, the print headline for this story, which appeared below the fold, was different, "Free Cows?  China Wages War on Rural Poverty."    That language is reminiscent of LBJ's "War on Poverty" from the 1960s. 

"Blockchain Chicken Farms" in rural China: a book review

Here's the link to the New York Times review, "The Untold Technological Revolution Sweeping Through Rural China," of a new book by Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm.   An excerpt from Clive Thompson's review follows: 

Raising free-range chickens isn’t easy, a Chinese farmer named Jiang tells Xiaowei Wang in a fascinating new book, “Blockchain Chicken Farm.” Why? “Chickens aren’t very smart,” he notes; if you leave lights on, they’ll cluster around “and they overcrowd each other, killing each other. A kind of chicken stampede.” Even if you get the chickens safely grown in their sunny, free-range yards, you have a new problem: You have to convince your finicky customers, in far-off cities, that you’re telling the truth about how the chickens were raised.

So Jiang turned to high-tech chicken surveillance. He outfitted his chickens with wearable legbands that record their movements — “a chicken Fitbit of sorts” — and worked with a tech start-up to record the data on a blockchain. A blockchain is a type of software, most famously used to create Bitcoin, that can make nearly tamper-proof digital records. When customers buy the chicken, they don’t need to take Jiang’s word that his birds strolled around in the sunshine. They can trust the implacable math. Blockchain in this case is a clever tech solution that also happens to have a bleak libertarian philosophy behind it. As Wang notes, some blockchain coders are fond of citing Thomas Hobbes’s dismal view of human nature: Nobody can trust anyone else.

It’s a weird, delightful and unsettling tableau. In “Blockchain Chicken Farm,” Wang introduces us to dozens of such quixotic figures, hopscotching across the country on a mission: to document how technology is transforming the lives of China’s rural poor.

Chobani and Clif Bar have micropolitan south central Idaho humming

I visited Idaho's Magic Valley in 2011 on a field trip with the Rural Sociological Society's (RSS) Annual Meeting in Boise, so it was with particular interest that I read Kirk Johnson's story about Twin Falls in the New York Times this week.  Johnson reported a few days ago--in a front-page story--under the headline, "What Decline? A Rural Hub Thrives in Idaho."  In a related story, Johnson offered a more personal reminiscence of his path to report this feature on Twin Falls, from the vantage point of his own upbringing in Utah, not far to the south.

Sadly, I never got a blog post written about my RSS field trip to the Magic Valley, memorable though it was.  I did, however, upload a few of my photos for this post in the run up the RSS Annual Meeting the following year.  One of the reasons I never got a blog post written is that what I saw and heard was so controversial.  Among other things, the "family" dairy we visited (family owned, but an industrial-sized operation)--across the river from Twin Falls in Jerome--was using immigrant labor in a way that seemed, well, exploitative.  The owner of the dairy talked about "her Mexicans" and how the dairy needed them in order to keep U.S. dairy products affordable, to prevent China from becoming the source of all of our nation's milk.  The owner also told us that local white workers were unreliable but that the occasional refugee resettled to the area worked out, too; she referred in particular to a Burmese refugee working at the dairy who had proved himself hard working, reliable and competent.  Mostly, however, she lauded "her" Latinx workers as critical to her business's sustainability.  After that visit to the dairy, our group went into Twin Falls where we had lunch at a "Mexican" restaurant and where a local priest talked to us about immigration and refugee resettlement into the region.  We were also made aware of the Idaho dairy industry's push for immigration reform, especially from many in this region whose economic livelihoods were reliant on immigrant labor.  (See a related, recent story here, about Wisconsin dairies).

Johnson's story is providing an update on what has happened since I visited nearly six years ago--and the news is good.  In recent years Chobani Yogurt (2013) and Clif Bar (2015) have established manufacturing facilities in Twin Falls.  These economic splashes are among factors that have the nine-country area in south-central Idaho booming.  Both pay workers$15/hour, more than twice the state's minimum wage of $7.25.  In short, with this story Johnson is offering a contrary narrative to the dominant rural narrative--so often featured on this blog--of decline, population loss, sagging economies.  (See just one example here).

Johnson puts Twin Falls' growth in national perspective: Between 2000 and 2015, the population of Twin Falls County increased by 25%, twice as fast as the national rate.

Twin Falls, population 47,000, is a place where rows of hay and feed corn brush right up against the edge of town, but it’s also the biggest community for a hundred miles in any direction, which makes it a shopping hub. Five new hotels have opened since the end of the recession, and more than 80,000 people a day drive in to work or shop.

This is consistent with what I wrote in this recent post--about the efficiency of regional services and retail consolidation, even (or especially) amidst a largely rural region with numerous smallish towns. Indeed, Johnson writes,

In its heady growth spurt, Twin Falls is sucking the oxygen from some smaller, struggling communities farther out in the country as retailers and restaurants cluster in the center.

Johnson also speculates about the "why"--why Twin Falls is growing while many nonmetropolitan places are not (though he notes that northern Idaho and Bend, Oregon are other communities in the "rural" West that are similarly booming, for different reasons):

What went right in southern Idaho started and ended with the rich volcanic soil. With irrigation, the black dirt was splendid for growing crops, from potatoes to alfalfa, that in turn fed the dairy cows that grew up in what became known as the Magic Valley.

Idaho, Johnson reports, is the 4th largest milk producing state in the nation, following California, Wisconsin and New York.  Further 75% of that milk production is within 75 miles of Twin Falls.  That's what drew Chobani, which each day purchases up to 60 tanker trucks of milk (8000 gallons each) from area dairies.

But Johnson also gives "culture" its due in regard to Twin Falls' ascendancy:

[A]bove all else, city leaders, business owners and residents say, it’s a practical place, where the old small-town values of hardball competition shape political life. If an idea gets in the way of economic growth, it should be discarded.

He quotes the Twin Falls City Manager, Travis P. Rothweiler:

Economic development is a blood sport, and I mean that in every single way you can think of it.

And this brings me to Johnson's more personal reflections, given his familiarity with the region:

I was not prepared for Zumba classes and personal trainers at the Clif Bar company gym in Twin Falls, in the still new building the company opened last fall. It was not just jobs and economics that were changing, I immediately saw, but culture. Companies like Clif Bar, based in California and steeped in the outdoor identity of biking and health, and Chobani ... were also changing the nature of a job for their Twin Falls employees, and for workers at other companies that were being forced, through competition, to up their pay and benefits.

* * *

In reporting there on the ground, I then also saw that the old frozen-in-place southern Idaho was defrosting fast, with strains and stresses along the way.

Both of these stories are well worth reading in their entirety.  

Chinese theft and espionage, in an Iowa cornfield (and other agricultural crime)

The Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this week on the F.B.I.'s recent attention to agricultural espionage.  An excerpt from Josh Kenworthy's story follows:  

United States law enforcement agencies are urging farmers and businesses more broadly to be increasingly vigilant amid a rise in attempted thefts of genetically engineered seed and other commercial secrets.   

Mai Hailong, one of six Chinese nationals U.S. authorities accused in 2013 of digging up seeds in Iowa farms with plans to send them back to China, pleaded guilty in January.  

Kenworthy notes that the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted the case as one of national security rather than handling it as a typical criminal case.  

Another agricultural crime story--this one about nut theft--is here.  An excerpt follows:  

California's agriculturists are beefing up security to strike at increasingly sophisticated efforts to divert their high-end nuts to the black market. Criminals find farm records so they can impersonate reputable shipping companies. A thief posing as a driver can take a truck-load of freshly processed nuts or pistachios, with a value as high as $500,000, and divert the entire shipment to the black market at a massive profit.

A rural crime-prevention specialist at the California Farm Bureau in Sacramento compared these nut heists to another crime sometimes associated with rural places.

Somebody who is stealing copper wire to make a quick buck for a quick fix is very different from somebody who is masterminding a plot to steal hundreds of thousands of pounds of nuts across county lines.

An earlier post (2013) on the topic of nut theft is here, and a quick search for stories on the topic on NPR brought up stories from 2008 (almonds), 2012 (almonds) and 2013 (walnuts).

China looking at implications for children of rural-urban migration

Emily Feng reports today for Sinosphere in the New York Times:

The Chinese government plans to conduct the country’s first comprehensive survey of rural children left behind by parents who have migrated to cities in search of work, the China Youth Daily has reported. 

The move comes after a series of reports on the plight of “left-behind” children, who are often put in the care of older relatives or are sometimes abandoned. Researchers say that many of these children have anxiety and depression, and that they exhibit high rates of juvenile delinquency and poor school performance.

Other posts about rural-urban migration in China--its causes, consequences, and the state's responses to it--are here, here, here, and here.

The Chinese may seem "over the top" with their rural idyll, Jackson Hole, but ...

On the front page of today's New York Times is this story about Jackson Hole, China, "Living a Frontier Dream on Outskirts of China's Capital," by Andrew Jacobs.  Here's the lede:

Yearning to breathe untainted air, the band of harried urbanites flocked to this parched, wild land, bringing along their dreams of a free and uncomplicated life. 

But unlike the bedraggled pioneers who settled the American West, the first inhabitants of Jackson Hole, a resort community on the outskirts of the Chinese capital, arrived by Audi and Land Rover, their trunks filled with French wine and their bank accounts flush with cash. 

Over the past decade, more than a thousand families have settled into timber-frame houses with generous backyards, on streets with names like Aspen, Moose and Route 66. On Sundays, some worship at a clapboard church that anchors the genteel town square, outfitted with bronze cowboys and a giant Victrola that sprays water.

Jackson Hole--the Chinese version that is--is on the cusp of Hebei Province, where it meets the sprawling Beijing municipality. 

It's easy to chuckle and poke fun at the Chinese frontier "wannabes," but the story reminded me of this piece nearly a decade ago, out of Florida, which tapped into some similar sentiments, myths and--yes, cache--regarding the rural.  The headline is "In Florida, a Big Developer is Counting on Rural Chic," and Abby Goodnough's story tells of a new development in the Florida panhandle:

What is a striving Florida developer to do when most of its vast holdings are not beach chic but rural, remote and mosquitoey? 

The St. Joe Company, which owns 800,000 mostly inland acres here in the scrubby pine forests of the Panhandle, is invoking Thoreau. 

The company, Florida's largest private landowner, is pushing "new ruralism," a concept it hopes will entice city and suburban dwellers who are weary of civilization and long to own a tractor, a pickup truck, or at least a kayak and a few large dogs.

Goodnough reports that the homes in so called RiverCamps are "in a design proudly called 'Cracker Modern."  I cannot imagine what led St. Joe to appropriate the word "cracker" because of its long-standing negative associations with rurality and, indeed, with "white trash."  But what else could be behind the play on "cracker"?   The average price for a lot/site at RiverCamps is $342,900 just for the land.  Per acre prices are expected to be lower farther inland, at developments called Florida Ranches (150 acres, catering to hunters) and WhiteFence Farms (5- to 20-acre lots near fields and ponds where "farmhands" will be available to to help mow the meadow using the owner's tractor)

Goodnough characterizes these Florida developments as "corporate reinvention of new urbanism, an antisprawl movement that advocates compact, old-fashioned towns where residents can commune in parks, shops and restaurants within walking distance of their homes. Instead of connecting with neighbors, new ruralism promotes connecting with the land -- though these cabins in the woods come with wireless Internet access and porches with screens that unfurl by remote control."

All in all, what St. Joe did in Florida is not so different to the re-branding of rural and frontier in Jackson Hole, China--though the Jackson Hole brand is clearly different to the varieties of rural reflected in RiverCamps, WhiteFence Farms and Florida Ranches.