China
Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2026 11:35 pm
This interesting article explains the long-term crisis the masses face in rural China in some depth. The crisis includes pollution and warming weather, and although the incidents of mass resistance are disconnected, there are a growing number of them.
https://andreaferrario1.substack.com/p/ ... irect=true The translation:
Rural China: The silent crisis of emptied villages
Between forced expropriations and unsustainable local debts, Chinese campaigns are experiencing a violent transformation. The earth, the last resort for millions of people, is disappearing
Andrea Ferrario
Feb 12, 2026
In November 2024, China's Ministry of Rural Affairs issued a statement that, behind its bureaucratic wording, allowed a significant political admission to emerge. The government said the government must “prevent on a large scale” the phenomenon of migrant workers “remaining stranded” in their home villages after the Lunar New Year holidays. The choice of the verb “prevent” suggests that Beijing considers the return to the countryside a problem of social stability to be contained, while the expression “they remain blocked” implies that these workers have decided not to return by choice to them. The communique came as the country prepared for the large annual migration for the holidays, when hundreds of millions of people cross China to reunite with families. That year, however, the authorities feared that many would no longer leave, restrained by the lack of work in the cities and the impossibility of keeping themselves in the villages.
When writing about China, the focus is almost always on the urban, modern and technological dimension. The megalopolis of the coast, the skyscrapers of Shanghai and Shenzhen, digital innovation and expansion of the middle class constitute the dominant narrative. But rural China, that of the villages of the interior marked by difficult economic conditions, is still the daily reality of hundreds of millions of people and even in very recent times, it has been one of the main places of resistance and protest against the central power. The Chinese campaigns are not only a legacy of the past destined to disappear with modernization, but a space in which the contradictions of the country’s economic and political system emerge with particular force. To ignore this dimension is not to understand where the deepest tensions of contemporary Chinese society are concentrated.
The phenomenon of rural migrants returning to villages definitively marks a break from the dynamics of the last forty years. Since 1980, the percentage of the urban population has increased from 10% to over 60%. This huge demographic transformation has been fueled by the continuous flow of farmers to coastal factories, construction sites and urban services. About 300 million people today make up the migrant workforce, moving between countryside and cities following the economic cycles. Until a few years ago this mobility functioned as a system relief valve. When the economy slowed, workers temporarily returned to the villages, where they could grow small plots of land waiting for the situation to improve. The land guaranteed a minimum safety net that allowed the system to unload on the villages the social costs of crises. This mechanism, however, has jammed. The proportion of migrant workers crossing provincial borders to seek employment fell from 47 per cent in 2014 to 38% in 2024, signaling a geographical contraction in job opportunities and a growing difficulty in finding employment away from home.
The crucial difference from the 2008 global financial crisis is that today the campaign can no longer function as a social shock absorber. Back then less than 10% of rural households had surrendered the rights of land use to others. Today that percentage has risen to 40%. Hundreds of thousands of households have rented or sold the rights to their plots, often out of economic necessity or because they have spent decades away from villages losing their agricultural skills. The result is that those who return find no more land to cultivate. At the same time, the construction sector, which absorbed huge amounts of low-skilled labour, entered a structural crisis with the collapse of the housing market. Manufacturing is relocating to countries with lower costs or replacing workers with automation. Some construction workers interviewed during the return trip to the villages of Henan said they saw their monthly income fall from 9,000 to 5,000 yuan in a few years, while others admitted to having left a month in advance of the holidays simply because “there were no more jobs”. Hengyang County, in the southern province of Hunan, recorded the return of 183,000 workers for last year's holidays, and over 40,000 of them are no longer broken down.
The central government has sought to mitigate the problem by promoting industrial development in the average inner cities. The goal is to attract a portion of manufacturing production away from expensive coastal provinces, creating jobs in the areas where migrants come from. This strategy, however, shows obvious limits. Wages in the innermost cities remain much lower than those of coastal metropolises and competition for available seats is very high. In addition, a generational shift in the priorities of younger workers is emerging. Many prefer to stay close to families even at the cost of earning less, rejecting the life model of parents who have spent decades separated from their children. This phenomenon worries state planners, who have built Chinese economic growth precisely on the availability of large masses of workers willing to move anywhere for very low wages. The fact that young people are “taking root” in places with fewer economic opportunities represents a difficulty for a system that has always relied on labour mobility as an instrument of productive flexibility.
Life in the villages
Those who return find a reality that in official statistics appears as a managed demographic transition, while on the territory it presents itself as a rapid social breakdown. In 2000 the Chinese rural population amounted to 807 million people, or 64% of the total. Today that figure has fallen to 465 million, 33% of the population. Over 340 million people have moved from the countryside to cities over a quarter of a century. This exodus left behind emptied villages, in which the traditional social structure dissolved without anything emerging that could replace it. The elderly left in rural areas survive with monthly pensions of 169 yuan, about 22 euros, while public services have been progressively reduced. The village elementary schools have closed, forcing children to travel every day for long kilometers to the provincial cities or to live on school campuses. Entire villages remain without children, except during the holidays, when the children of migrants return briefly before leaving with their parents. The demographic vacuum is combined with environmental degradation and the almost total absence of health and social care, creating living conditions that in many cases have worsened compared to those of thirty years ago.
The collapse of public services in rural areas proceeds along with economic disruption and environmental deterioration. In many villages the collection of waste is now irregular or absent, with streams transformed into drains and garbage accumulations that push some families to burn the waste or to throw them directly into the rivers. At the same time plant diseases are eliminating crops that for years had guaranteed a minimal source of income, further reducing the chances of local livelihood. In this context, the crisis of winter warming in Hebei is also part, an example of a situation that also affects numerous other provinces. After the obligation introduced in 2017 to replace coal with natural gas, initially supported by public subsidies, funding was progressively eliminated, also due to the growing debt of local administrations and the collapse of revenue related to the real estate sector. The increase in energy costs has made gas difficult for many rural households to sustain, forcing many of them to return to traditional systems despite the bans. The partially reintroduced subsidies in 2025 had a limited impact, leaving the underlying problem unresolved: the difficulty of supporting essential services in a context of economic crisis and increasingly reduced public resources.
The historical roots of discrimination
These conditions are not the result of a temporarily unfavourable economic situation. The campaign crisis has its roots in a system of institutionalized discrimination deliberately built after 1949 and never dismantled. The hukou system, the register of residence that divides the Chinese population into rural and non-rural citizens, has created two categories of people with very different rights. State resources have been concentrated in cities, while the countryside has been treated as labour reserves to support urban industrialization. This administrative system has produced such a profound social stratification that it still influences access to education, health, pensions and even the physical mobility of people. Rural residents have been transformed into second-tier citizens through a legal mechanism that has made discrimination a structural part of the state organization. The persistence of this system explains why the inequalities between urban and countryside continue to expand despite decades of overall economic growth.
In 2000 a local Communist Party official had tried to bring this reality to the attention of the central government. Li Changping, secretary of the party committee of a rural constituency of the Hubei, had written a letter to Premier Zhu Rongji denouncing the tax burden and conditions of sharp disadvantage imposed on rural families. The text contributed to the debate on “three rural problems” and preceded the abolition of the agricultural tax in 2005, but Li was then pushed to abandon the political career and public confrontation on structural discrimination against the countryside was progressively reduced, while the hukou system remained largely unchanged. What has changed in the following twenty-five years is mainly the demographic composition: the rural population has gone from 807 million to 465 million, but discrimination against those who maintain rural resident status has remained essentially intact. Physical mobility has increased with hundreds of millions of people moving to cities, but the peasant origin continues to function as a lasting social stigma. The term “phoenix man”, used in a derogatory sense to refer to a man of rural origin who through study and work has established himself in the city, is still widespread in everyday language and recalls the idea that the peasant origin leaves social traces difficult to erase. In 2021 a rural high school student, during a public discourse gone viral online, called himself “a country pig determined to devour the cabbages of the big city,” a metaphor that shows how deeply many young people have internalized this social hierarchy.
The expression of this generational trauma has found in recent years an unexpected outlet in rap music published on video platforms such as Bilibili. Two songs in particular have reached millions of views and have transformed the comment sections into real venting spaces, where young people of rural origin, from millennials to Gen Z, tell direct experiences of discrimination and alienation. The texts describe declining villages, heavily polluted environments, the desire to leave the countryside to move to cities and frustration with social barriers that continue to separate those born in the countryside from those born in the city. One phrase in particular struck hundreds of thousands of listeners for its ability to condense a widespread sentiment: “I don’t love this place, I was just born there.” Young people who today vent in the comments under these music videos probably don’t know that twenty-five years ago there had been a time when the reality of the campaigns had emerged in the public debate and a structural change seemed possible. Li Changping had described that truth to the premier, but few or had really listened. The public confrontation has progressively died down, the reforms have not come and the pain he had described continues to re-emerge in the songs of a generation that has no direct memory of that failed attempt. The persistence of this trauma a quarter-century long shows that the problem is not related to temporary economic stages, but is rooted in deliberate political choices that no Chinese government has ever really tried to overcome.
Protests and resistances
The pain that emerges in rap songs does not remain confined to the comments sections of digital platforms. In Chinese campaigns, widespread insubordination is taking shape that manifests itself both through open protests and through forms of passive resistance. Data collected in 2024 by independent observers monitoring dissent in China show that up to November of that year 661 rural protests had occurred, an increase of 70 per cent from the entire previous year. This growth cannot be traced back to a single triggering event or coordinated mobilization. Instead, these are hundreds of apparently disconnected local episodes, but united by the same underlying causes. Most of the protests concern expropriation of agricultural land by local authorities for building projects, with compensation deemed insufficient by the inhabitants. In a context where urban unemployment drives many workers to return to villages, land is the last available protection network. Losing even this resource means slipping into extreme poverty without real possibilities for livelihood.
The incidents recorded in recent months show an increase in conflict. In the province of Hainan, villagers attempted to prevent the demolition of a small local Taoist temple by surrounding the building and throwing handfuls of rice at the riot policemen, according to an ancient ritual to drive away evil. The temple was demolished. In Hunan province dozens of people surrounded uniformed officials to protest the expropriation of mulberry-grown land that a mining company wanted to turn into a limestone quarry. Two women knelt in front of the officers performing the kowtow, the traditional gesture with which justice is sought. In Guizhou province tensions continued for days when authorities imposed mandatory cremation of the deceased in place of traditional burial. A video released online showed villagers forcing local officials to get on their knees. These incidents remain geographically isolated and are rapidly repressed by security forces, but their oil-spotted multiplication signals a growing insufference to a system in which citizens have no guarantee of justice.
The dynamic that fuels the protests is both brutal and evident. Chinese local governments are burdened with debts accumulated over decades of infrastructure investment financed with land-backed loans. With the collapse of the housing market this source of revenue has reduced dramatically, leaving many local administrations in difficulty in paying salaries to civil servants and maintaining essential services. The expropriation of rural land offers an immediate solution because, although the land has lost much of their commercial value, they can still be used as collateral to get new loans. The local authorities then end up seizing agricultural land to support the administrative machine. The inhabitants live these expropriations as something that deprives them of the only resource left. The compensations offered are often based on arbitrary assessments and are insufficient to allow households to rebuild an equivalent source of income elsewhere. The result is a spiral in which local governments must expropriate increasing amounts of land to sustain ever higher debts, while the rural population is being progressively impoverished to the point of no longer having resources to rely on.
The growing presence in the villages of migrant workers returning from the cities is changing the nature of rural protests. Those who have spent years or decades in urban settings have developed different expectations than generations who have never moved from the countryside. He has a greater awareness of his formal rights, even if these rights remain largely theoretical. He noted how collective claims work in urban industrial settings and shows less deference to local officials. Above all, he is less willing to passively accept decisions imposed from above. Some analysts have described these returning migrants as carriers of “urban expectations” and “political awareness,” elements that would make rural communities more unstable and more exposed to sudden tensions. This interpretation captures the phenomenon well, although it is then often used to justify a strengthening of control measures. The resistance, however, is not expressed only through open protests. There is also a widespread form of daily insubordination. Farmers continue to burn stubble in the fields despite fines of between 500 and 2000 yuan, because there are no viable alternatives to freeing the land. Many households have returned to using solid fuels for heating while ignoring the bans, because natural gas is too expensive. This passive resistance is less visible than the protests, but it also affects state authority, showing how central government policies are often bypassed at the local level when they are difficult to enforce.
The authorities' response oscillates between attempts at preventive mediation and direct repression. In September 2024, the government set up 2,800 county-level mediation centers equipped with social workers, legal counselors and even psychologists tasked with defusing conflicts before they publicly explode. The very existence of this social control infrastructure reveals that central authorities consider rural tensions a serious threat that requires significant investment. Last month the Hebei authorities restored some natural gas subsidies under pressure from warming-related protests, but the extent of the aid remained modest and left thousands of households still in trouble. These marginal concessions mainly serve to prevent local situations from degenerating into open revolts, but without addressing the structural causes of the crisis. The protests themselves do not pose an immediate threat to the central government, not least because protesters tend to target anger against local officials rather than against Beijing, still remaining at a time when it merely attributes responsibilities to executors instead of top brass. However observers note that officials from county and local constituencies appear increasingly "overwhelmed" by the amount and frequency of tensions they have to handle. The Chinese rural crisis is not cyclical. It is the product of deliberate policy choices stratified over the course of seventy years that have created a system of institutionalized inequalities. Between unsustainable local debts, privatisation of essential services and structural economic slowdown, Chinese campaigns are undergoing a violent transformation devoid of any protection network. The land remains for rural dwellers the last bulwark between survival and absolute despair, while local governments continue to dispossess it to buy time in a system on the brink of collapse.
https://andreaferrario1.substack.com/p/ ... irect=true The translation:
Rural China: The silent crisis of emptied villages
Between forced expropriations and unsustainable local debts, Chinese campaigns are experiencing a violent transformation. The earth, the last resort for millions of people, is disappearing
Andrea Ferrario
Feb 12, 2026
In November 2024, China's Ministry of Rural Affairs issued a statement that, behind its bureaucratic wording, allowed a significant political admission to emerge. The government said the government must “prevent on a large scale” the phenomenon of migrant workers “remaining stranded” in their home villages after the Lunar New Year holidays. The choice of the verb “prevent” suggests that Beijing considers the return to the countryside a problem of social stability to be contained, while the expression “they remain blocked” implies that these workers have decided not to return by choice to them. The communique came as the country prepared for the large annual migration for the holidays, when hundreds of millions of people cross China to reunite with families. That year, however, the authorities feared that many would no longer leave, restrained by the lack of work in the cities and the impossibility of keeping themselves in the villages.
When writing about China, the focus is almost always on the urban, modern and technological dimension. The megalopolis of the coast, the skyscrapers of Shanghai and Shenzhen, digital innovation and expansion of the middle class constitute the dominant narrative. But rural China, that of the villages of the interior marked by difficult economic conditions, is still the daily reality of hundreds of millions of people and even in very recent times, it has been one of the main places of resistance and protest against the central power. The Chinese campaigns are not only a legacy of the past destined to disappear with modernization, but a space in which the contradictions of the country’s economic and political system emerge with particular force. To ignore this dimension is not to understand where the deepest tensions of contemporary Chinese society are concentrated.
The phenomenon of rural migrants returning to villages definitively marks a break from the dynamics of the last forty years. Since 1980, the percentage of the urban population has increased from 10% to over 60%. This huge demographic transformation has been fueled by the continuous flow of farmers to coastal factories, construction sites and urban services. About 300 million people today make up the migrant workforce, moving between countryside and cities following the economic cycles. Until a few years ago this mobility functioned as a system relief valve. When the economy slowed, workers temporarily returned to the villages, where they could grow small plots of land waiting for the situation to improve. The land guaranteed a minimum safety net that allowed the system to unload on the villages the social costs of crises. This mechanism, however, has jammed. The proportion of migrant workers crossing provincial borders to seek employment fell from 47 per cent in 2014 to 38% in 2024, signaling a geographical contraction in job opportunities and a growing difficulty in finding employment away from home.
The crucial difference from the 2008 global financial crisis is that today the campaign can no longer function as a social shock absorber. Back then less than 10% of rural households had surrendered the rights of land use to others. Today that percentage has risen to 40%. Hundreds of thousands of households have rented or sold the rights to their plots, often out of economic necessity or because they have spent decades away from villages losing their agricultural skills. The result is that those who return find no more land to cultivate. At the same time, the construction sector, which absorbed huge amounts of low-skilled labour, entered a structural crisis with the collapse of the housing market. Manufacturing is relocating to countries with lower costs or replacing workers with automation. Some construction workers interviewed during the return trip to the villages of Henan said they saw their monthly income fall from 9,000 to 5,000 yuan in a few years, while others admitted to having left a month in advance of the holidays simply because “there were no more jobs”. Hengyang County, in the southern province of Hunan, recorded the return of 183,000 workers for last year's holidays, and over 40,000 of them are no longer broken down.
The central government has sought to mitigate the problem by promoting industrial development in the average inner cities. The goal is to attract a portion of manufacturing production away from expensive coastal provinces, creating jobs in the areas where migrants come from. This strategy, however, shows obvious limits. Wages in the innermost cities remain much lower than those of coastal metropolises and competition for available seats is very high. In addition, a generational shift in the priorities of younger workers is emerging. Many prefer to stay close to families even at the cost of earning less, rejecting the life model of parents who have spent decades separated from their children. This phenomenon worries state planners, who have built Chinese economic growth precisely on the availability of large masses of workers willing to move anywhere for very low wages. The fact that young people are “taking root” in places with fewer economic opportunities represents a difficulty for a system that has always relied on labour mobility as an instrument of productive flexibility.
Life in the villages
Those who return find a reality that in official statistics appears as a managed demographic transition, while on the territory it presents itself as a rapid social breakdown. In 2000 the Chinese rural population amounted to 807 million people, or 64% of the total. Today that figure has fallen to 465 million, 33% of the population. Over 340 million people have moved from the countryside to cities over a quarter of a century. This exodus left behind emptied villages, in which the traditional social structure dissolved without anything emerging that could replace it. The elderly left in rural areas survive with monthly pensions of 169 yuan, about 22 euros, while public services have been progressively reduced. The village elementary schools have closed, forcing children to travel every day for long kilometers to the provincial cities or to live on school campuses. Entire villages remain without children, except during the holidays, when the children of migrants return briefly before leaving with their parents. The demographic vacuum is combined with environmental degradation and the almost total absence of health and social care, creating living conditions that in many cases have worsened compared to those of thirty years ago.
The collapse of public services in rural areas proceeds along with economic disruption and environmental deterioration. In many villages the collection of waste is now irregular or absent, with streams transformed into drains and garbage accumulations that push some families to burn the waste or to throw them directly into the rivers. At the same time plant diseases are eliminating crops that for years had guaranteed a minimal source of income, further reducing the chances of local livelihood. In this context, the crisis of winter warming in Hebei is also part, an example of a situation that also affects numerous other provinces. After the obligation introduced in 2017 to replace coal with natural gas, initially supported by public subsidies, funding was progressively eliminated, also due to the growing debt of local administrations and the collapse of revenue related to the real estate sector. The increase in energy costs has made gas difficult for many rural households to sustain, forcing many of them to return to traditional systems despite the bans. The partially reintroduced subsidies in 2025 had a limited impact, leaving the underlying problem unresolved: the difficulty of supporting essential services in a context of economic crisis and increasingly reduced public resources.
The historical roots of discrimination
These conditions are not the result of a temporarily unfavourable economic situation. The campaign crisis has its roots in a system of institutionalized discrimination deliberately built after 1949 and never dismantled. The hukou system, the register of residence that divides the Chinese population into rural and non-rural citizens, has created two categories of people with very different rights. State resources have been concentrated in cities, while the countryside has been treated as labour reserves to support urban industrialization. This administrative system has produced such a profound social stratification that it still influences access to education, health, pensions and even the physical mobility of people. Rural residents have been transformed into second-tier citizens through a legal mechanism that has made discrimination a structural part of the state organization. The persistence of this system explains why the inequalities between urban and countryside continue to expand despite decades of overall economic growth.
In 2000 a local Communist Party official had tried to bring this reality to the attention of the central government. Li Changping, secretary of the party committee of a rural constituency of the Hubei, had written a letter to Premier Zhu Rongji denouncing the tax burden and conditions of sharp disadvantage imposed on rural families. The text contributed to the debate on “three rural problems” and preceded the abolition of the agricultural tax in 2005, but Li was then pushed to abandon the political career and public confrontation on structural discrimination against the countryside was progressively reduced, while the hukou system remained largely unchanged. What has changed in the following twenty-five years is mainly the demographic composition: the rural population has gone from 807 million to 465 million, but discrimination against those who maintain rural resident status has remained essentially intact. Physical mobility has increased with hundreds of millions of people moving to cities, but the peasant origin continues to function as a lasting social stigma. The term “phoenix man”, used in a derogatory sense to refer to a man of rural origin who through study and work has established himself in the city, is still widespread in everyday language and recalls the idea that the peasant origin leaves social traces difficult to erase. In 2021 a rural high school student, during a public discourse gone viral online, called himself “a country pig determined to devour the cabbages of the big city,” a metaphor that shows how deeply many young people have internalized this social hierarchy.
The expression of this generational trauma has found in recent years an unexpected outlet in rap music published on video platforms such as Bilibili. Two songs in particular have reached millions of views and have transformed the comment sections into real venting spaces, where young people of rural origin, from millennials to Gen Z, tell direct experiences of discrimination and alienation. The texts describe declining villages, heavily polluted environments, the desire to leave the countryside to move to cities and frustration with social barriers that continue to separate those born in the countryside from those born in the city. One phrase in particular struck hundreds of thousands of listeners for its ability to condense a widespread sentiment: “I don’t love this place, I was just born there.” Young people who today vent in the comments under these music videos probably don’t know that twenty-five years ago there had been a time when the reality of the campaigns had emerged in the public debate and a structural change seemed possible. Li Changping had described that truth to the premier, but few or had really listened. The public confrontation has progressively died down, the reforms have not come and the pain he had described continues to re-emerge in the songs of a generation that has no direct memory of that failed attempt. The persistence of this trauma a quarter-century long shows that the problem is not related to temporary economic stages, but is rooted in deliberate political choices that no Chinese government has ever really tried to overcome.
Protests and resistances
The pain that emerges in rap songs does not remain confined to the comments sections of digital platforms. In Chinese campaigns, widespread insubordination is taking shape that manifests itself both through open protests and through forms of passive resistance. Data collected in 2024 by independent observers monitoring dissent in China show that up to November of that year 661 rural protests had occurred, an increase of 70 per cent from the entire previous year. This growth cannot be traced back to a single triggering event or coordinated mobilization. Instead, these are hundreds of apparently disconnected local episodes, but united by the same underlying causes. Most of the protests concern expropriation of agricultural land by local authorities for building projects, with compensation deemed insufficient by the inhabitants. In a context where urban unemployment drives many workers to return to villages, land is the last available protection network. Losing even this resource means slipping into extreme poverty without real possibilities for livelihood.
The incidents recorded in recent months show an increase in conflict. In the province of Hainan, villagers attempted to prevent the demolition of a small local Taoist temple by surrounding the building and throwing handfuls of rice at the riot policemen, according to an ancient ritual to drive away evil. The temple was demolished. In Hunan province dozens of people surrounded uniformed officials to protest the expropriation of mulberry-grown land that a mining company wanted to turn into a limestone quarry. Two women knelt in front of the officers performing the kowtow, the traditional gesture with which justice is sought. In Guizhou province tensions continued for days when authorities imposed mandatory cremation of the deceased in place of traditional burial. A video released online showed villagers forcing local officials to get on their knees. These incidents remain geographically isolated and are rapidly repressed by security forces, but their oil-spotted multiplication signals a growing insufference to a system in which citizens have no guarantee of justice.
The dynamic that fuels the protests is both brutal and evident. Chinese local governments are burdened with debts accumulated over decades of infrastructure investment financed with land-backed loans. With the collapse of the housing market this source of revenue has reduced dramatically, leaving many local administrations in difficulty in paying salaries to civil servants and maintaining essential services. The expropriation of rural land offers an immediate solution because, although the land has lost much of their commercial value, they can still be used as collateral to get new loans. The local authorities then end up seizing agricultural land to support the administrative machine. The inhabitants live these expropriations as something that deprives them of the only resource left. The compensations offered are often based on arbitrary assessments and are insufficient to allow households to rebuild an equivalent source of income elsewhere. The result is a spiral in which local governments must expropriate increasing amounts of land to sustain ever higher debts, while the rural population is being progressively impoverished to the point of no longer having resources to rely on.
The growing presence in the villages of migrant workers returning from the cities is changing the nature of rural protests. Those who have spent years or decades in urban settings have developed different expectations than generations who have never moved from the countryside. He has a greater awareness of his formal rights, even if these rights remain largely theoretical. He noted how collective claims work in urban industrial settings and shows less deference to local officials. Above all, he is less willing to passively accept decisions imposed from above. Some analysts have described these returning migrants as carriers of “urban expectations” and “political awareness,” elements that would make rural communities more unstable and more exposed to sudden tensions. This interpretation captures the phenomenon well, although it is then often used to justify a strengthening of control measures. The resistance, however, is not expressed only through open protests. There is also a widespread form of daily insubordination. Farmers continue to burn stubble in the fields despite fines of between 500 and 2000 yuan, because there are no viable alternatives to freeing the land. Many households have returned to using solid fuels for heating while ignoring the bans, because natural gas is too expensive. This passive resistance is less visible than the protests, but it also affects state authority, showing how central government policies are often bypassed at the local level when they are difficult to enforce.
The authorities' response oscillates between attempts at preventive mediation and direct repression. In September 2024, the government set up 2,800 county-level mediation centers equipped with social workers, legal counselors and even psychologists tasked with defusing conflicts before they publicly explode. The very existence of this social control infrastructure reveals that central authorities consider rural tensions a serious threat that requires significant investment. Last month the Hebei authorities restored some natural gas subsidies under pressure from warming-related protests, but the extent of the aid remained modest and left thousands of households still in trouble. These marginal concessions mainly serve to prevent local situations from degenerating into open revolts, but without addressing the structural causes of the crisis. The protests themselves do not pose an immediate threat to the central government, not least because protesters tend to target anger against local officials rather than against Beijing, still remaining at a time when it merely attributes responsibilities to executors instead of top brass. However observers note that officials from county and local constituencies appear increasingly "overwhelmed" by the amount and frequency of tensions they have to handle. The Chinese rural crisis is not cyclical. It is the product of deliberate policy choices stratified over the course of seventy years that have created a system of institutionalized inequalities. Between unsustainable local debts, privatisation of essential services and structural economic slowdown, Chinese campaigns are undergoing a violent transformation devoid of any protection network. The land remains for rural dwellers the last bulwark between survival and absolute despair, while local governments continue to dispossess it to buy time in a system on the brink of collapse.