In 2016 she moved into a small room beside the wet market in a small Hainan town, spending fourteen months amid the stench of fish and sweat, trying to get wary stall-holders to open up.
Xu Yunyian, fifty, runs a seafood and dried goods shop at Shuangjingtou wet market – no online store, no podcast. Retired elderly catching the early market and Chinese New Year stockpiling keep a family of four going; her younger son grew up right in this lane.
In the wheat–maize rotation zone of southern Hebei, farmers say straw incorporation makes emergence harder, increases pests and weeds, and raises the cost of spraying and rotary tillage; even when the yield loss feels limited, they still want to burn the straw.
After Qinguan, Fuji, wheat and maize, peaches and plums are now in the wheat field again. His father, nearly seventy, has kept switching crops in Liquan, and no one can say how long he will last when the next variety boom comes.
Under the straw burning ban, Dongting Lake area farmers in Hunan are forced to incorporate straw. Oilseed rape costs 60–70 yuan extra per season, yields nearly halve, and rice stem borer and other pests worsen year on year; one large-scale grower simply abandoned over 200 mu.
A city office worker with zero experience picks plastic fragments by hand and tugs half-buried plastic twine on a 20-square-metre plot in the Beijing suburbs. The more she clears, the more appears—and her anxiety spreads from one field to pressing questions about recycling systems and consumption habits.
In Penang’s Batu Maung, durian tours take tourists seeking old-tree kampung flavours, while an exceptionally abundant harvest has also left orchard owners facing a price crash and a dispute over tree-ripened durian.
From orchards in Johor and Pahang to Mersing wholesale points and the LKE Group investment promotion meeting, on the eve of fresh Musang King durian’s entry into China, Chinese demand is reshaping picking, export, frozen processing and durian-tree investment.
McDonald’s uses price anchoring, shrinking stores and its shared-staff system to cut costs. According to former shift manager Jiang Ke, this efficiency machine still ultimately relies on human on-the-spot judgement as its safety net.
After the wholesale market, riverside villages, maize fields and ginseng fields were flooded, silt clearing and reconstruction are continuing; rain will persist in the north-east, and some areas may suffer secondary damage.
