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.   

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

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."

Urban nostalgia for the rural isn't just an American phenomenon; NPR reports from Sichuan Province in China

NPR's "All Things Considered" program today featured a story about the attraction of urban Chinese for tranquil "rural retreats." (Photos Andrea Hsu for NPR). This isn't the first time NPR has covered this topic in recent months.

But today's piece was, in part, a postscript to the Sichuan earthquake in May. After that disaster, tourism dried up in ancient Shangli, 80 miles southwest of Chengdu, the provincial capital. As it turned out, Shangli was not affected by the quake, and now tourists are back in greater numbers than ever, in part because other rural Chinese retreats were devastated by the quakes.

Here's an excerpt:

To cross the Yellow Thatch Creek that runs through town, tourists hop on stones. They take pictures of peasants such as Li Shi Long, who readied a small patch of land for rice planting. [top photo]

"We're happy to see [the tourists]," Li said. "The more visitors we have, the richer we'll get. The more people, the better."

The contrast between the old world and the new is jarring.

Visitors in miniskirts and heels jabber on cell phones, crossing paths with wizened farmers doubled over from the weight of the vegetables they carry in baskets on their backs.

Xie Zhi Hui from Chengdu brought her 4-year-old daughter to Shangli.

"The air is clear and fresh," she said. "And the people are rustic. It's great to bring my daughter here to see this way of life."

So, it seems that the Chinese, like Americans, are drawn to their rural past, which in China sometimes connotes not just the old, but indeed the ancient.