China's middle classes head for the countryside

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?

A couple of days ago, I was walking in the woods and ran into a bunch of young Shanghainese, in Moganshan for a corporate getaway. We chatted and then moved on. In the wintry stillness of the forest I heard one of them say: “Wow. That foreigner sure has found a nice place to live.”