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Opinion | China’s ‘first coffee village’ highlights potential for rural revival
- In Yunnan’s Xinzhai village, jobs are abundant and people can earn well, thanks to a digital transformation that has altered farming and daily life
- In showing that rural life can be attractive and prosperous, Xinzhai is changing the narrative that village life has to be hard, backwards and inconvenient
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For thousands of years, China was a predominantly agricultural society, rooted in tradition and a distinctive culture.
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But over the past four decades, unprecedented reforms have transformed China into a largely industrial, commercial and urban society. The population that lives in cities has grown from 19 per cent in 1980 to 65 per cent last year.
Villages have been hollowed out. Adults left for work in the cities, leaving behind the old and young. Major characteristics of China, such as being conservative and self-sustaining, have been transformed to being proactive and interdependent with the rest of the world.
This transformation has its advantages. Life has become richer, more diverse and exciting. But unlike traditional agricultural society, which can sustain itself with minimal connection to the outside, urban society is not self sufficient. It must constantly produce and trade with others. If markets have setbacks and are not replaced by new markets, people suffer and wealth declines. This is where China is today.
For instance, the Post published a report recently about exporters in Zhejiang province. They believe it will be difficult to hit high 2024 growth targets because demand from their two largest export destinations, the European Union and United States, have declined, and new markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East are yet to be developed.
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Zhejiang is probably not alone. Buzzwords like “involution” (nei juan) and “lying flat” (tang ping) suggest a general frustration.
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