As competition in cities increases, a small but growing contingent of Chinese youth are returning to the countryside to till the land and look for inner peace
In 2019, Tang Shuqi gave up her office job in Hangzhou, the cosmopolitan capital of Zhejiang province and home of tech giants like Alibaba and NetEase, to become a full-time farmer. Tang, now 28, has lived in the mountain village of Songyang in the province’s southwest ever since. Perched on a hill and surrounded by terraced fields reclaimed from the land, the village is an isolated idyll, in part because dirt roads to and from make transportation to nearby larger towns and cities slow and cumbersome.
Despite this inconvenience, it’s exactly what Tang wants. “In the countryside, I live a low-consumption, high-quality life,” Tang tells TWOC. “My boyfriend and I now only spend 2,000 yuan a month, but we [still] live with an endless supply of coffee and good food.”
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