Huaxi Village calls itself the “number one village under the sky”. While it is a village with only a population of 60 000 people, it claims that every person in the village has a net worth of at least one million Chinese yuan, which is about 150 000 US dollars. This is a substantial amount for Chinese people. Obviously, Huaxi is a special case for Chinese villages, however, it goes to show how much China has been developing over the last 40 years. The villagers are all a part of the “Huaxi Village” corporation, and the corporation divides 20% of its income among every villager equally, which is why everyone in the village is a millionaire. All residents have the right to free healthcare, education, housing, and life insurance. The village looks like the perfect communist utopia, where a formally rural village was uplifted to welfare. The village even has a 1000 feet tall hotel to promote the growth of local tourism. It certainly is interesting to see that a village like this exists in China while many other villages have a rural lifestyle where people grow their own food and make significantly less amount of money in comparison to the average income in China (which is not even high in western standards). However, there is skepticism around the truthfulness of the Huaxi village. The video expresses concern that the village could be a demo project by China used as propaganda to show the “success” of modern, developed communism. It would be interesting to see if China could achieve this kind of success with other rural villages in the future. Furthermore, I am also interested in visiting the village myself to see if Huaxi is as good as the video describes it to be.
In this video, two youtubers who make videos about biking around China takes a trip in a semi rural area of Liaoning province of China. The youtubers talk about how this is what “average China” looks like, which is very different from what the China you see on television of the big cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. The youtubers talk about how China always talk about how they are the “number two GDP” in the world, and mentions how that does not translate to wealthiness of the average Chinese citizen. I think that is a very interesting also valid point. As someone who grew up in a pretty developed urban part of China, I was never really exposed to what China looks like outside of that. I have traveled to several rural part of China, and they are very different from Beijing, which is where I lived. As we know, China is currently still a developing country, I feel like it is fair to say that at least there are a decent portion of China that isn’t modern and super well developed. It was very interesting to see the two youtubers travel through rural China and see what life is like for people living in those parts of China. The youtubers also talk about how censorship and propaganda creates this image of China that is modern and developed, which many people around the world, even Chinese people living in urban areas, believe in. I have always felt like that I’m pretty privileged in that I get to live in a nice urban area and has the chance to study abroad, but I never really understood how people in poorer areas of China lived. I wonder if the lives of people in rural areas would change as China continues to develop.
In this video, the YouTuber revisits a village she used to teach at in Yunnan province of China. She was a part of a teaching program that sent her to the village for 3 months in 2017, and the video was made during 2022. The majority of the video was the youtuber just walking around the village and seeing if things have changed or not. In the video, the youtuber discovers that the roads in the village have been upgraded to concrete roads from gravel roads since 2017, there was also a new town square for villagers to exercise and use as a gathering place, furthermore, there was a new market where people can buy daily goods and snacks. However most of the villagers still live in a rural lifestyle where they grow their own food and maybe sell off the excess. The villagers that the youtuber talked to said that everyhousehold would raise farm animals like pigs, chickens, cows, etc. to provide food for their families. The school that the person used to teach at also remained largely the same. I think that is is clear the rural villages like this in China are still developing and lack a lot of basic infrastructures such as clinics, supermarkets, etc. that would be accessible for people living in urban areas. Most of the people living in rural areas still live a very agrarian lifestyle where they provide for themselves through farming and raising livestocks. This is quite different from rural areas in the United States where most people would buy food from grocery stores in town instead of relying on their own farms and livestocks. I assume that most of these families in the village are not very wealthy as they don’t seem like they have their own cars, and in order to get to the closest city they have to take a bus that arrives twice daily.
This video was also made in a village in Yunnan province of China. However in comparison with the previous video about another village in Yunnan, it is pretty obvious that the living conditions of people in this village are better than the other one. The youtuber is quite famous in China and on youtube, where she gained millions of subscribers in various video platforms. The youtuber makes a lot of videos documenting her life in rural China with her family, with most of the videos on various different foods they cook at home. In this video, the youtube makes a full course dinner with dishes containing home made ham. Ham is a very common home made food item in Yunnan, in the previous video about a different village in Yunnan, families are seen curating ham themselves as well. What is intersting about this video is that the youtuber made a pizza with the home made ham. I think that goes to show that the rural town that the youtuber lives in is pretty developed to the point where she has access to ingredients such as cheese and pizza sauce, which are not the easiest ingredients to find in China. This youtuber’s videos create an idealized image of rural China that is relaxing and beautiful, where people can gather with their family and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. I feel like the reason that this youtuber is so successful is because her rural life with her family makes a lot of people reminisce about their own families as well.
This video follows a couple’s journey back to their hometown before Chinese New Year. It is a tradition for Chinese people to go back to their families and celebrate Chinese New Year together. The couple are both working in a clothing factory in Shenzhen, China, which is one of the biggest cities in China. However, as migrant workers, they are not making a lot of money. They could not afford plane tickets so they would spend over two days traveling back to their home near Chongqing, China before Chinese New Year. Due to the lack of tickets, they were lucky to get regular seated tickets for the slowest train. Before going to the train station, they shopped a lot of snacks and goods to bring back to their family for the Chinese New Year. They needed to work away from their hometown and their families in order to make enough money to sustain themselves. They usually only see their families once a year during Chinese New Year, as a result, they miss out on the opportunity to see their children grow up. Despite the tiring journey to travel back home, they think it is worth it as there is nothing more important than family to them. The couple are working very hard in a distant city so they can make enough money to give their kids a better chance for having a better life than them. I feel like this documentary reflects a large portion of the population in China, especially among migrant workers who moved away from their hometowns to different cities. A lot of people in China are struggling to make enough money in order to let their kids move up in the social hierarchy and often have to leave their families top work in a different city.
This video gives us a glimpse into the lives of three siblings from Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture of China. Their parents are working in Guangzhou, and left them to live by themselves. They live in a poor region of China where there are not a lot of job opportunities, therefore their parents went to Guangzhou, which is a wealthier area, to work. They had to work away from their hometown in order to make enough money to support their children’s lives and education. Coming from a ethnic minority group, the parents do not know how to read or write mandarin Chinese, which makes them struggle with finding good jobs, therefore they want their kids to get a decent education so they can have a better future. The kids live about a 40 minutes walk from their grandparents, who sometimes comes to help them with planting vegetables or tending the farm. Their lives are very difficult, especially for the oldest sister, who is only 14. She has to do farmwork and take care of her siblings while going to school. According to this video, there are roughly 9 million children in China living without their parents. I think this video does reveal some of the underlying issues of a developing China. For the poor people in rural China, they need money to support their families and let their children get a good education. As their only hope to move up the social ladder is for their children to be able to get a decent job in a more developed region in the future. As a result, they often have to leave their children behind to work in cities, as they would not be able to support their families in the wealthier areas.
The video follows the journey of a 16 year old girl Chen Zhenzhen, who dropped out of school at 12 to become a migrant worker in order to support her family. Her family lives in rural village in Henan province of China, her family is poor, and her parents both became migrant workers in order to support their family. When she was 12, her grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, and her family had to borrow a lot of money in order to treat him. As a result, her family started to struggle even more financially. As her family is struggling to pay her tuition for school, Chen decided to drop out of school and work somewhere in order to reduce the financial burden on her family. In the video, she talks about her yearning for a normal life where she didn’t have to work or do chores or take care of her younger siblings all day, but could go to school and play with her friends like kids from wealthier families. Eventually, Chen decides to become a migrant worker and work in the city where her father is working. She knows that by making this decision, it is very likely that she would not be able to find a high-paying job in the future, and would be limited to working in laborious jobs such as manufacturing. However, there isn’t much of an option for her given her family’s economic situation. She hopes that in the future, her children would be able to live a “normal” life and get a good education so they could escape poverty. Chen’s story reflects the conundrum faced by many poor families living in rural China. It is almost impossible for them to climb the social ladder and escape poverty. Often times, they are forced to leave school and work just to make ends meet.
This video showcases some of the cooking made by Liziqi, an extremely popular Chinese youtuber whose videos are mainly around food and culture in the Chinese rural areas. The life that she leads is seen as the idealized getaway for many young people in the harsh and stressful urban environments. Liziqi's channel primarily focuses on the culinary culture of rural Chinese areas,. A common theme of these videos is the freshness of the ingredients and the all natural style of cooking. in a lot of her videos, she would always pick out vegetables that she grew herself while the meat would either be fresh of the market or from livestocks in the village. In this video, Liziqi showcases how to make some traditional snacks such as melon seeds, snowflake cakes and dried fruits. Starting from picking out the ingredients themselves in the wild, then each step is filled with detail and clear to the audience. The final product turns out to look delicious. In addition, some traditional Chinese culinary cultures have also been showcased in this video, for example it is very common to work and cook almost everything outside with friends and families and to be surrounded by pets. The large pots and stationary pans that she uses throughout the video is also very common in rural China and can cook a large amount of food quickly and is usually intended for special occasions with guests. Last but not least, eating the food with the neighbors and family has always been very common in rural China due to how close knitted the community is. Her videos serve as the ideal village in China and many people hope for this type of life after their journey and struggles in the city.
Poverty has also become a problem in rural China. This video talks about the life of people from a village whose majority of the population has moved to urban areas. In this sense, they only leave behind the women, children and elderly to fend for themselves. Poverty is a common phenomenon in these types of villages and not many people are willing to stay behind. Children are forced to take care of themselves from an early age and mothers can barely make enough to keep their family from starvation. The weather is also a deciding factor for these villages and how they do in a year. The village is in a remote mountainous region so there is not much access or communication resulting in the village becoming more isolated and people are only going out rather than coming back in. People in these places have settled here for a long time and is very conservative and traditional. The current movement of urbanization is not giving back to the village what it deserved since a lot of the young men left and never came back. In the video, we see that it is only the mother taking care of them the majority of the time and their father almost never shows up, the kids have to walk a long distance to school which only has 3 teaching staff. This lack of resources and development in these regions results in many tragedies and despite government reforms on these issues, many places have not been touched upon yet due to such high poverty rates from before. In the video, we see the difficult lives of the villagers and what the mother and children have to go through on a daily basis and most likely their sons and daughters as well.