About ten years ago, the term "escape from the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou" first entered people's attention, causing a lot of discussion. In an issue of Southern Weekend, "Escape from the North, Shanghai and Guangzhou", the author of the article once wrote the following paragraph:
After escaping the pressures of the big cities, they get lost in the mediocrity and solidification of small cities. On the back of the choice they make about the city is the choice that the city makes for them—whether it is the north, the guangzhou, or the small city, rejects these people who are in a rootless state, both economically and mentally. Behind the difficult journey of these young people is the future and hope of almost a generation of ordinary young people.
Ten years later, people still doubt urban life, but it is difficult to believe in poetry and distance. Faced with the choice of leaving or staying, some young people seem to have a heavier burden. Others are more proactive in choosing to leave. Their destinations vary and their presentations vary.
In this article, we want to explore the recent "homecoming" fever. Here, "returning home" is not a narrow sense of returning to one's hometown or returning to the countryside. Let's borrow the concept of "reverse urbanization" for the time being, defining it as a migration that "flows from large cities to small and medium-sized cities and suburban villages".
The article starts with the recent "low-desire rural life experiment", and restores and analyzes the current controversies about leaving the city and returning to rural life. Next, we will go back to the source of the "escape from the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou" and compare the similarities and differences between the two waves of "returning home". Finally, we return to the problem itself and understand the more fundamental spiritual appeal behind "returning home".
Written by | Qingqingzi
01
"Homecoming" controversy:
Who has the right to interpret rural life?
Let's start with a controversy some time ago. Earlier in June, an article titled "Why Did I Choose a Low-Desire Life in a Mountain Village?" This is a silent struggle against modern slavery" article was widely circulated in Douban. Douban user @ Xia Hail shared in the article how he made up his mind to quit his white-collar job in a big city and return to western Zhejiang to live a mountain life full of idle clouds and wild cranes. Before returning to the countryside, "Summer Hail", like most urban middle-class youth, "squeezed into a small rental house" and "60% of the salary is handed over to the landlord", and has to "punch like a machine" every day, spending in trivial processes and mechanized repetitive work, and worrying from time to time that they "will sooner or later become the screws of scrapping".
"Xia Hail" about urban workplace life undoubtedly poked at the pain of many netizens, but her "low desire" rural life experience has caused a lot of controversy. Shortly after the article was published, another Douban user wrote an article @X316 "Is 'Low Desire for a Beautiful Rural Life' Really As Beautiful as It Looks?" ——From homestays to tea gardens, I will talk about my real rural life experience + operability assessment of returning to the countryside" and question Xia Hail's so-called return to the countryside to live a low-desire life is the romanticized imagination of the urban middle class to the countryside, and rural life is far from being as quiet and beautiful as she writes. Her low-desire life was nothing more than "earning money from a city job and taking a vacation in the countryside."
Stills from the movie "Little Forest".
The back-and-forth debate involves many dimensions, but the focus is still on the old question of whether it is feasible to return to the countryside because of poor urban life. In the article "The Controversy of 'Low Desire Rural Life': The Plight of Urban Youth, The Countryside is Not the "Antidote"" published by The Surging Thought Market, the author Zeng Yuli believes that this controversy as a whole has not escaped the dualistic imaginary framework of "poetic countryside" and "cruel bottom", and the direct difference between the two lies in the struggle for the right to interpret the countryside.
The topic of the urban middle class's binary imagination of the countryside is not new. On the one hand, in the years when consumerism has soared, the countryside has long been not only the embodiment of nostalgia of "poetry and far away", but also harvested as a new generation of Internet celebrity symbols. Take Aranya, which has recently been in the limelight, as an example, this cultural tourism real estate project, which was once on the verge of bankruptcy, has become a resort for thousands of literary and artistic youth by virtue of its geographical advantages built by the sea. According to the article of "Burning Finance", nearly 400,000 people come to Aranya every year to punch in, and the community service business operation obtains a turnover of up to 500 million yuan, and the per capita consumption reaches 1250 yuan. During this year's Dragon Boat Festival, the price of accommodation in Aranya once rose to a sky-high price of 7,000 yuan a night.
On the other hand, people's criticism of romanticized villages tends to amplify the backward, cruel and violent side of rural society. This has also led to the further essentialization and mystification of rural society. This can be seen in the once-popular article "Cruel Underground Story: A Video Software in Rural China".
In a sense, the above two narratives about rural life are the inevitable result of urbanization and modernization. Luo Yalin has made a systematic discussion in "The Rising Earth". She summarized the various kinds of homecoming narratives in recent years into two modes: "nostalgia" and "nostalgia". One is the "homecoming diary" of intellectuals represented by Liang Hong and Huang Deng. They focus on the ups and downs of rural society in the process of modernization, mourning is human, and at the same time resent the devastating impact of modern sexual violence on the countryside. The other is the "township grievance" model represented by various types of "prevention of relatives" and "spring festival home to help themselves". What they express is that young people, after accepting the values of modern life, have to face the sedimentation from the local society.
Screenshot of rainbow choir's "Spring Festival Self-Help Guide" video.
The current discussion of young people leaving the city and returning to the countryside is often dominated by the above critical discourse: the romanticized imagination of the countryside reflects the self-obscenity of the urban middle class and obscures the harsh reality of rural society... But the truth is that different people's experiences are different, and universal critical discourse does not summarize the real situation.
02
Two waves:
From escaping from the north to Guangzhou, to the endless Odyssey
The desire of contemporary young people to leave the city and return to the countryside is not only recent. As early as 2010, "Escape from the North, Shanghai and Guangzhou" was selected as one of the "Top Ten Real Estate Hot Words" that year. It was also in that year that Chinese society had just experienced its first wave of urbanization, and housing prices in first-tier cities were rising steadily. Many young people who were working on the front line (also known as "ant tribes" at the time) first thought of leaving.
According to statistics at the time, house prices in Beijing increased by 42% year-on-year. A financial institution issued a "2003-2011 Beijing Commodity Residential Transaction Trend" report gives us more accurate comparative data: in 2003, the average transaction price of commercial housing in the Beijing property market was 4456 yuan / square meter, and in 2011, the average transaction price of commercial housing in the Beijing property market was 21929 yuan / square meter.
Stills from the TV series "Snail House" (2009).
In the face of the reality of hopelessness in buying a house, "choosing to stay in the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou, being squeezed like a sardine, or choosing to be a salted fish in the hometown" has become a question and choice in the hearts of many young people. A heated debate on social media about "big city bed vs small city room" was launched. The arguments of the two sides may seem nothing new today, with the former emphasizing open, pluralistic and relatively fair access to opportunities for urban life, while the latter pointing directly to a series of problems caused by "urban diseases", such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and fierce competition.
With the media's tracking and reporting of this group of young people, people gradually found that it is impossible to escape. The washing of urban civilization washes away not only the rural sounds, but also the values and lifestyles. In this sense, although urban life is not good, the closed acquaintance society in the hometown is a narrow water, a network of human feelings that can no longer be integrated.
In the "Escape from the North, Shanghai and Guangzhou" feature published by Southern Weekend, the author of the article wrote: "After escaping the pressure of the big city, they lost themselves in the mediocrity and solidification of the small city. On the back of the choice they make about the city is the choice that the city makes for them—whether it is the north, the guangzhou, or the small city, rejects these people who are in a rootless state, both economically and mentally. Behind the difficult journey of these young people is the future and hope of almost a generation of ordinary young people. ”
Stills from the movie "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers".
In the following years, the voice of "fleeing from the north to Guangzhou" was gradually replaced by "fleeing back to the north and Guangzhou". Representative articles include He Sanwei's "Beijing, Difficult to Leave" and "North to Guangzhou, Escape or Escape Back" published in southern people weekly. 》。 The latter tells the story of several young people who returned to their hometown from the big city and eventually found themselves "foreigners" in their hometown: a young man who had worked in IT in Shanghai returned to his hometown, lay in the "system", and found that the back of a stable life was "connections and background"; another young man who returned to his hometown to open an online store, although he got rid of the dependence of "relationship", was still trapped in the lack of cultural life and limited consumption options in his hometown.
Looking back now, the embarrassment faced by this group of young people who "fled the north, Shanghai, and Guangzhou" at that time was the drifting state of being unable to settle down in the big city and settling in their hometown during the continuous migration of urban and rural areas. This is also the fate that the generation that grew up in the wave of urbanization is destined to face.
Ten years on, the wave of urbanization has swept through almost every inch of the land. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, by the end of 2019, China's urbanization rate exceeded 60% for the first time. Rural society has gone through several ups and downs in the meantime. With the continuous exodus of population to the cities, the countryside has changed from a relatively closed society of acquaintances to a semi-acquaintance society in the mouths of many scholars. This also means that the rules of communication between human face and blood friendship have been loosened. At the same time, however, the development of urbanization is extremely uneven between regions. The Yangtze River Delta region is generally highly modernized, while the traditional industrial cities that originally occupied a competitive advantage (such as the three eastern provinces) have gradually lost their voice, and the phenomenon of population loss is becoming more and more serious.
Stills from the movie "The Piano of Steel".
At the same time, the wave of returns we are seeing today is more fluid and diverse. Unlike the practice of returning to their hometowns a decade ago, this time, young people's choices to return to their hometowns are beginning to be more diverse, not even limited to the traditional townships, but include some underdeveloped areas.
We see two types of "returning home": one is the "secluded bar" as the representative of ordinary young people, most of them come from humble backgrounds, harbor urban dreams, after working multiple jobs (or many jobs), choose to buy/rent a set of cheap houses in economically underdeveloped areas, and live a closed-door life. Not long ago, an article "Lost Young Man: Please Recommend a Place to Live in Seclusion to Me" reported the story of a hermit named Yang Mingwei in "Seclusion Bar". Born in Shangrao, Jiangxi, Yang Mingwei worked in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities before living in seclusion, working as a security guard, construction worker, decoration worker, Taobao customer service, and game training. Ten years of urban drifting life were exchanged for a small amount of savings and a bleak future. Last winter, he came to Hebi, Henan Province, bought a local two-bedroom house for 37,000 yuan, and has since lived a reclusive life of only going out once a week.
The other type is the urban middle-class youth represented by "Xia Hail", who generally have higher education and have a good white-collar job in first-tier cities, and their departure is more of an active choice, and the destination is mostly Zhejiang, Yunnan and other relatively developed and open villages and towns. For these people, leaving the city and returning to the countryside is not because they can't live, but because they are a cultural or lifestyle choice.
However, no matter what, the choices faced by young people today are still difficult compared to a decade ago. This difficulty lies in the fact that no matter where it goes, it is the external material environment that can be shaken off, and what is difficult to get rid of is a set of social value systems and missing social security networks related to "efficiency" and "success". Therefore, even if Xia Hail ran to the countryside of Zhejiang, her life was still not really low desire. Between the landscape and the grass, her middle-class dream is striking and dazzling. Yang Mingwei ran to Hebi, Henan, but finally found out after a rare flood that this place is not transcendent.
03
How is it possible to "return home"?
Since ancient times, being a happy person seems to be related to returning to the countryside. In ancient times, there was Tao Yuanming's "picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence, leisurely seeing the South Mountain", and now there is "facing the sea, spring and warm flowers" that have been appropriated as marketing words.
Leaving aside the current controversies and real dilemmas about the "homecoming" narrative, we see a more noteworthy social phenomenon: young people like the aforementioned "Summer Hail" who actively choose to leave the city and find habitat again are becoming more and more numerous. The phenomenon of squatting like Yang Mingwei has also aroused the attention of many scholars at home and abroad.
In this regard, the academic community has proposed the concept of "reverse urbanization". "Reverse urbanization" is, of course, an imported product. It was first proposed by the American geographer Bonn. He believes that the emergence of "reverse urbanization" is "the inherent requirement and inevitable impulse of urban function self-optimization and reduction of spatial pressure after urbanization has developed to a certain stage."
Stills from the movie "American Sweetheart".
Scholar Zhang Hui combed the historical context of the concept of "reverse urbanization" in her paper "The Migration Phenomenon of Middle-Class Reverse Urbanization: Taking Dali as an Example". She pointed out that "reverse urbanization" first appeared in the industrialization process of Western countries. After the 1970s, the urbanization rate of developed countries reached 70%, the population of large cities began to stop growing or even decreasing, and population and other resources gradually flowed to small and medium-sized cities, especially small suburban towns around large cities.
In the book, she takes the new immigrants from Dali as the research object and explores the path and model of Dali's "anti-urbanization" development. She first affirmed the effectiveness of this anti-urbanization lifestyle as a solution to the "urban disease", and at the same time, she also acknowledged that the current "unfulfilled" anti-urbanization development will have a negative impact on local residents and ecology. The latter is also one of the long-standing criticisms suffered by the urban middle class going to the countryside.
What Zhang Hui has not mentioned may be the more complex spiritual appeal behind the desire to "return home": it is not only about people's dissatisfaction with modern urban life, or a general loss, but also about a young man trying to find a way out, a possibility, in an environment that does not allow failure.
However, as mentioned earlier, the possibility of "returning home" does not depend on where you are, but more importantly, whether you have the courage to jump out of the existing value system and re-explore and create a life that may fail. In this sense, "returning home" seeks a spiritual breakthrough. If Nala's legacy a hundred years ago was "leaving", what to do after leaving may be the proposition of the times in front of every "returnee" person.
This article is exclusive original content. Author: Qing Qingzi; Editor: Qing Qingzi; Walk Around; Proofreader: Jia Ning. It shall not be reproduced without the written authorization of the Beijing News.