Chinese urban society is reaching a turning point. City dwellers are beginning to think about returning to the countryside. Not to live and work—who’d want to be a peasant again?—but just for the weekend.
It is a gradual process (unusually for China) and it would have been unthinkable a few years ago. As often predicted, the country’s emerging middle class has embraced consumer culture, acquiring first a television, next a washing machine, then a fridge, and more recently a satellite dish, car and iPhone. And now, in a more surprising and less noticed shift, they want to return to the place their poor forebears spent centuries struggling to escape from, or where their parents “learned from the peasants” during the cultural revolution.
Condominiums are appearing in the foothills of Moganshan. They are ugly and badly sited but are selling fast, regarded as investments as much as weekend retreats.
Five years ago, a friend brought his young Shanghainese staff here for a corporate retreat. They asked three questions: what television channels were there, was there any seafood, and why the hell would anyone want to live in such a backwater?
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