THE COUNTRYSIDE IS EVERYWHERE
Consider a few statistics. China’s urban population today dominates its rural population by two to one, 944 million to 465 million (2025 figures). The urban total of 944 million includes a so-called “floating population” of 376 million migrant workers from rural areas, who are officially counted as urban as long as they reside at least six months of the year in a city. This represents a dramatic change and reversal from three decades ago, when in 1995 the urban population was 30 percent and the rural population 70 percent. The migrant floating population was significantly less then but still substantial, estimated to have been between 50 to 80 million, up from 40 million in 1985 (the estimates for 1995 are vague because census takers lacked adequate survey tools at a time when economic reforms caused the migrant population to surge).
In large cities today, the floating population can approach 40 percent, a rough national average. In Shanghai they’re counted as 40 percent of the city’s official population of 25 million, in Beijing 37.5 percent of its 23 million. It also varies from region to region. Chongqing’s city population is 18.53 million and its municipal (metropolitan) population 32.8 million. It’s unclear how many of its estimated 8.4 million migrants are living in the city proper or within the municipality outside the city. Similarly, the Pearl River Delta megalopolis has an estimated 86 million, and its four largest cities, Foshan, Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen, which form an adjacent arc, 9.5, 15.1, 7.9, and 13.77 million respectively. The whole megalopolis is basically urban and people can commute from home to work almost wherever they live. The combined migrant population in this four-city axis, not counted in their official city populations, is estimated to be as high as 40 to 50 million. That would mostly make up the difference for the whole Pearl River Delta.
Data collection on the migrant population coming and going in the Pearl Delta region, and to, from, and within other regions in the country, is well-nigh impossible. Even when migrants stay put in rural areas, they are counted as urban if they live in a town. Due to a quirk of conflicting definitions, a village becomes a town for administrative purposes when the population reaches 20,000, but for statistical classification purposes, it is counted as urban with only 3,000. In reality, many towns deep in the countryside are far larger—up to 200,000, when a town is considered a city (though the state can classify a town with a much smaller population as a city for legal or other reasons). Thus the countryside is a patchwork of urban and rural. And urban pockets within the countryside also experience daily migratory labor to and from surrounding villages and townships (population data from DeepSeek and Wikipedia).
Cities too are a patchwork of urban and rural communities. Migrants reside in low-income neighborhoods within the city limits or around the outskirts, often in makeshift prefabricated housing that is easily demolished when city authorities want them out. In the 1990s, for example, migrants poured into Beijing’s Daxing District—500,000 of them at its peak—and were evicted in turn in various anti-crime clean-up campaigns before the huge area was bulldozed in 2018 to make way for the Daxing Airport. The migrants quietly return and flow into new neighborhoods like water. These “urban villages” resemble rural villages so much that migrants could be said to set up the countryside in the city. Those who aren’t hidden away in factories, construction sites or transportation vehicles live and work in these migrant zones, serving their community, or make daily commutes to their city jobs in the service industry. Most have secondary but few have any tertiary education. Some manage to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and become (relatively) wealthy—enough to buy a car and an apartment in the city.
Virtually every urban shop assistant, restaurant worker, hairdresser, and car mechanic you encounter, to mention just a few service jobs, hails from the countryside. The one-hundred to two-hundred thousand deliverymen on electric bikes in any first-tier city are from the countryside. Being born and raised in the countryside does not mean lack of access to higher education. Many office workers hail from the countryside: real estate agents and insurance salesmen at the lower end, accountants and bankers at the upper end. White-collar workers with the highest-paying jobs may come from the countryside if they bubbled up through a good university.
Most of the people you meet in Beijing, Shanghai, or any other major city are not locals. Just how many is evident when the big cities empty out during the Chinese New Year, and they all go back to their hometowns to join their families for a week or two. Some among this massive Spring Festival migration come from smaller cities and are urban by birth, others from the countryside. It’s hard to say which unless you ask them. Even that can be a tricky question, since many Chinese identify their adopted city as their hometown and may be reluctant to admit they’re of rural origin. They can with some justification state that they are from their adopted city if they’ve been living there for decades. In recent years, however, the countryside is an ever-lonelier place, its villages populated by grandparents and the grandchildren they bring up in their parents’ absence, and a dwindling number of farmers off in the fields.
Let’s have a quick tour of one migrant community in Beijing. From Henan Province, Yanyan was a massage worker in her thirties whom I met in a massage shop in my neighborhood near the Central Business District, some eight years ago. The massage business tends to have a high staff-turnover rate, and shops themselves often close abruptly, usually due to rent increases. When her shop closed, she decided to work directly out of her apartment in the Shimen East Road neighborhood where she lived with her boyfriend, off the Sihui expressway interchange, also close to the capital’s CBD.
Yanyan invited me to visit her hair salon. She had neither shop sign nor registered address and drew customers by word of mouth. I used WeChat’s mutual location-finder to find her. She was cutting someone’s hair through the open doorway and led me inside. At one end of the bare salon was her customer, at the other a massage table and pull curtain. In back was a bedroom and a small dining space and kitchen cubicle. Her boyfriend, a truck driver, took me to the butcher’s nearby to buy some chicken; no need to kill and skin a chicken but I suspect he could do that. While he prepared our lunch, she gave me a chaste rubdown behind the curtain, once her customer had left. He served us diced chicken with green peppers and chili, tofu skins with chili, “cold skin” noodles with cucumber and chili, preserved duck eggs, pancake-like shaobing buns, and beer. The meal was ordinary but cooked fresh. Only harried urbanites resort to fast food or instant noodles.
My first visit to a home in the Chinese countryside was back in 1999. A librarian at my university in Beijing was involved in the city’s migrant community. The children of migrant families were ineligible to attend schools outside their rural hometowns, and underground schooling was the only option in the big cities. Lixin joined a team of grassroots organizers to educate migrant women on their legal rights through community theater. A Beijing native, her experience serving in the PLA in her teens during the Cultural Revolution inclined her to be staunchly egalitarian toward people of whatever background. One rural woman she befriended invited her to her hometown in Fengyang County in northern Anhui Province. Deng Xiaoping had singled out Anhui as one of the more impoverished provinces in need of development.
Lixin took me and a female student along, and we arrived at the village by a minibus after an overnight train to Bengbu. Our hosts had recently built a two-story brick house. It stood out among the old stone huts surrounding a field with a few unfettered oxen. The house was spacious enough to accommodate Lixin and the student in one guestroom and myself in another. In traditional rural homes in China, as the world over, animals are kept in the ground-floor room and mingle with the family; the upper floor is for sleeping. The only thing distinguishing this house’s ground-floor room from the timeless past was a concrete rather than earthen floor; it resembled a garage more than a house. They kept the ample doorway open and chickens and their chicks scurried about inside.
(In Chinese cities as well in the 1990s, apartments all had concrete floors. I once asked a university professor why he didn’t cover his home’s floor with a nice rug. He said cleaning a rug was so much trouble when it was easier to dump water on the floor and wipe it up with a mop. Not until the turn of the century did apartments discovered decor, and shiny white floor tiling and fancier ceiling lighting than bare fluorescent tubes became the norm.)
They placed a couple tables together to make a bigger table for dinner. I don’t remember the dishes except the food was fresh and delicious, in contrast to many “home-style cooking” (jiachangcai) restaurants in Beijing—the Chinese equivalent of the American greasy spoon—with their overuse of oil, salt, and sugar. On the other hand, I also have a distinct memory of this family’s habit of not washing cups and glasses, the rims of which were encrusted in years of grime.
Not all urbanites showed the same solidarity with their country brethren as Lixin. The word for a rural person, nongmin, can have the pejorative sense of “peasant” among snobbish city types. The label is applied not only to farmers but to anyone whose subtle or not so subtle signs betray their class. This discrimination can be more extreme than anything in the U.S. or the UK. The bus ride to the suburb of Mentougou, thirty kilometers west of central Beijing, passed through a corridor of factories and fields. Despite the rural environs, the suburb used to be a major steelworks producer and is the very definition of urban working class. Still, anyone not from there considered anyone from Mentougou a peasant. My ex-wife was from Mentougou. Though she had a good university education and could speak standard Mandarin without a Beijing accent, she was very sensitive about her origins. To distance herself from the place, she herself was fond of pointing out all the women around her who were trying to pass yet, she claimed, were in fact nongmin.
JIANGXI PROVINCE: WIND TURBINES AND ABANDONED FACTORIES
Qingqing is another massage worker I met in 2021, while living in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province’s wealthy second city after Hangzhou. On my first visit to her shop, as I lay prone during a full body oil massage, she rolled a machine up and placed something over my butt which alternately pulled up and released each buttock with a powerful pressure by vacuum-operated suction cups. She moved the cups to my thighs and over my back in turn. The procedure was repeated on my front. When it was over, a mirror she held up revealed dark red circles all over my body. They were painless to the touch and would fade away after a few days. I had had cupping (baguan) done before but not by a machine. Normally, spherical glass cups are heated by a flame to create negative air pressure and placed over the flesh at their open end, pulling the internal organs toward the surface and literally sucking toxins out of the body, visible as black or brown deposits in the skin. Mechanical cupping does the same but with the advantage of continuous sucking action.
Another technician in Qingqing’s shop specialized in scraping (guasha) and moxibustion (aijiu). With scraping, a dull copper blade is drawn across the flesh, opening the superficial capillaries to allow toxins to dredge and also forming painless bruises. It’s often combined with moxibustion. The infrared radiation from burning moxa (mugwort) better penetrates the flesh when opened up by scraping. Moxa smoke can be applied to the body in a variety of ways. This shop used a “three-in-one” porcelain cup with a thin round edge and smoking moxa which was slid firmly over the flesh, thereby combining moxibustion, scraping, and massage. Yet another shop technician had a machine that transmitted an electric current through a flat steel knob rubbed over the flesh with oil (or directly through her massaging hands). This was said to open up the “meridians” and “collaterals,” the branching system of energy channels interpenetrating the circulatory and nervous systems through which qi flows through the body.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) holds that the body gradually loses heat over its lifetime, and poor health accelerates this. Whether combined with massage or separately, moxibustion, scraping, and cupping all work to stimulate blood circulation and heat and expel internal “wind,” “cold,” and “dampness,” thus slowing down the aging process. Most massage technicians in China have some formal training in TCM and certificates or diplomas of one sort or another; some are licensed acupuncturists. The bodywork side of TCM—as opposed to the medicinal side which tends to operate out of hospitals and pharmacies—is a huge, lucrative business these days and a step up in luxury from run-of-the-mill massage shops. For the curious, I go into more detail on these practices in my book, Electric Oil: More Writings on Massage (forthcoming in 2027).
I was always combining various treatments to see what worked and was a frequent visitor to Qingqing’s shop. She also came over for house calls, sometimes with a coworker. They appreciated customers like me because they could experiment. One day she informed me she had moved to a massage shop in Shanghai and wouldn’t be returning to Ningbo. A two-hour ride from Ningbo on the high-speed train, I was often in Shanghai and paid her a visit. This time she packed me in medicinal mud held in place with cellophane wrap, before scraping it off and concluding with a massage. Among the many massage workers I have met over the years, Qingqing was among the friendliest and most insistent in maintaining contact with me. She often invited me to visit her hometown. I finally took up the offer during Spring Festival of 2026.
In contrast to cities where everyone, except for the gated communities of the wealthy, lives in old low-rise or new high-rise complexes, in the countryside they are proud of their spacious free-standing houses. Qingqing had shown me photos of her maternal family’s 400-sqm house (4,300 sq ft) in the northern Jiangxi countryside on the sprawling Poyang Lake. I was curious to see it. Logistics prevented us from making it to her territory until Day One of the Spring Festival, however, one day too late. She had spent Spring Festival eve at her parents’ house and was due the next day at her husband’s household where she told us to go instead, in another part of Duchang County. They were too busy to pick us up at the high-speed railway station an hour away, and we took a taxi. The station was crowded when we arrived, as many others were also a day late in getting back home.
The taxi dropped us at a side road running along the edge of Jishan Village, with wheat and cabbage fields on one side and four-story residential buildings on the other. Qingqing emerged out of one entrance waving at us. We dropped our stuff in the garage-style front room with its concrete floor, round dining table, and a poster of Mao Zedong on the wall. The adjacent apartment in the same building housed a number of relatives, who began congregating outside. It was impossible to keep everyone straight. A few males offered me cigarettes—a standard gesture. Not being a smoker, I politely refused. A toddler with “2026” shaved into his haircut got the leash of a woman’s poodle tangled around our legs as he chased it. Qingqing’s husband’s mother sat on the steps clipping the nails off chicken feet to prepare a dish; her apron showed an ad for some Christian organization. The husband, an electrician, was a handsome, take-charge guy. He loaded us into his white Volkswagen SUV for a tour of a nearby mountaintop temple and surrounding wind turbines, which along with solar farms provided the area’s prime sources of electricity, which he claimed was plentiful and cheap.
Though her husband’s house had lots of space, Qingqing decided we would be more comfortable in the apartment they owned in nearby Duchang Town, the county seat, where her two daughters and son lived. One daughter taught kindergarten, the other worked in a fried-chicken shop, and the son worked as a hairdresser. He vacated his bedroom for us and went back to the village for the night. The three-bedroom apartment was on the top floor of a seven-story walkup with no elevator but was clean and spacious. We spent the evening watching a domestic romantic movie on their widescreen TV. The mid-February air was chilly (in the forties Fahrenheit) and it was brutally cold inside. They had heating but didn’t use it. This is traditional practice in China’s south. People feel it’s more economical and logical to wear winterwear inside and only resort to heating when absolutely necessary. Unless you’re brought up this way, it takes some getting used to. We were freezing and they weren’t even cold; it didn’t occur to them to close the windows. I didn’t say anything, out of a masochistic curiosity to see how much I could take. When we finally went to bed, they had to scrounge around to find the remote to operate our bedroom’s wall-mounted air conditioner-heater combo.
The next day, while the younger daughter was off serving fast food, the elder daughter drove us in her white Geely sedan (Qingqing couldn’t drive) to a lakeside temple fair and an old village in Sushan Township, where new residential homes rose above abandoned ones. Heshe Village wasn’t completely razed; a section was preserved without being renovated. The authorities seemed unsure what to do with it but clearly saw potential tourist value in the village, which they now designated “Heshe Old Village.” Tourists were indeed already wending their way among the labyrinthine lanes. It’s significant that this kind of foresight at this lowly regional level was operating at all.
Mother and daughter dropped us off at the high-speed rail station for an hour’s ride to the city of Jingdezhen, China’s famous porcelain mecca, where Qingqing invited us to stay in her other apartment, currently empty, after giving us her electronic door code. We were fortunate. Jingdezhen was swamped by Spring Festival tourists and hotel rates astronomically inflated when rooms could be found at all.
SICHUAN PROVINCE: EARTHQUAKE TERRITORY
Yeye is a massage worker I also met in Ningbo during Covid, who worked at a different venue from Qingqing’s. The spacious shop occupied the third floor of an office building and specialized in moxibustion. You could smell the burning moxa wafting from its windows out on the street. It was a fancy place. The owner was a middle-aged Daoist woman who wore colorful garments and taught Daoist dancing, whose graceful twirling hand movements had an obvious relationship to Taijiquan. The lobby was outfitted with classical hardwood furniture where she entertained friends and patrons. Their variety of moxibustion—rubber capsules filled with burning moxa covering every square inch of the naked body—normally followed a massage and scraping session.
Yeye herself didn’t perform massage or moxibustion but was the owner’s friend and star hostess. From Sichuan, she was a pretty, stylishly dressed woman in her mid-thirties. A massage worker there confided to me that Yeye in fact did massage certain clients—VIP businessmen who had donated money to the shop and thereby earned certain privileges. I often teased Yeye to give me a massage but she firmly denied she knew how and I never pressed it. She was often away for family matters back home in rural Sichuan. One day she informed me she was opening her own moxibustion shop there and would not be returning to Ningbo (well, she did turn out to be adept at moxibustion). I had recently moved to Dali in Yunnan Province and wondered if I could visit her hometown, a short plane hop away. Not only was she amenable, she seemed flattered and happy at the prospect of showing me around.
She lived with her husband and teenage daughter in a modern apartment complex in Deyang, an industrial satellite city an hour’s drive north of the megacity of Chengdu. She recommended a hotel that was both luxurious and affordable; as previously noted, hosting guests overnight is not a Chinese tradition, exceptions such as Qingqing’s hospitality aside. Yeye dashed into the lobby to pick me up. We toured around the city in her husband’s black Cadillac SUV before heading over to her massage shop for dinner. The shop was on the second floor of a residential building overlooking a pedestrian street, with restaurant tables spilling out onto the street. Outside the shop was a veranda that wound around the building and provided enough space for the shop to set up dinner tables out in front. Yeye had helped me arrange transportation from Chengdu airport to Deyang, and the boss of the company providing it was her friend and fellow local from Mianzhu, her hometown. He brought along several other male friends to dine with us, also from Mianzhu. Here we have another instance of the countryside in the city, where a network of rural friends and relatives help each other through connections to secure an economic foothold in the city. Like Yeye, they all now lived in Deyang.
The dinner presented a curious montage of city and countryside. Yeye spoke clear Mandarin though with a strong local twang. She was wont to dress in silk blouses, her husband in smart casual wear. They outfitted their massage shop with immaculate taste. But the evening was imbued with rusticity. The male guests were seated at one table, the women at another. Several men were shirtless. Toplessness in public settings is common among many rural and urban working-class men in China. Personally, I find it mildly offensive, not due to any prudishness but, on the contrary, the entrenched sexism that only allows males to go topless.
The men pulled out cigarettes and sorghum spirits for toasting. I did my best to contribute to the conversation but it was a struggle to understand their country drawl. The hotpot meal presented challenging ingredients for the uninitiated: on top of the usual beef, mutton, tofu, cabbage, and vegetables, there was pig brain, pig aorta, tripe, chicken gizzards, and duck feet, all scalded in the pot’s chili oil and dipped again in bowls of raw minced garlic and sesame oil. The Sichuanese unite in ecstasy around hotpot. It turns them into rustics: the simplicity of the dish bespeaks a time when every part of the animal was cherished as food. So beloved is this primal dish that it would be unthinkable, an insult, not to serve it whenever guests are involved, no less foreign guests. They cannot understand how we don’t crave the sensuous succulence of chewing organ meat and nibbling fowl cartilage.
I was careful not to spoil decorum by asking Yeye for a massage, but she pushed me into the shop anyway for a gratis session by a novice masseuse she had just hired to give her some practice.
They picked me up in the morning for the half-hour drive north to Mianzhu. Although a substantial city in its own right (pop. 440,000), Mianzhu administers a rural area and is surrounded by farmland. We were headed to a most unusual festival that happened to be going on at the moment, sponsored by what Yeye’s husband claimed was Sichuan’s superior baijiu brand, Dongsheng (东圣), distilled from sorghum. Soon the country road was backed up by traffic trying to find parking. The hundreds wending their way along the road turned into thousands as we reached the fields, red with ripening sorghum. People fanned out in all directions along the paths between the fields and amidst the sorghum stalks, the women dressed in red and photographing themselves. Zhang Yimou’s film Red Sorghum (1988) starring a sultry Gong Li tumbling with her drunken lover in a sorghum field came to mind. Most outdoor festivals take place on temple grounds during the Spring Festival, heralding the spring. This was a real fertility festival celebrating the fall harvest of a plant employed for alcohol. No drunkenness was in evidence (perhaps there would be later in the day), but the collective enthusiasm and energy was infectious, beyond anything I had ever seen in your usual temple festivals, which tended to be unvarying year after year wherever the location. Much bacchanalian potential here.
Back on the road, in the foothills of the Jiuding Mountain range another twenty kilometers north of Mianzhu, we reached Hanwang, a town so devasted in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake that it has been preserved as an earthquake relic zone and left as is. Over 11,000 died, 37,000 were injured, and 133,800 houses collapsed in the Mianzhu City area, mostly in Hanwang, which lay close to the fault line. Another 17,000 died in Deyang (total casualties for the earthquake were 87,587 dead, 374,643 injured and 18,392 missing). Yeye’s parents lived in a rural community on the outskirts of Mianzhu. Luckily the earthquake occurred in the afternoon when they were outside, for their entire street was leveled (Yeye was in school in Ningbo at the time, where her family has long had connections). It was there that we headed next for a late lunch.
The village was completely rebuilt. Yeye gave me a tour of the surrounding rice paddies and the family house. Their courtyard, built around the original house, featured pomelo and mandarin-orange trees. The original kitchen, the only surviving room, was left empty; they had built a whole new kitchen. A chicken coop was in a back shed. We had stopped at a supermarket along the way where I picked up a bottle of wine; Yeye recommended a brand of milk for her parents as well. As expected, they turned the meal into an occasion, and a host of friends and relatives piled into the front room. I saw that someone else had brought the same brand of milk for the hosts.
I was placed at the big round table for the men. The women set up a separate table for themselves. Three girls were affixed to their cellphones in the TV room and later joined the women’s table. I’ve always found this separation of the sexes disconcerting, while recognizing that it was an obligatory sign of honor and hospitality. (Qingqing, by contrast, was adamant that her family in the Jiangxi countryside didn’t practice it.) The food was as delicious as it was dazzling.
On the way back to Deyang, knowing I needed my afternoon coffee, they brought me to a Luckin Coffee shop (the domestic competitor of Starbucks) in the Mianzhu downtown. Yeye ordered a latte for herself.
CONTRADICTIONS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE
The Beijing librarian friend with whom I traveled to the Anhui countryside back in 1999 once related a trip she took to Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in north-central China. So impoverished were the rural folk that they couldn’t afford clothes and worked the fields naked. Going on three decades later, in 2024, I traveled around central China to do research for a book. This involved staying in a number of backwater cities not known for Chinese tourists, let alone foreign tourists—Dazhou in eastern Sichuan, Ankang in southern Shaanxi, and Shiyan, Xiangyang, Jingmen, Yichang, and Enshi in western Hubei. Every one of these utterly ordinary cities was clean and orderly, with excellent restaurants, craft-beer bars, and quality coffeehouses that rendered the inevitable Starbucks most of them boasted redundant. The trip also took us via bus through the remote countryside in the southwest corner of Hubei (Xuanen, Luyuanping). I tried to find evidence of poverty in the villages we passed through and saw only well-stocked stores and busy family restaurants open to the street.
To be sure, depressed pockets in the countryside are certainly to be found. But these pockets are shrinking. To anyone who’s been paying attention, China has come a long way in eliminating poverty. This is an indisputable fact plainly evident to anyone willing to visit the country and witness it with their own eyes. And no, I am not in the paid employment of Chinese state propaganda.
It could be pointed out that my native exemplars of countryside life are an exceptional group, the well-to-do of rural origin but no longer rural, with their cars and apartments, and certainly not representative of the majority. But who wants to be “rural” anymore? They had made it, achieved a secure foothold in the big city. The fact that I met them in the city already means that I have, in a sense, self-selected them. However, I would ask why the indigent majority—and it is by no means clear that the majority are indigent—must be taken as representative, when the trend is towards general wealth and abundance, and the rest of the world hasn’t noticed.
No need here to go into an orientalist analysis of the Western imaginary—I refer to Edward Said’s famous 1978 study Orientalism—whereby the West cannot apprehend the East in any objective sense: in its distorting mirror it only sees the negative fantasy of what it fears in order to reassure itself of its own superiority. It’s enough to say that the U.S. media in particular, with its relentless negativity about China, can only view the country as a seething cauldron of oppression, a giant concentration camp frozen in the 1980s, a dispossessed mass of grasping humanity whose only route to freedom is through the jungles of the Colombian-Panamanian Darién Gap. The millions of rural Chinese who are building their own wealth are, correspondingly, invisible. Unless you care to look.
* * *
Other posts in this series:
Insights into China, Part 1: A walk down the street
Insights into China, Part 2: A meal in a restaurant
Insights into China, Part 3: An invitation to a party
Insights into China, Part 4: A stay in a hotel
Insights into China, Part 5: A glimpse inside a school
Insights into China, Part 6: A visit to the library
Insights into China, Part 7: An immersion in a museum
Insights into China, Part 8: An afternoon in a café
Insights into China, Part 10: A vision in a concert hall
Insights into China, Part 11: A timeslip to the glorious Qing
Insights into China, Part 12: An idyll in paradise
BUY THE BOOK. FORTHCOMING THIS FALL:
At the Police Café: China in Twelve Scenes
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