{"id":824037,"date":"2026-07-26T01:56:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T01:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/824037\/"},"modified":"2026-07-26T01:56:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T01:56:28","slug":"life-in-rural-china-how-one-architects-guesthouse-reflects-the-countrys-economic-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/824037\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in rural China: How one architect\u2019s guesthouse reflects the country’s economic evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LisaSave<\/p>\n

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What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox.<\/a> <\/p>\n

Xingming village, China: Perched atop a hill in a small village in central China, Li Zhiying\u2019s family guesthouse has a spectacular view.<\/p>\n

Just beyond the front door is a vista of a pristine reservoir, ringed by pine forests and framed by mountain ranges flossed with low-hanging clouds.<\/p>\n

\"LiLi Zhiying grew up in poverty\u00a0in Hunan province in central China and later returned to his hometown to open a guesthouse.Lisa Visentin<\/p>\n

Along the cul-de-sac that winds past his house, Li\u2019s neighbours tend crops of beans, chillies, pumpkin and corn in small plots near their homes.<\/p>\n

Village dogs bark and scrap in the street and chickens roam freely. By the roadside, an elderly man is picking the Sichuan peppercorns that will spice the tea and tingle the tongues of neighbours who will pop by in the evening for a daily ritual of gossip and card-playing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve come to Li\u2019s hometown of Xingming in China\u2019s central Hunan province to spend three days exploring a different side of the modern China story that frequently makes headlines. The ordinariness of rural life.<\/p>\n

\"XingmingXingming village, in Hunan Province, central China.Lisa Visentin<\/p>\n

A snapshot of the so-called \u201creal China\u201d that\u2019s more representative of everyday life for millions of Chinese people than dancing robots, drone light shows and the breakneck speed of AI development that is reshaping tech hubs in Beijing, Shenzhen and Hangzhou.<\/p>\n

The evening I arrive, we wander down the street to the home of the retired village party secretary, a local Communist Party official, whose wife is serving slices of watermelon and tea in plastic cups to any neighbour who stops for a chat.<\/p>\n

\"NeighboursNeighbours pop by in the evening for a daily ritual of gossip and card-playing.Lisa Visentin<\/p>\n

\u201cHello Australia, welcome, please enjoy our village,\u201d one elder tells me, using a translation app.<\/p>\n

This is Chairman Mao country, where portraits of China\u2019s former supreme leader hang in the homes of older villagers, his reputation unspoiled by history\u2019s verdict \u2013 in the West at least \u2013 of the calamity caused by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cMao is like a god to us,\u201d a local party cadre from the neighbouring province tells me over lunch at the guesthouse. \u201cHe understood the ordinary people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nearest market is 5 kilometres away in a small, unremarkable township, where everyone is curious about the visiting foreigner (me). There\u2019s plenty of pointing and waving and lots of smiles.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever!\u201d an old villager running a pork stall responds when I ask how often foreigners come to the market.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Nearby, a man is loading hunks of fresh meat into the boot of his car lined with just a piece of cardboard.<\/p>\n

Another vendor is selling a freshly slaughtered whole dog, its fur shaved off but skin intact. It\u2019s a confronting sight for the uninitiated, though Li tells me he has never seen dog meat for sale here before.<\/p>\n

By his own admission, Li forewarns would-be guests that his home is located in a remote rural village that most Chinese people have never heard of. There\u2019s no tourist infrastructure, and quotidian village life is slow-paced and perhaps even boring.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you are looking for a comfortable, easy introduction to China, this may not be the place,\u201d he says on the guesthouse website.<\/p>\n

\"LiLi Zhiying and his friend, Li Mi, paddling on the reservoir that sustains the local village.Lisa Visentin<\/p>\n

But he believes visitors will be charmed by the warmth and authenticity of the locals, and the unrefined beauty of the Chinese countryside.<\/p>\n

For the most part, this is not the side of China that has bedazzled the wave of influencers who have arrived under the government\u2019s soft-power masterstroke of visa-free travel, which has now been extended to more than 70 countries, Australia included.<\/p>\n

They have flooded Instagram and TikTok with effusive videos about China\u2019s smartphone-powered megacities, with a cashless economy, gleaming skyscrapers, robots that deliver food to the hotel door, and futuristic electric vehicles that cruise silently around clean streets.<\/p>\n

The comparison is stark. There\u2019s little tangible wealth in villages such as Xingming, but community bonds are strong. People eat what they grow, or fish from the reservoir, and share what they have with their neighbours.<\/p>\n

\"VillagersVillagers fish from the reservoir.Lisa Visentin<\/p>\n

Some of the older generation speak patchy Mandarin, preferring their local dialect. This has tethered them to their home province and added to the language barriers with outsiders who arrive, as I have, reliant on AI tools to navigate them. ChatGPT, though an impressive translator, struggles with dialects.<\/p>\n

Younger people, meanwhile, have decamped for the cities looking for work, often leaving behind their children to be raised by their grandparents.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy children have gone to work in the 3D printing industry,\u201d one woman says, as she picks beans from her garden while her granddaughter plays nearby.<\/p>\n

But the crushing poverty that once afflicted Xingming, and mired families such as Li\u2019s in destitution, has largely been eliminated.<\/p>\n

\"PortraitsPortraits of Mao Zedong are a common sight in the homes of older residents in parts of rural China.Lisa Visentin<\/p>\n

To get to Xingming from Beijing, it\u2019s a five-hour journey on high-speed rail to the nearest station in Yueyang \u2013 a small, lower-tier city by Chinese standards with only 5 million people (about the size of Sydney). Then it\u2019s an hour-long drive through the countryside.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve come specifically to meet Li, a softly spoken 36-year-old architect turned aspiring AI developer, whose life has skirted the same grooves as China\u2019s own recent trajectory in many ways.<\/p>\n

He rose out of poverty off the back of China\u2019s economic juggernaut, which from the 1990s onwards lifted hundreds of millions of people like him with it. Li then crested the wave of the country\u2019s property boom before crashing with its collapse, shuttering his own construction company within six months of opening it in 2022.<\/p>\n

Since then, he\u2019s looked for ways to reinvent himself, firstly in e-commerce, joining a friend\u2019s large online company selling adult products to consumers all over the world on platforms like Amazon and Taobao \u2013 a lucrative pivot that was especially profitable in the US market until US President Donald Trump\u2019s tariff war upended global supply chains.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Now he\u2019s dabbling in the emerging tech economy, splitting his time between Xingming and Shenzhen \u2013 the gravitational epicentre of China\u2019s entrepreneurial classes \u2013 where he is teaching himself AI and building a small online game.<\/p>\n

At the same time, he has been running the guesthouse. The 14-bedroom homestay is a relatively new addition to Xingming, one he designed himself, overseeing its construction in 2016 during the runaway years of China\u2019s real estate bubble. To build it, he scrimped, saved and borrowed money from friends in a bid to deliver on his parents\u2019 dream for their son to return home and share his success with the family.<\/p>\n

Its minimalist open-plan aesthetic \u2013 with sharp lines, exposed brick, timber panelling and floor-to-ceiling glass windows \u2013 is a strikingly incongruous landmark in the small village.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also an unrecognisable improvement on the basic brick flat that once stood in the same spot and where his mother cooked over an open wood stove that doubled as heating. As a child, his family was too poor to afford a bicycle, so he and his brother walked two hours through the mountains to attend school, a journey they made twice a week, sleeping at the school quarters in between.<\/p>\n

\"NorthNorth Asia correspondent Lisa Visentin has lunch with Li Zhiying\u2019s family and neighbours at the guesthouse in Xingming village.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could only afford to eat meat a handful of times a year. As for clothes, we often wore the same clothes for five or six years, unless we literally outgrew them,\u201d he tells me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think everyone in China has felt the economic growth, and people in rural areas have felt it very noticeably too.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you had visited rural China 30 years ago, there was basically not a single paved or asphalt road in most rural areas. All the toilets in the countryside were simple pit latrines. Our waste was used to fertilise the vegetables.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related Article\"Chinese<\/a><\/p>\n

These days the roads are sealed, and the village has reliable power and sewerage systems. Many of his neighbours have rebuilt bigger, multi-storey houses in recent years, and many families have at least one car.<\/p>\n

Li\u2019s ticket out was that he was academically gifted, won a scholarship to study architectural design at university and was supported by government policies that helped low-income families. He graduated into a rapacious property market, at one point securing a well-paid job with Country Garden, China\u2019s biggest real estate developer.<\/p>\n

Laden with billions of dollars of debt, Country Garden has been teetering on the brink of collapse since 2023. Its crisis, along with the implosion of other major developers, has hollowed out China\u2019s middle-class wealth and left an economic wound so deep that even the nation\u2019s breakout AI industries haven\u2019t come close to healing it.<\/p>\n

When Li\u2019s guesthouse first opened before COVID-19 hit, it was fully booked on weekends, but since then, the slow post-pandemic recovery and lagging domestic economy have seen bookings dwindle as Chinese consumers sit on their savings.<\/p>\n

During my stay last weekend, I was the only guest, although more travellers arrived the day I checked out.<\/p>\n

As China opens up to foreign tourists, Li hopes more will find their way to villages such as Xingming.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you travel China, 70 to 80 per cent of the places are like this. It is also very beautiful here. Although the big cities are also a real part of China, this is what China truly is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what\u2019s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"LisaLisa Visentin<\/a> is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Beijing. She was previously a federal political correspondent based in Canberra.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":824038,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-824037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/824038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}