Rural revitalization, rural infrastructure, social change, and public services.
The old village in Heilongjiang holds only seven or eight households; my mother wept before the dish shelf and soured-cabbage crock in the collapsed-back-wall courtyard. Those left in Beijing try—with a crock, a bag of salt, a few cabbages—to re-stitch days bound to land and neighbours.
Farmers, construction contractors and researchers in villages in the southwest, northwest and central regions recount how some high-standard farmland has been abandoned because of water shortages, levelling and soil damage; they also discuss subsidies, acceptance inspection and squeezed profit margins, asking how food security can truly be safeguarded.
From Sichuan to Henan—topsoil stripped, pumped irrigation stations dry, transferred fields with no takers—”high-standard” conversions have become low standards in many places. Engineering thinking crashes against complex agricultural reality; who safeguards food security’s foundations remains unresolved.
From Hebei to Shandong, subsidy phase-downs, equipment failures and high heating costs make rural clean heating hard to sustain, while the straw burning ban has led some farmers to burn straw secretly at night or push it into ditches; why does the cost of the green transition always fall on farmers?
Disaster relief worker Hao Nan led disaster relief organisation Zhuoming’s team back to the Miyun and Xinglong disaster areas to reconstruct how abnormal mountain floods formed and how the grassroots judged evacuation timing. Grassroots disaster prevention and reduction still lack funding, staff and technical calculations.
Coaches day after day follow the same route along the village’s carefully arranged roads, telling eco stories to inspection groups and tourists; the scorched-black field ridges charred by herbicide beneath the rice paddies are selectively hidden in the display.
Foodthink’s research shows that rural social organisations need more than emission reduction accounting and risk assessment to build climate resilience. They must tackle livelihood issues such as hollowing out, ageing and water conservancy, and work with agricultural technology departments and grassroots governance.
Several ecological farms in Shunyi and Changping, Beijing, and Baoding, Hebei, have reshaped land, switched crops, and reinforced infrastructure after four straight years of downpours — but with surrounding public drainage works still lacking, extra investment is squeezing already razor-thin margins.
The “Reiwa rice riot” pushed 5 kg of Koshihikari to ¥5,072, yet doubled prices cannot save Japan’s paddies: decades of the acreage-reduction policy have kept prices depressed, 70% of farmers are over 65, more than 10,000 hectares vanish each year, and young people won’t take over.
Yi woman Kangli and Greater Khingan Range forager Jin Peng discuss pricing mountain produce, the drain of people from mountain villages, and the challenges and hopes amid climate change.
