Rural revitalization, rural infrastructure, social change, and public services.
Deep in the Taihang Mountains, Leyi Village, Heshun County, Shanxi, the “leopard-eating-cattle” conflict is not pronounced. Local beef cattle farming has contracted sharply during the recent price trough — only three households still keep cattle, just over seventy head, down from a peak of over two hundred.
Lu Yinghong, a left-behind mother for seven years who studied early childhood education, bends in the polytunnels daily with women in their fifties and sixties uprooted by the peppercorn plunge. The farm offers income without travelling far — but the soil degrades in three to five years, the road ahead uncertain.
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.
Sustained heavy rain from Typhoon Maysak breached Liulan Reservoir in Hengzhou, Guangxi, flooding jasmine fields, rice paddies and fish ponds, displacing tens of thousands, and bringing the challenges of agricultural insurance and flood resilience under extreme weather into sharp focus.
In the strictest straw-ban season of 2025, Village A in Hunan’s Dongting Lake region patrolled for three months and liaised with collection-and-storage firms to bale and transport the straw. Still, no outlet was found; villagers seized a window when tower cameras turned away, burning over a thousand mu.
Yang Xiuying and 70-year-old neighbour Deng Lian enter the hills before dawn, returning with hundreds of jin to peel, boil and dry all day—four to five hundred yielding under twenty. Children’s money is sporadic; social and medical costs top ten thousand yuan a year. She cannot stop.
Xianzi, a postgraduate at China Agricultural University’s Science and Technology Backyard in Quzhou, partnered with neighbour Uncle to open an organic fertiliser plant, hoping to reconnect the broken crop-and-livestock cycle. What blocks the way: raw-material transport costs, site rent and sums grain farmers simply cannot make work.
On the hillsides of Tongchuan, the 110 mu of land Hongxia and her husband farmed under verbal agreements is being claimed back, mu by mu, by relatives who have returned home — and their 150,000 yuan in farm machinery has become a sunk cost they cannot shake.
Four Foodthink articles on delivery riders, corn mould in North China, rural heating in Hebei, and high-standard farmland — none a traditionally “sensitive” topic — were successively taken down from the platform, and the space for public discussion shrank with each recurrence.
Chinese New Year in Wutong Village, Weiyuan County, Sichuan — under 3,000 residents, all elderly, growing vegetables, keeping hens. Rice steamed on a wood-fired stove, pea shoots pinched from ridges, hills crossed to buy beef tripe and aortic arch in the county town — five hours from rod to table.
